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before drawing her cloak more closely about her. Behind her, the aging duenna, clothed in deepest mourning, wearing a crow-black wimple and clutching a rosary, shot him a withering look. Quevedo stuck his tongue out at her. As he watched them depart, he smiled sadly and turned back to us without a word of explanation. He himself was dressed as soberly as ever: black silk stockings and shoes with silver buckles, a somber gray costume, a hat of the same color with a white feather, and the cross of St. James embroidered in red beneath the short cape caught back on his shoulder.
    “Convents are his specialty,” he added after that brief, pensive pause, his eyes still fixed on the lady and her companions.
    “Guadalmedina’s or the king’s?” Now it was Alatriste who was smiling beneath his soldierly mustache.
    Quevedo took a while to respond, then, sighing deeply, said, “Both.”
    I positioned myself next to the poet and, with eyes downcast, asked, “And the queen?”
    I asked this in a casual, respectful, irreproachable tone, as if it were the mere curiosity of a boy. Don Francisco turned a penetrating eye on me.
    “As lovely as ever,” he answered. “She now speaks the language of Spain a little better than she did.” He glanced at Alatriste and then back at me, his eyes glinting merrily behind the lenses of his spectacles. “She practices with her ladies-in-waiting and her mistress of the robes, and with her maids of honor.”
    My heart was beating so hard I was afraid it might give me away. “Did they all accompany her on the journey?”
    “They did.”
    The street was spinning. She was in this fascinating city. I gazed around me: at the empty, sandy area known as El Arenal, one of the most picturesque parts of Seville, which stretched from the city walls down to the Guadalquivir, with Triana on the farther shore; at the sails on the sardine boats and the shrimpers, and at all the other little boats coming and going; at the king’s galleys moored over by Triana, which was crammed with vessels as far as the pontoon; at El Altozano and the sinister castle that was the seat of the Inquisition; at the crowd of great ships on the nearer shore: a forest of masts, spars, lateen yards, sails, and flags; at the swarms of people, the tradesmen’s stalls, the bundles of merchandise; I could hear the hammering of ship’s carpenters, see the smoke from the caulkers’ tar barrels, and the pulleys on the great naval crane at the mouth of the Tagarete that was used to careen the ships’ bottoms.
The Basques in the north send us wood,
And cloth and iron and ships true and good,
And the sailor brings from the brave new world
Ambergris, pearls, silver and gold,
And skins and strange exotic dyes,
And everything else that money buys.
    Lope de Vega’s play El Arenal de Sevilla, from which these lines came, had remained engraved on my memory ever since I first saw it with Captain Alatriste at the open-air theater of El Príncipe when I was a mere boy, on the famous day when Buckingham and the Prince of Wales fought alongside him. And suddenly, that place, that city that was, in itself, so splendid, was made magical and marvelous. Angélica de Alquézar was there, and I might perhaps see her. I gave a sideways glance at my master, fearful that my inner turbulence might be visible from without. Fortunately, Diego Alatriste had more worrying things on his mind. He was studying the accountant Olmedilla, who had finished his business and was walking toward us, eyeing us about as cordially as if we had come to administer the last rites. Grave-faced and dressed entirely in black, apart from his white ruff, and wearing a narrow-brimmed black hat unadorned by any feather, and with that curious sparse beard that only accentuated his gray, mouselike appearance, he had the pinched air of one plagued by acid humors and bad digestion.
    “What do we need with this fool?” muttered the captain, as he watched him approach.
    Quevedo