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Thirteen days of March 1805 had passed. Simão occupied a common room in the Porto Court of Appeal prison. A plank bedstead, a shipboard mattress, a pine table and a chair made up almost all the furniture. In place of a pillow, a small bundle held the prisoner's few clothes. On the table stood a blackwood box containing Teresa's letters and the now dried bouquets. The box also contained his manuscripts from Viseu prison and one of Mariana's aprons. Mariana had wiped her tears on it and torn it from herself at the first moment of her distress. Simão reread the letters, opened the papers around the flowers and searched the linen for visible traces of tears.
Then he pressed his face and chest against the window bars and gazed into the distance. The hills of Valongo and Gralheira rounded the horizon, which was cut across by the banks of Gaia, Candal and Oliveira. Beyond them rose the monastery on Serra do Pilar beneath a clear spring sky. The light multiplied the colours while the breeze stole scents and promises of fruitfulness from the gardens. Nature seemed enamoured of the warmth awakening it, surrendered to an indefinable joy. It was a day of love and hope sent equally to the cottage in the hills and the shining palace. It reached the rich man in his cushioned carriage and the beggar warming his limbs beside the pillars of the churches. Only Simão fled from the brightness and the flight of the birds. Withdrawn into the shadows, he meditated, wept and entrusted to paper what was consuming him.
‘Bread earned by each day's work, and your breast, where I might rest my unstained face for an hour: I asked Heaven for nothing more.’ He wrote that he had discovered himself to be a man at sixteen and had learnt to see virtue by the light of Teresa's love. He had believed holy the passion that absorbed all the others or purified them in its fire. He claimed never to have entertained a desire that he could not confess aloud before the whole world. He invoked Teresa and God as witnesses that his lips had never profaned her purity. Never, he insisted, had he wished to turn his love into Teresa's shame. If Tadeu required him to crawl at his feet to deserve Teresa, Simão would kiss them. If Teresa ordered him to die so that she might be happy with another man, he would die. But Teresa had been alone and unhappy, and he had believed that her tormentor should not outlive her. ‘Here I am, a killer without remorse,’ he wrote, claiming the full contradiction of that conviction as his own. To Simão, the madness of crime might stun a conscience, but it had not stunned his. Nor had he feared the steps to the gallows during the days when he awoke imagining the convulsions of strangulation. At every hour he expected to be summoned to the prison chapel and told himself that he would speak to Jesus Christ. Without fear, he anticipated the seventy hours of that moral agony and the consolations a criminal could scarcely expect without affronting divine justice. Yet he wept for Teresa, because his cup contained, beyond its own bitterness, every one of her tears. He imagined hearing the martyr's groans and saw her, in her delirium, witnessing his final convulsions. Simão's image would not beckon to Teresa with the martyr's palm; instead, it would rise like a phantom from the boards of the scaffold. ‘What a death yours would be, my holy friend!’ concluded the meditation that João da Cruz came to interrupt.
João entered the room under an order from the Intendant General of Police, and Simão rushed to embrace him. He immediately asked after Mariana, fearing that João might have left her alone or perhaps dead. ‘Neither alone nor dead, sir; the devil is not always waiting behind the door,’ the farrier replied. João assured him that Mariana had recovered her reason, although she still needed a little strength before travelling. He spoke of witchcraft and listed bloodletting, setons, cold water on the head and the missionary's exorcisms. In his own fashion, João merely insisted that the girl was sound again and would soon set out. Simão blessed God, but João was already examining the bedstead and sparse furniture with displeasure. He wanted a bed fit for a human being and something on which a Christian might sit. Without ceremony, he also asked how Simão's stomach was faring. When Simão said that he still had money, the farrier replied that he had brought written authority to cover the expenses. He then handed him a letter from Rita Preciosa addressed to João himself. His mother authorised the farrier to meet her son's necessary expenses and promised to pay all duly signed bills. Simão considered it fair to accept the aid, since he believed that a legitimate share of the inheritance was due to him. João declared that he would now buy everything for him without waiting for further requests. The prisoner interrupted him to ask that he open his generous heart to a more valuable service.
Simão asked him to deliver a letter to Teresa de Albuquerque at Monchique. João accepted the task and warned him that Tadeu was in Porto. He added that if the devil put Tadeu within his reach, he might smash his head against a corner. He had already imagined waiting for him on the road and hanging him by the neck from a cork oak, but none of it went beyond words. He asked whether the letter would receive a reply, and Simão merely said, ‘If they deliver it to her, my good friend.’
