The Sisterhood

by Helen Bryan

  “Look it up,” said Menina.

  “Yes. First people must get permission from the Abbess but if she give they can go to scriptorium. You see there is a locutio in here, just like in the Abbess’s parlor. The church says nuns must keep behind the locutio. So there is bars, like prison to keep nuns and the world apart. Is long time ago. Now we don’t write but sit there and work. Not too many windows broken. And fireplace is good, nice and big because scribe cannot write if too cold. Scribe is good job I think!” Unexpectedly Sor Teresa chuckled.

  “I found a portrait of a girl. She didn’t look like a nun. Why would her portrait be in the convent?”

  “A girl?” Sor Teresa chuckled again and shook her head. “Of course is girl! Is many girls come to Las Golondrinas long time ago. People do not remember now, but once so many girls come, we help them, save their lives sometimes,” she muttered, leading the way down the corridor. “The world was dangerous place for girls if they are alone. But it is a long story. Everything at Las Golondrinas is a long story. And old. Too old. Soon all our stories, about the nuns, about our order, about the girls, are forgotten. Unless is a miracle, no one will know what happened here. You are the last girl, I think. Ha! Maybe you can tell our stories, no?”

  “Maybe you can tell me the old stories and I’ll do my best,” said Menina, hoping to placate Sor Teresa. What sort of stories would those be, she wondered.

  CHAPTER 6

  Madrid, Winter 1504

  The household of the Defensor del Santo Sepulchro family was in mourning. In the center of its great hall stood an elaborate bier draped in black and gold and surrounded by thick beeswax candles. On it lay the body of a woman in her thirties, her waxy face just visible under a shroud of black Brussels lace. A rosary of large black pearls with a diamond-and-gold crucifix was wound in her fingers. The countess had died a week after her stillborn son, and his tiny coffin with a lamb on its lid lay by her side. The bodies had lain in state for nearly three days, surrounded by the family and a host of nuns, friars, and priests who maintained a continuous vigil, praying for the souls of the departed. The next day there would be a procession to the Church of Saint Nicholas de los Servitas for a requiem Mass, followed by internment in the family vault.

  The only daughter of the family, fifteen-year-old Isabella, knelt alone on one side of her mother’s bier, her father, six brothers, and the priest on the other. If her clothes indicated wealth and her posture piety, it was her face that made her interesting—attractive rather than beautiful, intelligent and alert, with regular features and dark-blue eyes beneath heavy brows. In the flickering light shed by the tapers and candles, melancholy shadows devoured Isabella’s black mourning dress, throwing her pale face and stiff white ruff into relief. The pearls dangling from her ears glowed softly in the light, as did her dark-gold hair beneath the mantilla covering her bent head. Once or twice her gaze flicked up and she saw the priest watching her narrowly. She dropped her eyes again to her clasped hands, her heart and mind racing.

  She knew that her father and the priest were locked in a battle of wills over her future. Her family was an ancient one, and her pedigree outweighed even the huge dowry she would bring to a convent or a husband. Isabella was a vessel of limpieza de sangre, a pure Catholic bloodline untainted by intermarriage with Moors or Spanish Jews throughout the hundreds of years Muslims had ruled Spain. Since the Reconquista, Cristianos Viejos, Old Christians like the count’s family, had risen to even greater wealth and prominence. Their name meant “Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.” For centuries the family had secretly channeled money under the noses of their Moorish rulers to reclaim Jerusalem from the infidels. When their Catholic Majesties Isabella and Ferdinand swore to return the country to God and the Catholic Church, their plan to purge the country of unbelievers—Moors, Jews, and heretics—was a cause already dear to the count, whose pride in his bloodline was equaled only by his devotion to the church.

  Three of his sons, none very robust, were destined for the church and already at the seminary at Valladolid. The other three were betrothed to the daughters of other Old Christian families. Only Isabella’s future still hung in the balance. She was lame from birth, and the priest had repeatedly urged the count to install her in one of the elite convents in Madrid, reminding him of the advantages to the family of having a daughter placed among nuns who had royal blood and close connections to the court.

