“Inez?” Could harmless little Hippolyta have murdered Inez?
“No! Sor Eustacia.”
“Sor Eustacia?” What had the tall, kindly nun to do with anything?
“Yes. More than anyone else I have ever met, she cares about me. And I betrayed her.”
“Betrayed?”
Hippolyta nodded gravely. “I will confess it this afternoon when the padre comes, but I don’t think God can ever forgive me. I told the Abbess that Sor Eustacia was in love with Inez.”
“What?”
“That Sor Eustacia and Inez had an unnatural friendship.”
“A what?”
“I saw them. I went to Sor Eustacia’s room in the night a few days ago. I found Inez in her bed.”
“What? But they are two women! That’s not possible.”
“You don’t know anything,” Hippolyta said.
Beatriz blushed. “Oh, of course, I know all about that.” But she didn’t, and she couldn’t figure out how this child knew so much more than she did.
“It was Inez’s fault, not Sor Eustacia’s. I am sure Inez must have been the one to start it.” Hippolyta put her hand on her belly again. “I know how it happens.”
Eleven
THE ABBESS ONCE again stood terrified before the sisters gathered in the community room. She held her body in a posture of command that belied the fear boiling in her belly. She did not want the knowledge she was compelled to search out.
All her life—she now realized—she had kept certain kinds of thinking at bay. She had muffled her doubts with carpets of the silence in which she lived, blanketed all strong emotions under layers of solitude, drowned out niggling suspicions with torrents of chanted prayer.
She breathed in and made her words strong. “I intend to search this entire building for an explanation of Inez’s death. Sor Olga, Sor Monica, and Sor Eustacia, you will join me. Except for Padre Junipero and Fray DaTriesta at the locutory, no one has entered or left the convent since Inez died. If any clue remains, we will find it.” She signaled to Monica, Olga, and Eustacia to come to her side. The tall, serious Eustacia immediately stepped forward. She was not quite recovered from her cold, but she would not keep to her bed, preferring to see to her prayers and her duties. The Abbess refused to believe the rantings of the overwrought Hippolyta that Sor Eustacia had been in love with Inez. Eustacia was the most loyal and sensible sister in the convent. If it came to it, she had sworn, she would go to the stake in her Abbess’s stead.
Sor Olga stood, head high and hands together, one over the other, as if she held a trapped bird between them. This was her pose of command—a position that today seemed to sit much more comfortably on the Mistress of Novices than it did on Maria Santa Hilda. That Sor Olga had urged the Abbess to be more authoritarian made such an approach the more distasteful—as if disliking Olga meant rejecting all her advice, however wise. Now the older, cynical woman’s counsel could not be avoided.
“Go to your cells and remain there,” the Abbess said sternly to the sisters of her community. “The maids too must go to their dormitory and wait. In an hour, Padre Junipero will hear our confessions. Spend the intervening time examining your consciences.” She raised her hands, signaling the sisters to stand and be dismissed. The community scattered. Only the whisper of their swishing skirts and the creaking of their shoes broke the silence.
When they were gone, the Abbess turned toward the three women who had gathered around her. “We will begin with my quarters.”
They made their way around the front cloister to the street end of the building and Maria Santa Hilda’s suite of rooms. Their search of her office was thorough, unsurprising to her companions, and painless to the Abbess.
But in her tiny personal chapel, to her mortification, Sor Eustacia riffled through the music on her small foot-pump organ and found Maria Santa Hilda’s mediocre compositions. Eustacia was a good enough musician to see at a glance how simple and uninteresting the songs were. The Abbess held up her head and bore the younger woman’s wide, quizzical glance.
Eustacia, like everyone else in the convent, was becoming an enigma to the Abbess, whose heart refused any suspicion of this steady, intelligent, and devout sister—the dearest of the few Maria Santa Hilda felt she could count on as friends. Maria Santa Hilda’s mind saw, however, that she could not dismiss the information Hippolyta had so painfully and reluctantly given up. The Abbess’s duty was to take the child’s revelation seriously, and when she did, she saw the possibility that it was true. Passions of the soul and body often resided in the same person. Eustacia possessed the one. Why not the other? Maria Santa Hilda knew too well that the body’s longing for love did not cease with vows, and a soul’s loneliness grew in the silence of the convent. The Abbess lacked the moral indignation she was supposed to feel. She felt only sorrow that she must torment her younger sister with questions. God give her strength, she prayed, Eustacia’s secret life was just another misery to be faced.
