They came the next morning. I heard their footsteps on the creaking staircase that led up from the courtyard, and when I ran to open the door, the captain was already there, in his shirtsleeves and looking very serious. I had observed that during the night he had cleaned his pistols, and that one had been left, oiled and ready, on the table near the beam where his belt with the sword and dagger hung from a nail.

“Go outside for a walk, Íñigo.”

I obeyed, but when I went out into the hall I met don Francisco de Quevedo on the top steps. He was accompanied by three caballeros, though he acted as if he didn’t know them. I noted that they had not used the door on Calle Arcabuz, but the one between our courtyard and Caridad la Lebrijana’s tavern, the entrance on Calle Toledo, which was used less often and was, therefore, more discreet. Don Francisco cuffed me on the cheek affectionately before he went into our rooms, and I continued on along the gallery, but not before I sneaked a quick look at his companions. One was an older man, quite gray. The other two were young, one about eighteen and the other not far into his twenties. Nice-looking youths who bore a certain resemblance to each other; perhaps brothers or close relatives. All three were dressed in traveling clothes, and something about them said “not Madrileños.”

I swear to Your Mercies that I was a well-mannered and discreet young lad. I am not a meddler, nor was I then. But to a boy of thirteen, the world is a fascinating spectacle and he wants to taste every morsel. To that we must add the words I had overheard between Señor de Quevedo and Captain Alatriste the evening before. So if I am to be honest, I must confess that I went around the gallery, pulled myself up to the roof with all the agility of my youth, and, after scooting along an eave to a window, cautiously reentered the house. I squatted at the back of a cupboard in my room, where a certain crack allowed me to see and hear everything that was happening on the other side. I was careful not to make a sound, and determined not to miss a single detail of this business in which, according to don Francisco’s own words, both Diego Alatriste and he were gambling their lives. What I did not know—God save me!—was how I would come within a hair of losing my own.

“You are aware,” the captain was summing up, “that the penalty for breaking into a convent is death.”

Don Francisco de Quevedo nodded but said nothing. He had made the introductions and then stepped aside, letting the visitors speak. Of those three, it was the older man who had led the conversation. He was sitting beside the table that held his hat, a jug of wine no one had touched, and the captain’s pistol.

“The danger is real,” the older man said. “But there is no other way to rescue my daughter.”

I later learned that his name was Vicente de la Cruz; he was from an old family in Valencia and only temporarily in Madrid. He was thin, with white hair and beard, and though he must have been over sixty years old, he was vigorous and erect in his gait. His sons, the elder of whom had yet to see twenty-five, looked very much like him. Their names were don Jerónimo and don Luis. The latter was the younger; already very poised, though not more than eighteen. The three men were wearing simple traveling or hunting garb, the father in a black woolen shirt and blue doublet, and his sons in dark green cloth with trim of the same color. Each carried a sword and dagger in an old-fashioned baldric. Their hair was cut very short, and they shared a candid expression that accentuated the family resemblance.

“Who are the priests?” asked Alatriste.

He was leaning against an exposed beam in the wall, his thumbs hooked into his belt, mulling it all over. His eye was more on Señor Quevedo than the visitors, as if asking him what the Devil he had got him into. For his part, the poet, at the window, was staring at the neighboring rooftops as if none of this had anything to do with him. Only from time to time did he send Alatriste a dispassionate glance—very much the bystander—or study his nails with unwonted attention.

“Fray Juan Coroado and Fray Julián Garzo,” don Vicente replied. “They own and run the convent, and Sor Josefa, the prioress, speaks only through them. The rest of the nuns either have thrown their lot in with them, or live in fear.”

Again Captain Alatriste looked at don Franciso de Quevedo, and this time he caught his eye. I am sorry, the poet’s silence seemed to say. You are the only one who can help me.