  This was true, and yet…the count suspected the priest’s rise in the church rested on his ability to steer human prizes of wealth and breeding into its arms. But the matter of the bloodline had made the count hesitate. The family’s ancient noble title could be inherited by female descendants. Should his sons die without issue, the title would pass to Isabella and through her to her children.

  Shortly before being brought to bed with her last child, the countess had urged that Isabella’s marriage would be an extra safeguard for the family name, and the count had begun negotiating for her betrothal with several families. Now as he knelt beside his wife’s bier he vowed to conclude negotiations quickly. As soon as his choice was made, the marriage would take place without waiting for the end of the mourning period. The priest’s machinations were beginning to tire him.

  Isabella swayed on her knees, feeling faint. The bodies had lain in state for two days and she was sure she could detect a whiff of decomposition. Her sense of smell was keen these days and her stomach heaved. She quickly put her handkerchief to her mouth to stifle a retch and fumbled for the pomander attached by a gold chain to her waist. Holding it to her nose, she breathed in the scent of dried orange peel, cloves, and anise. But now that she had noticed it, the smell of death seemed to enfold her in its cloying embrace. She had to get away or she would be sick in front of everyone…She began to lever herself up from the velvet cushion on which she had been kneeling. Allowances were made for her disability and no one would censure her for withdrawing.

  She shook her head at the servant who came forward to help her. She crossed herself again and turned toward the door, holding herself upright with an effort, demonstrating that she could manage without help, that she was stronger than she appeared. She knew that Alejandro was watching. From his place among the friars chanting in the shadows, she felt his eyes following her with love and concern though the hood was pulled low on his forehead. By this time tomorrow they would be gone. Together.

  That the daughter of the proud Defensor del Santo Sepulchro family would link her fate to that of a tutor in the household was something that no one would have thought possible. That was why the two young people were able to fall passionately in love beneath the eyes of everyone.

  With the countess too ill with her pregnancies to attend to her daughter’s education, from an early age Isabella was sent to the schoolroom with her brothers. Their tutors were elderly scholars from a nearby monastery who tut-tutted at the presence of a little girl. What need had females for education? But the count was powerful enough to have his way in most things, and Isabella, hungry for attention and praise, proved the most conscientious student of the siblings and gradually won over the tutors by her studious application. They even forgot she was a girl.

  Then, just before Isabella’s fourteenth birthday, a new tutor joined the family.

  Fr. Alejandro Abenzucar was a seminary student at Valladolid, a young man of twenty-four who had demonstrated a brilliant grasp of mathematics, and Greek and Latin philosophy. His reputation as a promising Catholic scholar had reached the ears of the count, who insisted on the best for his sons and prevailed upon the young man’s superiors to postpone his final vows so that he might spend a year or two teaching the count’s sons. The seminary’s superiors felt nothing would be gained by revealing that the Abenzucar clan had been a Moorish family of influence and wealth with a large valley fiefdom in Andalusia, who had converted—most of them—to Christianity after the Reconquista, and that their youngest son had entered the church as proof their conversion was genuine.

  Fr. Al
ejandro’s superiors failed to take into account that the converso scholar was a handsome young man blessed with the rare combination of good looks and a kind heart, nor had they any notion how much he detested the idea of the priesthood and inwardly rebelled at his family’s humiliating forced conversion. He was also desperately lonely. Few of the other seminary students went out of their ways to befriend a converso, prodigy or not.

  As for Isabella, no one paused to reflect that she was no longer a child, but of marriageable age and, save for her limp, a lovely girl starved of affection a daughter had never merited in a family of boys. And no one asked themselves what use Fr. Alejandro’s mathematics and logic would be to a fourteen-year-old girl. Isabella’s presence in the schoolroom had long been taken for granted, and like any well-born girl, she was always chaperoned. Her duenna, a stern elderly woman, sat by Isabella’s side and sewed or told her beads during lessons. Only Isabella knew the old woman had grown deaf as a post and often fell asleep bolt upright in her chair or on her knees. Isabella helped conceal her frailties. She nudged the old woman awake when it was necessary for her to appear alert, and in the cold months slipped a shawl over her shoulders when she slept.

