Quart put the letter back in its envelope. He felt embarrassment for having intruded on the intimacy of the letter's words of love that were never answered.

"Would you like to read more?" asked Macarena.

He shook his head. The curtains billowed still in the breeze that came up the Guadalquivir from Sanlucar, and through them he caught a glimpse of the church tower. Macarena sat on the floor, leaning against the trunk, rereading some of the letters. Her black hair shone in the lamplight. Quart admired the curve of her neck, her tanned skin, her bare feet in the leather sandals. She exuded such an intense warmth that he had to stop himself from reaching out and touching her neck.

"Look at this," she said.

She held out a piece of paper. It was a sketch of a ship beneath the words: ARMED CUTTER, THE MANIGUA. Below the sketch was a list of the specifications of the ship, obviously copied from a periodical of the time, all in Carlota's hand.

Year of construction, England

Tons of displacement

Length

Draft

H.R Moving power

Knots

Range

1,800 miles at 10 knots

Armaments

2 of 47 (to stern)

1 of 75 (in the centre)

Crew

27 men (3x4 gunners)

Macarena handed him a folder tied with ribbon. "This dates from later on. My grandfather put it in the trunk after Carlota died. It's an epilogue to the story."

Quart opened the folder. It contained several cuttings from newspapers and illustrated magazines, all dealing with the end of the Spanish-American war and the naval defeat of July 3,1898. A front page from La Ilustracion showed an engraving of the destruction of Admiral Cervera's squadron. There was also a page with an account of the battle, a map of the coast of Santiago de Cuba, and pictures of the principal chiefs of staff and officers killed in the battle. Amongst them Quart found the one he was looking for. The engraving was of poor quality, and a note from the illustrator stated that it had been "drawn based on reliable accounts". It showed a good-looking man with sad eyes, his jacket buttoned to the neck. He had short hair, a large moustache and sideburns. He was the only officer dressed in civilian clothes, and it seemed as if the illustrator had tried to emphasise that this man wasn't a proper member of Cervera's squadron. Captain of the Merchant Navy Mr Manuel Xaloc Ortega, commander of the Manigua. Xaloc stared into space, as if indifferent to being listed among the heroes of Cuba. Below, on the same page, was the text:

The Infanta Maria Teresa, having withstood the concentrated fire of the American squadron for almost an hour, ran aground in flames on the coast. Meanwhile, the other Spanish ships set sail from the Port of Santiago, between the forts of El Morro and Socapa, and were immediately greeted by artillery fire from Sampson's battleships and cruisers, whose strength was overwhelming. The Oquendo, its entire port-side ablaze, guns unfixed, bridges and superstructure almost destroyed and with a large number of dead and wounded on board, passed before its flagship, which had run aground. Unable to continue, its commander (Commodore Lazaga) fallen, the Oquendo ran aground one mile to the west so as not to fall into enemy hands.

Pushing their engines to the limit, the Vizcaya and the Cristabal Colon sailed parallel to the coast, pressed against it by a barrage of North American fire. They passed their destroyed companions, whose survivors were trying to swim to shore. Being faster, the Colon moved ahead, while the unfortunate Vizcaya suffered the full force of the enemy fire. Its commander, Commodore Eulate, made futile attempts to ram the battleship Brooklyn, but the Vizcaya was in flames and ran aground under the intense fire of the Iowa and the Oregon. It was then the turn of the Colon (Commodore Diaz Moreu). At one in the afternoon, pursued by four American ships, defenceless, as it had no heavy artillery, it was forced against the coast and was scuttled by its crew. Meanwhile, without hope of surviving, the light units of the squadron, the destroyers Pluton and Furor, left port one after the other. They were joined in the last few hours by the armed cutter Manigua, whose commander, Captain of the Merchant Navy Xaloc, refused to remain in port. His ship would have remained unharmed and been captured with the town, which was about to fall. Aware that escape was impossible, the Pluton and the Furor headed straight for the American battleships and cruisers. The Pluton (Lieutenant Vazquez) ran aground after it was split in two by a heavy shell from the Indiana, and the Furor was sunk by fire from the Indiana and the Gloucester. As for the fast, light Manigua, it left the Port of Santiago last, when the coast was littered with Spanish ships run aground and in flames. It hoisted a black flag alongside the Spanish flag and, under enemy fire, headed straight for the nearest American ship, the cruiser Indiana. The Manigua sailed for three miles in a zigzag towards the cruiser, under intense fire, and sank at twenty past one in the afternoon, its deck devastated and in flames from bow to stern, still attempting to ram the enemy…

Quart put the cutting back in the folder and returned it to the trunk with the rest of the papers. Now he knew what Captain Xaloc was looking at in the picture: the cannons of the battleship Indiana. He pictured Xaloc on the bridge, surrounded by cannon fire and smoke, resolved to end his long journey to nowhere.

"Did Carlota ever find out about this?" Quart asked.

Macarena was leafing through an old photograph album. "I don't know," she said. "By July 1898 she had completely lost her mind, so we have no idea how she might have reacted to the news. Anyway, I think they kept it from her. She came up here to wait, until the day she died." She showed him a page of the album. There was an old photograph, with the stamp of the photographer's studio in a corner, of a young woman in light summer clothes, holding a parasol and wearing a wide-brimmed hat covered with flowers, a hat like those in the trunk. The photograph was very faded, but he could distinguish slender hands holding gloves and a fan, light-brown hair gathered in a bun, and a pale face with a sad smile and vacant eyes. She wasn't beautiful, but her face was pleasing: sweet, serene. She looked about twenty. "Maybe she had this taken for him," said Macarena.

A stronger breeze moved the curtains, and through them Quart once again saw the belfry of Our Lady of the Tears. To dispel his uneasiness, he went over to one of the arched windows. He took off his jacket and stood contemplating the outline of the church in the darkness. He felt bereft, as Manuel Xaloc must have felt when he left the Casa del Postigo for the last time and went to the church to leave Carlota's pearls there. "I'm sorry," he murmured, not quite knowing why. He remembered the cold against his hand of the entrance to the crypt, the hiss of burning candles during Father Ferro's Mass, the odour of a barren past rising from the trunk.

Macarena came and stood beside him, and she too looked out at the tower of Our Lady of the Tears. "Now you know all you need to know," she said.

She was right. Quart knew more than enough, and Vespers had achieved his futile purpose. But none of it could be translated into the official prose of a report for the IEA. Monsignor Spada, and His Eminence Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz, and His Holiness the Pope were concerned only with the identity of the hacker and the likelihood of