João reached Monchique as a court officer, two doctors and Tadeu were entering the convent courtyard. In the name of the local magistrate, the bailiff demanded that the doctors examine Teresa at her father's request. The abbess asked the doctors whether they possessed the ecclesiastical permission required to enter the enclosure. As they did not have it, the superior declared that the doors would remain closed. Tadeu's own doctors acknowledged that this was the custom of convents, and Teresa was not examined. After they left, João finally considered how to make the letter reach its destination. His first idea seemed the best, and he called to a nun through the parlour speaking grille, a small barred opening. He asked them to tell Terezinha of Viseu that the father of the village girl she knew was there. When the abbess asked who he was, João merely repeated that he was the father of that same girl. Teresa recognised the signal, exclaimed from within, ‘I know!’ and ran to the parlour. Her aunt moved a little aside, tenderly warning her to take care over what she was doing. Teresa asked whether João's daughter had written to her, and he placed the letter in the convent turntable. The abbess noticed the paper and smiled: ‘Love is very ingenious, Terezinha.’ She hoped that news of the girl would gladden her heart, but reminded her that the old aunt was as clever as the village girl's father. Teresa answered that affectionate playfulness with kisses, withdrew to read the letter and wrote her reply.
When she handed over the reply, Teresa pointed out to João a poor woman sitting on a small flight of steps. The farrier knew her and was surprised to see her there after a beating from the gardener. Teresa asked him to lower his voice and explained that she had already sent the woman to the prison, where she had been refused entry. From then on, João was to entrust the letters to her, and he agreed that the arrangement was a good one. The good news delighted Simão: divine Providence had taken pity on his hopeless plight that day. Mariana's restored reason and the possibility of writing to Teresa again were the two greatest joys of that day. Simão gave thanks to God while João installed several pieces of second-hand furniture in the room.
Suddenly, the farrier stopped working and announced another piece of news that he had kept back to surprise his friend. Mariana had travelled with him to Porto and remained at the inn, scarcely able to move because of her pain. The next day, João added, she would come to cook for Simão and clean the room. Simão restrained the indefinable feeling caused by the news and replied after a melancholy pause. ‘Then it is certain that my ill star drags your unfortunate daughter into every one of my abysses.’ He called Mariana a poor angel of charity, worthy of Heaven. João interrupted that solemn tone and asked why he had appeared saddened by the news. Simão solemnly asked him not to leave Mariana in Porto. He wished to see her once, but wanted her father to take her away, for he could not hold back her fate. He feared that a beautiful young woman, alone and knowing no one in the city, would be harassed.
João dismissed the fear with an exclamation and insisted that Mariana knew how to defend herself. He compared women to unripe pears: anyone who felt them and met resistance would quickly leave them alone. João supported the crude comparison with the authority of a man who believed he knew the courage of the women in his household. To prove the inherited courage, he recalled that his late wife had struck him twice when he pinched her leg during their courtship. Mariana, he added, had thrashed a young Mendes of Viseu with the mare's reins when he touched her slipper. Simão smiled at that extravagant praise of the young woman's courage. In secret, he took pride in the tender care Mariana had given him during eight months of almost continual companionship. Even so, he persisted in asking whether João could truly deprive himself of his daughter's company. The farrier said that he would manage with an elderly sister-in-law who could prepare his broth. He also claimed that Simão would remain imprisoned only briefly, since the magistrate was working to have him released. To João, release was certain, although no judicial decision had yet been issued. He then confessed that Mariana would have burst like a chestnut if her father had prevented her from coming to Porto. ‘She has a soul-deep passion for you, as surely as I am João,’ he declared. João called it his daughter's fate and believed that no harm would come to her beside Simão, if honour still existed in the world.
Simão threw himself into the farrier's arms, moved by such trust. ‘If only I could be your daughter's husband, my noble friend!’ he exclaimed. Gratitude had drawn from him a wish that its very impossibility condemned. His eyes veiled by the first tears Simão had ever seen there, João replied, ‘Husband indeed!’ He said that he had never thought of it and that, as he believed, neither had Mariana. He knew that he was a farrier and that his daughter might be Simão's servant, nothing more. Nor did he wish a friend to become unhappy by marrying a poor girl. João measured that future by the distance between farrier and nobleman and by the poverty he feared imposing on his friend. He asked them to drop the subject, saying it took a miracle to make him weep, but once he began he became a fountain. He immediately returned to arranging the room, placing the table, chest of drawers, chairs, bedstead, trunk, basin and water jug. The sheets and the rest of the household linen were with Mariana, who would make the room look like a chapel the next day. She had also asked for two vases for fresh flowers, while Teresa's dried bouquets remained preserved in the box. João explained that he must fetch dinner, for Mariana might imagine that they were not allowing him to leave the prison. He had been refused entry the previous afternoon, but he had taken a letter from Rita to an appellate judge. That morning, he had found at the inn the order from the Intendant General that had opened the prison to him. That, João explained, was how he had finally managed to enter the prison. ‘See you soon,’ he said at last, and left the prison to fetch dinner.