No Calé of either sex or any age came to the Inquisition with charges of any kind against anyone else and, after preaching his sermon that Sunday, between the statues of Saint James and Our Lady, the inquisitor made it his habit to pass his mornings, from Mass until dinner, waiting in the church. What he had told the villagers about the Seal of Confession, how it bound only the father confessor and any third party who might chance to overhear, while the penitent himself or herself always remained free to speak of it to anyone else at any time, bore fruit: Isabel Garate brought him her accusation immediately the next day, and by midweek three more village women added theirs.
Pablo Savarres, the husband of Isabel Garate, brought another charge: “This priest has his own woman. Yet he wants to make free with ours, as well.”
“His own woman?” asked Fray Giuliano.
“His so-called housekeeper. Beatrix de Córdoba.”
“Beware, man,” Don Felipe told him sternly, “of bringing us mere idle slander. The Holy Office knows how to punish sins against the Eighth Commandment.”
“The Eighth Commandment, your Reverence?” the informant asked, humbly enough. “Which is that?”
“Has your priest not taught them to you?” Fray Giuliano asked in turn, his voice betraying some shock. Already, as priest, Fransciscan, and fiscal, he had encountered too many parish priests barely able to mumble through their Latin with bad pronunciation and worse comprehension, who could hardly have named the Seven Deadly Sins, still less the Ten Commandments, without much hesitation and long pauses; but Don Felipe had told him of choosing his vicar, so many years ago, as much for Don Fadrique’s apparent learning as for his apparent piety.
Eyes turned down, Isabel Garate’s husband muttered, “Yes, he teaches us…when we are little children…and I remember well enough what they are, but I forget their numbers.”
The inquisitor breathed a sigh of qualified relief. “The Eighth Commandment, Pablo, is that one which forbids us to bear false witness against our neighbor. By ‘neighbor,’ as our Lord Himself taught us, we are to understand any and all of our fellow human beings.”
“False witness, your Reverence? Beatrix de Córdoba has borne him three sons and a daughter, and is lying abed big with yet another of his getting. All Agapida knows this! One of the brats died, and Don Gaspar has taken the other three into the castle while you are here.”
Don Felipe nodded slowly. “Have you ever heard it said that your priest married this woman openly and publicly?”
The informant looked as though, if not for whose presence he was in, he would have spat. “Beatrix de Córdoba is his whore, not his wife.”
“So. Well, then, Pablo Savarres, I must tell you, this matter of your priest keeping a concubine is not in itself heretical, and therefore does not fall within the business of the Holy Inquisition, as does the matter of abusing the sacrament of Penance. Nevertheless—not as inquisitor—but as holder of the benefice of Nuestra Señora del Pilar, and thus the immediate superior to whom Don Fadrique must make account, I thank you for bringing this to my attention. As inquisitor, I ask if you can tell me in what manner Don Fadrique gave you cause to complain, regarding your wife?”
“The holy devil tried to rape her when she went to him to confess her sins!”
“And how do you know this, Pablo Savarres?”
“How do I know it, your Reverence? Am I not her husband? Did she not run home to me with tears running down her face, and tell me all?”
Don Felipe thanked him again and dismissed him with the admonition that he might be called upon to repeat his testimony at another time.
When they were alone once more, Fray Giuliano observed, “His testimony agrees with what the Calé woman told us concerning the manner in which Don Fadrique’s attack upon Isabel Garate became known.”
“My thought exactly,” Don Felipe agreed, twitching not so much as one corner of his mouth at the bound his heart took upon the fiscal’s reference to the niece of Don Sagesse Labaa. “It may turn out that my inquisitorial duties will suffice for removing this man from my parish, with no need of my personal jurisdiction over him.”
* * * *
Whether Don Gaspar had indeed planned all along to leave the Holy Office a few days in idleness before feeding it with whatever local suspicions could be garnered, or whether Don Fadrique observed those who entered his church as the Inquisition sat there, and applied to the young lord in some attempt to point inquisitorial attention elsewhere, that Tuesday and Wednesday saw a small press of other informants, from castle and village both, armed with tales and suspicions, mostly of the Calé.
