A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series




"Assuredly . . ." began the priest, and then he checked. "Where
is your shop?"

"Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?"

Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.

For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the
celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he
went straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the
early hour, desired to see her Excellency.

"Lady," he told her, "I have great news; news that will rejoice
your heart." She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in
his sunken eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones.
"Don Sebastian lives. I have seen him."

A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she
paled until her face became as white as the nun's coil upon her
brow; her breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed
upon her feet, and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady
and save herself from falling. He saw that he had blundered by
his abruptness, that he had failed to gauge the full depth of her
feelings for the Hidden Prince, and for a moment feared that she
would swoon under the shock of the news he had so recklessly
delivered.

"What do you say? Oh, what do you say?" she moaned, her eyes
half-closed.

He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting
all the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses.
Gradually she quelled the storm of her emotions.

"And you say that you have seen him? Oh!" Once more the colour
suffused her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became
radiant. "Where is he?"

"Here. Here in Madrigal."

"In Madrigal?" She was all amazement. "But why in Madrigal?"

"He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I--his sometime
preacher and counsellor--was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real.
He came to seek me. He comes disguised, under the false name of
Gabriel de Espinosa, and setting up as a pastry-cook until his
term of penance shall be completed, and he shall be free to
disclose himself once more to his impatiently awaiting people."

It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in
turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and
dreadful fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the
constant companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent,
imaginative, starved Soul had come to love with a consuming
passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be seen in the
flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her in
an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to
bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and
so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.

Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the
Holy Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed
that he had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the
pride that had brought him down, by roaming the world in humble
guise, earning his bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat
of his brow like any common hind, until he should have purged his
offense and rendered himself worthy once more to resume the
estate to which he had been born.

It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It
exalted her hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in
her fond dreams, particularly when to that general outline were
added in the days that followed details of the wanderings and
sufferings of the Hidden Prince. At last, some few weeks after
that first startling announcement of his presence, in the early
days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel proposed to her the
thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.

"I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all
these years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply
touched. He desires your leave to come and prostrate himself at
your feet."

She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom
heaved in tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint
consent.

Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour,
where her Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in
the background. Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle
height, dignified of mien and carriage, dressed with extreme
simplicity, yet without the shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had
first discovered him.

His hair was of a light brown--the colour to which the golden
locks of the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago
might well have faded--his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes
were grey. His face was handsome, and save for the colour of his
eyes and the high arch of his nose presented none of the
distinguishing and marring features peculiar to the House of
Austria, from which Don Sebastian derived through his mother.

Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before
her.

"I am here to receive your Excellency's commands," he said.

She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.

"Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up
as a pastry-cook?" she asked him.

"To serve your Excellency."

"Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least
understand is that of a pastry-cook."

The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep
sigh.

"If in the past I had better understood another trade, I should
not now be reduced to following this one."

She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between
them was very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a
promise to come soon again, and the undertaking on her side to
procure for his shop the patronage of the convent.

Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass
celebrated by Frey Miguel in the convent chapel--which was open
to the public--and afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy
and accompany him thence to the convent parlour, where the
Princess waited, usually with one or another of her attendant
nuns. These daily interviews were brief at first, but gradually
they lengthened until they came to consume the hours to dinner-
time, and presently even that did not suffice, and Sebastian must
come again later in the day.

And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also
in intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian's
future came to be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself.
His penance had been overlong already for what was really no
fault at all, since it is the heart rather than the deed that
Heaven judges, and his heart had been pure, his intention in
making war upon the Infidel loftily pious. Diffidently he
admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey Miguel were of
opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of Philip
II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be
long delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip
might oppose Sebastian's claims.

Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa's, and the long hours he
spent in Anne's company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal,
within and without the convent. She was a nun professed,
interdicted from seeing any man but her confessor other than
through the parlour grating, and even then not at such length or
with such constancy as this. The intimacy between them--fostered
and furthered by Frey Miguel--had so ripened in a few weeks that
Anne was justified in looking upon him as her saviour from the
living tomb to which she had been condemned, in hoping that he
would restore her to the life and liberty for which she had ever
yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his
own. What if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been
against her will, preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she
was still within the five probationary years prescribed.
Therefore, in her view, her vows were revocable.

