“Good swordsmen?”
“On that occasion, I didn’t stay long enough to find out.”
Contreras smugly twirled his mustache and looked around, letting his eyes linger in particular on Captain Alatriste and don Francisco.
“The greater the number of Moors to fight, the greater the glory, don’t you agree, Señor de Quevedo?”
Don Francisco adjusted his spectacles and frowned, for it ill became a court favorite to get involved in a scandal involving kidnappings and sword fights. However, the presence of Alonso de Contreras, Diego Alatriste, and Lope’s son made it very hard for him to refuse.
“I’m afraid,” he said in resigned tones, “there’s nothing for it but to fight.”
“It might provide you with matter for a sonnet,” remarked Contreras, already imagining himself the hero of another poem.
“Or, indeed, a reason to spend a further period in exile.”
As for Captain Alatriste, who was leaning on the table before his mug of wine, the look he exchanged with his old comrade Contreras was an eloquent one. For men like them, such adventures were merely part of the job.
“And what about the boy?” asked Contreras, meaning me.
I felt almost offended. I considered myself a young man of considerable experience and so I smoothed my nonex istent mustache, as I had seen my master do, and said:
“The ‘boy’ will fight too.”
The way in which I said this brought me an approving smile from the miles gloriosus—the boastful soldier Contreras—and a glance from Diego Alatriste.
“When my father finds out,” moaned Lopito, “he’ll kill me.”
Captain Contreras roared with laughter.
“Your illustrious father knows a thing or two about kidnappings and elopements. The Phoenix was always a great one for the ladies!”
There followed an embarrassed silence, and we all stuck nose and mustache in our respective mugs of wine. Even Contreras did so, suddenly remembering that Lopito himself was the illegitimate child born of just such an affair, even though, as I mentioned before, Lope had subsequently acknowledged him. The young man, however, did not appear offended. He knew his father’s reputation better than anyone. After a few sips of wine and a diplomatic clearing of the throat, Contreras took up the thread again:
“There’s nothing like a fait accompli; besides, that’s what we military men are like, isn’t it? Direct, bold, proud, straight to the point. I remember once, in Cyprus it was . . .”
And he immediately launched into another story. When he had done, he took a long draft of wine, sighed nostal gically, and looked at Lopito.
“So, young man, are you truly willing to join yourself in holy matrimony to that woman, until death do you part, et cetera?”
Lopito held his gaze unblinking.
“As long as God is God, and beyond death itself.”
“No one’s asking that much of you. If you stick with her until death, you’ll be doing more than your duty already. Do we gentlemen here have your word as a gentleman?”
“On my life, you do.”
“Then there’s nothing more to be said.” Contreras gave the table a satisfied thump. “Can anyone resolve matters on the ecclesiastical side?”
“My Aunt Antonia is abbess of the Convento de las Jerónimas,” Lopito said. “She’ll gladly take us in. And Father Francisco, her chaplain, is also Laura’s confessor and knows Señor Moscatel well.”
“Will he agree to help if he’s needed?
“Oh, yes.”
“And what about the young lady? Will your Laura be prepared to be put to the test like this?”
Lopito said quite simply that she would, and there was no further discussion of the matter. Everyone agreed to take part, we all drank to a happy conclusion, and don Francisco de Quevedo, as was his wont, contributed a few appropriate lines of verse, not his this time, but Lope’s:
“Once she’s in love, the most cowardly woman
(More so if she’s a maid)
Will gladly tread her family’s honor
Mud-deep where she is laid.”
Everyone drank to this as well, and eight or ten toasts later, using the table as a map and the mugs of wine as the main protagonists, Captain Contreras—his speech now slightly uncertain, but his resolution firm—invited us to pull up our chairs so that he could lay out his plan to us. His assault tactics, as he termed them, were as detailed as if we were preparing to send a hundred lancers into Oran rather than plotting a small-scale attack on a private house in Calle de la Madera.
A house with two doors is always difficult to guard, and don Gonzalo Moscatel’s house had two doors. A couple of nights later, we, the conspirators, our faces muffled by our cloaks, were standing in the shadows of a nearby arcade opposite the main door. Captain Contreras, don Francisco de Quevedo, Diego Alatriste, and I stood watching the musicians who, by the light of the lantern one of them had brought with him, were taking up their positions before the barred window of the house in question, on the corner of Calle de la Madera and Calle de la Luna. The plan was a bold and simple one: a serenade at one door, attracting protests and alarm, followed by a skirmish with swords, while escape was made via the other door. Military planning aside, due attention had also been paid to preserving the lady’s honor. Since Laura Moscatel was free neither to choose whom she would marry nor to leave her house, the only way of bending the will of her stubborn uncle was a kidnapping followed immediately by a wedding to make amends. The abbess aunt and the chaplain-cum-family-friend—the latter’s pastoral scruples having been soothed by a purseful of doubloons—had both been forewarned by Lopito and were, at that moment, waiting in the Convento de las Jerónimas, where the bride would be taken as soon as she was freed, so that everything could be seen to be proper and aboveboard.
“An excellent adventure, praise God,” muttered a gleeful Captain Contreras.
He was doubtless recalling his youth, when such adventures were more common. He was leaning against the wall, his face concealed by hat and cloak, between Diego Alatriste and don Francisco de Quevedo, who were equally well disguised, so that only the glint of their eyes could be seen. I was watching the street. In order to reassure don Francisco somewhat and to preserve appearances, our arrival on the scene had been made to look like mere coincidence, as if we were a group of men who just happened to be passing. Even the poor musicians, hired by Lopito de Vega, had no idea what was about to occur. They only knew that they had been paid to serenade a certain lady—a widow, they had been told—at eleven o’clock at night, outside her window. There were three musicians, the youngest of whom was fifty if he was a day. They were standing ready with guitar, lute, and tambourine, the latter played by the singer, who launched without further ado into the famous song:
“I worshipped you in Italy,
In Flanders died of love,
I come to Spain still passionate,
My madrileña dove . . .”
Not the most original of sentiments, it has to be said, but this was, nevertheless, a very popular ditty at the time. The singer got no further than these lines, however, for no sooner had he concluded that first verse than lights were lit inside the house, and don Gonzalo Moscatel could be heard swearing by all that’s holy. Then the front door was flung open and there he stood, sword in hand, wildly threatening the musicians and their progenitors and declaring that he would skewer them like capons. This, he roared, was no time to be disturbing honest households. He was accompanied—they were presumably spending the evening together—by the lawyer Saturnino Apolo, who was armed with a short sword and was carrying the lid of an earthenware jar as buckler. At this point, four nasty-looking individuals came bursting out of the coach house and immediately fell upon the musicians. The latter, who had done nothing wrong, found themselves being roundly punched and beaten with the flat of their assailants’ swords.