I might as well have no servant at all, de Vega thought, drifting toward sleep. But a gentleman without a servant would be. Unimaginable was the word that should have formed in his mind.

What did occur to him was better off. He yawned, stretched, and stopped worrying about it.

When he woke, it was still dark outside. He felt rested enough, though. In fall and winter, English nights stretched ungodly long, and the hours of July sunshine never seemed enough to make up for them. Diego didn't seemed to have moved; his snores certainly hadn't changed rhythm. If he ever felt rested enough, he'd given no sign of it.

Leaving him in his dormouse-like hibernation, Lope put on what he'd taken off the night before, adjusting the bright pheasant plume in his braided-leather hatband to the proper jaunty angle. He resisted the temptation to slam the door as he went out to get breakfast. My virtue surely piles up in heaven, he thought.

He joined a line of soldiers who yawned and knuckled their red eyes. Breakfast was wine and a cruet of olive oil-both imported from Spain, as neither the grape nor the olive flourished in this northern clime-and half a loaf of brown bread. The bread was local, and at least as good as he would have had back in Madrid.

He was just finishing when his superior's servant came up to him. Captain GuzmA?n's Enrique was the opposite of his own Diego in every way: tall, thin, smarter than a servant had any business being, and alarmingly diligent. "Good day, Lieutenant," Enrique said. "My principal requests the honor of your company at your earliest convenience."

Gulping down the last of the wine, Lope got to his feet. "I am at his Excellency's service, of course." No matter how flowery a servant made an order, an order it remained.

No matter how much Lope hurried, Enrique got to Guzman's office ahead of him. "Here's de Vega," he told GuzmA?n in dismissive tones. As a captain's man, he naturally looked down his nose at a creature so lowly as a lieutenant, even a senior lieutenant.