Sor Olga, who read no music, glanced at the manuscripts and disapproved out of habit.
In the Abbess’s cell, where no one but the maids ever entered, Maria Santa Hilda barely endured their discovery of her secular books—Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies and the story of the Cid. They were not scandalous, but they revealed her love of adventure that she had hidden from the world as if it were a sin.
Sor Monica searched the armario without disturbing a single fold of the neatly stacked underlinens. When she was finished she went and stood by the door, her face red with an embarrassment equal to what the Abbess felt but concealed.
Noises from the plaza intruded and gave urgency to their search. Out there, Indian workers hastily sawed boards and mixed plaster for some construction to honor the arrival of Nestares—who would bring the Inquisitor with him.
“If you are satisfied, Sisters, that there is nothing suspicious here, we shall go next to Sor Olga’s quarters.” She took perverse joy in the Novice Mistress’s shock and indignation and her silent—for a change—and stony submission. Of course, they found nothing to incriminate Sor Olga. In fact, they found nothing at all. The older woman’s cell contained her clothing, her breviary, her devotional articles, and not a single other thing—not a book, no ink or quills, not even a scrap of paper.
In the main chapel, they searched even behind the ebony-and-gold frame that held the jewel-encrusted Madonna before which the community prayed six times a day. Aristocratic ladies often came to the convent to petition the sisters to pray for special favors—the recovery of a sick child, the safe return of a husband who had to cross the sea to Spain, the rescue of a loved one trapped by a cave-in at the mine. If their prayers were answered, they gave a precious stone, pearls, or gold to adorn the Madonna. Over the decades, the artisans in the Calle de los Mercaderes had attached the jewels to the image, creating the splendid Madonna of Los Milagros. On Holy Saturday in the year of Our Lord 1650, the opulent Virgin looked down serenely on the Sisters of Santa Isabella. She concealed no secrets behind her exquisite frame.
The searchers went next to the vault that abutted the church. Wealthy Potosinos often deposited their valuables in convents and monasteries for safekeeping. Each religious order kept a secure place such as this to store jewels and silver. On a table in the counting room, the sisters found a canvas-wrapped parcel. “Dear Lord, forgive me,” the Abbess exclaimed. She had neglected her duty here. Captain Ramirez, the Tester of the Currency, had brought in some silver two days ago. She had sent Juana, the sturdy maid, to take the deposit. Then that evening, in the confusion following Inez’s death, the Abbess had forgotten to come and lock it away in the vault.
While the others searched in the counting room cupboards, she unwrapped and weighed Ramirez’s ingot and entered the amount in her account book. She took a key only she possessed and opened the fortified door to the adjoining vault. In the dank interior, she caught an odd whiff of candle wax and found a sprinkling of sand on the floor. This had not been h
ere the last time she had come in. Under her wimple, her scalp went cold. A theft as well as a murder? Had someone penetrated the vault? She looked around quickly and saw nothing amiss. Yet something had happened here. Was there anyone she could trust? Instinct told her not to reveal this to the others. She would say nothing as yet to her sisters. She put down Ramirez’s silver, left the vault, and locked the door.
She focused on her search of the convent. In the kitchen storeroom, they found nothing untoward among the sacks of maize and barley and boxes of salted fish that had been their sustenance during the fasting season. And nothing among the vihuelas, guitars, and mandolins in the room where they taught the girls music.
In the refectory, Sor Eustacia searched even the bowl of ashes kept on a table by the door as a reminder of the dust they would all one day become.
By the time they reached the rear cloister and the living quarters, the silent sisters were filing out in answer to the bell that called them to confession. The Abbess and her sisters searched the cells and found many things that outraged Sor Olga—a stash of coca leaves here, a gold bracelet, the memento of a former life, there, quite a few hidden sweetmeats, even during Lent, and a number of forbidden secular books and diaries—but nothing that connected anyone to Inez’s death.
They passed to the upper floor, to the dormitory of the maids, whom Maria Santa Hilda dismissed. They went to prepare the noon meal while the sisters riffled through their meager possessions.
