The duchess sent a page to Sancho’s wife with Sancho’s letter, a letter of her own and a coral necklace tipped with gold. The page was the very boy who had played Dulcinea in chapter 30. At a stream at the edge of the village, women were doing their washing. When the page asked for Teresa Panza, a girl of about fourteen jumped to her feet.
“Teresa Panza is my mother, and Sancho is my father.”
It was Sanchica. Barefoot and with her hair uncombed, she ran ahead of the page’s horse and called her mother from the doorway. When Teresa came out, spinning a hank of rough flax, the page got down and knelt. He asked to kiss the hands of Doña Teresa, wife of the lord governor Sancho Panza. Teresa waved him off, saying she was no doña, only the daughter of a farmer who turns the soil and the wife of a knight-errant’s squire.