“Fray Juan, the chaplain,” don Vicente continued, “is the minion of the Conde de Olivares. His father, Amandio Coroado, founded the convent of the Adoratrices Benitas at his own expense, and is, in addition, the only Portuguese banker the king’s favorite can rely on. Now that Olivares is attempting to cease his dealings with the Genoese, Coroado is his ace card for getting money out of Portugal to fund the war in Flanders. For that reason, Fray Juan, his son, enjoys absolute impunity in the convent and outside it.”

“These are very serious accusations.”

“They have been proved time and again. This Juan Coroada is not some simple, credulous priest, like so many; not one of the Illuminati, not a mere petitioner, not a fanatic. He is thirty years old. He has money, position at court, and he cuts a handsome figure. He is a pervert who has turned the convent into his private seraglio.”

“There is a more explicit word, Father,” put in the younger of the sons. His voice trembled with anger, and he was almost stuttering; anyone could see that he was restraining himself out of respect for his father.

Don Vicente de la Cruz reprimanded him, frowning. “Perhaps. But as your sister is there, dare not be so bold as to speak it.”

The youth paled and bowed his head, as his elder brother, less vocal and more self-possessed, put a hand on his arm.

“And the other priest?” pressed Alatriste.

The light falling through the window illuminated the side of the captain’s face, leaving the other side in shadow. It highlighted his scars: the one over the left eyebrow and another, more recent, at the hairline in the center of his brow, a souvenir of the skirmish in the yard of El Príncipe theater. The third visible scar, across the back of his left hand, was also recent and also from a dagger. That had been acquired in the ambush at the Gate of Lost Souls. Unseen, covered by clothing, were four others, the latest being the wound that had mustered him out of the Battle of Fleurus, the one that some nights kept him from sleeping.

“Fray Julián Garzo is the confessor,” don Vicente de la Cruz replied. “Another admirable church leader. He has an uncle on the Council of Castile. That renders him untouchable, like his confrere.”

“In other words, two men to watch out for.”

Don Luis, the younger son, could barely contain himself, his fist squeezing the pommel of his sword. “What you mean is two dogs, two swine.”

He was choking on his repressed anger, and that made him seem even younger; that, and the blond, still unshaven, fuzz on his upper lip. His father sent him another frowning glance, demanding silence before he continued.

“The fact is,” he said, “that the walls of La Adoración convent are thick enough to silence all that goes on within them: a chaplain who veils his lasciviousness beneath a hypocritical mysticism, a stupid and credulous prioress, and a congregation of unfortunate women who have been convinced that they have celestial visions or are possessed of the Devil.” The caballero ran his fingers through his beard as he spoke, and it was obvious that acting with equanimity and decorum was costing him dear. “They are even told that through love for and obedience to the chaplain they may find the way to God, and that certain intimacies and unchaste acts proposed by the spiritual director are the pathway to perfection.”

Diego Alatriste was far from being surprised. In the Spain of our very Catholic monarch, Philip IV, faith was usually sincere, but its external manifestations often resulted in hypocrisy in the privileged, and superstition in the common folk. In that broad panorama, many clergy were fanatic and ignorant, a vulgar assemblage of ne’erdo-wells who wanted to escape employment or military service; some, ambitious and immoral, hoped to better their social situation, more devoted to their own good than to the glory of God. While the poor paid taxes from which the rich and the religious by profession were excluded, legal scholars argued whether ecclesiastic immunity was or was not a divine right. And there were many who took advantage of the tonsure to satisfy contemptible appetites and self-interest. The result was that side by side with unquestionably honorable and saintly clerics, one also found the vile and avaricious: priests who had concubines and bastard children, confessors who preyed on women in the confessional, nuns who entertained lovers, convents that were havens for illicit affairs. These scandals that were the daily, if not exactly hallowed, bread.

“No one has condemned what is happening there?”

Don Vicente de la Cruz nodded dejectedly. “Yes. I myself. I even sent a detailed reminder to the Conde de Olivares, the king’s right hand, but have no reply.”

“And the Inquisition?”

“They are informed. I had a conversation with a member of the Supreme Council. He promised to attend to my request, and I know that he sent two Trinitarian examiners to look into the matter. But between the efforts of Father Coroado and Father Garzo, and the collaboration of the prioress, they were convinced that all was in order, and they left with only good things to say.”