Like the others, Juana, the missing maid, kept her belongings in a wooden box under her bed. Among her things, they found religious pictures in frames marvelously carved with motifs of the sun, the moon, and mermaids playing guitars. “These are beautiful,” the Abbess said.
Sor Eustacia fingered the fine carving. “Sculpted by her brother, the one she is trying to save from the mita.”
“I thought he was illiterate,” the Abbess declared. “Evidently he has found another way to express his thoughts.”
“It looks very pagan to me,” was Sor Olga’s predictable response.
From the bottom of the box, Sor Monica pulled a rough pañete sack. In it was an animal horn containing ground lime and coca leaf wrapped in a rag, and under it a glass vial. Monica held the vial up to the light from the window. “It is some sort of dark resin.” She pulled the cork and sniffed. “Very aromatic. It might be some drug the Indians inhale—like the one Vitallina found in the Plaza de la Fruta that relieves pain.” She wet her little finger on her tongue, thrust it into the vial, and moved to taste the stuff.
“No,” Sor Eustacia cried out. “It might be poison.”
Maria Santa Hilda stayed Monica’s hand. “You must not risk it. Feed it to the cat.”
Sor Monica recorked the vial and put it in her pocket. She put back the horn with the coca in it. Sor Olga snatched it up. “We must destroy this.”
“I don’t—” Sor Monica began to object, but in the face of Olga’s grim determination, she demurred.
“Leave the coca,” the Abbess commanded. Whatever it was to the Europeans, it was more like a tonic or elixir to the Indians.
Sor Olga dropped it into the box and pushed the box back under the bed with her foot. Wrinkles of resentment stood out around her lips.
“We are finished with this search,” the Abbess said. “Sor Monica, please try this new substance on the cat and report to me what happens. Sor Eustacia, I must speak with you in my office after Vespers.” She knew they would follow her orders—they had vowed to obey—but neither showed enthusiasm. “For now, Padre Junipero awaits our confessions.”
They walked together in silence across the rear cloister, but then the Abbess broke off from the others. She indicated with a hand signal that they should go on without her. She doubled back to the counting room.
When she unlocked the vault, Ramirez’s silver ingot was where she had left it. She lifted it onto the proper shelf. Then she felt along the wall that separated the vault from the church. Above the sand on the floor, she found a loose brick, and when she pulled it out, several others came away with it, opening a hole large enough for a person to crawl through. On the other side of the wall was the otherwise locked guardarropa where Morada and his bodyguard left their swords and cloaks when they attended Mass in the church each morning. The Abbess put her head through the opening. Except for a bit of red plume that must have fallen off a ceremonial helmet, the room was empty.
She replaced the bricks, took a candle, and checked the bags and boxes of silver on the shelves. They all seemed in order. The obvious had not occurred. No silver had been stolen from the convent’s vault.
On a hunch, she lifted the carpet near the door, found loose floorboards and, under them, a huge excavation filled with silver. Bars, ingots, bags of coins. It struck her dumb how much silver was hidden here. A vast fortune. And in a flash, she knew what it was. Those caravans of Indians that everyone said went out each night into the surrounding plain did not carry Morada’s silver, as rumor had it. Bit by bit, every day for many months, perhaps years, he and his guard had, on entering the church for daily Mass, carried his fortune here.
The enormity of this shook her breath. She was the unwitting guardian of a king’s ransom. Men would kill for far less.
Her mind froze on a thought: Inez’s death must have something to do with this. Any other theory was unthinkable.
The Abbess put everything back as she had found it and relocked the vault and counting room doors. Crossing the cloister, listening to the deep silence of the convent within the vast silence of the mountains, she gazed up at the Cerro Rico. The barren rocks and earth of the mountain shone green, orange, gray, yellow, and red in the pale autumn sunlight. The Cerro dominated the city, like a pagan goddess of good and evil. The cross at its summit seemed too small in the face of its power.
She went to wait her turn for the confessional. Her mind swam in a sea of doubt and speculation. She prayed that this spiritual exercise would somehow prepare her to confront Eustacia, as she knew she must. That would be the most difficult conversation of her life.
When her turn came, she looked into Padre Junipero’s quizzical face. His eyes had a perpetual wariness, as if he held some inner guilt and feared it might be read.