But this was a matter beyond the general consideration or
knowledge, and so the scandal grew. Within the convent there
was none bold enough, considering Anne's royal rank, to offer
remonstrance or advice, particularly too, considering that her
behaviour had the sanction of Frey Miguel, the convent's
spiritual adviser. But from without, from the Provincial of
the Order of St. Augustine, came at last a letter to Anne,
respectfully stern in tone, to inform her that the numerous
visits she received from a pastry-cook were giving rise to talk,
for which it would be wise to cease to give occasion. That
recommendation scorched her proud, sensitive soul with shame. She
sent her servant Roderos at once to fetch Frey Miguel, and placed
the letter in his hands.

The friar's dark eyes scanned it and grew troubled.

"It was to have been feared," he said, and sighed.

"There is but one remedy, lest worse follow and all be ruined.
Don Sebastian must go."

"Go?" Fear robbed her of breath. "Go where?"

"Away from Madrigal--anywhere--and at once; tomorrow at latest."
And then, seeing the look of horror in her face, "What else, what
else?" he added, impatiently. "This meddlesome provincial may be
stirring up trouble already."

She fought down her emotion. "I . . . I shall see him before he
goes?" she begged.

"I don't know. It may not be wise. I must consider." He flung
away in deepest perturbation, leaving her with a sense that life
was slipping from her.

That late September evening, as she sat stricken in her room,
hoping against hope for at least another glimpse of him, Dona
Maria de Grado brought word that Espinosa was even then in the
convent in Frey Miguel's cell. Fearful lest he should be smuggled
thence without her seeing him, And careless of the impropriety of
the hour--it was already eight o'clock and dusk was falling--she
at once dispatched Roderos to the friar, bidding him bring
Espinosa to her in the parlour.

The friar obeyed, and the lovers--they were no less by now--came
face to face in anguish.

"My lord, my lord," she cried, casting all prudence to the winds,
"what is decided?"

"That I leave in the morning," he answered.

"To go where?" She was distraught.

"Where?" He shrugged. "To Valladolid at first, and then . . .
where God pleases."

"And when shall I see you again?"

"When . . . when God pleases."

"Oh, I am terrified . . . if I should lose you . . . if I should
never see you more!" She was panting, distraught.

"Nay, lady, nay," he answered. "I shall come for you when the
time is ripe. I shall return by All Saints, or by Christmas at
the latest, and I shall bring with me one who will avouch me."

"What need any to avouch you to me?" she protested, on a note of
fierceness. "We belong to each other, you and I. But you are free
to roam the world, and I am caged here and helpless. . ."

"Ah, but I shall free you soon, and we'll go hence together.
See." He stepped to the table. There was an ink-horn, a box of
pounce, some quills, and a sheaf of paper there. He took up a
quill, and wrote with labour, for princes are notoriously poor
scholars:

"I, Don Sebastian, by the Grace of God King of Portugal, take to
wife the most serene Dona ulna of Austria, daughter of the most
serene Prince, Don John of Austria, by virtue of the disiensation
which I hold from two pontiffs."

And he signed it--after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in
all ages--"El Rey"--the King.

"Will that content you, lady?" he pleaded, handing it to her.

"How shall this scrawl content me?"

"It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit."

Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey
Miguel urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot
her own grief, and became all solicitude for him, until naught
would content her but she must empty into his hands her little
store of treasure--a hundred ducats and such jewels as she
possessed, including a gold watch set with diamonds and a ring
bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip, and last of all a
portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.

At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel
had gone on his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he
had passionately urged him not to linger; and then Sebastian had
done the same by the Princess both weeping now. At last he was
gone, and on the arm of Dona Maria de Grado the forlorn Anne
staggered back to her cell to weep and pray.

In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed
by her sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last
she sought to mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither
he had repaired. Of all those letters only two survive.

"My king and lord," she wrote in one of these, "alas! How we
suffer by absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I
did not seek the relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend
some moments in communion with you, there would be an end to me.
What I feel to-day is what I feel every day when I recall the
happy moments sodeliciously spent, which are no more. This
privation is for me so severe a punishment of heaven that I
should call it unjust, for without cause I find myself deprived
of the happiness missed by me for so many years and purchased at
the price of suffering and tears. Ah, my lord, how willingly,
nevertheless, would I not suffer all over again the misfortunes
that have crushed me if thus I might spare your Majesty the least
of them. May He who rules the world grant my prayers and set a
term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable torment I
suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty. It
were impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.

"I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I
plighted to you I shall keep in life and in death, for death
itself could not tear it from my soul, and this immortal soul
will harbour it through eternity. . ."

