Beatriz gazed at the tall, ugly priest standing behind the table, at the Abbess, and back at the elegant, seated priest. Who were these men? The ugly standing one who asked her the question wanted her to say awful things. She could tell. He looked at her the way her father did when he expected her to confess some sin. But her father was a chirimoya pear—hard on the outside, but soft and sweet underneath. This tall priest standing so proudly was like an ear of old maize—hard and dry all the way through. Being near him made the damp and cold feel worse. He wanted her to say bad things. She shivered and gazed up at the sky. She would not. Not to this ugly one. The moon was still visible, even though the sky was light.
“Again I ask you,” the ear of maize said in a low, nasty voice, “make a full confession or we have ways to make you talk.”
She stepped back, confused.
The handsome priest at the table held up his hand. He wore an elegant ring and looked very noble in his plain clothing. “There is no need to threaten her yet.” He turned to her and smiled. “Please, my child, tell us what you know.” His accent was beautiful, making the words sound like a lovely song. He was an avocado—a layer of soft sweetness over a huge hard stone.
Beatriz’s sleepy brain flashed into wakefulness. Threaten? Ways to make her talk? This was the Inquisitor! Oh, God! These men had come to take Mother Maria away. She could not let them. She folded her hands in front of her, the way Inez used to do when she was about to tell a lie and wanted to be believed. “Evil, Father? I know of no evil here. We pray. We only pray for the repose of the souls of the dead, for God’s grace on Holy Mother Church. This is a good place. The very best place in this city.” She opened her eyes wide and smiled right into the faces of the two men, the way Inez would have. She looked at the Abbess, who did not meet her gaze. Beatriz pressed her clenched hands beneath her breasts. A screaming child in a nightmare in her heart insisted she should have told the truth. But that little coward was wrong.
“What do you know about the way Inez Rojas de la Morada died?” asked the seated priest.
“Nothing,” Beatriz answered. “Mother Maria is a good and holy woman.”
The corncob came near her. He smelled like dead flowers. “What about midnight meetings of coveys?”
Beatriz tried hard not to wrinkle her nose. Inez would not have wrinkled her nose no matter how he stank. “I have never heard of such a thing. We only pray and chant.” She tried to smile beguilingly at him, but he would not look at her.
“I have heard a rumor about women having illicit relations with other women.”
Beatriz widened her eyes. “Here, Padre? That never happens here.”
He smiled at her, and her breath halted. His eyes had turned cold and triumphant. What had she said? She hadn’t said anything to hurt Mother Maria. His big, pink tongue darted at the corner of his mouth. He turned to the avocado, who sat sipping maté from a gourd. “You see. This child shows no shock, no confusion, at the mention of such depravity. She knows of such liaisons. How else could she, but that she learned about them here? May even have been taught to participate in them.”
The panicked child in Beatriz’s nightmare escaped. “No! That is not true. No bad things ever happen here. None. Mother Maria is good. She is very good.”
“You are endangering your soul and your body by lying,” the corncob rasped at her.
Beatriz could hardly breathe. “All I know is that Mother Maria is the holiest woman I know.”
He dismissed her with a wave. “You see, Your Excellency, how well trained they are. There is no guile or deceit they do not practice and teach the young.”
The avocado took up his pen and wrote something slowly and carefully in the big black book on the table in front of him.
“No. I am not lying!” Beatriz shouted. She tried to look in the face of the Abbess, but Mother’s head was lowered and her eyes closed, as if she already knew herself to be dead. Beatriz bit her lip until it bled. If they asked her another question, she would not say another word.
But they did not ask.
EUSTACIA SEETHED WITH indignation. When DaTriesta asked her the same sanctimonious questions he had asked poor, well-meaning Beatriz, she could not hold her pounding anger. It boiled over like milk left too long on the fire. “How can you waste time investigating this holy woman? You are committing an outrage against a saint!”
Maria Santa Hilda shook her head vehemently. Her eyes pleaded with Eustacia to desist.