Many charges concerned such matters as presumably stolen chickens and suspected illicit love affairs between laypeople. Dolores Banet and Beatrix del Sol had torn each other’s hair in a quarrel over one of the castle squires; Manuel Cardoza had knocked Vicenzo Oblaño unconscious for borrowing his donkey halter without permission, and so on and so forth. All such complaints were naturally discarded at once. Don Felipe directed his fiscal to file all the rest, the ones which did touch upon matters of the Faith, very scrupulously, knowing that, unless brought forth again immediately, they would safely vanish amongst the mess of other, similar documents.
Some few he glanced into immediately. Where two or more informants agreed, especially if they seemed unconnected with each other—in so far as any member of so small a community could be called independent of any other member—he and Fray Giuliano read their reports through a second and third time. In half a dozen cases, they sent their familiars to conduct the accused parties to Don Felipe’s afternoon tribunal in the Calé quarter. Each time, the accused guessed at once, either exactly or closely enough, why he or she had been summoned. Several identified and explained the incident—washing a soiled shirt on Saturday, forgetfully eating bacon on Friday, and so on; the others guessed and named their accusers as personal enemies. Only one of this class of cases involved a Calé.
Fray Giuliano was young and earnest enough still to worry a little over Don Felipe’s custom of hearing such cases on the spot and closing them without further ado. The putative irregularity seemed to bother him less in this place, however, than it had in other villages, where there was no such young lord as Don Gaspar offering the castle prisons and panting to put the ancient torture chamber back into use. Don Felipe needed to remind his fiscal only once that in no way could their own secret cells of Ainsa house so many accused persons for all the months that full investigations would have required.
“I think,” Fray Giuliano replied on that occasion, “that we may need one of our cells, at least. May we not?”
“I think it very likely,” the inquisitor agreed.
As for little Fray Pablo, he scrivened away as usual, making no comments and—Don Felipe suspected—thinking as few thoughts as possible upon the matters he set down with so much obedient diligence between his stifled yawns.
* * * *
And yet, had it been only the niece of the Calé count, had all those other women and at least one young boy not also been involved, had it been only Doña Pilar who had tempted Don Fadrique, all innocently and unintentionally, with the swell of her bosom beneath the bright if much-mended bodice and shawl, the curve of her neck above its silver necklace, golden earrings dangling against the faint hollows of her brown cheeks, her dark, dark eyes and that lock of black hair with one silver strand that escaped the bounds of her colorful coif from time to time…had it been this woman alone, Don Felipe might have understood, even compassionated—though never condoned—his vicar’s weakness.
Catching this thought in his brain, the inquisitor whipped it away with images of Christ’s Passion and mementes mori. Yet it returned. Mementes mori would not long remain in the mind of a man still so newly released from the secret prison (whether it were living tomb or second womb), and thoughts of the Resurrection, dangerous to his present state because of the throbbing they did nothing to quiet, sprang more readily into the perpetual Easter of his soul than more
wholesome meditations on the sufferings of our Lord.
At length he remembered the lady of his youthful devotion, his lost Morayma, and attempted to smother the new feelings beneath thoughts of her; but the old memories were too old, too long and successfully buried, too far on the other side of that great barrier between his youth and his maturity which more than a decade of total, solitary imprisonment had left scored across his life. The ancient devotion, the chivalric loyalty that had so long served him as armor against the fleshly weaknesses which beset priests, like other mortals, on all sides, and to which he had seen so many clerics so gleefully succumb, he finally felt trembling beneath the unconscious assault of a woman—no longer entirely young—but who had not yet been born at the time he was forced apart from his boyhood love.
