Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

Alatriste ignored the comment. He was still considering the really important question.

“According to you, then, someone still has one too many kings in the pack, and I’ve been chosen as the one to discard that king.”

As Malatesta was closing the door, Alatriste heard him laugh again.

“I said no such thing, Captain. But at least I’ll know that when I do kill you, no one will be able to say that I’m dispatching an innocent or an imbecile.”

“I love you,” Angélica said again.

I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. I was gradually coming to, waking from a delicious dream during which I had not, for one moment, lost consciousness. She still had her arms about me, and I could feel my heart beating against her satiny, half-naked flesh. I opened my mouth to utter those identical words, but all that emerged was a startled, exhausted, happy moan. After this, I thought confusedly, no one will ever be able to part us.

“My boy,” she said.

I buried my face in her disheveled hair, and then, after running my fingers over the soft curve of her hips, kissed the hollow above her shoulder blade, where the ribbons of her half-open chemise hung loose. The night wind was whistling in the roofs and chimneys of the palace. The room and the rumpled bed were a haven of calm. Everything else was excluded, suspended, apart from our two young bodies embracing in the darkness and the now slowing beat of my heart. And I suddenly realized, as if it were a revelation, that I had made that whole long journey—my childhood in Oñate, the time I had spent in Madrid, in the dungeons of the Inquisition, and in Flanders, Seville, and Sanlúcar—that I had survived all those hazards and dangers in order to become a man and to be there that night, in the arms of Angélica de Alquézar, that girl who, although only about the same age as me, was calling me “her boy,” and whose warm, mysterious flesh seemed to hold the key to my destiny.

“Now you’ll have to marry me,” she murmured, “one day . . .”

She said this in a tone that was both serious and ironic, in a voice that trembled strangely in a way that reminded me of the leaves on a tree. I nodded sleepily, and she kissed my lips. This kept at bay a thought that was trying to make its way through my consciousness, like a distant noise, rather like the wind blowing in the night. I tried to focus on that noise, but Angélica’s mouth and her embrace were stopping me. I stirred uneasily. There was something wrong. A memory of foraging in enemy territory near Breda surfaced in my mind. I recalled how that apparently tranquil green landscape of windmills, canals, woods, and undulating fields could unexpectedly unleash on you a detachment of Dutch cavalry. The thought returned, more intense this time. An echo, an image. Suddenly the wind howled more loudly outside the shutter, and I remembered. The captain’s face. A lightning flash, an explosion of panic. The captain’s face. Of course. Christ’s blood!

I sat up, detaching myself from Angélica’s arms. The captain had not kept his appointment, and there I was in bed, indifferent to his fate, plunged in the most absolute of oblivions.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I did not reply. I placed my feet on the cold floor and began groping in the darkness for my clothes. I was completely naked.

“Where are you going?”

I found my shirt and picked up my breeches and my doublet. Angélica had left the bed too, but was no longer asking questions. She tried to grab me from behind, but I pushed her roughly away. We struggled in the dark. Eventually I heard her fall back on the bed with a moan of pain or perhaps anger. I didn’t care. At that moment, all I cared about was the anger I felt against myself, the anguish of my desertion.

“You wretch,” she said.

I crouched down again, feeling about on the floor. My shoes must be there somewhere. I found my leather belt and was going to put it on when I noticed that it was not as heavy as it should be. The sheath for my dagger was empty. “Where the hell is it?” I thought. I was about to ask that question out loud, a question that already sounded foolish before it had even reached my lips, when I felt a sharp, very cold pain in my back, and the surrounding blackness filled up with luminous dots, like tiny stars. I uttered one loud, brief scream. Then I tried to turn and strike my attacker, but my strength failed me and I dropped to my knees. Angélica was holding on to my hair, forcing my head back. I was aware of blood running down the back of my thighs and then felt the blade of the dagger at my throat. With a strange lucidity I thought: “She’s going to slit my throat as if I were a calf or a pig.” I had read once about a witch, a woman who, in antiquity, used to change men into pigs.

She dragged me back onto the bed, tugging at my hair, keeping the dagger pressed to my throat, forcing me to lie down again, this time on my stomach. Then she sat astride me, half naked as she was, her thighs gripping my waist. She still had a firm hold on my hair. Then she removed the dagger from my throat, and I felt her lips on my still bleeding wound, felt her licking the edges, kissing it just as she had kissed my mouth.

“I’m so glad,” she whispered, “that I haven’t killed you just yet.”

The light was paining Diego Alatriste’s eyes, or, rather, his right eye, because his left was still swollen, and both eyelids felt as heavy as loaded dice. This time, he saw two shadows moving about near the door of his cell. He sat looking at them from his position on the floor, his back against the wall, having failed to free his bound hands, despite almost rubbing the skin raw in his efforts.

“Do you recognize me?” asked a dour voice.

The man was lit now by the lantern. Alatriste recognized him at once, with a shiver of fear and surprise that must, he thought, have been evident on his face. Who could forget that vast tonsure, that gaunt, ascetic face, those fanatical eyes, the stark black-and-white Dominican habit? Fray Emilio Bocanegra, president of the Court of the Inquisition, was the last man he would have expected to meet there.

“Now,” said the captain, “I really am done for.”

Behind the lantern, Gualterio Malatesta gave a harsh, appreciative laugh. The Inquisitor, however, lacked any sense of humor. His piercing, deep-set eyes fixed on the captain.

“I have come to confess you,” he said.

Alatriste shot an astonished look in the direction of Malatesta’s dark silhouette, but this time the Italian neither laughed nor commented. This offer of confession was clearly intended seriously, too seriously.

“You are a mercenary and a murderer,” the Inquisitor went on. “During your unfortunate life, you have broken each and every one of God’s commandments, and now you are about to be called to account.”

The captain finally recovered the use of his tongue, which had stuck to the roof of his mouth when he heard the word “confession.” Surprising even himself, he managed to keep his composure.

“My accounts,” he retorted, “are my own affair.”

Fray Emilio Bocanegra regarded him impassively, as if he had not heard that last remark.

“Divine Providence,” he went on, “is offering you the chance to reconcile yourself with God, to save your soul, even if you must then spend hundreds of years in Purgatory. In a few hours’ time, the holy swords of the archangel and of Joshua will fall and you will have been transformed into an instrument of God. You can decide whether to go to your death with your heart closed to God’s grace or to accept it with goodwill and a clear conscience. Do you understand?”

The captain shrugged. It was one thing for them to kill him and quite another to come bothering his head with such stuff. He could still not fathom what Bocanegra was doing there.