Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Justice!” shrieked a woman’s voice from the back of the crowd, and a man’s took it up: “We want justice!”

  “Justice shall be had!” Don Felipe shouted back. “As your bishop’s Ordinary, I promise you that the Holy Inquisition—”

  “What, old Fray Potbelly?” shrilled the voice of a second woman, earning a little ragged laughter.

  Manrique de Dios stepped forward and raised his wand of office, shouting: “I tell you again, even now my companions are arresting the foreign Jew and his host!”

  “They are all murderers! All of them!” screamed a voice so hoarse it might have been either man’s or woman’s, and another added, “Will you jail every Jew in Daroca?”

  The alguazil answered, “They will all be held fast in their own quarter until this matter is sifted through.”

  “And then burned!” “Burned or hanged!” “To Hell with them all now at once!” Three shouts, coming almost simultaneously, raising many more shouts and a general loud mutter, like heavy seas on rocky shores.

  “Hear me!” Don Felipe shouted above it. “Hear the voice of your bishop!” As they fell grumblingly silent, he hurried on, “You have lived side by side with these people for many years! Have they ever been known to do such a deed among you? Why now—”

  One of the anonymous voices cut in, “That foreign Jew!”

  “Stop!” The Ordinary raised his hands higher. “We, your priests, have studied their faith more deeply than is permitted to any of you! For we must know in order to combat. A false faith, yes, and riddled with many errors, but—mark this and mark it well!—nowhere does it allow the sacrifice of children! Indeed, from the days of Abraham down to our own, all Jews everywhere have ever and always been most strictly forbidden to harm or kill any human child!”

  This speech, at least, they heard through; but as he paused for breath, someone shouted, “What of God’s own Son?” At the same time, a clod of earth sailed out of the mob and struck Don Felipe on the shoulder.

  Catching his resolution with difficulty, he pointed a slightly trembling finger in the direction from which he thought the clod had come, and shouted, “In striking me, you strike your bishop! In striking any ordained priest, you strike at God Himself!”

  “Does God defend murdering Jews?” came the response from somewhere in the crowd.

  Thank God and our Lady, thought the priest, that all these cries came from several different throats. Had it been always the same voice, the mob would have had its leader, its spearhead. “In striking out at God,” he told them, “at God as represented by the lawful authority He has appointed over you, you make yourselves worse than the boy’s murderer—than the boy’s as yet unknown murderer! You place yourselves on a level with the damned archrebel Satan!”

  That seemed to cow them a little. Or perhaps—he saw by glancing round—it was the appearance of Gamaliel Ben Joseph and his host Nathaniel the Silversmith, in chains and surrounded by four of the alcalde’s soldiers, that caused the breathless silence.

  It lasted for only seconds before the muttering started again, with waving of torches and movements as of gathering missiles.

  Brandishing both wand and sword, the alguazil shouted: “Clear our way!”

  “Justice!” shrilled the woman near the back.

  “Justice?” Don Felipe shouted back. “You shall have justice! Yes, you shall all have justice indeed! You have heard of the new Inquisition your king and his Castilian queen have brought, under the pope’s own authority, into her realms to the south! By your own actions, you shall bring it here as well—down upon your own heads! No more old Fra Guillaume, whom you should shudder to insult, as you should shudder to insult any of God’s anointed servants—but harsh strong men, stern and fierce in their righteous calling, men who will know well how to ferret out each and every one of you who raises hand or voice against your bishop’s authority here tonight, men who will have less mercy on the baptized Christian than on the unconverted Jew—for to whom much is given, from him much more will be expected!”

  That held them back…long enough, at least, for the soldiers to get their prisoners through. Don Felipe could not help looking at Gamito, who never turned his head, never met his glance. The Jew was more prudent than the Christian, in refusing to betray their old friendship by even the slightest sign to the sharp, suspicious eyes of the mob. Nathaniel Ben Solomon, however, turned his frightened face toward the priest once or twice before the group of prisoners and guards rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.

