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News that could cheerfully stir the legitimists continued to arrive from the Upper Minho. Cristóvão Bezerra, the former captain-major of Santa Marta de Bouro, wrote to his relative, the major of Barrimão. It was said that Dom Miguel was in his kingdom and, more astonishing still, very close by. Cristóvão could not write plainly until he knew whether his cousin understood the cipher of the Order of Saint Michael of the Wing. According to him, King Afonso Henriques had founded the order and the legitimate monarch had recently revived it. The major of Barrimão was a commander of the order, knew the cipher, and told his relative to write without reserve. As he distrusted the post, he sent Zeferino to Santa Marta de Bouro with a very important letter. The mason felt immensely proud to be given such a mission. His godfather, however, knew how to keep a secret and did not reveal the letter's contents to him. Zeferino therefore confined himself to sharing a suspicion with his father.
He told Gaspar that, unless he was mistaken, Dom Miguel must be nearby and would soon appear. The news sent an electric discharge down the former ensign's spine and threw him into an extraordinary convulsion. He resembled one of those paralysed men whom terror or exultation suddenly sets in galvanic motion. Since only his gullet remained unobstructed, Gaspar absorbed a great deal of brandy with the suction of some voracious sea creature. Then he began roaring that the King had arrived. With the discretion proper to a secret agent of the Restoration, Zeferino grew annoyed by the patriotic clamour. He asked his father whether he was drunk. Wounded both as a vassal and as a father, Gaspar enjoyed an honourable interval of lucidity. He replied that, if he were not crippled there, he would give the rascal a fitting answer. Zeferino saddled the mare and set off for the lands of Bouro.
As he passed Simeão's house, he shot the farmer a sidelong glance from beneath the brim of his hat. Simeão was yoking the oxen to the cart. Zeferino gave a long, growling throat-clear, spurred the mare, and lowered his iron-shod staff beside his leg. The rest of his hostility remained in the glance and the gesture. When he lost sight of him, Simeão muttered that the Devil could take the swaggering fool. Cristóvão Bezerra answered his cousin's questions and received the messenger very warmly. Zeferino introduced himself as the major's godson and the son of the ensign who had led the 1838 attack on Santo Tirso. As he did not know the story, Cristóvão asked him to tell it. The mason described his father's feat of swimming across the river with his sword between his teeth. On learning that Gaspar was crippled, Cristóvão lamented such wasted ability. He observed that a Roman general had done the same and recommended the hot-water treatment at Caldas de Vizela. The loyalty of father and son encouraged him to confide in the messenger.
Cristóvão asserted that Dom Miguel was nearby, although he received no one because the liberals were already watching him in Portugal. The acclamation, he said, would begin in the lands of Bouro and spread as far as Lisbon. He further assured Zeferino that the king would give him his father's commission, or perhaps a higher one. The mason rubbed his knees and rocked in his chair, beaming like an idiot. He took from his pocket a little beaded purse containing three gold pieces and seven smaller coins. He set the money down with a crash before Cristóvão and asked him to send it to the king for his expenses. He explained that for four years he had contributed one gold coin each year. Father Luís de Sousa Couto of Porto had told him that Dom Miguel knew every subscriber by name. Cristóvão refused the donation because he was not authorised to receive it and did not think it necessary. According to him, Dr Cândido of Anelhe held fifty contos donated by the Infanta Isabel Maria. That money would suffice, in the conspirators' phrase, to put the procession into the street.
The letter carried by the delighted Zeferino was more explicit than these confidences. It asserted that Dom Miguel was hiding at the residence of the abbot of São Gens de Calvos, in the municipality of Póvoa de Lanhoso. The abbot's name was Marcos António de Faria Rebelo. Very few people were said to have seen the supposed king, who would appear to the faithful only when foreign generals entered through Galicia. Some of those generals would come from the former Carlist army and others from England. The reference to foreigners pricked the national pride of the major of Barrimão. He found it impossible that the exiled prince should not trust the skill and loyalty of Santa Marta, Vitorino, Póvoas, and Bernardino. He called it ingratitude, and Frei Gervásio added that it was also stupidity. The friar recalled how little Bourmont, Pussieux, and MacDonnell had served the king at the end of the campaign. Barrimão concluded that there was trickery afoot and that someone meant to pocket the Infanta's fifty contos. In his view, Cousin Cristóvão was a complete ass.
