City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  DaTriesta came to usher the Abbess and Sor Eustacia before the Tribunal. His long arms gestured dramatically, as if he were preparing for the dance of the Moors and the Christians.

  The two women entered the main church, where three Inquisitors sat on a dais under a canopy of green velvet lined with blue silk, making it seem as if they were under a perpetually sunny sky. A life-size crucifix hung from the shallow dome above them. The table in front of them was covered with the same green velvet trimmed in blue. Candles burned at either end, and there was a large tome covered in green leather tooled with gold. Except for de la Gasca, who sat in the center, the seated men were strangers to Maria Santa Hilda. The thin, pale ascetic on the right reminded her of her father’s confessor—a severe and humorless man. He glanced at her and turned away in disgust, as if she were a plate of mutton that he found greasy and unappetizing. On the left sat a heavy, sweating man with a black stubble of badly shaved beard, jet eyes in his fleshy face. He was probably more interested in his next meal than he was in her guilt or innocence. In the center, the dangerous de la Gasca—perfectly groomed, with his beautiful complexion and an expression completely devoid of emotion. His mind was sharp and precise, like the movements of his thin, immaculate hands as they arranged the pen and inkstand before him. He was a man who saw a straight line between right and wrong, like the perfect seams in the black and white marble squares beneath the Abbess’s feet. He looked at the Abbess, and she saw doom in his eyes.

  THE TRIBUNAL THAT prepared to judge the Abbess would have immediately arrested Sor Monica for witchcraft had they found her where she hid in the Jesuit cemetery under a cape, with a dead cat and some hot pepper in a bag. The beads she fingered, the prayers on her lips, would have only incriminated her more. Her one hope would have been to be considered mad rather than evil. She was not sure herself.

  She had no plan except to get her evidence to the Visitador. She expected the Holy Ghost to guide her to that end.

  As dawn broke, she stood and painfully straightened her stiff limbs, smoothed the maid’s uniform, and invoked inspiration. “Veni Creator Spiritus,” she chanted under her breath as she carried her sack toward the Alcaldía.

  BEATRIZ UNSHEATHED HER cutlass. The men who rushed at them stopped but did not seem intimidated.

  “Boy,” one of them demanded, “have you seen two girls?” He wore several buff waistcoats, and his hair hung limp and dirty around his shoulders. He was missing several teeth.

  Beatriz made her voice deep. “No.” She tried to sound decisive.

  His companions, members of Captain Morada’s guard, grabbed Gemita. “And you, young sir?” one of them growled.

  Gemita began to wail. She put her hand under her cape and took the pistol and fired. The shot hit one of the guardsmen, broke through his armor, jacket, and jerkin. He fell to the ground.

  Gemita shrieked.

  With all her might, Beatriz swung her sword at the scruffy thug in front of her. She hit his arm with the flat of it. He looked stunned. She grabbed Gemita, and as the other guardsmen knelt over their comrade, they ran down the twisting, narrow streets of the silversmiths and silk traders to the broad avenue where great mansions towered, with coats of arms over their doors. Footsteps followed them, and Gemita hollered continually, “I killed him. . . . I killed him.”

  As they reached the Plaza la Merced, one of the men behind them came so close, Beatriz could hear his panting. She glanced back and saw him only a score of paces behind. When he was practically on top of her, she fell to one knee and thrust her sword up at him with all her might. The point went in through the man’s throat and came out the back of his neck. He fell dead on the paving stones.

  At that moment, the Alcalde’s remaining guardsmen entered the Plaza Mayor just as Beatriz and Gemita scrambled down the Calle Real and into the plaza from the other end. A group of men had congregated in front of the Alcaldía. Beatriz went toward them, hoping to find help, and then realized they were members of the Cabildo. She and Gemita barely had time to change directions when the men who pursued them entered the square and began to shout.

  “Run away, Gemita!” Beatriz yelled, and she charged one of the guardsmen, swinging her sword with both hands with fierce blows. The guardsman lunged. The blow struck Beatriz but did not hurt her. Then behind the guardsman, a squadron of Visitador Nestares’s guard came into the square from the Calle Luizitana.