Thus and much more in the same manner wrote the niece of King
Philip of Spain to Gabriel Espinosa, the pastry-cook, in his
Valladolid retreat. How he filled his days we do not know,
beyond the fact that he moved freely abroad. For it was in the
streets of that town that meddlesome Fate brought him face to
face one day with Gregorio Gonzales, under whom Espinosa had been
a scullion once in the service of the Count of Nyeba.

Gregorio hailed him, staring round-eyed; for although Espinosa's
garments were not in their first freshness they were far from
being those of a plebeian.

"In whose service may you be now?" quoth the intrigued Gregorio,
so soon as greetings had passed between them.

Espinosa shook off his momentary embarrassment, and took the hand
of his sometime comrade. "Times are changed, friend Gregorio. I
am not in anybody's service, rather do I require servants
myself."

"Why, what is your present situation?"

Loftily Espinosa put him off. "No matter for that," he answered,
with a dignity that forbade further questions. He gathered his
cloak about him to proceed upon his way. "If there is anything
you wish for I shall be happy, for old times' sake, to oblige
you."

But Gregorio was by no means disposed to part from him. We do not
readily part from an old friend whom we rediscover in an
unsuspected state of affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio.
Gregorio's wife would be charmed to renew his acquaintance, and
to hear from his own lips of his improved and prosperous state.
Gregorio would take no refusal, and in the end Espinosa, yielding
to his insistence, went with him to the sordid quarter where
Gregorio had his dwelling.

About an unclean table of pine, in a squalid room, sat the
three--Espinosa, Gregorio, and Gregorio's wife; but the latter
displayed none of the signs of satisfaction at Espinosa's
prosperity which Gregorio had promised. Perhaps Espinosa observed
her evil envy, and it may have been to nourish it--which is the
surest way to punish envy--that he made Gregorio a magnificent
offer of employment.

"Enter my service," said he, "and I will pay you fifty ducats
down and four ducats a month."

Obviously they were incredulous of his affluence. To convince
them he displayed a gold watch--most rare possession--set with
diamonds, a ring of price, and other costly jewels. The couple
stared now with dazzled eyes.

"But didn't you tell me when we were in Madrid together that you
had been a pastry-cook at Ocana?" burst from Gregorio.

Espinosa smiled. "How many kings and princes have been compelled
to conceal themselves under disguises?" he asked oracularly. And
seeing them stricken, he must play upon them further. Nothing, it
seems, was sacred to him--not even the portrait of that lovely,
desolate royal lady in her convent at Madrigal. Forth he plucked
it, and thrust it to them across the stains of wine and oil that
befouled their table.

"Look at this beautiful lady, the most beautiful in Spain," he
bade them. "A prince could not have a lovelier bride."

"But she is dressed as a nun," the woman protested. "How, then,
can she marry?"

"For kings there are no laws," he told her with finality.

At last he departed, but bidding Gregorio to think of the offer
he had made him. He would come again for the cook's reply,
leaving word meanwhile of where he was lodged.

They deemed him mad, and were disposed to be derisive. Yet the
woman's disbelief was quickened into malevolence by the jealous
fear that what he had told them of himself might, after all, be
true. Upon that malevolence she acted forthwith, lodging an
information with Don Rodrigo de Santillan, the Alcalde of
Valladolid.

Very late that night Espinosa was roused from his sleep to find
his room invaded by alguaziles--the police of the Alcalde. He was
arrested and dragged before Don Rodrigo to give an account of
himself and of certain objects of value found in his possession--
more particularly of a ring, on the cameo of which was carved a
portrait of King Philip.

"I am Gabriel de Espinosa," he answered firmly, "a pastry-cook of
Madrigal."

"Then how come you by these jewels?"

"They were given me by Dona Ana of Austria to sell for her
account. That is the business that has brought me to Valladolid."

"Is this Dona Ana's portrait?"

"It is."

"And this lock of hair? Is that also Dona Ana's? And do you,
then, pretend that these were also given you to sell?"

"Why else should they be given me?"

Don Rodrigo wondered. They were useless things to steal, and as
for the lock of hair, where should the fellow find a buyer for
that? The Alcalde conned his man more closely, and noted that
dignity of bearing, that calm assurance which usually is founded
upon birth and worth. He sent him to wait in prison, what time he
went to ransack the fellow's house in Madrigal.

Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner
mysteriously found means to send a warning that enabled Frey
Miguel to forestall the Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival,
the friar had abstracted from Espinosa's house a box of papers
which he reduced to ashes. Unfortunately Espinosa had been
careless. Four letters not confided to the box were discovered by
the alguaziles. Two of them were from Anne--one of which supplies
the extract I have given; the other two from Frey Miguel himself.

Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd
reasoner and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile
was kept on the alert by the persistent plottings of the
Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He
was intimate with the past life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-
sacrificing patriotism and passionate devotion to the cause of
Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of his prisoner, and
leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his hands--the man
whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms by the
title of Majesty--was the Prior of Crato. He conceived that he
had stumbled here upon something grave and dangerous. He ordered
the arrest of Frey Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona Ana
at the convent. His methods were crafty, and depended upon the
effect of surprise. He opened the interview by holding up
before her one of the letters he had found, asking her if she
acknowledged it for her own.

She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his
hands, tore it across, and would have torn again, but that he
caught her wrists in a grip of iron to prevent her, with little
regard in that moment for the blood royal in her veins. King
Philip was a stern master, pitiless to blunderers, and Don
Rodrigo knew he never would be forgiven did he suffer that
precious letter to be destroyed.

Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments
and confessed the letter her own.

"What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-
cook, and to whom you write in such terms as these?" quoth the
magistrate.

"He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal." And to that declaration
she added briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir
and subsequent penitential wanderings.

Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but
convinced that it was time he laid the whole matter before King
Philip. His Catholic Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once
dispatched Don Juan de Llano, the Apostolic Commissary of the
Holy Office to Madrigal to sift the matter, and ordered that Anne
should be solitarily confined in her cell, and her nuns-in-
waiting and servants placed under arrest.

Espinosa, for greater security, was sent from Valladolid to the
prison of Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with
an escort of arquebusiers.

"Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?" he asked his
guards, half-mockingly.

Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos,
a travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that
he spoke both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos
addressed him in Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and
replied that although he had been in Portugal, he could not speak
the language.

Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three
chief prisoners--Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne--
succeeded one another with a wearisome monotony of results. The
Apostolic Commissary interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel;
Don Rodrigo conducted the examinations of Espinosa. But nothing
was elicited that took the matter forward or tended to dispel its
mystery.

The princess replied with a candour that became more and more
tinged with indignation under the persistent and at times
insulting interrogatories. She insisted that the prisoner was Don
Sebastian, and wrote passionate letters to Espinosa, begging him
for her honour's sake to proclaim himself what he really was,
declaring to him that the time had come to cast off all disguise.

Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was
Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man's bearing, and
the air of mystery cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie
that asseveration. That he could not be the Prior of Crato, Don
Rodrigo had now assured himself. He fenced skilfully under
exurnination, ever evading the magistrate's practiced point when
it sought to pin him, and he was no less careful to say nothing
that should incriminate either of the other two prisoners. He
denied that he had ever given himself out to be Don Sebastian,
though he admitted that Frey Miguel and the princess had
persuaded themselves that he was that lost prince.

He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating
that he had never known either of them--an answer this which
would have fitted the case of Don Sebastian, who was born after
his father's death, and quitted in early infancy by his mother.

As for Frey Miguel, he stated boldly under examination the conviction
that Don Sebastian had survived the African expedition, and the
belief that Espinosa might well be the missing monarch. He
protested that he had acted in good faith throughout, and without
any thought of disloyalty to the King of Spain.

Late one night, after he had been some three months in prison,
Espinosa was roused from sleep by an unexpected visit from the
Alcalde. At once he would have risen and dressed.

"Nay," said Don Rodrigo, restraining him, "that is not necessary
for what is intended."

It was a dark phrase which the prisoner, sitting up in bed with
tousled hair, and blinking in the light of the torches, instantly
interpreted into a threat of torture. His face grew white.

"It is impossible," he protested. "The King cannot have ordered
what you suggest. His Majesty will take into account that I am a
man of honour. He may require my death, but in an honourable
manner, and not upon the rack. And as for its being used to make
me speak, I have nothing to add to what I have said already."

The stern, dark face of the Alcalde was overspread by a grim
smile.

"I would have you remark that you fall into contradictions.
Sometimes you pretend to be of humble and lowly origin, and
sometimes a person of honourable degree. To hear you at this
moment one might suppose that to submit you to torture would be
to outrage your dignity. What then . . ."

Don Rodrigo broke off suddenly to stare, then snatched a torch
from the hand of his alguaziles and held it close to the face of
the prisoner, who cowered now, knowing full well what it was the
Alcalde had detected. In that strong light Don Rodrigo saw that
the prisoner's hair and beard had turned grey at the roots, and
so received the last proof that he had to do with the basest of
impostures. The fellow had been using dyes, the supply of which
had been cut short by his imprisonment. Don Rodrigo departed
well-satisfied with the results of that surprise visit.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.