Frei Gervásio advised his brother to write to Póvoas and Bernardino and ask them for information. The royalist officers replied that some attempt at restoration was undoubtedly fermenting. Ribeiro Saraiva was working in earnest, and Dom Miguel was expected in London. But the king was not in Portugal and would return only to take his permanent seat upon the throne that had been usurped from him. With the letters in his hand, Barrimão told Zeferino that the king would come, but had not yet done so. He also said that the abbot of Calvos had deceived Cristóvão and that the contribution sought for the rising was a swindle. He advised his godson to stop talking nonsense and not to fall for the fraud.
Zeferino persisted and offered odds of two to one that Dom Miguel was at Calvos. He tugged at his beaded purse like a horse-dealer at a fair and displayed the money. He invoked the opinion of Lieutenant-Colonel Cerveira Lobo, lord of Quadros, who also said that the king was already in Portugal. Frei Gervásio replied that Cerveira was a great drunkard. Barrimão added that the only king present was the king of drunkards inside Cerveira's body. Zeferino objected that he had heard Dom Miguel was very fond of the lieutenant-colonel. The friar admitted the possibility, recalling that the king was fond of great scoundrels. His reputation for cleverness wounded, Cristóvão insisted by letter that the king truly was at Calvos. He claimed to have kissed the royal hand at the abbot's house on the night of 16 April 1845. He had seen Dom Miguel only briefly in Braga in 1832, yet had recognised him from his portrait and his slight limp. The leg the king had broken in 1828 served as his proof. According to Cristóvão, the supposed king had made the abbot of Calvos his chief chaplain, given the see of Coimbra to the abbot of Priscos, appointed Father Manuel das Agras as precentor, and granted Cristóvão two commanderies and the title of Baron of Bouro.
Barrimão asked his brother what he made of that account. Frei Gervásio replied that he saw in it the familiar stupidity of Cousin Bezerra and the priests. If the hidden man really was Dom Miguel, he added, then the fool would be the king himself. As a precaution, he asked His Most Faithful Majesty's pardon. They wrote again to Póvoas, Tavares de Fagilde, and Pontes, a contributor to the newspaper A Nação. The three men denied that there was any Dom Miguel at Calvos. They nevertheless advised letting the story run, since a preparatory agitation, a rehearsal, and a trial sounding would be useful. Gervásio concluded that the possible impostor would be a Baptist, the forerunner of the true Messiah. He therefore proposed that they should let both the rehearsal and the trial sounding continue. As he spoke, he clasped his hands over his prominent belly and revolved one thumb around the other. Whatever it was would make itself known in time, but Zeferino must not commit himself before the Portuguese generals took to the streets.
Amid these intrigues, Zeferino ceased working as a mason. He left the building work to his journeymen and began running between his godfather's house and that of another royalist patron. That patron was Vasco Cerveira Lobo, a lieutenant-colonel and lord of Quadros. He had been born to rank and, since the Convention of Evoramonte, had neither cut his beard nor left the ruins of his manor at Vermoim. Since his political passion could find no consolation, he sought distraction in alcohol. Conscious of the degradation of his drunkenness, he shut himself in his room and sometimes fell asleep in his own vomit. He had become brutalised and dull. Cerveira had suffered a stroke when Brigadier José Urbano de Carvalho took several squadrons over to the Duke of Terceira's division. He had seen his colonel, António Cardoso de Albuquerque, acclaim the Constitutional Charter and Queen Maria II. He felt himself dragged away, deceived, and captured as he tried to carve an honourable grave with his sword. In his memory, the brave Chaves regiment, which had never given the enemy a deserter, had perished in that hour beneath a weight of disgrace. From then on, he saw himself as a misunderstood wretch who drank to forget the sudden reversal of his career.
