The Devils of Cardona

by Matthew Carr

  “There was nothing.” Her face showed no sign of emotion as she returned his gaze. “Nothing that you yourself don’t already know.”

  “Very well. Then I must ask for your cooperation in another matter regarding the prisoners you took from Belamar.”

  “Rest assured that my courts will punish them with the severity their crimes warrant, Licenciado.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Mendoza replied, “but the bandits and the montañeses are only pawns. The men who directed them must also face justice. I would like your magistrates to offer amnesty to anyone who can give them any information about these men—and to send any such information to me in Zaragoza.” Mendoza handed her a rolled sheet of paper. “And I want this read out in all the towns and villages of Cardona so that the offer of amnesty can be extended throughout the señorio. Otherwise there will never be peace in Cardona. I would also like an escort of twenty men to take my prisoners from Jaca to Zaragoza in three days’ time.”

  “So you mean to arrest Vallcarca?”

  “Among others.”

  “It will be done as you ask, Licenciado. I ask for just one exception—my father-in-law.”

  “But if Espinosa was acting on behalf of Vallcarca, then he was also criminally responsible.”

  “My father-in-law is a greedy fool, but he is not a murderer. I would like the opportunity to punish him in my own way.”

  “Very well, then. As you wish.”

  “And surely the carpenter Navarro and his apprentice can be released now?”

  “There is nothing I can do for them, my lady. That is a matter for the Inquisition. But the two Moriscos were not innocent. They were ready to join the Redeemer.”

  “But they weren’t guilty of rape,” she protested.

  Mendoza nodded. “Indeed. And I shall inform the Inquisition in Zaragoza of my findings and see if it may be possible to obtain clemency or at least a remission of sentence for them.”

  “Then perhaps we will know peace—if His Majesty can be persuaded that we are not all heretics.”

  The limpid blue eyes stared at him calmly, but Mendoza sensed the anxiety behind them. She really did have the face of an angel, he thought. It was difficult to gaze on such loveliness and believe that it was capable of deception. Yet she had lied again and again, just as Segura and the Moriscos had lied, and if he failed to report what he knew, then he would be complicit in the lies they’d told. In that moment he thought of his Morisco childhood friends, many years ago, when they had played games of Moors and Christians at the Alhambra palace and taken turns on each side. He thought of Galera and Lepanto and the other battles he’d fought in. He thought of the Lutheran nun on the Inquisition pyre and all the other persecutions of men and women who only wanted to worship their own gods in their own way, and it seemed to him that the countess’s lies were necessary, that they were honorable and even benevolent, in comparison with the lies of Vallcarca, Calvo and Villareal.

  “That is a matter for the Church and the Inquisition, my lady,” he said. “My investigation in Belamar is concluded, and I do not propose to advise His Majesty on matters outside my jurisdiction.”

  The countess looked visibly relieved. “Then I have one other favor to ask you.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I intend to appeal directly to His Majesty to change the Cardona statutes so that my daughter, Carolina, can inherit my estates.”

  Mendoza looked at her in surprise. “Forgive my impertinence, my lady. But do you yourself not intend to marry?”

  “I have . . . other plans. My lawyers inform me that the king is sometimes prepared to grant such exceptions and allow the inheritance to be passed down through the female line in special circumstances. Particularly when the petitioners have done him great service. I believe that I have served His Majesty well these last few days.”

  “You have indeed, my lady. Without your intervention we would all have been killed and the War of Cardona would only be just beginning.”

  “Then it would be of great assistance to my appeal if you could mention this in your report to His Majesty.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I thank you. And I and the people of Belamar will always be grateful to you—and also to your companions.”

  • • •

  SHE SMILED BENIGNLY AT GABRIEL, who ushered her downstairs to where Susana was waiting. The four of them accompanied the countess to her carriage in the main square, and Gabriel stood next to Mendoza and bowed as she looked out the window and waved to them. Afterward he drifted over to the medieval wall and looked disconsolately over the terraces that had only recently been strewn with the dead. He was still sitting there when Ventura came and sat beside him.

  “You’re looking very down in the mouth, boy,” he said. “I hear that my cousin told you about Galera.”

  “He did.”

  “And that’s why you’re walking around looking as if a dog just ate your supper?”

  “How should I feel, now that I’m the child of Saracens? Happy?”

  “Why not?” Ventura laughed. “It doesn’t matter what you were. It’s what you are now that counts. And anyway, being the son of Moriscos from Galera is nothing to be ashamed of. They were brave men and women who fought for their homes and families—just as the Moriscos here did.”

  “They were heretics.”

  Ventura pulled a face. “Let me tell you something, boy. When I was a child, I saw my father—your guardian’s uncle—wear a sanbenito because someone said he was a Jew. He had to wear it for three months, every time he went out into the street. He mostly stopped going out at all, but the shame was on his face even when he was in the house. The shame didn’t come from him—others put it there. That damn rag still hangs in the church to remind me that I share in his sin. But you know what? I don’t care if he was a Jew or not a Jew. I don’t care if a man is a converso or a Marrano or a Morisco or a Saracen, and you shouldn’t either. Because the only thing that matters in this life is that men behave with honor. And your guardian is an honorable man. Anyone else would have left you in that house to die. But he brought you up and educated you as if you were his own son. He gave you a life, and tomorrow you will be going back to it.”

