Doña Estefanía would then get her property back, and who could blame Clementa—or any woman—for procuring a good husband, whatever subterfuge it entailed?

“There’s friendship and there’s friendship, I said, and Estefanía ought to think twice about this. She might wind up having to sue to get her own things back. But she gave me so many reasons, and said she owed Doña Clementa so much that, very much against my will and my better judgment, I played along and agreed for us to stay with another friend of hers, provided the whole affair wouldn’t last more than a week.

“We finished dressing, and when she went to make her goodbyes to Doña Clementa Bueso and Lope Melendez de Almendarez, I ordered my servant to follow her with the luggage. Without taking leave of anyone, I followed too. Doña Estefanía stopped at another friend’s house and stayed talking with her for a while, leaving the servant and me in the street, till at last a girl came out and told us to come in. We went upstairs to a small room with two beds so close together they looked liked one. The two sets of bedclothes actually touched each other.

“There we stayed for the better part of a week, and not an hour passed when we didn’t fight. I kept telling her what a stupid thing she’d done to give up her house and everything, whether to a friend or to her own mother.

“One day when Doña Estefanía had gone out to check on things, our host asked me why I was always quarreling so much with my bride. What had she done for me to accuse her of colossal stupidity rather than selfless friendship?

“I told her the whole story of how I’d married Doña Estefanía and the dowry she’d brought me, and the mistake she’d made in lending her house and goods to Doña Clementa, even to catch such a prize husband as Don Lope. The woman began to cross herself and repeat, ‘O, Lord! O, the harlot!’ at such a clip that she made me very nervous. At last she said, ‘Ensign, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but my conscience would bother me even more if I kept it to myself. By God, here goes—honesty is the best policy whatever happens, and devil take the rest! The truth is, Doña Clementa Bueso really owns the house and estate that you think is your dowry. Every word Doña Estefanía told you is a lie. She has no house, no goods, no clothes save the ones on her back. Doña Clementa went to visit a relative in Plasencia and perform a novena in the church of our Lady of Guadalupe. She left her great friend Doña Estefanía to look after her house, which gave Estefanía this whole idea. Depending on how you look at it, can you blame Doña Estefanía? After all, it got her a gentleman such as you for a husband.’

“Here she finished, leaving me almost frantic. I would’ve become completely desperate if my guardian angel hadn’t sustained me and made me remember that I’m a Christian, and that the greatest sin men can commit is despair, since from it all other sins grow. This thought comforted me, but not so much that I didn’t take up my sword and cape and go looking for Doña Estefanía, ready to make an example of her that nobody could forget.

“But fate, whether for or against me I don’t know, saw to it that I couldn’t find her in any of the places that I expected to. So I went to the church of San Llorente, commended myself to Our Lady, sat down on a bench, and in my distress fell into such a deep sleep that I’d have been out quite awhile if the passersby had let me.

“So I slunk back to Doña Clementa’s and found her at ease—as well a woman might be, in her own house. Not daring to say a word to her with Don Lope there, I went back to our innkeeper, who had already told Doña Estefanía that the jig was up. Apparently, Estefanía had asked how I took the news. The landlady said that I’d taken it very badly and gone out to look for my wife with mayhem in mind, and so Doña Estefanía had made off with everything in my trunk but one suit, unfit to wear except on the road. I dashed to my trunk and sure enough found it open, like a coffin awaiting a dead body. If I’d fully grasped the fix I was in, the coffin might as well have been mine.”

“Quite a fix all right,” the scholar Peralta put in. “And to think that Doña Estefanía absquatulated with all your beautiful chains! That just goes to show you it never rains but it pours.”

“I can’t really complain,” answered Ensign Campuzano, “since I feel like Don Simueque’s son-in-law in the old story: ‘He tried to marry off his one-eyed daughter to me, but on our wedding night she wished she was blind.’ ”

“What does that have to do with you?” asked Peralta.

“Only this: all my shiny chains and armor might barely tally some ten or twelve florins.”

“Impossible!” exclaimed the scholar. “The chain alone must have cost more than two hundred ducats.”

“So it must,” answered the ensign, “if all were as it seemed. But all that glitters isn’t gold, and my finery only counterfeited the real thing—although so expertly that only a touchstone or a crucible could have detected the forgeries.”

“So,” said the scholar at length, “we’ll call it a draw.”

“Enough that we can shuffle the cards and deal a fresh deck, Peralta. But the hell of it is that she can pawn my fake chains, but I can’t get loose of the chicanery she roped me in with. This bit between my teeth never comes out, and she remains my wife.”

“You can thank God, señor Campuzano,” said Peralta, “that your wife has taken to her round heels, and that you don’t have to go looking for her.”

“Very true.