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The next day, Tadeu de Albuquerque announced himself at the porter’s lodge of the Monchique convent. His cousin, the abbess, received him first in the parlour, wiping away tears of joy. ‘Do not think I am weeping from distress, cousin,’ she explained. ‘God willing, our angel may yet be saved.’ That morning, she had seen Teresa walking unaided through the dormitories and noticed a different colour in her face. She attributed the improvement to a miracle worked by two saints preserved intact within the enclosure and invoked by some of the nuns. If the improvement continued, she hoped to keep that angel among them for a few more years. Tadeu declared himself delighted, but announced that he would take his daughter back to Viseu at once. He maintained that Teresa would recover in her native air, which was healthier than that of Porto. The abbess objected: it was far too soon for such a long and arduous journey. Teresa had no strength to travel; the day before, they had expected to find her dead that morning. She asked for a few months and promised not to prevent Teresa’s departure once the danger had passed. To Tadeu, the greater folly would be to keep her in Porto, where the man who had killed Baltasar must already be imprisoned. According to Tadeu, a magistrate had defended Simão and secured the Court of Appeal’s late acceptance of the appeal. He added that the same magistrate had secured the prisoner’s transfer to Porto gaol. Tadeu was seeking confirmation of the death sentence and refused to keep his daughter in the city while Simão was there.
The abbess initially yielded: he was the father, whereas she was merely a relative. She told him to enter the first parlour on the right and went to summon Teresa to the meeting he had requested. On learning that her father was waiting, Teresa lost her healthy colour and returned to her usual pallor. Seeing her in that state, her aunt wished to spare her the visit and offered to postpone the meeting. ‘It has to be,’ Teresa replied; ‘I shall go, aunt.’ When he saw her, Tadeu trembled and went pale, genuinely shaken by a change far greater than he had expected. Without warning, he thought that he would not have recognised his own daughter. ‘What a state I find you in, Teresa! Why did you not tell me sooner how ill you were?’ Teresa smiled and replied that she was not as ill as her friends imagined.
Tadeu asked whether she would have the strength to return to Viseu with him. ‘No, Father; I do not even have the strength to tell you briefly that I shall not return to Viseu.’ In answer to her father’s indignant question, she declared that her health depended on precisely the opposite: at Monchique she would live or die. With a gentleness that was merely feigned, Tadeu replied that if he judged the air of Porto harmful, she would have to leave. Tadeu invoked his duty to guide his daughter and put right her unhappy lot; Teresa replied that her lot was already put right, for death puts right every error in life. He insisted that he wanted her alive and that half a day’s journey would be enough for her health to return as if by a miracle. ‘I shall not go, Father,’ Teresa repeated. Enraged, the old man thrust his hands against the grille, trembling with anger, and repeated his daughter’s refusal in disbelief. Teresa pointed to the ironwork he was clutching: those bars divided them for ever. Tadeu then invoked the law: he had legitimate rights to compel her to leave, since Teresa was only eighteen. She knew her own age, did not know the laws and was not troubled by that ignorance. She warned, however, that if a violent hand tried to tear her away from that place, it would find a corpse. Afterwards they might dispose of her as they pleased; while she still had a voice with which to say no, she swore to her father that she would not leave.
The old man roared that he understood the cause of such obstinacy and asked whether Teresa already knew that Simão was in Porto. ‘Yes, sir, I do,’ she answered without hesitation. Tadeu began to reproach her for uttering that truth without shame or horror at herself. Teresa interrupted him: she could no longer listen because she felt faint, and asked leave to withdraw. She told him to take whatever revenge he could: in that martyrdom, her glory would be a gallows raised beside Simão’s. Teresa left the grille, took a few steps towards her cell and leant against the wall, on the verge of fainting. Her aunt and Constança ran to support her, but she gently pushed them both away. ‘There is no need; I am well. Such blows give life, aunt,’ she murmured. And she went on alone, with faltering steps, her body contradicting the assurance of her words.
Meanwhile, Tadeu was pounding the convent door in a fury that the narrator renders ridiculous, blow after blow. The portress and the other nuns were frightened by such extraordinary misconduct. The abbess sternly asked what was happening; Tadeu demanded that Teresa be brought outside. ‘What do you mean, outside? Who is to cast her out?’ the superior retorted. He replied that she could not keep a daughter there against her father’s wishes. The abbess conceded the principle but urged prudence; he declared that there would be no prudence at all. On learning that Teresa refused to leave, the superior proposed persuading her gently, for they would not drag her outside. Growing ever more furious, Tadeu replied that he would go in and fetch her himself, and ordered them to open the doors. The abbess reminded him that those doors could not be opened without permission from a higher authority and that the Rule could not be broken to serve a rancorous passion. She told him to calm himself, let that frenzy subside and return on another occasion so that they might agree only what befitted those concerned.