There followed an unbroken chain of miseries. The sons got drunk like their father. The daughters courted road engineers and attended fairs in scarlet clothes, patent-leather boots, and silk hats with tassels and feathers. Cerveira's mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the apostolic Queen Carlota Joaquina and had belonged to the Ramalhão circle. She boasted that the Count of Vila Flor had loved her. On entering the vast old house at Quadros, she had suffered hysterical fits that filled the neighbourhood with supernatural fears. Cerveira could have lived handsomely at court, for the estate's rents and dues were considerable. Honorata begged him through her tears to do so. He angrily replied that he could not face the liberals. He would not leave the house until he had recovered his insignia as a lieutenant-colonel of dragoons. He pointed to their five children and ordered Honorata to be a good mother and look after the filthy children. The narrator observes that Cerveira possessed such notions of justice only when he was sober.
Honorata replied that his drunken bouts disgusted her even more. The nobleman would then punish her in military fashion. When he did not kick her, he fired a volley of barrack-room abuse at her. He asked whether she missed the brothels and royal revels of the Ramalhão. After that squalid obscenity, Cerveira lapsed into a stupid muteness and ceased answering her. Cerveira shut himself in the room beside the wine store. Thus political defeat was transformed within the household into drunkenness, violence, and neglect. In that patron, Zeferino encountered another model of authority fed by humiliation and alcohol.
Honorata Guião was about twenty-eight when she left Lisbon for the Minho in 1834. She was beautiful, with the fine graces of an aristocrat and a nervous, restless elegance. The narrator compares her to a white flower nibbled by desires as if by bees. She had accepted Major Cerveira because he was rich and paraded liveried servants at court. He was thirty, and people said he would be a general by forty because Dom Miguel was very fond of him. There was also a rumour that Cerveira had taken part in the murder of the Marquis of Loulé. The former court youth, intimate with the king and the infantas and sought after by the queen's ladies, had become a grey-haired old drunk. He braced himself against the iron balcony rail and vomited sour gushes of wine onto the public road. The girls who passed greeted him fearfully as their noble lord and lord of the estate. With his beard stained by vomit, he ordered them to show their 'patriotism' and commented on their haunches and swaying hips. The girls fled without answering, for they were his tenants and knew the landlord's power. Once away from him, they wished the Devil would take the drunken nobleman.
Some said that the noblewoman had done well to run away with the doctor from Pombais. An elderly farm woman disagreed and called any woman who left five children behind a bad woman. Not even bitches would do such a thing, she declared. The older boys were already getting drunk, while the daughters, nearly grown women, had neither been to confession nor learnt their catechism. Teresinha was already dressing up for a student from Quintãs who appeared there in the guise of a hunter. Young Heitor courted José Alho's daughter and, according to rumour, had even spoken of marriage. The old woman had seen him in the Vilaverde tavern, too drunk even to lick his lips, buying wine for Alho and his daughter. The three of them ate pieces of fried cod with their hands. To the village storyteller, it was astonishing to see a gentleman of the Quadros family reduced to such company. When she was a girl, those gentlemen never went out without liveried servants and sedan chairs painted with the royal arms. Rodrigo, the present lord's father, had held posts in the governments in Lisbon. When he came to inspect the estates, the most influential people in Braga and Guimarães hurried to pay their respects.
At the sight of the noblewomen of old, common people ran to kiss their hands. At Easter, they sent headscarves and ring-shaped loaves to the village girls. In those days, the house was always full of friars from wealthy orders. José Dias seized on the phrase and suggested that the noblewomen too had been full of friars. Aunt Rosa of Carude rebuked him for his mischief and called him an idler. She asked him ironically whether the present was better, now that noblewomen ran away with doctors and abandoned their children. In the old days, Rosa said, noblewomen were shameless, knew friars, and nevertheless raised their own children. José asked whether she meant the friars' children. Rosa told that wicked mouth to be quiet and said he would have made a fine priest. It was just as well, she added, that Marta of Prazins had made him change course.