  Immediately, the Cabildo and the Visitador’s guard set upon one another from every direction, making such a din with their weapons that it seemed a hundred men were fighting. Sparks of fire leapt from their swords, the blows they exchanged rang, and voices of the cursing men resounded: “Dog of a Jew!” “Scoundrel!” “Indian!”

  In the midst of the fray, Beatriz struck back at the guardsman again and again until her arms burned with pain. Gemita called to her, but she could not turn. The guardsman was pressing her so that she was stumbling backward, barely able to fend off his sword. A woman came near her and swung a sack and hit the opponent repeatedly. Beatriz closed her eyes and swung her sword against the side of his head. He howled and drew back. The woman—a maid from the convent—pulled Beatriz out of the fray.

  Twenty-four

  THE LIGHT OF the rising sun changed the rocks of the Cerro from brown to purple to lavender to pink.

  When his footman came to his door and woke him just after dawn, Nestares called out his good morning through the locked door and turned to the warm, smooth-skinned Doña Ilena Nieves beside him. After a night of sound sleep, he found himself quite able to do what had been impossible the night before. He did not disappoint her, nor she him. An hour passed before he reluctantly left the scarlet bed where the courtesan lay drowsing behind the draperies. He called his valet, who helped him dress in a black-on-black brocade doublet, a white and well-fitting collar, and a black velvet cape. At his side, he strapped a sword of the Hidalgo. He looked appropriately elegant and severe.

  While Nestares waited for his breakfast, he went to the desk near the window to make notes for the pronouncement he would deliver in a short while at the Alcaldía Municipal. He found a supply of the finest Genoa paper.

  The Visitador sat and wrote. He would order the coins of Potosí separated into three parts—O, E, and R, respectively, for Ovando, Ergueta, and Ramirez, the three most recent officials of the Mint. In tests at Lima, the coins of the first had proved real. He would leave them at their full value. The second he would lower from eight to six, according to their assay. The Ramirez coins had proven only three parts silver to eight parts copper, but here he decided to be merciful. It was more than the bastards deserved, but he would cut the value of these most recent coins only in half. He would throw this bone to stay the dogs’ wrath. He dipped the quill and made a characteristic but unconscious gesture—spiraling the pen in the air as he lowered it to the paper.

  While the Visitador wrote, many Potosinos, anticipating Nestares’s actions, were already packing their mules to flee the city. As in those periods of hysteria over the outbreak of a plague or the pox or fears that the Caricari dam would break again and wash their houses away, many refugees would soon clog the roads in every direction.

  To make matters worse, chaos had broken out in the center of the town. Nestares’s chamberlain entered the study to inform him that scores of men were fighting in the main square. In this city where a fight could turn into a brawl, a brawl into a battle, and a battle into a war, it was thought best that the Visitador not venture to the Alcaldía while the fighting went on.

  While Nestares arranged another, safer venue for his audience of the morning, a servant of Alcalde Francisco Rojas de la Morada appeared at the kitchen door with breakfast on a silver tray. He said it was for the beautiful Cape Verde lady who served the Visitador and was sent by a secret admirer.

  MARIA SANTA HILDA’S gaze took in the marble pillars of the altar, the chairs of Brazil wood, the statues of saints richly carved, but she thought only about her defense. They called this
a proceso, a trial. Presumably, that meant they had not yet decided her fate. Perhaps she could convince her judges of her innocence. But when she thought about it, her glimmer of hope faded quickly. She had already used up whatever leniency Grand Inquisitor de la Gasca would accord on account of their shared nobility. Her early arrest had proved that.

  At this moment, Commissioner DaTriesta was citing the accused Abbess’s opinions on women as proof of her Protestant tendencies. The arrogant and ruthless-looking men behind the table listened with great interest. Everyone, rich or poor, powerful or impotent, was at their mercy. They levied fines and used them to build more jails for the people they accused.