Eustacia could not comply. “Yes,” she insisted, addressing the Abbess rather than the Inquisitor. “You are. Especially compared to the evils they impute to you.” She glared at de la Gasca and DaTriesta. “There are real evils in this city. You should be striving to deal with them. Bigamists, for instance. Half the Spaniards have left wives in Spain and taken new ones here. Men abuse their own daughters. Get them with children. But then it is women you want to torture, isn’t it? Not men.”
The sisters around her all gasped. Shock registered even in the Inquisitor’s placid face. She bit her lip. She was insane, really insane to have said such things. She saw it herself. A cry of anguish escaped her.
DaTriesta shook his large, beastlike head. “Women, as you are all amply proving by your unconsidered words, are prone to spread evil. You poison God’s creation with your sins.” He turned in disgust to de la Gasca. “I think we have enough proof to take them.”
Eustacia abandoned any attempt at self-control. “Women were bishops in the early Church. They administered the Sacraments. There are Greek texts that prove this.”
De la Gasca, who toyed with his pen but wrote nothing, gave her a supercilious stare. “I would not mention the Greeks if I were you, Sister.”
Her veins burned with embarrassment and anger. “I? You think I am worthy of your notice? If you must torture a woman, torture one who deserves your wrath. Do you know there is an old woman in this city who used to be a wet nurse? Do you know that now that she can no longer give suck to children, she sucks them, but in a different place? She is harming them. In a way that can never be fixed. I know. I have talked to her victims. If you are looking for witches, why don’t you go and take her?”
They looked at her, dumbstruck. Even the soldier-priests standing against the wall stared in disbelief.
Eustacia fell at Mother Maria’s feet. “Forgive me, Mother. Forgive me.” She wished she could take her own life. She did not care what happened to her. At that moment, she wanted them to take her away and burn her.
Monica rushed to Eustacia and tried to lift her from the ground. Mother Maria stood as still and hard as the columns of the cloister. She would not or could not move. Too small to lift Eustacia, Monica bent by her side. “She is ill,” the Sister Herbalist told the priests of the Inquisition. “Her humors have been out of balance. She has had a cold. Too much intensity. You must not take what she says to heart.”
But de la Gasca was already writing in his book. And once written, his words could not be canceled.
“We will deal with you in a moment, Sister Herbalist,” DaTriesta said. “We have particular questions to ask of you.”
De la Gasca held up his hand. “In the meantime, Sister,” he said softly, “would you bring me some more of your excellent elixir?”
She tore herself away from the sobbing, prostrate Eustacia and took the maté gourd from the table. She bowed and, marshaling all her strength, managed to walk slowly out of their sight. Then she ran. She did not want to miss a word of what transpired. She had to be there to hear any chink in their arguments, any false turn of logic that could be counterargued to save Mother Maria.
When she got to the infirmary, she refilled the gourd with Vitallina’s help and ran back.
She had to push her way through a crowd of sisters eavesdropping from around the corner. “Pray. Pray with all your might,” she whispered to them as she pushed past.
Olga was speaking. Monica placed the maté on the table where de la Gasca was writing furiously. She bowed and took a
place in the shadows.
Olga stood before de la Gasca, her thin, wrinkled face glowing with righteous joy. “—buried in our sacred vaults, when she so obviously took her own life. This Abbess has tolerated illicit love between women. She espouses dangerous notions about the rights of women. And”—Olga paused and looked defiantly into Monica’s stunned eyes—“she has condoned sorcery involving a cat.”
Monica began to shake. She backed against the wall and dug her fingernails into the bricks. Her neck, her jaw, were rigid. “No. Dear Blessed Mother,” she mumbled.
DaTriesta came toward her.
She clasped her hands in front of her and bit her fingers.
“Obviously,” the Commissioner said, “Sor Olga’s accusations have struck a chord with the Sister Herbalist. Come forward, Sister, and speak.”
