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Abbot Marcos Rebelo's residence in São Gens de Calvos had a parlour with an alcove and windows overlooking a wooded kitchen garden. The pear, apple and plum trees were beginning to flower, for it was early April. On those frigid heights, the biting winds from Barroso and Gerês blew. They froze the sap in trunks penetrated by snow and glacial crystals. It was cold.
The whitewashed little parlour, dirty with fly droppings, had a smoke-darkened chestnut ceiling and a floor gnawed by woodworm. On one side stood two grain chests; on the other, old walnut chairs with tattered seats. Two lithographs hung upon the walls. One showed Dom João VI, with a sly eye and a thick lip. In the other, the Marquis of Pombal, holding the decree expelling the Jesuits, pointed pompously towards the harbour bar. In the distance, the sails of the ships carrying the expelled men showed white.
Against the old whitewash, pitted and stained by dried spittle, stood out two oak frames containing cracked oil panels. Saint Jerome appeared in the desert with a distressed face and a painful tic. Saint Anthony of Padua, by contrast, displayed healthy plumpness and an ingenuous smile. The Christ Child, very well nourished, sat upon a ball which hagiographers said represented the terrestrial globe. At the centre, an ochre-painted pine table was covered with red chintz patterned with macaws and fringed in variegated wool. Beside it stood a leather chair, with an embossed back and yellow studs greened by verdigris. On the other side, an iron brazier held glowing coals beside a wicker basket filled with charcoal. Between two small windows with inner lattice shutters and stone corbels, a wall clock worked thunderously. Without glass, the dial's mouldings were full of dead flies, hanging by one leg, with swollen bellies and spread wings.
It was ten o'clock when the alcove door creaked softly upon its crooked hinge. A medium-sized man emerged, broad-shouldered, with a dark beard flecked with white, bright eyes, a sallow complexion, and a hooked nose. He appeared to be between thirty-six and forty years old. He sat beside the brazier and slowly prepared a cigarette, lighting it at the flaming edge of a coal. With a cigarette in his mouth and one eye closed against the acrid smoke, he opened the window and put out a hand to test the temperature. He limped slightly. He withdrew his hand in displeasure and closed the window.
Up the kitchen stairs came an old woman in shirt sleeves, blue woollen stockings, and list slippers. She asked leave to enter, bent her knees in a curtsey without lowering her body and enquired whether His Majesty had slept well. "Excellently, Senhorinha, I slept very well," the man replied. Senhorinha welcomed the news and explained that the abbot had gone to confess a dying parishioner after a fall. As he might not return by half past nine, he had left orders for His Majesty's breakfast to be served. The guest allowed her to serve him whenever she wished, since the abbot had given the orders and ruled the house.
From the kitchen came the fragrant steam of cured sausage fried with eggs. His Majesty scented it with eager nostrils and a powerful appetite. The servant returned with a tablecloth, napkin, Indian china, silver cutlery and a covered dish. With easy familiarity, the guest removed from the table notebooks sewn with scarlet silk and a lead inkwell with quill pens. Senhorinha protested at the trouble, scandalised to see a king busy himself with such a task. Her sentence remained suspended: "A king doing..." The royal lord told her to proceed and insisted on helping, because a king was a man like any other. "Good heavens, there is a great difference, a very great one," Senhorinha replied. Laughing, she uncovered the dish and began to recall what His Majesty said he liked. "Pickled sardines? I should say I like them!" he broke in. He declared that the sardines seemed to be asking him to eat them. And he fell upon them with the voracity of a pauper.
Next came slices of cured sausage with eggs, one of those national dishes of which His Majesty was extremely fond. He had already tasted tripe and had often remembered in exile the tasty dish of white beans and pig's trotter eaten in Braga. The Abbot of Calvos was moved to tears when he saw his king gnawing a pig's trotter. He was equally touched to see him wipe the pork fat from the royal beard. The third course was roast veal. Senhorinha brought it on the spit, because His Majesty liked to carve one thin slice after another. The cook, squatting beside the brazier, held the spit above the coals, where the meat hissed and browned. The guest accompanied the food with an old white wine made by a Braga nobleman who owned land in the Douro. That nobleman knew the Abbot of Calvos's secret and already called him the king's chief chaplain and prior-elect of Guimarães.
The servant watched the formidable act of swallowing with cheerful fascination. In private, she told the abbot that the gentleman, judging by what he ate, seemed to have endured a great deal of hunger. No one would believe, she added, how much His Majesty could pack into that belly. Even so, she felt like weeping when she thought of the privations he was supposed to have suffered. The abbot claimed to have read in God Wills It, by the Viscount of Arlincourt, that Dom Miguel in Rome did not always possess ten réis for a cup of milk. He had asked the man served as king whether it was true. The guest had confirmed that he had reached such an extremity, but had preferred hunger to surrendering his rights and his subjects' happiness. He said that he had refused the annual sixty contos offered to him from the House of the Infantado.
At last the coffee arrived while slices of bread toasted on the brazier. His Majesty spread them with national butter, for he preferred the butter of his own country. He likewise preferred the veal, the pork loin in Portuguese cured sausage and the same animal's trotter in tripe, also Portuguese. Everything had to come from his own country. What a king, what a patriot, reflected the clerical fervour of that court of invented titles. Tender tears were dabbed away with a coarse Alcobaça handkerchief. At the end of the copious breakfast, the performed king smoked smuggled Spanish cigars. He unbuttoned his waistcoat, belched, sprawled in the rather uncomfortable leather chair and sent great columns of smoke up to the ceiling.
