I picked it up and glanced around surreptitiously. Senhor David was sitting at his desk, smoking his pipe, absentmindedly rubbing his hand over his bald head while studying a large map. Hercules had curled up in his lap.

I crept into the darkest corner of the room and saw that I held a letter written in elegant script, addressed to a woman named Lúcia. It began, My beloved, will you think me too bold if I were to say that I fallinto the arms of slumber each and every nightimagining your hand over my heart?

Next I read of moist lips, moonlight, fainting spells, and orange blossoms. I recognized the word seios — breasts…. What glorious, heart-stopping wickedness that portended! Many other words were unfamiliar to me, however. I’d need a dictionary to know how daringly shocking this letter might be. It was signed with a swirling flourish by a man named Joaquim. He even dotted the i with a wee heart.

I wondered if The Fox Fables had been a present from Joaquim to Lúcia. Perhaps it had displeased her and she had sold it to Senhor David, forgetting she had concealed her suitor’s letter inside. Since it bore no date, the two lovers might very well be grandparents by now. Though it was possible they were still unmarried and were at that very moment planning their next forbidden tryst at the top of the Clerics Tower, two hundred feet above the city’s streets.

I tucked the letter into the pocket of my breeches, took a snootful of musty air into my lungs to rouse my courage, and marched to Senhor David. Handing him the book as innocently as my racing heart would allow, I dropped into his large palm all the copper coinage then in my possession: precisely four five-reis pieces. Judging from his wrinkled nose, this grand sum of twenty reis was not nearly enough. I begged him to let me pay for the book a little each week, giving him a helpless look, as was my wont when entreating an adult.