“Which is by all accounts strange,” interposed don Francisco de Quevedo. “The Inquisition has been keeping a sharp eye on the Conde de Olivares, and this would be a good pretext for harassing him.”

The Valencian shrugged. “That is what we believed. But no doubt they decided they would be spending too much good coin to protect a simple novice. Furthermore, Sor Josefa, the prioress, enjoys a reputation at court for being a pious woman. She devotes a daily mass and special prayers to Olivares, and the king and queen, of course, asking God to send them male heirs. That assures her respect and prestige, when in fact, except for a smattering of inconsequential knowledge, she is merely a foolish woman who has been sucked into the whirlpool of the chaplain’s charm. The case is not unusual, now that every prioress worth her salt must have at least five stigmata and exude the scent of sanctity.”

Don Vicente smiled with bitterness and scorn. “Her mystic aspirations, her desire to be center stage, her dreams of grandeur, and her connections, have led her to believe that she is a new Santa Teresa. In addition, ducats fall like rain from Father Coroado’s fingers, making La Adoración the wealthiest convent in Madrid. More than a few families want to place their daughters there.”

I was listening through the chink in the wall, not overly shocked despite my youth. In a society in which religion and immorality went hand in hand, confessors were notorious for taking tyrannical possession of the souls, and at times the bodies, of devout women—with scandalous consequences.

As for the influence of those in the religious life, it was immense. Different orders formed enmities and alliances among themselves. Priests forbade their faithful to reconcile with other congregations, and when it was their whim, they blithely severed family ties, even counseled disobedience of authority. Neither was it unusual to see clerics who preyed on women employ a mystic-amatory language that evoked the divine, nor veil prurient passions and appetites, ambition and lust, under the guise of spiritual exercises. The figure of the predatory priest was well known, and widely satirized, in that century, as in these explicit verses from La cueva de Meliso.

It was not surprising, in that time of superstition and sanctimoniousness, that such wickedness prevailed, given that we Spaniards lived in so little accord, badly fed, and worse governed amidst collective pessimism and disillusion. Sometimes we sought the consolation of religion because we felt we were on the brink of an abyss, and others for simple, bare-faced, earthly gain.

This situation was aggravated by the numbers of priests and nuns who had no calling for the cloth—there were more than nine thousand convents when I was a boy—the result of the practice of penniless noble families who, unable to wed their daughters with traditional decorum, instead directed them to the religious life, or incarcerated them against their will following some worldly indiscretion. Cloisters were filled with women who did not wish to be nuns. It was they to whom don Luis Hurtado de Toledo—the author, or, to be more accurate, the translator, of Palmerin of England—was referring in these famous lines.

Don Francisco de Quevedo had not moved from his place by the window; he seemed removed from the conversation, staring vacantly at the cats wandering across the roof tiles like idle soldiers. Captain Alatriste gave him a long look before turning back to don Vicente de la Cruz.

“I do not yet understand,” he said, “how your daughter came to find herself in this situation.”

The elderly man was slow to reply. The same light that accentuated the captain’s scars split his brow with a deep vertical furrow that spoke of his profound grief.

“Elvira came to Madrid with two other novices when La Adoración was founded, about a year ago. They were accompanied by a duenna, a woman who had been highly recommended to us, who was to wait upon them until they took their vows.”

“And what does this duenna say?”

The captain’s question was met with a silence thick enough to be sliced with a scimitar. Don Vicente de la Cruz was staring at his bony, gnarled, but still strong right hand where it rested on the table. His sons were scowling at the floor as if studying something in front of their boots. I had observed that don Jerónimo, the elder son, rougher and more taciturn than his brother, had a hard, piercing gaze that I had seen in only a few men, something I was learning to take as warning. The look of a man who while others strut about clanking their swords against the furniture and boasting in loud voices, sits quietly in a corner of the gaming house, unblinking, taking in every detail, not opening his mouth, until suddenly he gets up and without changing expression walks over and skewers you with a sword. Captain Alatriste himself was such a man; and I, from being so long near him, was beginning to recognize the type.