Other women had tempted him throughout a life already long; he would not have been human had they not. Rarely had the temptation lasted beyond the time of actually being in the woman’s presence. Yet other women had danced through his thoughts, waking as well as sleeping, during his imprisonment. Frequently faceless, they had been no more to him than pimples popping up from the festering restlessness of the secret cell. But never, never since boyhood, could he recall that any other woman had haunted his thoughts so persistently and perpetually; and now, beside this woman of the Calé, even Morayma faded to the dim memory of a childish ideal.
Prudence dictated that he should avoid all further contact with Doña Pilar, but to shun the niece of his host would have betrayed the duties of a guest; and for this excuse to continue glimpsing her, exchanging scraps of polite conversation with her, accepting food and drink served by her hand, he felt profound gratitude.
And Doña Pilar trusted him. He had appealed to her to help him right the wrong, and she had complied by arming him with the first formal accusation against Don Fadrique Osorio. Fighting his own temptation in the only way remaining, by plunging himself into his holy work, he took his fiscal, scrivener, the two Juans and, for sniffing, Gubbio—and paid Don Fadrique’s house a visit on Thursday morning, while the priest was in his church saying Mass.
No servant opening to their knock, the familiars had to force open the door. The house was not deserted, however: scarcely had the party entered, when a woman’s screams assailed their ears.
The screams came from above. Fray Giuliano bounded up the stairs first, his young legs leading Don Felipe’s by no more than two or three steps, the familiars following. In the upper bedroom, they found the woman abed indeed—in the act of giving birth, with one midwife to attend her.
Don Felipe retained sufficient presence of mind to ask, “Beatrix de Córdoba?”
Both women stared at him. In the eyes of the one giving birth, he beheld such horror as he could not even remember feeling in that most awful moment on the way between Santiago de Compostela and Daroca when he had heard the dread words, “A matter of Faith,” directed against himself.
The midwife was a woman whose skin suggested some mixture of African and Moor, as her dark eyes suggested strong anger mixing with her natural fear. “Yes, Beatrix de Córdoba is her name!” cried this woman. “And mine is Teresa La Negra, and you are the Holy Inquisition, and—with your pardon—the business the good God has set on her cannot wait, even for you!”
“It is for you to pardon us, Teresa La Negra,” Don Felipe replied, courteous as knight addressing noble lady. “Neither you nor Beatrix de Córdoba is under any present suspicion of heresy. We will leave this part of the house alone for now.”
He herded his party back to the ground floor. At the foot of the stairs, the fiscal observed softly, “The explanation could still be innocent.”
“True,” the inquisitor agreed. “He could have been providing the unfortunate woman shelter for herself and her offspring by unknown fathers, and Pablo Savarres could have brought us mere slander.”
“But the sworn testimony of ten women and one boy would seem to render the most obvious explanation also the likeliest.”
“Even were it otherwise, is it not part of a pastor’s duty to avoid, so far as possible, any appearance of slander?”
Meanwhile, the little scrivener had found a doll and Juan de Torla a toy horse, seemingly left behind when the older children were hidden among those belonging to the castle. Even more damning, Gubbio looked twice around Osorio’s study, went straight to the oaken press, opened it, lifted out two books and three folded garments to uncover, at the bottom, cards, dice, and several bags of jingling money.
“All this,” Fray Giuliano exclaimed sadly, “and he has made his house into a gambling den as well!”
“And with small children beneath his roof,” Don Felipe added.
“I marvel,” Gubbio put in, “that he could find players willing to come to him, trying as he seems to have been to cuckold every man in his flock.”
Of course the Italian spoke in jest. Gamblers always came forth, ready to play at every opportunity. Don Fadrique Osorio was far from the first parish priest they had found also serving as master of a gaming house—deplorable, but hardly heretical.
But they had all they needed without the cards and dice. Bidding Gubbio bury them again in the chest, Don Felipe settled down with his men to wait.
In a few moments, Don Fadrique returned from saying Mass. He stepped into his house, saw the Inquisition, and crumpled even before Don Felipe rose to utter the words of arrest.