  It required another half hour, and the arrival of more soldiers to guard the Jewish quarter, before the last of the crowd finally dispersed, ending the immediate danger of riot and massacre.

  * * * *

  Don Felipe sought out Fra Guillaume that same night, to find him dozing over books and wine in his study closet. The single candle, although of wax, cast too little light for the younger man’s eyes, let alone old “Fray Potbelly’s,” to have scanned the letters of tiny print swimming over the quarto pages. Don Felipe guessed that the open books were for show…though for whose benefit? That of the angels?

  “We must—You must demand authority in this case, my brother!” the Ordinary began after minimal formalities of greeting.

  “How can I, friend? They are unbaptized Jews, are they not?”

  “And for that very reason, the secular arm will make short work of them, hoping to stave off general riot.”

  “Well?” Fra Guillaume hiccuped softly. “Would that not be better than to see all our poor Jews slain in a body?”

  “But they are innocent, my brother! Is it not acting the part of Annas and Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, this allowing of two men to be slain even to save the multitude?”

  “Young priest, young priest.” Sighing heavily, Fra Guillaume shook his head and swallowed more wine. “Even admitting your argument, we can do nothing. We must leave this thing to the secular arm. I know—most of the city knows, and it is hardly to your credit—that this Gamaliel Ben Joseph is your friend. But he remains unbaptized, for all that he is your friend and you his. Over the unbaptized, neither the Holy Inquisition nor the bishops’ courts can claim any jurisdiction, unless there is some question of proselytism, and there can be no such question here. This is murder, pure and simple. Ritual or not, and even if it is some false ritual, it is theirs alone, as long as they were never baptized. We can do nothing.”

  Dismayed to hear even Fra Guillaume seemingly ready to consider the thought that Jews might have done it, Don Felipe suggested, “We could find two or three New Christians, and arrest them. That would make it apostasy, giving us the right to investigate, and allowing Gamaliel Ben Joseph and Nathaniel Ben Solomon to be released.”

  Again Fra Guillaume shook his head. “Quiet your young blood, my friend. Not only would such a trick be more unjust than allowing your friend and his host to suffer, it would never cause the secular arm to release them. We would simply widen the net, make new victims to join them. And do you accuse me of playing the part of Annas and Caiaphas?”

  “But you could hold them for a year or two, then quietly release them…”

  “Do you truly think that this furor over our new little Holy Child will die away as quickly as that?” The Dominican gave a great belch and rubbed his middle as if it pained him. “Or that old Fray Potbelly is likely to outlive it? Our Lord alone knows who is likely to replace me here! No, friend, leave them to the secular arm and let us not make an evil matter still more evil.”

  “But…”

  “Moreover…I grieve to point this out to you, my friend…but can you truly be sure of the innocence of this Gamaliel Ben Joseph?”

  Finding his breath, Felipe protested, “Never once, brother—never once, in all my boyhood years in Alhama de Karnattah, where we lived side by side, Christian and Jew and Moslem mingled together—never once did the Jews ever do such a deed! If not there, why here?”

  Fra Guillaume rubbed his tonsure. “It may mean nothing save that the
Moors, in their own realm, could keep their Jews under tighter rein. Go home, my friend, and leave it in God’s hands and the alcalde’s. We can do nothing.”

  Don Felipe rose shakily to his feet. “I can appeal to the Justicia!”

  The inquisitor shrugged. “As you will, provided only that you attempt no further demands of poor old Fray Potbelly. You may, perhaps, even find the Justicia willing to hear your friend’s case. I would not, however, do anything more to remind either him or the people that Gamaliel Ben Joseph is your friend. A word to the wise… Now go, Felipe, and leave me in peace. This is, after all, a holy night.”

  * * * *

  Holy night or none, it was far from peaceful for the bishop’s Ordinary. Sporadically he would succeed in calming his soul, reach the jumping-off place into sleep…only to have the prickle of some flea startle him awake with thoughts of how much worse the bed vermin must be where Gamito lay this night. In some secret cell of the alcalde’s, surely; for Rodrigo de la Paz, being a reasonably just magistrate, would not risk two Hebrew prisoners in the common jail, among Christian cutthroats, now when mob feeling ran so high.

