all measures had been
concerted, and Gil de Mesa awaited me outside with horses--the whole
having been contrived by my dear wife--I made the attempt. My apparent
condition had naturally led to carelessness in guarding me. Who would
guard a helpless, dying man? Soon after dark I rose, donned over my own
clothes a petticoat and a hooded cloak belonging to my wife, and thus
muffed walked out of my cell, past the guards, and so out of the prison
unchallenged. I joined Gil de Mesa, discarded my feminine disguise,
mounted and set out with him upon that ninety-mile journey into Aragon.

We reached Saragossa in safety, and there my first act was to surrender
myself to the Grand Justiciary of Aragon to stand my trial for the
murder of Escovedo with which I was charged.

It must have sent a shudder through the wicked Philip when he received
news of that. A very stricken man he must have been, for he must
have suspected something of the truth, that if I dared, after all the
evidence amassed now against me, including my own confession under
torture, openly to seek a judgment, it was because I must possess some
unsuspected means of establishing all the truth--the truth that must
make his own name stink in the nostrils of the world. And so it was.
Have you supposed that Antonio Perez, who had spent his life in studying
the underground methods of burrowing statecraft, had allowed himself to
be taken quite so easily in their snare? Have you imagined that when I
sent for Diego Martinez to come to me at Turruegano and instructed him
touching the surrender of those two chests of documents, that I did
not also instruct him carefully touching the abstraction in the first
instance of a few serviceable papers and the renewal of the seals that
should conceal the fact that he had tampered with the chests? If you
have thought that, you have done me less than justice. There had been so
much correspondence between Philip and myself, so many notes had passed
touching the death of Escovedo, and there was that habit of Philip's of
writing his replies in marginal notes to my own letters and so returning
them, that it was unthinkable he should have kept them all in his
memory, and the abstraction of three or four could not conceivably be
detected by him.

Ever since then those few letters, of a most deeply incriminating
character, selected with great acumen by my steward, had secretly
remained in the possession of my wife. Yet I had not dared produce