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After some days had passed, Mariana went to Viseu to collect her paternal inheritance. The industrious farrier had left her well provided for, in proportion to her birth. The fields alone yielded enough to support her. Mariana lifted the familiar hearthstone and found four hundred thousand réis beneath it. João da Cruz had counted on that money to sustain the small comforts of his inactive old age. She sold the land, resolved not to return. She left the house to her aunt, who had been born there and in whose home her father had married.
Once the inheritance had been liquidated, Mariana returned to Porto. She placed her capital in Simão Botelho's hands, without thereby ceasing to own it. She said that she feared a robbery in the little house on Rua de São Bento, opposite the Relação prison. ‘Why did you sell your land, Mariana?’ the prisoner asked. ‘I sold it because I do not intend to return there.’ Simão wanted to know where she would go when he was transported into exile. ‘Will you remain in Porto?’ ‘No, sir, I shall not,’ Mariana stammered, surprised that an answer should still be necessary. Her heart believed that it had given that answer long before. ‘Then what will you do?’ Simão insisted. ‘I shall go into exile, if you will have me as your companion, Senhor Simão.’ Had Simão feigned surprise, he would have appeared ridiculous even to himself.
‘I expected that answer, Mariana, and knew you would give me no other.’ ‘But do you know what exile is, my friend?’ Mariana replied that she had often heard of those lands, hotter than Portugal. ‘But there is bread there too, and people live,’ she concluded. Simão set against this the prospect of death beneath the burning, unhealthy sun of that sky. He spoke of death from longing for one's homeland. And he recalled the ill-treatment inflicted by galley governors, who treated a convict like a wild beast. ‘It cannot be quite so terrible,’ Mariana countered. She had carefully questioned the wife of a prisoner who had served ten years in India. That man had lived well in Solor, where he had kept a shop. According to her, but for homesickness, life in Solor would have continued to prosper more than it did in Portugal. ‘If you agree, Senhor Simão, I too shall open a small shop.’ ‘You will see how well I shall manage our living.’ Mariana was accustomed to heat and field work; Simão was not. With God's help, she hoped to spare him exposure to the weather.
‘And suppose, Mariana, that I die as soon as I reach the place of exile?’ ‘Let us not speak of that, Senhor Simão.’ Simão insisted, for at the hour of death he would feel responsibility for her fate weighing upon his soul. ‘If I die?’ he repeated. ‘If you die, I shall know how to die too.’ Simão objected that no one dies at will. ‘Oh, people can indeed die at will, and they can live at will too,’ Mariana replied. She then invoked Teresa's words. Teresa had said that she was fading away when Simão arrived in Porto and that his arrival had restored her life. ‘Many people are like that, Senhor Simão.’ The gentlewoman was frail; she, by contrast, was a countrywoman hardened by every kind of labour. If she had to open a vein in her arm and let the blood run until she died, she would do it as readily as she said it.
‘Listen to me, Mariana: what do you expect from me?’ ‘What should I expect? Why do you ask me that, Senhor Simão?’ Simão said that so many sacrifices could have only one fitting recompense, although she claimed nothing. He asked her to open her heart to him. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ ‘You know my life as well as I do, do you not?’ Mariana answered that she did, without understanding where he meant to lead the conversation. ‘Do you know that I am bound in life and death to that unfortunate lady?’ ‘And what of it? Who has ever told you otherwise?’ ‘I can respond to the feelings of your heart only with friendship.’ ‘And have I ever asked you for more, Senhor Simão?’ Simão acknowledged that Mariana had asked nothing of him. Yet the debt created by such devotion deepened his unhappiness. Mariana did not answer: she wept. When Simão gently asked why she was weeping, she accused him of ingratitude. ‘I do not deserve to hear you say that I make you unhappy.’
‘You have misunderstood me,’ Simão replied. He lamented that he could not make her his wife; that possibility was closed to him. He wished only that Mariana could say, ‘I sacrificed myself for my husband.’ In that imagined account, she had kept vigil beside him for nights while he lay wounded in João da Cruz's house. When misfortune had put him in irons, she had given him the bread that his wealthy parents withheld. When she saw him sentenced to the gallows, she had lost her reason. When a ray of divine compassion restored her reason, she had hastened to the second prison. There she had fed and clothed him and adorned the bare walls of his cell. In exile, she would accompany him and make herself the homeland of that poor heart. She would labour beneath the murderous sun to shield him from the climate, toil and abandonment that would kill him. Mariana's mind did not rise to the prisoner's eloquent expression, but her simple heart divined his meaning. The poor young woman smiled and wept at once.