  Yet de la Gasca was not known to be corrupt, as others in his position had been. He was strict, but he was moral. The right argument might win him.

  DaTriesta babbled on, accusing her.

  Finally, de la Gasca invited her to respond to the charges against her. The best appeal, she thought, would be to their power, to their importance. “You have so many more critical things to think about, bringing to justice Protestants from captured corsairs, bigamists, adulterers. I am a mere woman who tries her best to care for the tortured souls who find their way to solace in an insignificant convent.”

  “Come now, Lady Abbess.” The fat priest to de la Gasca’s right spoke for the first time. “Transparent appeals to our vanity will do you no good here.” The flesh of his face trembled as he wagged his head with disapproval.

  Sor Eustacia tugged at the Abbess’s sleeve. “Let me take the blame,” she begged. “I don’t care what happens to me. I only care that you should live.”

  Maria Santa Hilda grasped her sister’s hand. “I will speak the truth,” she said, as much to her accusers as to Eustacia. “We will tell them the truth, and we will rely on God’s mercy.” And she prepared to say to the men who would judge her that which she knew they did not want to hear.

  AN INDIAN SMUGGLING silver he had stolen from the mine of Don Juan de Borea during the night approached the Bridge of Santiago in the pale first light of that cold day, but what he saw in the center of the span stopped him. Three of the Alcalde’s guardsmen waited there, near the head of another Indian thief that rotted on a pike. Pachamama, this was no time to be stopped and searched. Instead of crossing, he descended the bank to where the Indians kept balsa logs, which they used—one under each arm—to cross the swift-flowing water out of sight of the Spanish who guarded the bridge.

  As the Indian reached the water’s edge, he heard gasping. Within seconds, he had pulled from the water the nearly dead body of a priest he knew to be a friend to his people.

  When the Indian tried to question Padre Junipero of the Compañia de Jesus, he found the priest witless, the way people became if they stayed too long in the cold.

  BEATRIZ GRASPED THE hand of the woman in the maid’s uniform and looked into her face. “Sor Monica!” They had paused under the arch at the entrance to the Plaza Ghatu.

  “I have proof that Inez did not kill herself,” the Sister Herbalist said. “I am trying to bring it to the Visitador.”

  Beatriz patted the packet inside her doublet. “We too have proof, that it was the Alcalde himself who had Inez killed.”

  Sor Monica blessed herself. “God have mercy on his soul.”

  Gemita pushed back Beatriz’s cloak. “You are bleeding!”

  Beatriz felt, for the first time, a stinging in her arm just below the short sleeves of the mail shirt that protected her chest and her shoulders. Sor Monica tore open the shirt and with a piece of the sleeve stanched the blood.

  A shout behind them raised the hair on the back of Beatriz’s neck. The Alcalde, his sword unsheathed, rushed at them like a madman. Beatriz parried his first blow. The second knocked her off her feet. Her sword dropped from her hand. She lay struggling for breath when the Alcalde’s foot pinned her. “Run away!” she shouted to the others.

  “Here, you dogs,” Morada called over his shoulder to his men.

  Beatriz caught her breath, pulled the dagger from the sheath at her waist, and stabbed it into Morada’s leg. At the same moment, Sor Monica came near and threw something into the Alcalde’s eyes.

  He howled and drew back.

  A large retinue entered the plaza, headed by the Marquesa’s nephew. Gemita screamed to them for help.

  WHEN THE VISITADOR was finally able to begin his official duties, he was forced by the chaos that had broken out in the streets to hold his audience in the grand salon of the home of General Juan Velarde Treviño.

  Potosí’s noblemen shuffled nervously while they awaited the announcement about their currency. Finally, when the impatient Nestares gave up waiting for the arrival of Alcalde de la Morada, he took the sheets of fine vellum handed him by his secretary and read out a long royal cédula stating the extent of his authority. The end of the document established the totality of his power: “No appeal will be taken from your definitive judgments in these cases. Given at the city of Barcelona on the twentieth day of November in the year of the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ one thousand six hundred and forty-nine. I the King.”