Gesticulating before the parlour grille, Tadeu concluded that the nuns were conspiring against him and threatened to teach them a lesson. He demanded that his daughter should receive no more letters from the man he called a killer. The abbess resisted ironically: Teresa had never received letters from killers and never would. Refusing the distinction, Tadeu promised to watch the convent and ordered them to expel Constança, Teresa’s maid. He explained that he had instructed her to inform him of everything that happened, but she had told him nothing. ‘Perhaps she had nothing to tell you, sir!’ the superior replied, her patience now exhausted. When Tadeu renewed his demand for immediate expulsion, the abbess refused to commit an injustice. Tadeu could send another maid; other ladies would take Constança in when she ceased to serve Teresa. Constança herself wished to remain in the convent, the abbess made clear. Tadeu shouted that they meant to kill him, but that he would not die until the devil burst apart. He lurched out of the convent atrium as though bucking, his hardened face contorted with rage. Hideous anger drew tight his leathery cheeks, while sweat and blood seemed to show in his sunken eyes.
He next went before the police intendant and requested measures to have his daughter handed over to him. The intendant replied that the application had not been made in a legally competent form. Tadeu demanded that the gaoler withhold any letter from Simão Botelho, the prisoner from the district of Viseu. The intendant explained that, without grounds connected with an investigation, he could not prevent a prisoner from writing to whomever he wished.
His fury redoubled, Tadeu took the same demands, in the same arrogant tone, to the Porto magistrate. That magistrate, a personal friend of Domingos Botelho, dismissed the troublesome visitor with irritation. He told him that old age without judgement was as much a cause for laughter as for pity. He almost lost his mind and wandered through Porto, unable to find a course worthy of his lineage and vengeance. The next day, he found several appellate judges more inclined to clemency than to the justice he wanted for Simão. One of them, Mourão Mosqueira, was a childhood friend of Rita Preciosa and had been personally implored by her.
Mourão addressed a long accusation to the enraged nobleman, its vehemence belonging to the magistrate’s own voice. ‘It takes very little for a man to become a killer, Senhor Albuquerque,’ he began. He asked how many deaths Tadeu might already have caused if any adversaries had stood in the way of his anger. He asserted that Simão, the target of Tadeu’s violence, maintained his honour at the height of his misfortune. Simão’s father had abandoned him and allowed him to be condemned to the gallows; yet not once in his utter degradation had he cried out to beg for mercy. During eight months in prison, a stranger had given him alms on which to live. According to Mourão, Simão had accepted it without dishonour: the gift honoured both its recipient and its giver.
That very day, Mourão had gone to see the son of a lady he had known at court, seated beside kings. He had found Simão dressed in coarse baize and rough cloth, and asked whether he was so attired because he owned nothing better. Simão had replied that he dressed according to his means and owed those trousers and that jacket to a farrier’s charity. Mourão had then advised him to write to his father and ask to be clothed decently. Simão had refused to ask anything of the father who had allowed the offences of his heart, dignity and name to be expiated upon a scaffold. ‘There is greatness in this eighteen-year-old man, Senhor Albuquerque,’ Mourão concluded.
Had Tadeu allowed Teresa to love Simão, Mourão asserted, he would have spared the life of the dishonourable man who had come between them. Baltasar had confronted Simão with insults and physical outrages so grave that the young man would have been dishonoured had he not resisted them with courage and spirit. Had Tadeu not opposed his daughter’s honest and innocent affections, he added, justice would not have ordered a gallows to be erected. Nor, he accused him, would Baltasar’s life have been sacrificed to the whims of a bad father. Mourão further asked whether the Albuquerque coat of arms would be diminished if Teresa married the son of the magistrate of Viseu. He did not know the age of Tadeu’s nobility, but knew Rita Preciosa’s lineage from the finest genealogies in the kingdom. On his father’s side, he asserted, Simão had some of the finest blood in Trás-os-Montes and would not fear comparing it with that of the Albuquerques of Viseu. Those Albuquerques, he concluded ironically, were certainly not the terrible Albuquerques celebrated by Luís de Camões.
Wounded by the irony, Tadeu rose, took up his hat and enormous gold-knobbed cane, and bowed. ‘Truth is bitter, is it not?’ Mourão Mosqueira asked with a smile. Tadeu replied ironically that the judge might know what he was saying, while he himself knew what decision he would stand by. He was leaving pierced in his honour and in that of the fifteen ancestors whose memory sustained his pride. Mourão told him to keep whatever decision he pleased, but to leave certain of one thing: Simão Botelho would not go to the gallows. The assurance was firmer than the earlier hope, but it was not yet a formal judicial decision. ‘We shall see,’ the old man muttered, without relinquishing his hostility.