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In the printed text, this opening bears the internal heading ‘II’, but it remains Chapter XII for the reader. On the very day of the arrest, Domingos Botelho ordered his wife and daughters to prepare to leave Viseu the following morning. They would take only what could be carried on pack animals. At this point, the narrator deliberately interrupts the chronology to transcribe a simple and painful recollection received by letter some months earlier. Its author is identified only as a woman of Simão's family; although she mentions elder sisters, the document does not allow her to be named with certainty. In the letter, the woman says that fifty-seven years have passed, yet she still remembers the sad events of her youth as though they happened yesterday. She is astonished that her childhood memories are now clearer and more detailed than they were thirty years earlier. When their mother told the daughters to pack their trunks, they all burst into tears and worsened their father's anger. The elder sisters, perhaps more accustomed to punishment, quickly fell silent. The correspondent continued to weep, for until then she had been punished only once, precisely because of Simão. She even had the innocent courage to ask permission to visit her brother in prison before they left. Domingos then punished her for the second time, and harshly. The servant returned from the prison with the dinner Simão had refused and reported that there was already some furniture in the room. He also said that Simão was dining with outward calm while every bell in Viseu tolled for Baltasar's soul. Beside him stood a beautiful village girl, sorrowful and covered in tears. Pointing Mariana out to the servant, Simão had said: ‘This is my family.’
At daybreak the following morning, the family left for Vila Real. Rita wept without ceasing, and Domingos, irritated, got out of the litter he shared with her. He made the correspondent take his place and completed the whole journey on her mount. In Vila Real, quarrels over Simão became so frequent that Domingos abandoned the family. He withdrew alone to the estate at Montezelos. Rita also wished to leave and seek her son's release through relatives in Lisbon. On learning this, Domingos threatened to compel her by law to remain in the home of her husband and daughters. Rita wrote to Simão and, receiving no reply, believed that her son was remaining silent. Years later, however, the family found all those letters among Domingos's papers. It was he who had them removed at the post office. A woman in Viseu wrote to Rita, praising the love and charity with which, as she supposed, Rita was helping her son. Delivered by a muleteer, that letter had escaped the fate of the others. Rita was astonished and admitted to her friend that she was not supporting Simão, for he had rejected the little she had tried to do. Her friend replied that a farrier's daughter was living near the prison and caring for the prisoner with ample provisions and cleanliness. Mariana told everyone that she was there on Rita Preciosa's orders and at her expense. The woman in Viseu herself had sometimes summoned the young woman and had wanted to offer Simão finer dishes. Mariana had refused them, explaining that Senhor Simão would accept nothing. The public attribution to Rita thus protected Mariana's true initiative; it did not prove that Simão's mother paid for or directed the care.
From time to time, the family received news, nearly always sad. In Domingos's absence, nearly all the prominent people of Viseu turned against the unfortunate Simão. Rita wrote to relatives in the capital, imploring them to seek a royal pardon, but the letters were again diverted into her husband's hands. The letter then asks what Domingos was doing on the estate, without family, glory or reward for so many failings. Surrounded by labourers, he cultivated that great tract of land at Montezelos. Among the gorse and heather, the correspondent says, traces could still be seen of the vines he had planted before the estate was abandoned. Rita wrote to him lamenting their son; Domingos merely replied that justice was no game. He invoked antiquity, when fathers themselves condemned their criminal sons. One day, Rita bravely went to Montezelos and asked permission to visit Viseu. Her husband refused and assailed her with furious words. Seven months later, the family learnt that Simão had been sentenced to die on a gallows erected at the site of the killing. The windows were closed for eight days, all the women put on mourning, and Rita fell ill. The prominent people of Vila Real then went to Montezelos to press Domingos, gently but collectively, to act. Several relatives came from Lisbon to protest against the disgrace that the gallows would bring upon the family. Domingos replied that the gallows had not been invented only for those who did not know their grandfather's name. Bad deeds, he said, were the shame of families, and justice disgraced only the person it punished. His later change did not arise from affectionate reconciliation, but from pressure applied to that very idea of honour.
The family had a venerable great-uncle, António da Veiga, who had reached the age of eighty-three. António told Domingos that he might live for only another two or three years. That existence was scarcely life any longer, but it had been honourable and unstained, and so it must end. His eyes would not witness the family's dishonour. He demanded that Domingos promise to save his son from the gallows, or else he would kill himself there in front of him. As he made the threat, António pointed a razor at his neck. Domingos seized his arm and promised that Simão would not be hanged. António's threat secured the promise; it was not carried out as an act of self-killing. The following day, Domingos left for Porto, where he had many friends in the appeal court, and then travelled on to Lisbon. At the beginning of March 1805, Rita learnt with great joy that Simão had been transferred to the Porto appeal-court prison. The transfer overcame the opposition of Tadeu de Albuquerque and Baltasar's sisters, who were the complainants. The letter continued with an ‘Afterwards...’, but the narrator suspends the extract here so as not to anticipate further events. Out of respect for narrative art, he announces that he will resume the thread broken before the sentence and intervention just revealed.