Honorata Guião's flight with Silveira of Pombais had not caused an uprising of scandalised public opinion. With the exception of the austere Rosa of Carude, almost everyone sided with the noblewoman. Cerveira had lovers among poor women and brought them into the house. It was another diversion besides drink, when he did not combine the two in open promiscuity. Honorata visited only Dona Andresa da Silveira of the Pombais household. Andresa was the sister of a law graduate serving as a magistrate in Amarante. Honorata wept often with her friend and asked her to consult her brother. She wanted to know whether the law would allow her to separate before despair drove her to throw herself into a cistern. Andresa asked her brother to come and hear her unfortunate friend's sorrowful case.
Honorata was thirty-three when Adolfo Silveira met her at Pombais. The magistrate was a Romantic. He had gone into exile in 1828 while still a student, after members of the Divodignos society were hanged for murdering their professors. He had completed his degree in 1838 and received a public appointment. He read a great deal of Schiller and Arlincourt. He wrote verse romances filled with Moorish knights, lovesick Christian princesses, and rebecs played by moonlight on castle battlements. He also published prose in the Gazeta Literária do Porto. In his dramatic scenes, men swore by their throats, high-born figures trailed black cloaks, and Toledo blades were driven into Dom Fuas's door. Then came cavernous growls, shudders, and dry cackles like gulls pecking one another above a becalmed sea.
To the law graduate, Honorata surpassed every embodiment of his ideals. She was a former lady of the queen, slender and thin, with the elegance of a lineage refined in the salons of Bemposta. Her ivory pallor, vague air, and noble, rebellious smile joined, in his eyes, the poetry of martyrdom to beauty. Honorata was ashamed to tell him about her husband's degraded life, his affairs with labouring women inside the house, and the neglect of the children. It was Andresa who laid everything before her brother in her friend's presence. She said that Cerveira got drunk every afternoon and allowed women of the lowest condition to rule the household. The boys were brought up brutally, and Heitor, the eldest, could not even read. Their father could scarcely write his own name.
A resident priest had been engaged to teach the children. Instead of teaching, he spent his time repairing the floorboards like a carpenter. At lesson time, he put down his adze and entered the room in his shirtsleeves, without a cravat and wearing clogs. The boys had no respect for him. When the master threatened Heitor with the ferule, the boy replied that he would slash him with a knife. Cerveira found this amusing, and the priest left. An old schoolmaster from Guimarães later tried to teach them with great patience. The torments inflicted by Heitor and Egas forced the poor man to flee. Honorata had endured that scourge since the fall of the monarchy, as though she were to blame for Dom Pedro's victory. The Guião family had been close to Dom Miguel and the Count of Basto, but they had been persecuted and stripped of their property.
Even if she wished to flee her husband, Honorata had no family in Lisbon able to support her. Without that poverty, she would already have ended her ordeal. Andresa added that her friend had often thought of killing herself. Adolfo sentimentally interrupted her with a reference to the dear little children. Honorata replied at once that it was not the children who held her back. In her view, a mother's heart filled with love for her children only when her love for their father had evaporated. She had never loved Cerveira. The marriage had been imposed on her by exploiting the bitterness caused by the ingratitude of a count she loved. Her family had married her off in haste.
Honorata denied that political misfortune had worsened her husband's character. He had always been the same man. At court, he had merely got drunk with noblemen at Alfeite and Queluz and slept there. The women he corrupted, or who corrupted him, were not then Honorata's servants or acquaintances. She had merely known for certain that her husband was debauched. She had five children by that man, but described them as the accursed products of a senseless obligation. For her, the obligation to be a mother merely because one was a wife was degrading. That was Honorata's conclusion, spoken before Adolfo and Andresa. Adolfo had never heard anything like it, nor found in novels so philosophical a reason why a mother might dislike her children.
