The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet ca-5

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Only some of this is my doing,” said Alatriste.

  No one seemed to believe him. Martín Saldaña was grave-faced. He had his staff of office tucked in his belt, his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  “Give yourself up,” he warned again, “or I’ll kill you.”

  The captain reflected for a moment. He knew the fate that awaited regicides: he would be tortured to death and his body quartered. Not a very pleasant prospect.

  “It would be better if you killed me.”

  He was looking at the bearded face of the man who, up until that night, had been his friend—he was losing friends at an alarming rate—and he saw him hesitate, just for a moment. They both knew that Alatriste had no wish to be taken prisoner. Saldaña exchanged a rapid glance with Guadalmedina, and the latter almost imperceptibly shook his head. We need him alive, the gesture said, so that we can try to get him to talk.

  “Disarm him,” ordered Guadalmedina.

  The two catchpoles carrying the torches stepped forward, and Alatriste raised his sword. Martín Saldaña’s pistol was pointing straight at his stomach. “I could force him to fire,” he thought. “I just need to meet the barrel full on and with a little luck . . . True, a bullet in the gut hurts more than one in the head, and you take longer to die, but there’s no alternative. Martín might not refuse me that.”

  Saldaña himself seemed to be pondering the matter deeply.

  “Diego,” he said suddenly.

  Alatriste looked at him, surprised. It sounded like an introduction to a longer speech, and his comrade from Flanders was not the most verbose of men, certainly not in a situation like this.

  “It isn’t worth it,” added Saldaña after a pause.

  “What isn’t worth it?”

  Saldaña was still thinking. He raised his sword hand and scratched his beard with the cross-guard, then said:

  “Letting yourself get killed for no good reason.”

  “Leave any explanations for later,” Guadalmedina said brusquely.

  Alatriste leaned against the wall, confused. There was something that didn’t quite fit. Saldaña, his pistol still leveled at Alatriste, was looking at Guadalmedina now, frowning.

  “Later might be too late,” Saldaña said sullenly.

  Guadalmedina paused to think, head to one side. Then he stood studying them both for a while. Finally, he seemed convinced. His eyes fell on Saldaña’s pistol and he sighed.

  “It wasn’t the king,” he said.

  Through the left-hand window of the carriage, on the hills overlooking the orchards and the Manzanares River, he could just make out the dark shape of the Alcázar Real. Accompanied by half a dozen constables and catchpoles on foot, all bearing torches, they were on their way to Puente del Parque. Alongside the coachman sat another two guards, one of whom was carrying a harquebus with the match lit. Guadalmedina and Martín Saldaña were in the coach, sitting opposite Captain Alatriste. The latter could hardly believe the story they had just told him.

  “We’ve been using him as a double for His Majesty for eight months now; the likeness was quite astonishing,” concluded Guadalmedina. “The same age, the same blue eyes, a similar mouth . . . His name was Ginés Garcia millán and he was a little-known actor from Puerto Lumbreras. He stood in for the king for a few days during the recent visit to Aragon. When we heard that something was being planned for tonight, we decided that he should play the role once more. He knew the risks, but agreed to take part anyway. He was a loyal and valiant subject.”

  Alatriste pulled a face.

  “A fine reward he got for his loyalty.”

  Guadalmedina regarded him in silence, faintly irritated. The torches outside illuminated his aristocratic profile, his neat beard and curled mustache. Another world and another caste. He was supporting his splinted arm with his good hand to protect it from the jolting of the carriage.

  “It was doubtless a personal decision,” he said lightly. After all, compared with a monarch, the late Ginés Garcia millán mattered little to him. “His orders were not to appear until we arrived to protect him, but he was determined to play his role to the hilt and he didn’t wait.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “Playing a king was probably the high point of his career.”

  “He played the part well, too,” said the captain. “He remained dignified throughout and fought without once uttering a word. I doubt a king would have done the same.”