Simão Botelho watched the day of his trial approach without flinching. He sat in the murderer's dock without counsel or defence witnesses. He answered the questions with the same cold composure he had shown at the first examination. Required to explain the cause of the crime, he gave a faithful account without uttering Teresa Clementina de Albuquerque's name. When prosecuting counsel spoke that name, Simão sprang to his feet. ‘What is a lady's name doing in this den of infamy and blood?’ he exclaimed. He accused the wretched prosecutor of being unable to use the defendant's confession to prove the need for an executioner without smearing a woman's reputation. ‘The case against me is complete: I made it myself; now let the law speak,’ Simão declared. He told the villain to be silent, since he could not accuse without defaming. The judge ordered him to be silent, and Simão sat down again, muttering: ‘Wretches, all of them!’ He then heard the sentence of death by hanging, to be carried out at the scene of the crime. At that same instant, Mariana's piercing cries rose from the crowd. Simão turned towards the crowd and told them that they would have a fine spectacle. ‘The gallows is the people's only festival!’ he exclaimed. He asked them to take away the poor woman who was weeping, the only person for whom his execution would not be an amusement. João da Cruz carried Mariana in his arms to the little house near the prison.
As he returned from the court to prison, Simão retained all the agility and strength of his eighteen years. He heard someone ask when he would be executed. Another voice approved the sentence, saying that he would pay for the innocent people his father had sent to the gallows. According to one spectator, Simão had tried to win the heiress by force of bullets. Others reproached noblemen for believing that killing was a simple matter. One man claimed that, had Simão killed a poor person, he would already be at home. They also remarked that the condemned man walked with his head held high, but promised that someone would soon make it fall. Rumours spread that the executioner was on his way, or had already arrived by night with two knives hidden in a hood. No one had seen him: the news had passed from a family friend to the neighbour of a sister's brother-in-law, in a chain of gossip. One person asked another whether they would take their children to see the condemned man suffer. The answer was enthusiastic: examples of that kind must not be missed. The same man boasted that he had seen three murderers hanged. His companion reminded him that, two years earlier, he had nearly sent Amaro Lampreia into the next world. The man justified himself by pleading self-defence, and was asked what use the hanged men's example had been to him. Having no answer, he invoked Friar Anselmo, who preached that parents should take their children to see executions. Another joked that the friar might be trying to avoid being fleeced by those whom he fleeced with demands for alms. The narrator calls all this the people's philosophy of the gallows. Simão's mind remained so untroubled that this cruel philosophy sometimes brought a smile to his lips.
Back in his room, Simão was formally notified that he could appeal within the legal time limit. He replied that he would not appeal, that he was content with his fate and on good terms with justice. He asked for Mariana, and the gaoler sent for her. It was João da Cruz who appeared, weeping and lamenting that he was losing his daughter. Mariana was beside herself, spoke of the gallows and asked to be killed first. A piercing pain passed through Simão when he understood, as though the truth had suddenly flashed before him, that Mariana loved him unto death. The narrator merely conjectures that Teresa's image may briefly be displaced by Mariana's, without asserting replacement or reciprocated love. Perhaps he saw Teresa as a redeemed angel, serenely contemplating her Creator. Mariana, by contrast, would appear as a symbol of torment, dying by inches without one moment of reciprocated love to give glory to her martyrdom. One was dying, loved; the other was in agony, never having heard ‘love’ from lips that offered her scarcely more than cold words of gratitude. The man of iron then wept tears that were worth all Mariana's bitterness. He begged João to care for his daughter and leave Simão himself, who was strong and well. He told João to comfort that creature, born under his evil star, and take her out of Viseu to their home. He was to save her, so that two sisters would remain in the world to mourn Simão. The shortness of his remaining life made Mariana's favours unnecessary; within days Simão would be taken to the condemned prisoners' chapel, and it would be better if she did not know.
On returning, João found Mariana collapsed on the floor, injured in the face, now laughing and now crying, beyond her usual self-command. João had to take her home tied up and entrusted another person with feeding the condemned man. The narrator then recalls the seven months during which Mariana had been able to enter the prison freely. She was liked by the gaoler and protected by Rita Preciosa's friend, and rarely left Simão alone for an hour. She sewed while he wrote, or attended to the order and cleanliness of the room. If Simão was ill or prostrate in bed, Mariana sat at the table to exercise her limited knowledge of writing. She wrote the name ‘Simão’ a hundred times, and her tears often blurred it away. All this had lasted seven months without either of them uttering or hearing the word ‘love’. Mariana's night vigils were spent in prayer, work or late journeys to visit her father.
Terrible were the solitary hours that followed for Simão. Never again did he see that gentle creature cross the iron-bound prison door. With dark irony, the narrator says that the door rationed the prisoner's air so that the gallows rope might retain the honours of suffocation. When he summoned Teresa's image, a trick of his weakened eyes made Mariana appear beside her. He saw them both in tears. He would then leap from the bed, dig his fingers into the thick window bars and think of smashing his skull against the iron. It was only a self-destructive thought, not an act carried out or an actual suicide attempt. No hope on earth or in heaven restrained him, and no ray of divine light entered the prison. For him, the angel of pity had been embodied in that heavenly creature who had lost her self-command, as though her spirit had returned to heaven. Thus, it was not hope in God or in humanity that saved him from suicide. The thought that restrained him was a proud one: ‘Coward, after all! What courage is there in dying when no hope of life remains?’ ‘The gallows is a triumph when it stands at the end of the path of honour,’ he concluded.