Maria Santa Hilda made the sign of the cross. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
PADRE JUNIPERO HEARD the troubled Abbess’s confession of her failings and doubts. She whispered to him of the weakness of her faith, of her pride, failings that seemed to the priest to have nothing to do with the woman before him. Words of guilt poured forth from her, but the intensity of her feelings did not match her words. Before giving her absolution, he hesitated. “Mother Maria, I sense there is some trouble you are not confessing.”
She did something at that moment that he never expected to see her do. She burst into tears.
Unable to think of a single comforting word, he could do nothing but wait for her to recover herself. Blessedly she did, quickly.
“I forgot myself,” was the only explanation she offered. “I have an idea of why someone might have murdered Inez. I believe it has something to do with her father’s fortune. Please, go and find out if there is anyone she talked to before she came here that night. Find out what she said, what she knew. Find out if she knew the real hiding place.”
“It would help if you told me more about what you suspect.”
“Not yet, Father. I do not want to give you this knowledge if knowing it killed Inez.”
“Do you know where the silver is? I sense you are afraid of something.”
She paused and averted her eyes. “I am upset over something about Sor Eustacia.”
“Does she know where the silver is? Did she—” He could not finish the sentence, but the Abbess knew what he meant.
“No,” she said distractedly, “Eustacia did not kill Inez.” Then, “No,” too definitely.
“Lady Abbess,” he said, “Beatriz Tovar just told me—”
“Stop,” she almost sho
uted. “Padre, you cannot betray the seal of the confessional.”
He was insulted that she would even think such a thing. “What I am going to say is not a sin of her own that she revealed. It is information about someone else.”
“Oh, Father, I have heard Beatriz’s suspicions. She is a good girl at heart, but she lets her imagination run amok. Please spare me hearing her wild speculations.”
“I suppose,” he said. “She is overly romantic.”
He absolved the Abbess and gave her a small penance. They agreed to meet and exchange information early the next morning, after Mass.
“Don’t forget,” she said. “You must find the people Inez spoke to before she came here.”
“I will,” he said. Having blessed her with God’s forgiveness, he watched her leave the confessional obviously as troubled as she had been when she entered. I have failed her, he thought. But I will save her. I will.
He hurried from the convent, along the Calle Real toward the theater.
In this very street only yesterday, he had joined his fellow Jesuits in a penitential procession of more than two hundred Potosinos. Dressed in prickly hair shirts, they had performed harsh acts of self-discipline—lashing themselves savagely with metal-tipped scourges. Marching behind banners bearing the images of San Ignacio, the Apostle of the Indies, he and his brother priests wore ashes on their heads and crowns of long thorns. His temples still bore the wounds of the barbs; his shoulders still ached from the heavy cross he had carried. Such penance was supposed to remind him of the pain of Christ’s suffering, to cleanse him. It had only deepened his guilt. The procession had seemed just another form of masculine excess. Men could go too easily out of control with self-abnegation or to the opposite extreme with sex and violence.
His mind tumbled, like the rock slides one heard from time to time echoing across the Altiplano. He feared for the Abbess’s life, for his own, and for his city’s future. Like the war between the Basques and the Vicuñas twenty-five years ago and the bursting of the Caricari dam that had once flooded the city and killed so many, the coming devaluation would devastate the city, cause enormous suffering among the rich and even more among the poor. The most destitute might starve to death. In Potosí, the richest city on earth. City of churches glistening with gold and silver, of underfed Indians, of ladies of easy virtue and holy women in ecstasy before the martyred Christ, of smugglers toiling ceaselessly in pursuit of fortune, Mestizos fuddled by coca, artists who carved stone into patterns as delicate as lace. Magnificent music in the cathedral; snide, satiric verses posted on the street corners. Children squealing with delight as they played—or dragging themselves home at night after a day of work that would exhaust an adult. Potosí had a Spanish soul: proud, greedy, cruel, and noble. It had beauty. Grandeur. Chaos. The rhythm of Potosí was the rhythm of his heart, which swelled with love of all of it. Each time he extended his arms in the form of the cross at his daily Mass, he wanted to embrace the whole city—the lowest and the highest. The impossibly blue sky, the filthy beggars, the covetous, jealous, and zealous. He loved them all. And they were all threatened. And none more than the Abbess.
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