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The residence of Abbot Marcos Rebelo, at São Gens de Calvos, had a room with an alcove and windows overlooking a wooded kitchen garden. It was early April, and the pear, apple and plum trees were beginning to blossom. Yet cutting winds from Barroso and Gerês blew across the cold heights, strong enough to freeze the sap in the trees.
The small whitewashed room was fouled with fly droppings and dried phlegm from old bouts of catarrh. On the walls hung a lithograph of Dom João VI, with his sly eye and drooping lip, and another of the Marquis of Pombal. Two cracked paintings showed an anguished Saint Jerome in the desert and a healthy, smiling Saint Anthony with a very well-fed Infant Jesus. A leather chair, a brazier, a coal basket and a noisy clock full of dead flies completed that improvised court.
At ten o'clock, the crooked alcove door creaked and a man of medium height and broad shoulders emerged. He appeared to be between thirty-six and forty and walked with a slight limp. He was Veríssimo, but the scene presented him through the royal performance accepted by those around him, not through any proof that he was Dom Miguel. He sat beside the embers, slowly lit a cigarette and put his hand out of the window, but the cold made him close it again.
An elderly woman called Senhorinha came up from the kitchen in her shirtsleeves, blue woollen stockings and rough slippers. She asked permission, bent her knees without lowering her body and enquired whether His Majesty had slept well. Senhorinha explained that the abbot had been called away at eight o'clock to hear the confession of a parishioner who was said to be dying after a fall. He had left instructions that His Majesty should be served breakfast if he had not returned by half past nine. Veríssimo replied that she might serve whenever she wished, since the abbot was the master of that house.
The smell of cured sausage fried with eggs rose from the kitchen, and the guest breathed it in with obvious appetite. Veríssimo began removing from the table some notebooks sewn with red silk and a large lead inkwell containing duck quills. The servant was scandalised to see a king troubling himself with such work. He told her to carry on and declared that a king was a man like any other. Senhorinha replied that there was an enormous difference. When she uncovered the pickled sardines, Veríssimo said that they seemed to be calling him to eat them. He fell upon the sardines with a thoroughly unmajestic greed.
He claimed that, during his exile, he had often remembered the tripe with white beans and pig's trotter that he had eaten in Braga. The Abbot of Calvos was moved to tears as he watched him strip the meat from a pig's trotter and wipe the pork fat from his supposedly royal beard. Within that court, Marcos Rebelo had already received the invented titles of the king's chief chaplain and Dom Prior-elect of Guimarães. The servant cheerfully watched that enormous meal and told the abbot that the gentleman must have suffered great hunger, judging by all that he put into his belly. The abbot supported that story with an Arlincourt romance, according to which Dom Miguel had once lacked even ten réis for a cup of milk in Rome. Questioned about the matter, Veríssimo confirmed that he had reached such an extreme. He added that he had preferred hunger to abandoning his rights and his subjects' happiness in exchange for the annual sixty contos offered by the House of the Infantado.
He said that he preferred his country's butter and meats; 'What a king, what a patriot!' thought the Abbot of Priscos, dabbing his tears with a handkerchief. After the abundant breakfast, Veríssimo smoked smuggled Spanish cigars, unfastened his waistcoat, belched and sent great columns of smoke towards the ceiling.
Senhorinha approached and quietly warned him that Mr Trocatles was waiting outside. The guest hesitated for a moment and then remembered that he was supposed to call him Viscount. He ordered that the visitor be shown up.
The man who entered was Torcato Nunes, a former sergeant in the royalist army and a native of São Gens. Veríssimo rose to receive him, and the pair shut themselves in the alcove.
In the kitchen, one servant marvelled that she now had to call that scoundrel Trocatles a viscount. The other remembered him asking her for two patacos for cigarettes and never paying them back. The first explained Nunes's sudden good fortune by saying that he had been the first to recognise Dom Miguel and had won His Majesty's favour. The servants knew the new viscount's impoverished past, although they interpreted the court arranged upstairs in different ways.
At that moment Marcos Rebelo returned, tired and covered in sweat, cursing the obligations of the parish. The woman whose confession he had gone to hear was not dying: she had become drunk at the Póvoa fair and fallen down an embankment. When he asked whether the guest had eaten well, Senhorinha compared his stomach to a mill hopper, ready to receive everything poured into it. She then warned the abbot that people in the town were already asking about the house's guests because of the large quantity of food arriving there. Senhorinha had replied that some priests were coming to dine because it was confession time.
The abbot began to climb the stairs, asking permission while he was still halfway up. Veríssimo and Nunes emerged from the alcove, the first standing upright in an attitude of majesty and the second carefully composed in one of respect. Veríssimo asked why the Dom Prior sought permission inside his own house. The Dom Prior of Guimarães bent his right knee, and the man playing the sovereign hastened to raise him. Veríssimo repeated that he wanted no ceremony, but the abbot replied that he could not and should not behave otherwise.
With his arms crossed over his cassock, Marcos Rebelo announced a letter from the militia commander of Santa Marta, whom that court called the Baron of Bouro. The abbot placed the letter in the hands of the man treated as king, and he read it aloud. In the letter, Cristóvão sought permission to present the bearer of a letter from Vasco Cerveira Lobo, lord of the entailed estate of Quadros and former lieutenant-colonel of the Chaves dragoons. According to the messenger, Dom Miguel had been a personal friend of Cerveira, and Cristóvão considered the landowner useful for both his name and his wealth.
Veríssimo paused and pretended to search his memories for his friend Cerveira, lieutenant-colonel of dragoons. Nunes supplied the memory he needed, saying that Cerveira had been taken prisoner at Chamusca when Urbano went over to the Liberals with the cavalry and Colonel Albuquerque. When Nunes asked whether he remembered, Veríssimo replied that he remembered perfectly. He ordered the Dom Prior to write to the Baron of Bouro that he anxiously awaited the letter from his friend Cerveira.
He feared that Cerveira might speak to him about details from the past that he could not remember. Nunes ordered him simply to receive Cerveira as an old friend. He assured him that Cerveira could not speak about particulars and, according to one of the landowner's cousins, was a brutish, very rich and perpetually drunken man. He predicted that Cerveira would not even come to Calvos and repeated, before the abbot entered, that the man had a great deal of money.
Marcos Rebelo returned with a brief message: His Majesty would receive Lieutenant-Colonel Cerveira Lobo's letter with great pleasure. Veríssimo approved it and ordered that the delivery should take place that night, with every necessary precaution.
Senhorinha then announced Caneta, a Braga hatter who carried a letter and would deliver it only to the abbot in person. While Marcos Rebelo ordered the messenger to be admitted, Veríssimo and Nunes hid in the alcove and pretended to fear discovery.
The letter came from the Abbot of Priscos, whom the false court called the Bishop-elect of Coimbra. Through him, the Botelhas women of Braga were sending one hundred gold pieces to His Most Faithful Majesty. They said that they offered the donation on their knees and placed all their possessions at the king's service. Caneta handed over two thick rolls secured with crossed red silk ribbons. After Caneta asked for a receipt and Marcos Rebelo took him away, Nunes came out of the alcove, felt one of the rolls and tested its weight. In a very low voice, he announced that it was gold and that the stream of money was finally beginning to flow. Veríssimo opened his eyes wide and stuck out his tongue as far as he could. In that moment of naked greed, he did not look like a king at all.