Monica took a tentative step away from the wall and stopped. “I—I—” She wanted to say she knew nothing, but that was not the truth. So she told them all the facts—the circumstances of Inez’s death, about Hippolyta, about the cat, about the noises in the night. As God was her witness, every answer she gave was the truth, but she was certain that the sum of what de la Gasca wrote in his awful book was not the truth. He did not begin to understand. He did not even seem to want to. Despair fell on her like a pall.
“I say we take the four—the Abbess, the practitioner of perverted sex, that sorceress of an herbalist, and the lying postulant,” DaTriesta declared.
De la Gasca fingered the now empty gourd on the table beside him.
Oh, God, must I burn? Monica did not know whether her thoughts were a prayer or a curse.
“Not the herbalist. Not the postulant,” de la Gasca said. He began to rise from his chair. “By the authority of the Council of the—”
Suddenly, the stone Abbess raised her hand. She drew herself up to her full stature.
De la Gasca continued to rise but not to speak.
For the first time since she took her vows, Maria Santa Hilda allowed all of the pride she was taught to take in her bloodline to show in her face. A long-closed door had flown open in her heart. She was suddenly the daughter her father had always insisted she be. “A moment, please, Your Grace.” She addressed him as the Marqués he would have been had he been born a first son and inherited his father’s title, instead of a second son automatically dedicated to the Church.
His impassive aspect turned slightly wary.
“I believe,” she said, taking a tone of refined dinner table conversation, “that given . . .” She hesitated. Should she plead for time before her trial to put her convent’s affairs in order? Should she appeal to his gallantry, on the grounds of harm to her order?
“Yes?” He faced her squarely across the table.
“I believe, Your Grace, that, like myself, you are a cousin to His Royal Majesty.” Her kinship with the King was closer than his, counted for much more.
One of his eyebrows bounced. “Yes, that is true. Through my mother, as you are through yours.”
“I think, then,” she said, as if she were going to ask to borrow his carriage to take her home from a ball, “that you will want to allow me time to put my affairs here in order.”
DaTriesta fairly leapt forward. His stench came with him. “They must be taken at once. We must remove them and their sinful influence from this place today.”
De la Gasca eyed his local Commissioner but continued to face his distant cousin, the King’s near relation.
The Abbess smiled at him. The humility she had nurtured for twenty years seemed to have evaporated. She knew her own power. It could not save her from the stake, but it could buy her the time to try with logic to save herself.
DaTriesta stepped closer. “As long as she stays here, the debauchery will continue.”
The Abbess did not take her eyes from de la Gasca’s. “I have been accused, but not tried and not found guilty.”
“You will not leave your convent,” de la Gasca said at last. “You will not communicate with anyone outside these walls for any reason.”
“My confessor?”
“We will appoint a suitable priest.”
“This must not be,” DaTriesta sputtered. “We all know she vowed never to appeal to her lineage. She is breaking another vow. You cannot . . .” His voice trailed off. He must have finally grasped the futility of trying to overcome blood ties with argument.
“We grant a short time, a matter of a day or two.” De la Gasca reached down and slammed the book shut.
Sixteen
NO ONE AT the grand entrance parade of Nestares into the Villa Imperial of Potosí noticed that a lock of hair showing from under one of the elaborate Indian headdresses was a shade of light brown never found on an Inca head. Or that the eyes that looked out from the man’s feathered mask were blue.
Such small details were lost in the outpouring of pomp and grandeur. The world-famous spectacle of a royal emissary’s grand entrance into the Silver City mesmerized even its own citizens. The “white Indian” in the condor costume himself wondered at this reception—fit more for a viceroy than for a prosecutor.
A sudden clamor in the street ahead seemed to signal the Visitador’s arrival. “Ahora,” an Indian leader called, and the drums began. The troupe of forty gaudily clad men began to dance. The condor man moved his arms and legs in the complicated pattern he had hastily learned at dawn that day, all the while alert, scanning the crowd that lined the Calle de Santo Domingo. Death was ready to strike. He had a plan. He was ready. Even here. Even now.