Upstairs, the newborn infant began to cry. Its wails did not appear to hearten Don Fadrique in any way.
* * * *
As it turned out, Don Fadrique Osorio was the only prisoner the Holy Office claimed in Agapida. Don Felipe recognized his priesthood, however dishonored, by appointing the hidalgo Don Carlos Cascajo as one of the two guards to escort him back to Ainsa. As Don Fadrique’s other guard the inquisitor named Micer Garcias; these two familiars got on well together.
He could easily have had one or two more nobly-born familiars from the castle. Don Gaspar showed himself ready to turn the rack with his own hands on some unfortunate if by so doing he could win appointment as familiar to the Holy Office—but then, Don Felipe suspected that Don Gaspar was eager to set his hand to any such work even without additional incentive. The inquisitor ignored the castle, however, and selected replacements for Cascajo and Garcias from among the villagers, naming Pablo Savarres and a strong young man called Ernán del Río. He would have liked to make familiars of some Calé men, but Don Sagesse smilingly declined the offer on behalf of himself and all his people. “I fear,” he explained to his guest in private, “that already we have made no friends with his young lordship, by housing you here when you could have gone into his castle.”
“Friend, that choice was my own.”
“And deeply have you honored us, my lord.”
“Consider this: being named familiars would benefit you. The Holy Inquisition protects its own.”
Still Don Sagesse shook his silvering head. “If you will name Don Gaspar your familiar, then we also will take pride in accepting this great gift. But, I beg you, do not give him further cause to envy us.”
“It is your choice, my friend. In any case, you will have time to reconsider. I will be back.”
Filling Don Fadrique’s place cost the inquisitor more pains than replacing the familiars. Again, the castle had two chaplains available, but the old lord’s confessor seemed as feeble as Don Alfons himself, and Don Felipe would as willingly have left his former vicar alone as trusted the young lord’s confessor in his place.
At last he turned to his trusted fiscal. “Will you suspend your career in the Holy Office, at least for now, to serve God, myself as your immediate superior, and this unfortunate flock by acting as their new shepherd?”
Fray Giuliano bowed his head. “Obedience before all. But which does your Excellence need more, a good vicar or a good fiscal?”
“Sorely as I shall miss your services as fiscal, at the moment I and my benefice have greater need of a vicar whom I can trust. A new fiscal I can fi
nd at the nearest monastery.”
“That would be Nuestra Señora de las Nieves,” Fray Giuliano pointed out, “and they are Dominicans.”
“Curb thy Franciscan jealousies, brother. The Dominicans, too, have proved themselves capable of serving the Holy Office with some small competence. Remember: my fiscal I will have constantly under my eye, but my vicar I must be able to trust at a distance.”
Fray Giuliano’s eyes suggested that his superior, being a secular priest, could never understand the vital importance of distinguishing among the various Orders. But he quickly blinked and nodded. “Write the appointment, Excellence, for I may need it to prove my authority in Don Gaspar’s face, and I shall place it upon my head and wear it in my heart for however long you see fit.”
“Take heart, good brother! I intend to pay Agapida another visit within the year—if not as inquisitor, then as holder of the benefice.”
And as ardent admirer, his heart added, of one dark-eyed lady of the Calé. The moment his head recognized this thought, it tried to smother it, but neither very successfully nor very enthusiastically.
“Remember, also,” he added, half sportively, half to cover the silent clamor of his own heart, “that to eat meat on a day of abstinence is no evidence of judaizing if the meat is pork.”
“Have no fear, your Excellence. I shall not attempt to serve two masters at the same time. I shall not be pastor and inquisitor both!”
Chapter 22
The Dream of the Ill-Clad Ladies
He stood atop the high bell-tower of the Alcazaba, the very nose of the Alhambra, looking down over a city which was and was not the great Karnattah he had twice visited as a boy. He understood the reason for its strangeness when he saw Rosemary standing beside him.
Inquisitor Dreams Page 23