“We do not know what has become of the duenna,” don Vicente said finally. “She disappeared a few days ago.”

Again that silence. This time don Francisco de Quevedo took his gaze from the roof tiles and the cats. His deeply melancholy eyes met those of Diego Alatriste.

“Disappeared,” the captain repeated, as if turning the words over in his mind.

Don Vicente de la Cruz’s sons were still examining the floor. Finally the father abruptly nodded. It seemed he could not take his eyes from the motionless hand on the table beside the hat, the jug of wine, and the captain’s pistol.

“Yes,” he said. “She cannot be found.”

Don Francisco de Quevedo moved away from the window and took a few steps into the room, stopping beside Alatriste. “They say,” he murmured, “that she served as a go-between for Fray Juan Coroado.”

“And she has disappeared.”

For a few instants the captain and don Francisco stood toe to toe.

“So we have heard,” the poet finally affirmed.

“I understand.”

Even I, in my hiding place, understood, though I didn’t yet comprehend exactly what role don Francisco was playing in such a scabrous affair. As for the rest of it, perhaps the pouch that Martín Saldaña had found in the possession of the strangled woman in the sedan chair, could not, after all, buy enough masses to save her soul.

Wide-eyed, I peered through the chink in the cupboard, beginning to feel more respect for don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons. He did not seem as aged now, or his sons as young. After all, I thought, shuddering, it was their sister and daughter who was involved. I had sisters of my own back in Oñate, and I do not know how far I might go to avenge them.

“Now,” the father continued, “the prioress says that Elvira has turned her back on the world forever. We have not been able to visit her for eight months.”

“Why has she not run away?”

Don Vicente made a helpless gesture. “She is under their sway in what happens to her. The nuns and the novices spy on one another. Imagine the scene: visions and exorcisms, confessions used to practice unholy ceremonies behind closed doors, under the pretext of cleansing the nuns of devils, jealousy, envy—all their petty convent quarrels.” The Valencian’s stoic expression crumpled into a picture of pain. “Nearly all the sisters are very young, like Elvira. Any who do not believe they are possessed of a demon, or have celestial visions, invent them to attract attention. The stupid prioress, who has no will of her own, is in the hands of the chaplain, whom she considers a saint. And Fray Juan and his acolyte roam from cell to cell giving solace and comfort.”

“Have you, Your Mercy, spoken with the chaplain?”

“Once. And I swear on the life of our king that had we not been in the locutory of the convent I would have killed him on the spot.” Don Vicente de la Cruz held up his inert right hand, incensed, as if he lamented that it was not bathed in blood.

“Despite my gray hairs, he laughed in my face with unbearable insolence. Because our family…”

He stopped mid-sentence and looked at his sons. The younger was deathly pale, without a drop of color in his face, and his brother was looking away with that frightening expression of his.

“In truth,” their father continued, “the purity of our blood is not categorical. My great-grandfather was a convert to the Faith, and my grandfather was harassed by the Inquisition. All that took a great deal of money to resolve. That swine, Padre Coroado, knew how to play that card. He threatened to denounce my daughter for having Jewish blood…and us as well.”

“Which is not true,” the younger son intervened. “Although we have the misfortune of not being old Christians, our family is without blemish. The proof of that is that don Pedro Téllez, the Duque de Osuna, honored my father with his confidence when he served under him in Sicily.”

He stopped suddenly; his pallor changed to pomegranate red. I watched Captain Alatriste look at don Francisco: now the connection was clear. During his reign as Viceroy of Sicily, and later Naples, the Duque de Osuna had been Quevedo’s friend, and Quevedo, too, had suffered during Osuna’s fall from favor. It was obvious that the obligation that bound the poet to don Vicente de la Cruz was to be found in that tangle of relationships, and that the Valencian’s misfortune and abandonment at court was mud stirred from that dust. In addition, don Francisco knew how it was to find oneself abandoned by people who in other times had sought one’s favors and influence.

