Purity of Blood by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

wanting to put distance between us. But Angélica was still studying me as if she were able to read my thoughts. She put her hands to her throat and pulled out a delicate gold chain with a small charm hanging from it. She undid the clasp, and put the chain in my hands.
    “Perhaps one day you may die,” she whispered.
    As she spoke those words, her enigmatic eyes never left mine, and at the same time, a smile came to her lips. It was a smile so beautiful, so perfect, so filled with all the light in a Spanish sky vast as the abyss of her eyes, that I wanted to die that instant, sword in hand, shouting her name as there in Flanders my father had shouted the name of his king, his homeland, and his flag. After all was said and done, I thought, maybe those things were all one and the same.

IV. THE ASSAULT
    Far in the distance, a dog barked four times, and after that…silence. Well armed, with pistol, sword, and dagger at his waist, Captain Alatriste looked at the moon that seemed about to impale itself upon the tower of Las Benitas convent, and then, turning his head from side to side, his eyes swept the shadowy corners of La Encarnación plaza. The coast was clear.
    The captain adjusted his buffalo skin jerkin and tossed back the tails of the short cape over his shoulders. As if that had been a signal, three dark silhouettes emerged from the gloom, two from one side of the plaza and one from the other, and moved toward the convent wall. Light shone from one window; almost immediately it was extinguished, then quickly relighted.
    “It is she,” whispered don Francisco de Quevedo.
    He was stationed beside the wall, all in black—hat, clothing, and cape—and he had not drunk a drop all night despite the chill—in order, he said, to have a steady hand. I could not see him, but I heard him slowly draw his sword halfway from its scabbard and then let it drop back, testing whether it moved smoothly. And I also heard him mutter a few words of his own composition:
“Night could not overcome my sorrows
nor give peace to my vexations…”
    I wondered briefly whether don Francisco was reciting verse to relieve his anxiety, to counter the cold, or whether he truly had ice in his veins and was capable of composing poems at the very Gates of Hell. Whatever the case, this was not the time to give the proper due to the flower of his satiric genius. My attention was focused on the captain, whose dark profile, masked by shadow, was still as a statue beneath the broad brim of his hat. The three dark shapes that had slipped across the plaza earlier were also frozen, attempting to remain unseen. The dog barked again, only twice this time, and from the hill of Los Caños del Peral came, as answer, the faint nickers of the mules of the waiting coach. With that sound, Diego Alatriste turned toward me. His eyes were palest gray in the moonlight.
    “Be very cautious,” he said.
    He put his hand on my shoulder. I took a deep breath and bolted across the plaza, feeling like the boy who stuck his head in the wolf’s mouth, aware of the captain’s eyes on me. In my ears, the homage don Francisco was kind enough to improvise, rewriting some verses of his own:
“How easily he scales the high wall of stone
spurred on by his youth.”
    My heart was pounding as hard as it had earlier that day when I had been so close to Angélica de Alquézar. Or perhaps more. I felt an almost unbearable tightness in my stomach and my throat, and unfamiliar drums were sounding in my ears as I passed the crouching shapes of don Vicente de la Cruz and his two sons. They were huddled against the wall, and I could see the glint of metal from between the folds of their capes.
    “Quickly, lad,” whispered the father, impatient.
    I nodded, and followed the wall toward the carriage guard at the corner. There I surreptitiously crossed myself, commending myself to the same God whose holy sanctuary I was about to violate. With no difficulty at all—at the time I was as agile