  Don Felipe reached the dawn of Easter Monday haggard and heavy with vague guilt for suffering in luxury while others suffered in hunger and filth…his guilt all the heavier in that he would not willingly have traded his luxury for their squalor and discomfort. He made an unaccustomed attempt to read his Divine Office, but laid it down when the words danced meaningless and dry between his eyes and his brain. He heard the day’s first Mass, and it woke no devotion, but rather parched the desert of his soul still drier. He sat to break his fast, and might as well have still eaten the hardest of Lenten fare, for all that he took double the sauce.

  As he rose from table, thinking to seek out the alcalde himself in the time remaining before High Mass, his servant brought him word that someone waited to see him.

  “Who is it, Gubbio?”

  “One Fray Bartomeu, the priest of Santa Maria near the north gate. Franciscan, by his habit. You may remember his face, master. As for his name, I had to ask it myself. He begs to see you in private.”

  Don Felipe sighed. “Cannot it wait?”

  “Master! Do you ask a simple layman to judge on the urgency of priestly matters? I suspect, by the set of his round old shoulders, that he may want you to hear his Confession.”

  “A Franciscan? Confess to a secular?”

  Eying the table, Gubbio made one of his Italian shrugs. “Yes, that is strange to me, also. Why come so far, and then stop short of the bishop himself? Well, I may be mistaken.”

  “I will see him at once,” Don Felipe decided. “In my closet.” Pretending not to observe his servant pocketing a sausage, the young priest passed into the little room, smaller even than Fra Guillaume’s, that served him for study and rare private audiences.

  Fray Bartomeu arrived without loss of time—an elderly monastic, creased of face and comfortable of waistline. God grant, thought Don Felipe, that he has not come seeking to draw the bishop’s office still deeper into their everlasting Franciscan squabbles between Conventuals and Observants! Not at this time… Aloud, he courteously requested his visitor to be seated.

  The Franciscan sat, appeared to ponder for the length of an Ave, and said at last: “I would make my Confession.”

  Thinking that once again Gubbio had guessed shrewdly, Don Felipe asked, “Shall we go into church?”

  Fray Bartomeu shook his head. “Not at this time. Not with the hour of High Mass fast approaching, and the place crowded.”

  “As you will.”

  “Shall I begin?”

  Felipe thought, Yes! old man—begin and end and let us be done with all this! Aloud, he said courteously, “Whenever you are prepared, brother.”

  “I last confessed on this Saturday morning just past, to prepare myself for the holy feast. On Saturday afternoon…” Fray Bartomeu’s voice fell still lower… “Pedro Choved came to make his Confession to me, insisting that we go far apart. Little thinking that so young a lad could have any sin on his soul but what any man would only smile to overhear by accident—in my religious duties, I had not yet heard of his little friend’s disappearance… My lord, young Pedro confessed, weeping, that he had helped his friends Juan and Luis del Quivir to murder their brother Estevan!”

  “Wait.” It is not easy to shock a father confessor—but this… “Why? How could Satan move them to such a deed?”

  “It began innocently enough, by Pedro’s account. They thought only, in youthful piety, to re-enact our Lord’s Crucifixion, and make a shroud, such as they had heard of from pilgrims. They nerved themselves to inflict that grievous pain by meditating on the piety of their intentions. They did not expect Estevan to die. Even when they uncovered him, the first time, and found him cold beneath the cloth, his brothers could not believe it. He would rise, they still insisted, between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, as our Lord rose, and this time he also would imprint his little shroud.”

  “My God!”

  “Pedro himself seemed half convinced, even making his Confession, that the miracle would yet come to pass. He saw their sin, but still expected the miracle.”

  “I…see… What penance did you give him?”

  “I told him there could be no spiritual absolution in such case until he had confessed to the secular arm as well. As far as I have heard, he has not done so. He protested at once to me that it was not his sin alone, that he could not put his friends in danger of law along with himself. I insisted that his absolution was dependent upon his confession of the crime to the alcalde, although he might choose to accuse only himself, as if he had acted alone. Still, he seems to prefer keeping the whole, unpardoned burden of his guilt, rather than bare it to the secular arm.”