  Alejandro was disconcerted to find a girl in the schoolroom, but was quickly reconciled to her presence by the same qualities that had appealed to her other tutors—her quickness of mind and her careful and considered answers to the questions he posed, her attention, and thoughtful application of what she learned. Gradually he began to notice Isabella’s small graces—her neat ways, her beautifully legible hand, her modest demeanor, and the kind attentions to the old lady by her side. Above all, he noticed the expression on her face when he addressed her, the blush of pleasure when he praised some piece of work, and the way she lowered her eyes bashfully, long lashes sweeping her cheeks.

  He realized her presence illuminated the schoolroom each morning. He did not care that she had a limp. In fact, he had scarcely noticed it. Having no contact with young women in the seminary, he dreamed of girls constantly. Then he began to dream only of Isabella and her beautiful eyes.

  To a shy girl who knew no men outside her family, Alejandro was as dazzling as Apollo in a fiery chariot, and Isabella was disconcerted when he spoke to her. Previously, she had never looked in the mirror longer than necessary to see that her hair was tidy, but she began to study her reflection more closely to see how she appeared to him. She began to dress carefully, deciding whether this or that color was becoming, completing her toilette with a few jewels, scenting her hair. Then she suffered agonies of nerves in his presence, in case he noticed her efforts.

  Lodged in the tutor’s room next to the family chapel, Alejandro spent less and less time there, crossing back and forth across the courtyard to and from the count’s library, where he prepared his lessons. The courtyard was where Isabella liked to sit at her needlework each afternoon. As the duenna mumbled over her beads, they exchanged simple everyday pleasantries. Alejandro looked into Isabella’s eyes, tried to think of something interesting to say, and stuttered, “The weather is very fine today,” or “How loud the church bells sound.” To the despair of the gardener, he distractedly plucked the best blossoms from the carefully cultivated plants in the courtyard to present to Isabella. “The color of your embroidery thread,” he would say as his hand brushed hers.

  Isabella would nod, accepting it, and give him a smile. It was sweet to be given a flower. Alejandro finally asked if he might read to her while she sewed—a devotional work of course. His choice was The Divine Comedy. “It is about love! An allegory of holy love,” he exclaimed enthusiastically.

  Love! Isabella blushed, staring hard at her sewing as if she had never seen anything so interesting in her life as blue silk thread. “As you think best,” she murmured. “I have not read it. My Italian is insufficient.”

  “Ah, exactly! Then you will benefit doubly—in addition to its instructive discourse, it will improve your Italian.” But its instructive discourse was of love and adoration. And discussing these interesting topics did indeed give them a chance to practice their Italian, which the duenna did not speak. But had her hearing been as sharp as it once was, she would have had no need of Italian to notice the passion with which they compared courtly love, which looked for nothing beyond adoration of its object, and profane earthly love, which looked for a good deal more. In fact, so much was said on the topic of love and its ecstasy with Alejandro close by her side that Isabella found it difficult to confine her mind to love’s subliminal nature. Alejandro’s presence by her side made the air sweet and bright, and the sound of his voice threw her into a turmoil of emotion, made her heart pound and her trembling fingers snare her needlework into a hopeless tangle.

  “La gloriosa donna della mia mente”—“the glorious lady of my mind”—as Dante had called Beatrice, rang in Isabella’s ears as she remembered how intently he had looked into her eyes when he said it. At night in her bed she whispered it over and over, at the same time reminding herself severely that Beatrice was pure and unattainable, and the phrase had to be understood chastely.

  Then one afternoon in the middle of a highly charged discussion of the intensity of spiritual passion, the duenna went off to answer one of her frequent calls of nature and Alejandro exclaimed, “I must tell you or die!” He knelt at her feet and clutched her hands. “You are my angel and truly, the flower, the glorious lady of my heart. I will place my life, my soul, in your power and no longer conceal the truth from you. I am no Christian with celibacy in his heart but a Moor with blood in his veins. And I am not Dante, to live forever without Beatrice. I would prefer death to parting from you.”