  “To spend the rest of my life pretending.”

  “Everybody pretends, boy. This is Spain! Priests pretend to be holy. Women pretend to be virtuous. Jews and Moors pretend to be Christians, and men without a drop of blue blood in their veins buy titles and pretend to be nobles so that they can pay no taxes and have other men bow and scrape to them. So stop feeling sorry for yourself. And I believe there’s someone you need to say good-bye to.”

  He nodded in the direction of the church, and Gabriel looked around just in time to see Juana turn away. He had not talked to her properly since the battle. Even when they worked together in the hospital they hardly spoke, and since then he’d been busy writing letters and proclamations. Now the realization that he would never see her again added to his gloom. He continued to sit by the wall after Ventura had gone, his mind swarming with gallant and heartfelt words, before he finally mustered up the courage to go look for her.

  He found her in the village hall, scrubbing the floor with the women who had helped her, while the stretcher-bearers carried out the straw and mattresses. He immediately offered to help them, and before anyone could say yes or no, he took the bucket from Juana’s hand and went down to the lavadero to fill it. For the next hour, he emptied buckets of bloodied water over the terraces and went to the lavadero to bring replacements. By early evening the cleaning was completed and he had still not said a word to her and she had not tried to speak to him. He no longer had any reason to be there, and he went back to the dispensary in a mournful mood to wait for supper in his room.

  Mendoza’s room was empty, and Gabriel lay on his own bed staring at the ceiling. He had not been there long when
he heard a faint knock on the door. He hadn’t even heard anyone coming up the stairs, and he opened the door to find Juana standing barefoot with an empty bucket in her hand, looking at him accusingly.

  “So, scrivener, you were going to leave me without saying good-bye?”

  “No, I wasn’t, I—”

  Before he could finish, she reached out and pulled him toward her and kissed him on the lips for a long time with her eyes closed. There was no need for gallant words now as he squeezed her to him and rested his hands on her slim hips. All the fear and death of the last few weeks were gone now, and his heart soared as he held the slight, eager body of the first girl he’d ever felt anything for tightly in his arms, and then he heard the sound of his guardian’s stick on the stair, and she pulled away from him and extricated herself.

  “Good-bye, scrivener,” she said. “And don’t forget me.”

  “Never,” he whispered hoarsely as she turned and walked away.

  • • •

  IN THE MORNING Segura and his children came out to watch them leave. Ventura brought Romero out into the main square on the baker’s own horse, and Mendoza was surprised and clearly moved to find that a large crowd of Moriscos had gathered to say good-bye to them.

  “We didn’t need a send-off,” he said gruffly.

  “I didn’t ask them, Don Bernardo,” the mayor replied. “You will always have friends here.”

  “Thank you,” said Mendoza. “And I wish the people of Belamar better times—and a better priest.”

  “We all hope for that.” Segura smiled and held his hand in a tight grip. “And may God go with you, Licenciado Mendoza.”

  He shook Ventura’s and Gabriel’s hands and muttered the same benediction. Beatriz choked back a sob as Ventura doffed his hat in an extravagant bow and mounted his horse. Juana met Gabriel’s eyes only briefly and then hurried away from the square with her hand over her mouth as the crowd broke into a round of spontaneous applause, and the men rode down the street where they had fought for their lives only a few days before.

  The Moriscos came out of their houses now or stood in their windows or on balconies to clap and cheer as they went past. Mendoza stared straight ahead, but Gabriel could tell that he was moved, and his own throat and chest were fit to burst with sadness and pride. The crowd followed them out of the main entrance and cheered as they descended the hill into the valley, where some of the peasants in the fields stopped to wave them on.

  “What will happen to them now?” asked Gabriel when he was finally able to speak.

  “The same thing that happens to all Moriscos,” Mendoza replied. “They will be forgotten for a while, but sooner or later the Inquisition will come here again.”

  At the footbridge they paid the toll keeper for the last time and paused to look back on the valley once again, and then they turned the corner and descended toward the Jaca plain, as the sun rose higher into a sky that looked like polished blue stone. On arriving in Jaca, they took Romero to the cathedral jail. Mendoza told Ventura to wait for the countess’s militia to bring the prisoners and went with Gabriel to take Calvo’s deposition. They found Necker and one of Vargas’s constables standing outside the closed door in almost the same positions they’d left them in.

  “Everything in order, Necker?”

  “Yes, sir. No one has been in or out, as you said, sir. Señora Calvo has asked to be let out. I said no.”

  “And the corregidor?”

  “Not a sign of him, sir. But I have heard them arguing.”