  Interrupting that dramatic moment, the Visitador’s chamberlain suddenly threw open the door of the salon.

  Beatriz Tovar, passing under the lintel carved with a cross in low relief, blessed herself. Gemita and Sor Monica did the same.

  The Marquesa’s nephew, with a gesture of his plumed hat, ushered them toward a tall man in a black-on-black brocade doublet, who eyed them with a penetrating look. Beatriz bent in a low curtsy made awkward by the men’s clothing she wore.

  “Explain that salute, young man,” the Visitador said sternly.

  Beatriz was on the point of removing her cape and revealing her identity when a beautiful maid approached Nestares with a silver tray. Without taking his eyes from Beatriz, the Visitador reached for the gourd of maté on the tray.

  Beatriz charged the maid, unsheathed her sword, and slammed it against the bottom of the tray, sending its contents flying and setting the maid to screaming. In half a second, Nestares’s attendants had grabbed Beatriz and were holding her facedown on the ground. “Poison,” she choked out. “I can prove it.”

  On her insistence, they let her up. “I am Beatriz Tovar,” she said, and heard her own voice so loud and clear in the silent room that it seemed not to come from her own body. It frightened her a little, but she looked right into the astonished face of Nestares and told him her tale. Then Sor Monica joined in and laid out before him the evidence she carried. Even Gemita spoke up to explain where she had found the letters.

  The Visitador listened almost impassively. In the end, he said gravely, “If those who are supposed to enforce the law flout the law, there can be no justice.” He sent the captain of his guard and a large squadron to arrest the Alcalde de la Morada.

  Then he turned to the Marquesa’s nephew. “We must go to the Tribunal immediately. Come, all of you. Follow me. Ladies. Rodrigo.”

  “Rodrigo!” The name escaped Beatriz’s lips.

  The handsome stranger—she knew him now for the one who had rescued her from the slobbering boy the day she left the convent. Could that have been just yesterday?

  He bowed low and smiled into her eyes. “I hope very soon to make your acquaintance properly. Your father has hoped for many months to introduce us. I never imagined a woman as beautiful as you could be as brave.”

  A blush began down beneath Beatriz’s trousers and spread over her belly.

  Twenty-five

  AT THE LOFTY stone Church of Santo Domingo, before the dais of the Holy Tribunal, Maria Santa Hilda stood on aching legs and wondered at the slow, meticulous process that marched her relentlessly toward her doom. The cool, painstaking priests at the table went about their work so carefully, listening politely to DaTriesta’s accusations, nodding while de la Gasca read out, in a bored voice, from his tome the testimony of Beatriz Tovar, Monica, and Sor Olga. Bit by bit, they built their case that gave facts but no truth. Their underlying
method lent an air of calm reason, of well-informed and carefully considered logic, to the violence she knew they wanted to do to her and to Eustacia. They followed rules, observed the laws. They had no cause to doubt what they were doing. No one—not the King, not the Pope, not Almighty God—could fault the way they saw to their duty.

  Thoughts tempted her. To condemn, as Eustacia had, the God these men purported to represent on earth. Her sister accused stood beside her, clenching and unclenching her fists, mumbling incoherently. Anyone watching her might have thought she was praying, but standing so near her, the Abbess caught the odd phrase—“wait for you in hell,” “spawn of Satan”—that revealed Eustacia’s terrified and terrifying thoughts.

  With a loud bang and a shout from the guards at the door, de la Gasca stopped reading and looked up; his face lost its bored expression. The Abbess turned to see a large group striding toward them, led by a well-dressed, rather pointy man she had never seen before. He must have been important because two of the three priests seated at the table rose to their feet. De la Gasca remained seated and looked annoyed. As the intruders gathered near the dais, Mother Maria was astonished to realize that two of the lads in the group were really Beatriz Tovar and Gemita de la Morada, dressed in men’s clothing and accompanied by one of the maids from the convent. But wait! Not a maid. Dear Lord, it was Monica in a maid’s uniform. What madness for her to appear here, before these priests, in that attire.