  Martín Saldaña listened impassively, never taking his eyes off Alatriste, his pistol in his lap, cocked and ready. Guadalmedina had removed one glove and was using it to flick away the dust on his fine breeches.

  “I don’t believe your story,” he said. “At least not entirely. It’s true, as you say, that there are signs of a fight and there must have been more than one assassin, but who’s to say that you weren’t in league with them?”

  “My word.”

  “And what else?”

  “You know me well enough.”

  Guadalmedina snorted, one glove hanging limp in his hand.

  “Do I? You haven’t proved very trustworthy of late.”

  Alatriste stared hard at the count. Up until that night, no one who said such a thing would have lived long enough to repeat it. Then he turned to Saldaña.

  “Don’t you believe me either?”

  Saldaña kept his mouth shut. It was clear that it was not his business to believe or disbelieve anything. He was simply doing his job. The actor was dead, the king was alive, and his orders were to guard the prisoner. He kept his thoughts to himself. Any debating he would leave to inquisitors, judges, and theologians.

  “It will all become clear in the fullness of time,” said Guadalmedina, drawing on his glove again. “The fact is, you received orders to stay away.”

  The captain looked out of the window. They had passed the Puente del Parque, and the carriage was taking them past the city wall, along the dirt road that led to the south side of the Alcázar.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To Caballerizas,” said Guadalmedina.

  Alatriste studied Martín Saldaña’s inexpressive face and noticed that he was now gripping the pistol more firmly and pointing it at his chest. “The sly fox knows me well,” he thought. “He knows it was a mistake to give me that information.” Caballerizas, better known as the Slaughterhouse, was the small prison next to the Alcázar stables where prisoners guilty of lèse-majesté were sent to be tortured. It was a sinister place where neither justice nor hope was to be found. There were no judges or lawyers, only torturers, strappado, and a scribe to note down each scream. Two interrogations were enough to leave a man crippled for life.

  “So this is as far as I go.”

  “Yes,” agreed Guadalmedina. “This is as far as you go. Now you’ll have time to explain everything.”

  “I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” thought Alatriste. And never better said. Taking advantage of another sudden jolt of the carriage, he flung himself on Saldaña just as the latter’s pistol was pointing slightly away from him. With the same impetus, he delivered a vicious headbutt to Saldaña’s face and felt the other man’s nose crunch beneath the impact. Cloc, it went. Thick, red blood flowed forth, pouring down Saldaña’s beard and chest. By then, Alatriste had snatched the pistol from him and was pointing it straight at Guadalmedina.

  “Your weapon,” the captain said.

  Taken completely by surprise, Guadalmedina was about to open his mouth to call for help from those outside, when Alatriste hit him hard in the face with the pistol, just a moment before relieving him of his sword. Killing them wouldn’t solve anything, he decided. He glanced at Saldaña, who was barely moving, like an ox felled by a blow to the back of the neck. He again struck Álvaro de la Marca hard, and the count, unable to defend himself, his arm in a sling, slid between the seats. “You’re damn well not taking me to the Slaughterhouse,” thought the captain. A blood-spattered Saldaña was gazing at him with dazed eyes.

&n
bsp; “I’ll see you again, Martín,” said Alatriste.