  “I’m sure you have.” He knocked on the door, and a servant answered it almost immediately. “We’re here to speak to your master.” Mendoza stepped inside without waiting for a reply while Gabriel followed close behind with his escritorio dangling from his shoulder. In the same moment, Señora Calvo appeared in the kitchen doorway on the other side of the courtyard, looking bored and petulant.

  “How long must I stay here?” she asked.

  “For as long as I say so, madam. Where is your husband?”

  “In his room. He’s been in there since yesterday morning. Feeling sorry for himself, no doubt. What I don’t understand is why I have to stay here with him.”

  Mendoza felt himself about to say something that he knew he would regret.

  “Which door?” he said tersely.

  “The second one on the left.”

  He went upstairs, tapping his stick angrily on the marble floor, and knocked on Calvo’s door. There was no answer.

  “Calvo?”

  He knocked more loudly, and there was still no response. He pushed on the handle, but the door was locked. “Calvo? Open the door, man!”

  Downstairs in the courtyard, Señora Calvo and the servants were looking up at him, and Necker and the constable had also been attracted by the noise.

  “It’s bolted from the inside,” Señora Calvo said. “The fool has probably drunk himself into a stupor.”

  Mendoza pushed against the door with his shoulder, but it remained solidly shut.

  “I need someone to break it down!” he shouted.

  Vargas’s constable hurried away, and Necker came upstairs and tried without success to break open the door with his good shoulder. Ten minutes later the constable returned carrying a large blacksmith’s hammer.

  “And who’s going to pay for the door if you smash it?” Cornelia Calvo complained.

  Mendoza ignored her. After a few blows of the hammer, the wood around the lock began to splinter, and suddenly the door flew open. The constable stood back, and Mendoza stepped inside the darkened room. Even before he drew back the curtains, he could smell the familiar aroma that he had smelled so often in the last few weeks. Calvo was lying sprawled across the bed in his white shirt and hose, and the sheets around him were soaked with blood from his slashed wrists. The blood had also spread onto the floor, where it formed a pool around the knife that had fallen from his hand. The corregidor’s grizzled face was as white as marble and in death he looked calm and serene, as if some burden he’d been carrying had now been lifted from him. On a table by the window, a sheaf of papers had been piled neatly next to an inkwell and quill.

  Behind him Mendoza heard Cornelia Calvo let out a strange sound that was somewhere between a howl of pain and an exclamation of disgust or frustration as he read the short note addressed to him on top of the pile:

  My dear Bernardo,

  Please forgive me if I call you by your first name out of respect for our friendship. You were right, of course. I should have died at Lepanto. Had I done so, I would have left this world as a hero and a martyr. Didn’t the pope promise absolution for the sins of all those killed in the battle? Yet we survived, and in the years that followed, I discovered things about myself that I did not realize then I was capable of. You know I always admired you, Bernardo. You were the one with the high ideals, with all your beautiful schemes to help the poor and make the land fertile and your quaint belief in justice. But this country is not beautiful or just. And now I must leave this world covered in shame and dishonor, and I cannot stand to let you or anyone else judge me even in the short time I have to remain in it.

  So I have decided to break my word and betray you once again and make my own escape. But before that happens, I have something to give you, as a token of our friendship. You will find here my full confession regarding everything I have done, with all the facts that I have already told you and the details you need to know about this dirty business. I also include Villareal’s letters to me in the hope that they will be of interest to you.

  And now my journey is about to end. I do not ask your forgiveness, but I ask you from time to time to remember me how I once was, rather than the man you knew more recently, though it may be you will prefer not to think of me at all.

  Your friend,

  Pelagio

  Mendoza gazed out the window at the sunlit
street and remembered the young man with a bright smile and thick dark hair, arm wrestling for money in a tavern and smiling grimly while Mendoza and the other students cheered him on and chanted, “Cal-vo, Cal-vo!” He remembered shouted arguments about moral philosophy, student brawls when he and Calvo had staggered home to their lodgings arm in arm and battered and bloodied like soldiers, crawling through the rushes to watch the poor women bathing naked in the Tormes River. He remembered a distant Christmas when he and Calvo and their friends had drunkenly sung carols in the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca and how Calvo had performed a drunken galliard when the city watch ordered him to go home.

  Most of all he remembered the brave young warrior who had fought the Saracens at Lepanto thirteen years earlier, a Spanish warrior whose strong arm had swept Mendoza off the deck and lowered him to safety and given him life. As long as he lived, he would never be able to connect those memories to the fat little man who’d been ready to see him crucified and who now lay on his own bed in his own blood. Only God could know the reasons for that transformation, but he promised himself that he would prove his old friend wrong and see that justice was done.

  Behind him Necker, Gabriel and the constable were standing just inside the room, and as he gathered up the papers, he heard Cornelia Calvo’s footsteps fading away in the corridor.

  “Should we remove the body, sir?” asked the constable.

  “No. Leave him here. And no one is to speak of this until I say so. Boy, give me your escritorio.”

  Gabriel looked at him curiously as he went out into the corridor carrying the escritorio and intercepted Cornelia Calvo on the stairs.