Later, he confessed to his sister that he had wanted to kneel before Honorata. He extolled her beauty and talent. He declared that he had travelled for five years and known the most enchanting women in Europe. Neither at El Pardo, nor in the Bois de Boulogne, nor in Hyde Park had he seen a woman who pierced so deeply into his soul. At twenty-eight, he felt the palpitations of a heart that had only just been born. He asked what spark of love was now setting fire to the joys that had gilded his existence only the day before. It was Arlincourt's bloated style. Even so, the narrator concedes that the excess expressed a simple and natural emotion in enormous lettering. Honorata's grace, elegiac sadness, and unyielding dignity had moved him. Misfortune had given her a modern and revolutionary critique of the religion of motherhood.
Scandalised, Andresa clipped his wings and asked whether a judicial separation would provide Honorata with the means to live. Lost in abstraction, the law graduate appeared to have forgotten the code. The state of his soul would not allow him to turn the infamous prose of the law with a lawyer's hand. He promised to study the matter. It seemed to him that, if she sought a divorce, Honorata would be entitled only to maintenance because she had brought no property into the marriage. He chewed over those phrases with boredom and nausea. It was as though, after reciting a meditation by Lamartine, he had to read two paragraphs of the law of emphyteusis.
Dona Andresa was a sensible and very serious woman, educated at the convent of Vairão. She had Mass said at home and began her letters to nuns with the words 'Jesus, Mary, Joseph'. She was about thirty-five, very phlegmatic, and felt a great horror of the vices of the flesh. Adolfo knew her temperament and understood that she would neither applaud nor assist a passion for a married woman. Andresa agreed that Honorata was beautiful. But she reminded him with a sly smile that she had called him to advise her friend about separation, not to assess her beauty. Adolfo restrained his enthusiasms and began studying the matter with Bento Cardoso of Guimarães and Torres e Almeida, known as the Rasqueja of Braga. The narrator calls the two lawyers a pair of walking clichés. In truth, Adolfo wanted to disguise his delays at Pombais and gain time without arousing his sister's suspicions. He also had to guard against her chaplain, a shrewd royalist who, with a sly cackle, remarked on the weaknesses of a man without firm religious principles, corrupted by life in foreign countries.
Andresa began to worry because her brother neither returned to Amarante nor began the proceedings. Honorata appeared radiant to her and increasingly careful in her dress. Her dresses were out of fashion but elegant and rich, with loose sleeves and necklines that kindled strange scruples in the chaplain's eyes. In his sister's presence, Adolfo maintained a discreet manner. He spoke of his travels in exile and named writers unknown to Honorata as close friends of his in Paris. He sighed over Paris and wondered how he could have ended by exchanging that city for Amarante. Andresa told Father Rocha that her brother was behaving with great seriousness. It was Honorata who seemed to her bolder and more provocative. Father Rocha agreed and predicted that something would burst from it.
And, as the chaplain's explosive phrase had predicted, something was indeed about to burst. Adolfo and Honorata exchanged letters every day. Their intermediary was one of Andresa's tenant women, whose sister was a servant in Cerveira Lobo's house. The incendiary letters, written during the night, changed hands in the morning. Adolfo would then go out to breathe the balm of the dew-covered slopes. At times, he climbed to the crest of the castle hill at Vermoim. From there, beyond the oak woods and pines, he could see the vast brown mass of the Quadros house with its two crenellated towers. On the terrace of one tower, a white figure could be seen with one arm resting on a battlement and her head supported by her hand. The pose seemed to have come from a ballad by Baour-Lormian. It was Honorata, her binoculars trained on the rock where Adolfo stood in the first orange light of the sun.
At the end of two weeks, the pair left the realm of balladry. One night, two horses supplied by Gaitas left Guimarães on the road towards Porto and stopped at Ponte de Brito. One of the animals carried a lady's saddle. Near midnight, Adolfo and Honorata reached the bridge at a quick, restrained pace. Their anxiety mingled exultation with fear. Adolfo helped Honorata into the saddle and then mounted the other horse. He told the two horsemen their destination, but the account does not reveal it. Honorata was leaving behind the house at Quadros, her husband, and her five children. The two rode away at a broad trot.