  “But…when did they do it?” Don Felipe asked, remembering in bafflement that the family had gone directly from church to bed on Good Friday, and missed their youngest son already upon rising before dawn on Holy Saturday.

  “They did it on Good Friday afternoon, thinking it as holy a ritual as that enacted in every church. My lord, does this not add heresy to murder?”

  “It does,” Don Felipe replied abstractedly. “But…but all these witnesses who have come forward with their tales of seeing Estevan and his brothers in church on Good Friday afternoon?”

  “The children themselves—Luis, Juan, and Pedro—began that tale, saying they had been there together, although apart from their families, and Estevan with them. They meant to avert any doubt or suspicion that must have risen out of their absence, but Pedro himself seemed filled with wonder that others should have seen them, too. I think he believed it to be a sign that in some spiritual sense they were indeed all present in church, and that the miracle would indeed come to pass. Even now that Estevan has been found still dead, his killers may think it a sign that his sainthood lessens their guilt.”

  “It remains mysterious,” said Don Felipe. Somewhere, deep within his head, a strange, brusque voice—a woman’s?—seemed to say: Never trust your eyewitnesses. Tell people what you think they should have seen, and their memories change to order.

  Neither recognizing this voice nor understanding its message, he ignored it and more or less accepted the apparitions as some miracle resembling that of bilocation. Was not the child still a holy saint, even though martyred by fellow Catholic Christians? The Ordinary went on, searching every aspect, “They thought to make a shroud, you say? A holy relic, like that of our Lord?”

  “Their cloth was at first too large for the child. Half of it served to cover him. When they found him dead beneath it half an hour after they had laid him out, they tore away the part that was all bloody from his wounds, and left the clean second half over him, thinking to have their shroud more clearly imprinted when the miracle should come to pass on Holy Saturday night.”

  For some moments the two men sat silent, Don Felipe’s mind groping through a maze of terrible images in search of further questions. At last he told his peniten
t, “I can find nothing in your actions to condemn, my son.”

  “Should I not have given the boy our Lord’s forgiveness without condition?”

  “No. In such a matter, the condition you attached was right and commendable.”

  Several more reassurances, a few peccadillos of the Franciscan’s own to justify penance and absolution, and Fray Bartomeu finally took his departure, leaving his young father confessor to grapple alone with the revelation.

  If only it had come to him in any other way! The initial horror of this thing—four Christian boys playing piously at crucifixion until the chosen one died—had at first banished thoughts of Gamito and Daroca’s other Jews, their danger and what this truth would do in their behalf…if only it could be made public!

  And that it could not. Told in sacramental Confession, it was knowledge imparted by the conscience-ridden soul directly to the Lord Ihesu. Only within another Confession could it be shared, as the Franciscan had shared it. Outside this sacramental conference, both Fray Bartomeu and Don Felipe were strictly forbidden any claim to possess this knowledge in their own persons. The secret belonged to God and Pedro Choved. Young Pedro alone, as the original penitent, had the right to reveal it…the duty to reveal it, if he obeyed God’s voice as transmitted through Fray Bartomeu. And if the boy had gone to another confessor, gained absolution without Fray Bartomeu’s condition? Or if fear for his body outweighed fear for his soul? In any case, if he had not come forward yet, it seemed unlikely that he ever would. That left it to God, Who might reveal it through miracle… And why would God so bestir Himself now, when He had not done so to save or revive little Estevan?

  Lives hung upon this secret. Innocent lives, lives unjustly maligned. Among them, the life of one of Felipe’s earliest friends, his last remaining link with boyhood, one who had survived the horrors of Alhama’s capture and hardships of the journey north from Karnattah, one whose family and whose people looked to him for support and comfort. And Felipe de Alhama de Karnattah must forget as man what he had learned as priest: the knowledge that could save Gamito, might yet prove essential to save all the Jews of Daroca.