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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