In a few words she described the dark side of Moncada; she told Juliana that, yes, the assault had been planned, that she and her sister had never been in danger, and that the stain on Moncada’s pant leg was not from a wound but from a piece of sheep gut filled with chicken blood.
She said that once in a while one or two men of her tribe did jobs for Moncada, usually unimportant things; only in a handful of instances had they done something bad like the attack on Count Orloff. “We are not criminals,” Amalia explained, and added that she was sorry that the Russian and Nuria had been struck; violence was prohibited in their law. And as the real coup de grace, she informed Juliana that it was Pelayo who had sung the serenade because Moncada was as tone-deaf as a duck. Juliana listened to the entire confession without a single question. The two women nodded and said goodbye. Amalia left the carriage; then Juliana burst into tears.
That same afternoon Tomas de Romeu formally received Rafael Moncada, who had informed him in a brief note that he found himself recovered from loss of blood and hoping to pay his respects to Juliana. That morning his footman had delivered a bouquet of flowers for her and a box of almond nougats for Isabel, delicate, modest attentions for which Tomas gave the suitor good marks. Moncada arrived dressed with impeccable elegance, leaning on a cane. Tomas welcomed him in the main salon, dusted in honor of his future son-in-law. He offered him a glass of sherry, and once they had taken a seat thanked him again for his timely intervention. Then he sent for his daughters. Juliana looked strained, and was wearing a dark dress more appropriate for a nun than for an important occasion like this. Her sister Isabel’s eyes were blazing, and the corners of her lips lifted in a mocking smile; she held Juliana’s arm in such a strong grasp that she seemed to be dragging her along. Rafael Moncada attributed Juliana’s ravaged countenance to nerves. “It is no wonder, after the terrible experience you have been through ” he began before she interrupted to announce in a trembling voice, but with iron conviction, that not even dead would she marry him.
After hearing Juliana’s emphatic no, Rafael Moncada left the house fuming, although still in control of his good manners. In his twenty-six years he had encountered a few obstacles but he had never failed in anything. He was not going to give up. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve: that was what social position, money, and connections were for. He had refrained from asking Juliana for her reasons; intuition warned him that it would be very bad strategy. She knew enough to have doubts, and he could not run the risk of being exposed. If Juliana suspected that the assault in the street had been a farce, there could be only one reason: Pelayo. He did not think the man would have dared betray him there was no profit in it for him but he might have been careless. There were no secrets in Barcelona; the servants had a much more efficient information network than the French spies in La Ciudadela. Just one wrong word from any of the conspirators and it would have reached Juliana’s ears. He had used the Gypsies on various occasions precisely because they were nomads; they came and went with no interchange with anyone outside their tribe; they had no friends or acquaintances in Barcelona; they were discreet out of necessity. During the time that he was away on his journey, he had lost contact with Pelayo, and in a certain way he was relieved.
Dealings with such people made him uncomfortable. When he got back, he thought that he could start with a clean slate, forget the peccadilloes of the past and start anew, detached from the underhanded world of hired skullduggery, but his vow to be a new man lasted barely a few days. When Juliana had asked for another two weeks to respond to his proposal of marriage, Moncada suffered a panic very rare in him; he prided himself on dominating even the monsters of his nightmares.
During his absence he had written Juliana several letters, which she had not answered. He attributed her silence to shyness; at an age when her contemporaries were already mothers, Juliana behaved like a schoolgirl. In his eyes that innocence was the girl’s best quality; it guaranteed that when she did give herself to him, she would do so without reserve. But with the new postponement his certainty faltered, and that was when he had decided to put on some pressure. A romantic exploit like one of those in the books she treasured would be his most effective move, he calculated, but he could not hope that the opportunity would happen on its own he had to speed things up. He would get what he wanted without harming anyone; it would not actually be deceiving her, because should footpads attack Juliana or any other decent woman he would rush to their defense. It did not seem necessary to explain those arguments to Pelayo, of course; he simply gave the orders and they were carried out without a hitch. True, the scene the Gypsies staged was briefer than he had planned because the knaves broke and ran after a few minutes, when they feared that Moncada’s sword was overly enthusiastic. That had not given him time to act with the dramatic splendor he had envisioned, which was why when Pelayo came to collect, he felt it was fair to haggle over the price. They argued, and Pelayo ended by accepting the lower amount, but Rafael Moncada was left with a bitter taste in his mouth; the man knew too much, and he might be tempted to blackmail him. Definitely, he concluded, it was bad for a man of that stripe, who respected no law or moral code, to have power over him. He must get rid of him as quickly as possible, him and his whole tribe.
As for Bernardo, he was very familiar with the tight network of gossip that people of Moncada’s class were so in fear of. With his tomblike silence, his dignified Indian ways, and his willingness to do favors, he had endeared himself to many people: the women in the market, the stevedores in the port, the artisans in the barrios, and the coachmen, lackeys, and servants in the homes of the rich. He stored information in his prodigious memory, divided into compartments as if in an enormous archive that contained orderly facts and lists to use at the proper time. He had not stored the night he had met Juanillo in Eulalia de Callis’s courtyard under “blow received” but, rather, under “attack on Count Orloff.” He had kept in contact with Juanillo, and in that way followed Moncada’s movements from afar. The footman was not very bright, and he detested anyone who was not a Catalan, but he tolerated Bernardo because he never interrupted him, and he knew that the Indian had been baptized. Once Amalia acknowledged Moncada’s dealings with the Gypsies, Bernardo had decided to find out more about him. He made a visit to Juanillo, taking as a gift a bottle of Tomas de Romeu’s best cognac that Isabel had slipped to him when she learned that it would be used for a good purpose. The footman did not need liquor to loosen his tongue, but he was grateful nonetheless, and soon he was telling Bernardo the latest news: he himself had carried a missive from his master to the military chief of La Ciudadela, a letter in which Moncada accused the tribe of Gypsies of smuggling contraband weapons into the city and of conspiring against the government.
“Those Gypsies are eternally cursed because they forged the nails for Christ’s cross. They deserve to be burned at the stake. Give them no mercy, that’s what I say,” was Juanillo’s conclusion.
Bernardo knew where to find Diego at that hour. He headed straight for the open country outside the walls of Barcelona, where the Gypsies had their filthy tents and beat-up wagons. In the three years they had been there, the camp had taken on the look of a village of rags. Diego de la Vega had not renewed his trysts with Amalia because she was afraid that she would endanger her own fate forever. She had been saved from being executed by the French; that was more than enough proof that the spirit of her husband Ramon was protecting her from the Other Side. It was not a good idea to provoke his anger by continuing to bed a young gadje. It was also in her heart that Diego had confessed his love for Juliana to her; in that case they were both being unfaithfuclass="underline" she to the memory of her deceased husband, he to the chaste maiden.