  He took Saldaña’s second pistol and stuck it in his belt. Then he kicked open the carriage door and jumped out, a pistol in his right hand and a sword in his left. “I just hope my wounded leg doesn’t let me down,” he thought. A catchpole was already there, shouting to his comrades that the prisoner was trying to escape. The man was holding a torch and struggling, single-handed, to unsheathe his sword, and so, without thinking twice, Alatriste shot him point-blank in the chest; the blast lit up the man’s face as it hurled him backward into the shadows. Alatriste’s military instinct alerted him to the smell of a harquebus lit and ready to fire. Its owner was on the coachman’s seat; there was no time to lose. He threw down the discharged pistol and took out the second one in order to shoot the man above. At that moment, however, another catchpole came running toward him, brandishing a sword. Alatriste had to choose. He pointed the pistol and stopped the running man in his tracks. The man was still clinging to a wheel of the carriage for support as Alatriste raced to the edge of the road and hurled himself down the slope that led to the stream and the river. Two men made as if to follow him, and a shot from a harquebus blazed forth from on top of the carriage: the bullet whistled past him and was lost in the darkness. He scrambled to his feet among the undergrowth, his face and hands all scratched, ready to start running again despite his painful leg, but his pursuers were on him already. Two black shapes came panting and stumbling their way through the bushes, shouting: “Halt! Halt! Give yourself up in the name of the king!” Two of them at once and so near as well. He had no alternative but to turn and face them, his sword at the ready; and when the first one reached him, he did not wait, but lunged straight at him, driving his blade into the man’s chest. The catchpole screamed and fell to the ground, while the other man hung back, prudently. Alatriste could see several more torches approaching down the path now. He set off running into the darkness, downhill, keeping close to the trees, guided by the sound of the nearby river. He found himself at last in the reedbeds and felt the mud beneath his boots. Luckily, the river was still full after the recent rains. He stuck his sword in his belt, waded in until the water was shoulder high, and then let himself be carried along by the current.

  He swam downriver as far as the little islands, and from there returned to the shore. He walked through the reedbeds, splashing through the mud, until he was nearly at the Segovia bridge. He rested awhile to recover his breath, tied a handkerchief around the wound in his thigh, and then, shivering in his drenched clothes—he had lost cloak and hat in the scuffle—passed underneath the stone arches, avoiding the sentry box at the Puerta de Segovia. From there he walked slowly up to the heights of San Francisco, where, via a small stream that was used as a kind of drain, he could enter the city unseen. At that hour, he thought, there would be a swarm of constables out looking for him. He obviously couldn’t go back to the Inn of the Turk, nor to Juan Vicuña’s place. Taking refuge in a church would serve no purpose either, not even with Master Pérez’s Jesuit brethren. In any matter involving a king, Saint Peter’s jurisdiction was no match for that of the sword. His one chance lay in the poorest areas, where royal justice would not dare to venture at that hour of the night, and even during the day would do so only in a large band. Taking shelter in the shadows, he cautiously made his way as far as Plaza de la Cebada, and from there—taking the very narrowest of streets, and hurrying across the broader thoroughfares of Calle de Embajadores and Calle del Mesón de Paredes—he got as far as the fountain of Lavapiés, where Madrid’s lowest inns and taverns and bawdy houses were to be found. He needed a place where he could hide away and think—he found Gualterio Malatesta’s presence in Camino de las Minillas disconcerting in the extreme—but he had not a single doubloon with which to pay for such a haven. He mentally reviewed the friends he had in that area, weighing up which of them would be loyal enough not to betray him for thirty pieces of silver when a price was put on his head the next day. Immersed in these black thoughts, he turned and walked as far as Calle de la Comadre, where, at the door of the various whorehouses, lit by the torches and the little lanterns in the hallways, half a dozen prostitutes were plying their sad trade. Then he said to himself: “Perhaps God does exist and doesn’t merely content himself with watching from afar while chance or the devil play fast and loose with mankind.” For who should he see outside one of the taverns, slapping a whore about the face and looking every inch the ruffian, with the brim of his hat pulled down over one bushy eyebrow, but Bartolo Cagafuego.

  7. THE FENCER’S ARMS

  Don Francisco de Quevedo angrily threw down his cloak and hat on a stool and unfastened his ruff. The news could not be worse. “There’s nothing to be done,” he said, unbuckling his sword. “Guadalmedina refuses even to talk about the matter.”

  I stared out of the window. The threatening, gray clouds filling the Madrid sky above the rooftops of Calle del Niño made everything seem even grimmer. Don Francisco had spent two hours with Guadalmedina, trying, unsuccessfully, to convince the king’s confidant of Captain Alatriste’s innocence. Álvaro de la Marca had said that even if Alatriste were the victim of a conspiracy, his flight from justice had complicated everything. Quite apart from killing two catchpoles and badly wounding a third, he had left Saldaña with a broken nose and inflicted further injuries on the count himself. “In short,” concluded don Francisco, “he’s determined to see him hanged.”