The wave of breathless anticipation that stirred the crowd near the Dominican monastery turned out to be one of the many false alarms of the morning. Though Dr. Francisco de Nestares had started out before dawn, he would not arrive for another hour.
In darkness, a ceremonial squadron mounted on fine steeds had met him at his hospice six leagues from the city. Don Fernando de Almanza, the Viceroy’s nephew, led the group of three hundred nobles who represented all the various provinces of Spain and tribes of Peruvians. They had found the Visitador not quite ready. Most of his entourage, including the priests of the Holy Tribunal, had gone ahead the evening before, slipping quietly into the city. In order to enter with proper pomp, he, plagued by headache, breathless in the thin air, and exhausted, had spent one more night—his twenty-fifth—on the road.
Eschewing an effeminate man-carried litter, he had bumped along the rough trails for weeks, hours each day, in an ox-drawn cart or jogged on a cantankerous mule to saddle-sore exhaustion. Blessedly, the tambas along the route were placed close enough together so that he, if not all of his retainers, had passed nearly every night in a decent bed.
This morning, he saw in his looking glass a travel-weary man, his long, regal face drawn and pale, his eyes vacant and smudged beneath with exhaustion, his lips white from the lack of good meat. He called his barber to trim his hair and beard and tint his wan, chilled cheeks with pomegranate juice. He donned court dress and a gold chain bearing the jewels of his office. In the pink light of dawn, he greeted his honor guard and mounted a beautiful black Chilean horse they had brought for him. The magnificent beast was caparisoned with gold-plated silver and bristled with energy even in this killing climate. Nestares patted the horse’s neck and drew in its warmth, soothing in the chill air.
Up at the summit of the conical Cerro Rico—whose shape was unmistakable to him as it would have been to any educated person in the Spanish Empire—huge flags had been unfurled to greet him. They whipped in the harsh wind that looked as if it would tear the banners off their slender poles. The King’s envoy nodded to a cavalier carrying the mace, his symbol of authority, to lead on.
MARIA SANTA HILDA signed and folded her letter to Padre Junipero. She would give it to Beatriz Tovar to deliver. In defiance of the Grand Inquisitor, she had sent him one message already—by the boy who waited in the plazuela. In return, she had received only a cryptic note. It lay on her desk now: “I am in danger from Morada’s men, who think I killed Inez
. I must conceal myself, but I am going to continue on a path that I am sure will lead us to the truth.”
He was in harm’s way because of her. And the note she was about to send him would intensify that danger. She pushed down the guilt that rose in her gullet. She had broken so many promises she had made to herself, and to God. She could not fathom what the implications might be for the future of her heart. Who was she that she could put other people’s lives in danger? She did not know herself anymore.
The events of the past few days had ripped from her soul a raiment that had felt like shining gold. What lay beneath it was dross. Her bones felt as if chunks of flesh had been torn away with her illusions.
Yet as if a veil had also been removed from her eyes, she saw at once the power of her person—a power she had always ascribed to the Lord, to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. If it was God’s power that worked in her, it worked in her in a particular way because she was who she was. No matter what happened, no matter the verdict of the Inquisition, she would never diminish herself again.
Her guilt and her new awareness of herself warred within her, and even still she saw everyone and everything more clearly now. All the unexplained facts she had learned so far must fit together in some way. Drop by drop, the truth trickled into her consciousness.
Inez had said she was threatened by knowledge of a secret. What information so dangerous could a mere girl know? But Inez was not an ordinary girl. She had been her father’s confidante. The Abbess herself and the padre both worried that her father had involved her in his worldly affairs to the detriment of her immortal soul. Inez had told her sister, Gemita, about some documents that could protect a person’s life. Could not letters that would save a life also take a life?
The Alcalde’s silver was in the convent vault. Everyone knew he had been hiding it, they thought out on the Altiplano. But it lay here, under the floorboards of the convent’s vault. Why had he decided to hide it in the first place?
City of Silver Page 21