“What is the plan?” the captain asked.

I heard in his voice a tone I knew very well: resignation, and an absence of illusions concerning the chances for success or failure. An exhausted, silent resolve, stripped of any concerns other than technical details, the veteran soldier matter-of-factly preparing to confront a bad assignment that was part of his job. Often, in the years ahead, when we were to share adventures and fight in the wars of our lord and king, I recognized that same tone and that unemotional expression that so uniquely hardened the gray-green eyes of the captain after the long immobility of waiting during a campaign, when the drums sounded and the tercios marched toward the enemy at that awesome, stately pace beneath the tattered flags that had led us to both glory and disaster. That same look, and that same tone of infinite weariness, became mine many years later: the day when I stood among the remnants of a Spanish formation, dagger between my teeth, pistol in one hand and unsheathed sword in the other. There, I watched the French cavalry form their last charge, as in Flanders, rosy with blood, a sun went down…one that for two centuries had inspired fear and respect throughout the world.

But that morning in Madrid, in ’23, Rocroi existed only in the dark pages of Destiny, and two decades would pass before that fateful encounter. Our king was young and gallant, Madrid was the capital of two worlds, the old and the new, and I myself was a beardless youth. I crouched impatiently at the crack in a cupboard, waiting for the answer to the question the captain had posed: What plan had don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons, through the good offices of don Francisco de Quevedo, come to present? As the grieving father prepared to answer, a cat jumped through the window and slipped between my legs. I tried, quietly, to brush it away, but it refused to leave. Then I moved too brusquely, and a broom and a tin dust bin crashed to the floor. And when I looked up, horrified, the door had been flung open and the elder son of don Vicente de la Cruz was standing before me, dagger in hand.

“I believed you to be inflexible in regard to purity of blood, don Francisco,” said Captain Alatriste, when we three were alone. “I never imagined that you would place your neck in a noose for a family of Jew-turned-Christian conversos.”

I glimpsed a smile of affectionate indulgence beneath the captain’s mustache. Seated at our table, wearing the face of a man with few friends, Señor de Quevedo was dispatching the jug of wine that until that moment no one had touched. After reaching an accord with the captain, don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons had left.

“Everything has its…charm,” the poet murmured.

“I have no doubt. But if your much-loved Luis de Góngora catches scent of this, you should prepare to be lambasted. His sonnet will drop you to your knees.”

“A pox on him.”

But it was true. In a time when hatred of Jews and heretics was considered an indispensable component of faith—only a few years earlier, the aforementioned Lope, as well as good don Miguel de Cervantes, had crowed over the expulsion of the Moors—don Francisco de Quevedo, who prided himself on being an old Christian from Santander, was not exactly noted for his tolerance of anyone whose purity of blood was dubious. On the contrary, he often used that theme when aiming darts at his adversaries—and especially don Luis de Góngora, to whom he attributed Jewish blood.

The great satirist liked to intersperse such compliments with allusions to Góngora’s sodomy, as he did in a certain famous sonnet that concludes,

Yet here he was, getting his own hands dirty: don Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas, he of the habit of Santiago and proven family purity, lord of la Torre de Juan Abad, scourge of Judaizers, heretics, sodomites, and assorted Latinate court poets, risking life and honor, plotting nothing less than to violate the sanctity of a cloister in order to aid a family of Valencian conversos. Even I, at my tender age, recognized the terrible implications.

“A pox on him, by Christ,” the poet repeated.

I suppose that any sane man would be swearing—in Greek, even Hebrew, both languages that don Francisco was familiar with—had he found himself in Quevedo’s starched white collar. And Captain Alatriste, who was not in Quevedo’s gorget, but faced ruin enough in his own, was well aware of that.