  “But they were friends,” I protested.

  “No friendship could withstand this. Furthermore, this really is a very strange affair.”

  “I hope at least you believe his story.”

  The poet sat down in the armchair made of walnut in which the late Duke of Osuna used to sit when he visited the house. On the table next to it lay paper and quills, a copper inkwell and sandbox, as well as a snuffbox and several books, among them a Seneca and a Plutarch.

  “If I didn’t believe the captain,” he said, “I wouldn’t have gone to see Guadalmedina.”

  He stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. He was looking abstractedly at a sheet of paper, the top half of which bore his own clear, vigorous handwriting—the first four lines of a sonnet which I had read while I was waiting.

  He that denies me what’s only gained by stealth

  Acts quite rightly and deprives me of nothing,

  For low ambition, brought to pass with loathing,

  Brings with it much dishonor, naught of wealth.

  I went over to where don Francisco kept his wine—a sideboard decorated with a frieze made of squares of green glass, beneath a painting depicting Troy ablaze—and poured a large glass of wine. Don Francisco took a pinch of the snuff. He was not a great smoker, but he was fond of that powder made from leaves brought from the Indies.

  “I’ve known your master for a long time, my boy,” he went on. “He may be stubborn, he may sometimes go too far, but I know he would never raise his hand against the king.”

  “The count knows him too,” I said, handing him the glass.

  He nodded, having first sneezed twice.

  “True. And I would bet my gold spurs that he knows the captain had nothing to do with it. However, there are only so many insults a nobleman can take: Alatriste’s impertinence, the wound he dealt him in Calle de los Peligros, the beating he received the other night . . . Guadalmedina’s pretty face still bears the marks left by your master before he escaped. Such things are hard to accept when you’re a grandee of Spain. It’s not so much the blow as not being able to make a fuss about it.”

  He took a sip of his wine and sat looking at me, meanwhile still fiddling with the canister of tobacco.

  “It’s lucky the captain got you out of there in time.”

  He continued to regard me thoughtfully. Then he put down the canister and took a longer drink of wine.

  “Whatever made you go after him?”

  I muttered something about a boy’s curiosity, a liking for intrigues, et cetera.
I knew that anyone trying to justify his actions tends to talk too much, and that too many explanations are always worse than a prudent silence. On the one hand, I was ashamed to admit that I had let myself be led into a trap by the poisonous young woman with whom, despite all, I was deeply in love. On the other hand, I considered Angélica de Alquézar to be my affair alone. I wanted to be the one to resolve that particular situation, but as long as my master was safely hidden away—we had received a discreet message from him through a safe channel—all explanations could wait. What mattered now was keeping him out of the hands of the torturers.

  “I’m going to tell him what you’ve told me,” I said.

  I buttoned up my doublet and picked up my hat. Rain had started speckling the windows, and so I put on my serge cloak as well. Don Francisco watched as I concealed my dagger amongst my clothes.

  “Be careful no one follows you.”

  There was every likelihood that someone would. The constables had questioned me at the Inn of the Turk, until I managed to convince them, by lying shamelessly, that I knew nothing about what had happened in Camino de las Minillas. La Lebrijana had been of no use to them either, even though they threatened and abused her, albeit only verbally. No one told her the real reason for the captain’s disappearance. It was attributed to a sword fight in which someone had died, but no further details were offered.

  “Don’t worry. The rain will help to disguise me.”

  I was less concerned about the officers of the law than I was about the people behind the conspiracy, because they, I imagined, would certainly be watching me. I was about to take my leave when the poet raised one finger, as if an idea had just occurred to him. Getting up, he went over to a small desk by the window and removed what looked like a jewelry box.