  “An infidel!” Isabella exclaimed in horror. Alejandro rushed on bravely. A Muslim’s love for a Christian was not dishonorable. Until the Reconquista, the Abenzucar family had intermarried with Christian and Jewish neighbors, and had enjoyed a long friendship with a Christian convent—the Convent of the Swallows, Las Golondrinas, that stood above the valley where the Abenzucars had their estates. The Abenzucar women would travel up the mountain to visit the nuns with gifts of dried fruit, spices, and almonds for the Christian feast days, while the nuns offered prayers when the Abenzucars suffered illness or the women gave birth, and shared the medicines they made with great skill.

  Though she could not imagine such cordial relations between nuns and the infidels, Isabella’s scandalized expression wavered.

  “If you do not believe me, in your own father’s library is a book that proves the truth of what I say. It is the recollections of a venerable Christian hermit, a true Old Christian like your family, who lived in the mountains hundreds of years ago and who praised the nuns of the Convent of the Swallows for their learning and peaceable relations with their neighbors.”

  “But you converted, and that changes everything,” Isabella said sadly.

  Alejandro’s expression altered as he explained he had done so unwillingly. After the Reconquista, formerly powerful Muslim families like the Abenzucars were offered a stark choice—baptism, or exile and confiscation of their lands and wealth. But his elderly father had decreed some must go and some must stay. Several families of younger cousins fled to Portugal, but Alejandro’s parents, brothers, sisters, and their families had to become Christians and stay to preserve their estate. Baptism was only a formality. The Abenzucars would remain Muslims in secret and hope for better times.

  A mass baptism of the family and all their servants and peasants had been held at his parents’ estate. A distressing matter of necessity, his father had thought, but one to which they need not give the slightest credence. How could they seriously embrace the blasphemous practice of worshipping three gods instead of Allah, the one God?

  But the Abenzucars had not anticipated the way in which the church authorities would seal their conversion. Alejandro’s eyes filled with tears and his voice faltered. After the ceremony, a large group of people from the valley, their friends and neighbors, men, women, children, and old people were her
ded together to a vast pile of wood and brush. Their crime was read out. They were apostates, baptized but practicing as Muslims in secret. The Abenzucars had been forced to watch the auto-da-fé that followed as the accused heretics were burned alive before them. Their screams and cries and pleas to Alejandro’s powerless father were a warning of what awaited false Christians. And to remind them that those enemies of the church would pay the penalty as enemies of Spain. And so, Alejandro had entered the church to allay suspicion of the Abenzucars’ conversion.

  What was Isabella to do now? Alejandro should be the mortal enemy of any Christian Spaniard. But her heart overrode what her religion had drummed into her, and above all, Alejandro’s story inspired pity for him and the poor victims.

  “God is great! I love you. Betray me if you must. My life is yours to do what you will,” Alejandro took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. Isabella thought she would faint.

  The duenna returned muttering about her bowels and Alejando let go of Isabella’s hand. “Your secret is safe. I will never betray you,” Isabella whispered behind the duenna’s back, longing for the touch of Alejandro’s lips again.

  In the schoolroom they hardly dared look at one another now, each felt so keenly the presence of the other. Alejandro found it more and more necessary to lean over Isabella’s shoulder to point out a passage in a book. Isabella would murmur, “Is this the one? Or this?” pointing to she-hardly-knew-where on the page to keep him close as long as possible.

  Then one day when they were alone in the schoolroom save for the duenna snoring in the corner, Alejandro kissed her bent neck. She shivered, her lips parting, and looked up. Then before the two young people knew it, their lips met. Isabella broke away first, whispering they had sinned. Alejandro whispered that he did not care and kissed her again, so firmly that this time Isabella, transported, did not protest. The duenna stirred and they leaped apart.