The captain had not moved from his place against the wall throughout the conversation with our visitors, and his thumbs were still hooked over his belt. He had not shifted position even when Jerónimo de la Cruz returned to the room, dagger in hand, leading me by the ear. Alatriste merely ordered the man to release me, in a tone that inspired my captor, after only an instant’s hesitation, to obey. As for me, the awkward moment past, I was huddled in a corner, still red with embarrassment, trying to pass unnoticed. It had taken a certain effort to convince the father and sons that although disobedient, I was a prudent lad and could be trusted. Don Francisco himself had to speak for me. But the beans had been spilled—I had heard everything—and don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons would have to put their faith in me. Although when it came down to it—as the captain clarified very deliberately, casting cold, intimidating looks at each of the three in turn—this was no longer a situation in which they could offer an opinion or have a choice. That declaration was followed by a long and weighty silence, after which my involvement was not questioned again.

“They are good people,” Quevedo said finally. “And blood or no blood, no one can accuse them of not being good Catholics.” He paused in search of further justification. “And when we were in Italy, don Vicente performed a number of services for me. It would have been wicked not to hold out a hand to him.”

Captain Alatriste nodded his understanding, and beneath his military mustache I could see the same irrepressible smile.

“All that you say is well and good,” the captain acknowledged. “But I press my point about Góngora. After all, Your Mercy is constantly dwelling on his Semitic nose and his aversion to the flesh of the pig. You remember when you wrote,

Don Francisco smoothed his mustache and goatee, half pleased that the captain remembered his verses, and half annoyed by the bantering way he recited them.

“By the good Christ, Alatriste, what a good—and, I might add, badly timed—memory you have.”

Alatriste burst out laughing, unable to contain himself any longer, which did not improve the poet’s humor.

“I can just imagine what your enemy will write,” said the captain, beating a dead horse, holding his fingers as if he were writing on air.

“What do you think?”

Don Franciso’s face grew even more dour. Were it not Diego Alatriste speaking, his tormentor would have tasted steel some time ago.

“Bad, and with very little flair,” was all he said, dispiritedly. “Those lines could, in fact, have been written by that Cordovan sodomite, or that other friend of yours, the Conde de Guadalmedina, whose behavior as a caballero I do not contest, but who as a poet is the mortification of Parnassus. As for Góngora, that puerile asshole, that proparoxytonic, euphistic versifier, that dabbler in vortices, tricliniums, promptuaria, and vacillating Icaruses, that shadow on the sun and eructation of the wind…he is the last thing that worries me now. I do fear, however, that I have brought you into a bad business.” He gripped the jug of wine more tightly and took another swig, glancing in my direction. “And the lad.”

The lad—that is, I—was still in the corner. The cat had strolled past me three times, and I had made every effort to get in a good kick, with little success. I saw that Alatriste, too, was looking at me, and he was no longer smiling. Finally he shrugged his shoulders.

“The lad got himself into it,” he declared calmly. “As for me, do not concern yourself.” He pointed to the pouch of gold escudos in the center of the table. “They have paid, and that eases all cares.”

“Perhaps.”

The poet did not seem convinced, and Alatriste’s lips again twisted with irony.

“What the devil, don Francisco. It is a little late for regrets, now that you’ve already got me dressed for the ball.”

Dejected, the poet took a swallow, and then another. His eyes had begun to water.

“But to turn a convent upside down,” he said, underscoring the obvious, “is not a trifling matter.”

“Nor is taking La Goleta, pardiez!” The captain strode to the table, where he picked up his pistol and removed the primer and charge. “They tell that my mother’s great-uncle, a man well known in the day of Charles the Fifth, broke into a convent one day in Seville.”

Don Francisco looked up, interested. “Was he one who inspired Tirso’s play?”

“So they say.”

“I was not aware that you were related.”

“Well, now you know it. Spain is a pocket handkerchief: here everyone knows everyone, and all roads cross.”

Quevedo’s eyeglasses were dangling from their cord. Thoughtful, he held them a moment but did not place them on his nose. Instead, they dropped from his fingers to again hang above the embroidered cross on his chest, and he reached instead for the wine. He drank a long, last draught, gazing lugubriously at the captain over the lip of the jug.

“Well, by the good Christ, I venture that your uncle, that trickster Don Juan, had a bad third act.”