Simão reminded her that she was twenty-six and urged her to live. Her life, if spent in that fashion, could be nothing but a hidden torment. She should not give everything to one who could return only the tears he had cost her. Exile could not be far off, and to expect a better fate would be madness. If he remained in his homeland, free or imprisoned, Simão would ask that sister to complete her generous work. She could then wait for the last word of his life. But she should not follow him to Africa or India, whence she would return alone after his death. If the exile were temporary and death spared him for further shipwrecks, he would one day return home. He needed to find in Portugal a devoted soul awaiting him, so that he might say he was returning to his family. If Mariana had a husband and children, her family would also be his. If she remained unattached and alone, Simão would seek his sister's company. ‘What is your answer, Mariana?’
João da Cruz's daughter raised her eyes from the floor. ‘I shall see what I must do when you leave for exile, Senhor Simão.’ Simão asked her to think about it at once. ‘I have nothing to think about; my intention is settled.’ At his urging, she hesitated for a few seconds and answered calmly. ‘When I see that you no longer need me, I shall end my life.’ ‘Do you think it would cost me much to kill myself?’ She had no father and no one else, and believed that no one would miss her life. ‘You can live without me, Senhor Simão; so be it, but I cannot...’ She suppressed the end of the thought, as though ashamed of its boldness. The prisoner clasped her in his arms, trembling with agitation. ‘You shall come with me, my sister.’ He asked her to consider the common misfortune that they would henceforth swallow together like poison. Perhaps they would find overseas a grave whose earth was as heavy as that of their homeland.
From that day onwards, a secret joy almost drove Mariana's heart mad. Yet let us not invent miracles of self-denial. Mariana's heart was a woman's heart: she loved. She loved as fancy imagines certain angels, passing from ballroom to ballroom and alighting only to be seen and adored in the glow of passionate poetry. And she was jealous of Teresa. It was not jealousy relieved by confidence or spite, but a series of silent hells. The flames did not reach her lips, for her eyes at once opened in tears to extinguish them. She dreamt of the delights of exile, where no other human voice would moan at the unfortunate man's bedside. If she were forced to relinquish her inglorious mission as a sister, she would do so. She would say only that no one would love Simão or soothe his sufferings as selflessly as she did. And yet she never hesitated to receive from Teresa or the beggar the letters intended for Simão. She watched him covertly, seeing every furrow of pain that the reading opened upon his brow. Every fibre of her heart trembled, and in silence she asked why that lady must embitter his life. And the unfortunate girl did bitterly distress his life!
Hopes revived in Teresa, destined to last only until disillusionment refined her misfortune. She imagined freedom, pardon, marriage, happiness and the crown of her martyrdom. Her friends coloured that fantasy for her: some knew nothing of the atrocious reality, while others trusted too much in the prayers of the virtuous women of the convent. If such prophecies were fulfilled, Simão would leave prison and Tadeu would die of old age and rage. The marriage would be beyond dispute, and the heaven of the unfortunate would begin in this world. After five months in prison, however, Simão already knew his likely fate. He thought it necessary to warn Teresa, lest the inevitable blow of separation strike her down without warning. He dearly wished to brighten the dark prospect of exile with hope. But consolations supported by neither conviction nor feeling came from him feeble and cold. Teresa could not even deceive herself, for she carried within her breast an alarm that continually summoned her to the final hour. Her face might deceive the compassion of strangers; that inner voice could not. In her letters to her friend, Teresa poured out laments, invoked God and hurled almost sacrilegious apostrophes at fate. She alternated gentle patience with bursts of anger against her father. She clung to the life escaping her and implored death, which did not release her from the torments of body and soul.
At the end of seven months, the appeal court commuted the death sentence to ten years' exile in India. Tadeu de Albuquerque had followed the appeal to Lisbon and placed his household at the service of anyone who would keep Simão's gallows standing. Alerted by the alarming warning from his son Manuel, Domingos Botelho also went to Lisbon. He used money and influence to counter the support Tadeu had won in the Casa da Suplicação and the Desembargo do Paço. Domingos prevailed and obtained from the Prince Regent permission for the convict to serve his sentence in Vila Real prison. According to the narrator, he was moved more by caprice than by paternal love. When he was informed of the appeal decision and the Regent's grace, Simão refused the benefit. He wanted the relative freedom of exile, not confinement in Vila Real. He declared that he would protest before the judicial authorities against a favour he had never sought and considered more terrible than death. On learning of the refusal, Domingos replied that his son should do as he wished. In his view, he had won his victory over Tadeu's protectors and those corrupted by the Viseu nobleman's gold. Simão's decision was reported to the Intendant-General of Police. Simão Botelho's name was then entered in the register of convicts bound for India.