Senhorinha approached and quietly announced that Mr Trocatles was waiting. The guest hesitated, as if he had momentarily forgotten the title, and corrected himself: "Ah, the 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. The king rose, and the two men shut themselves in the alcove. Downstairs, the cook remarked to the other servant that she had never imagined she would live to call that scoundrel Trocatles a viscount. Her companion crossed herself and said that the world took many turns. She remembered well the rogue who had once asked her for two patacos for cigarettes and had never repaid them.
The cook explained that Nunes had been the first to recognise Dom Miguel and that His Majesty liked him greatly. The devil of a man had been lucky, and the affair would yet lead to government office, she assured her companion. She had already heard that his nephew, Father Zé da Eira of Rio Caldo, whom they called zanagra, had been made a canon. The family had shaken off its poverty, and Nunes's wife had worn a skirt and jacket of rich blue cloth the previous Sunday.
At that moment the abbot entered, breathless and covered in sweat. He consigned the parish to the Devil and said that he would not endure such nuisances much longer. They had made him hear the confession of a drunken old woman who had drunk too much at the Póvoa fair and fallen down an embankment. He immediately asked whether the guest had eaten well. Senhorinha replied that there was no need to ask. With all due respect, he was like the lime in a mill: his belly took everything that was thrown into it. She also reported that Nunes had already gone upstairs, quickly correcting herself to call him a lord abbot.
In the town, she added, people had asked whether the house had guests because of the quantity of food being sent there. She feared that they might grow suspicious, for there was more behind that question than met the eye. The abbot wanted to know what she had answered. Senhorinha had said that several priests were dining there because it was confession time. "You did well," Marcos Rebelo approved.
As he climbed towards the room, asking leave while still halfway up the stairs, the king and viscount were already leaving the alcove. One composed himself into an attitude of majesty; the other, very erect, assumed an attitude of respect. The sovereign asked whether the Lord Prior sought permission inside his own house. The prior-elect of Guimarães bent his right knee, and the sovereign hastened to raise him. "No ceremony, I have told you dozens of times," the king declared. The abbot replied that he could not and ought not to behave otherwise. "You can and must, because I command it," the other man replied.
Bowing with his arms crossed over his cassock, the abbot announced a letter from the captain-major of Santa Marta, created Baron of Bouro by that majesty. The king replied that he knew that amiable gentleman well. Nunes attested that he was a perfect gentleman. Marcos Rebelo then placed the letter in His Majesty's hands, and he read it aloud.
The missive began, "My friend the Lord Prior of Guimarães, a royalist from the district of Famalicão arrived at this house a short while ago." It asked his noble old friend for royal leave to present the man as the bearer of a letter from Vasco Cerveira Lobo. It identified Cerveira as the lord of the entailed estate of Quadros and a former lieutenant-colonel in the Chaves regiment of dragoons. According to the messenger, Dom Miguel had been a personal friend of the lieutenant-colonel. The captain-major therefore believed that the king would gladly receive the letter from that legitimist, useful both for his name and for his wealth. It ended by asking for the commands of His Most Faithful Majesty to be conveyed to him.
Pausing as though searching his memories, the prince repeated Cerveira Lobo's name and his rank as lieutenant-colonel of dragoons. He ended by calling Cerveira his friend. Nunes promptly supplied the memory he lacked. He recalled that Cerveira had been taken prisoner at Chamusca when Urbano went over to the liberals with the cavalry and Colonel Albuquerque. He asked whether His Majesty remembered. "Perfectly," replied Veríssimo in the role of king. He ordered the Lord Prior to write to the baron that he anxiously awaited the letter from his friend Cerveira.
While the abbot went to his room to write, Veríssimo spoke into Nunes's ear. The opening phrase reaches us malformed in the surviving text, but it expresses fear that the business might go badly. Nunes asked him why. Veríssimo feared that this supposed great friend might appear at Calvos. Nunes instructed him to receive the man precisely as a great friend. Veríssimo objected that Cerveira might speak to him about particular details. Nunes replied that Cerveira did not know how to speak about particulars. He was a brute, very rich and always drunk, according to the lord of Tanque, his cousin in Braga. Nunes further assured him that Cerveira would not come there and that everything was proceeding perfectly. When the abbot's footsteps could already be heard, he insisted upon the essential point: Cerveira had money, a great deal of money.
The abbot entered, saying that he had written only two words. He read the reply: "His Majesty receives with great pleasure the letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Cerveira Lobo." The king approved and set the audience for that night, with every safeguard required by caution. Senhorinha then announced a man called Caneta, a hatter from Braga, who carried a letter to deliver personally to the abbot. They ordered him to enter. The king and viscount withdrew into the alcove, feigning fear.
The letter came from the Abbot of Priscos, whom that court styled bishop-elect of Coimbra. He had the honour of sending the king one hundred gold pieces offered by the Botelhas ladies of Braga. The donors presented the gift on their knees and declared all their possessions to be at the disposal of His Most Faithful Majesty. Caneta handed over two thick rolls bound with crossed ribbons of scarlet silk. With great punctiliousness, he asked the reverend abbot for a small receipt. Marcos Rebelo took him away to write the receipt.
The two conspirators emerged from the alcove, for they had heard mention of the receipt, and found the rolls upon the table. Nunes, his eyes starting, felt the parcel. In a very low voice, he exclaimed that it weighed like the Devil and that it was gold. "The dripping has begun, can you see?" he murmured to his companion. Veríssimo opened his eyes wide and stuck out his tongue as far as he could. He did not look like a king at all.