City of Silver (18 page)

DaTriesta made a curt greeting and rubbed his thin, hairy hands together before the fire in the brazier. “Workers are running every which way, preparing for the arrival of Nestares. The sinners clog the streets, making a show of their great penance when we all know they will be back to gambling and whoring before their Easter soup is cold.”

“Yes, yes. Daring and unscrupulous people are always drawn to a place like this.” The Bishop let his voice show the distaste he felt. DaTriesta would think it was for the sins of his flock and not for the Commissioner himself. “Who would come here but greedy adventurers and their camp followers?”

DaTriesta eyed him askance. “Who indeed?”

The Bishop turned away. What gall! Dealing with this worm
was like having to drink the putrid water on the galleons that crossed the ocean. One did it to stay alive, but it turned the stomach of a sensitive man.

Without invitation, DaTriesta took the wide oak-and-leather chair opposite the Bishop’s. “We have seen many bloody battles in the streets, corruption, revolting sexual crimes. We must put a stop to them, Your Excellency. We must strive for the triumph of true Spanish traits—honor, piety, the supremacy of the spiritual over the material.” DaTriesta tented his hands and nodded as if to show agreement with his own words.

The Bishop nodded, too, although he was sure that stamping out materialism at the world’s richest silver mine was about as possible as banishing the burning sun at noon or the piercing cold at midnight.

“The Abbess has put the condemned girl in the vaults with the other nuns,” DaTriesta said triumphantly. “If this is not blasphemy, I do not know what is.”

A savior of an idea glimmered in the Bishop’s mind. There might be a way to appease DaTriesta, get rid of the overly independent Abbess, and leave the door open to a friendship with the Alcalde. “Blasphemy would only put the Abbess in prison. Perhaps we should come up with a more serious charge.” He rummaged in his mind for the best one. “Possession by the devil, for instance.”

DaTriesta waved his long, skinny hand. “Too difficult to prove. Half the time the proofs are the same as those for sainthood. Besides, we have no evidence.”

“Witchcraft, then. It is very easy to prove.”

DaTriesta’s pale, irritable mouth worked, as if he were tasting wine and not sure if it had turned. “Such a charge might involve a number of the nuns.”

He was warming to the idea. The Bishop nudged him forward. “Exactly. They took in that Negress slave from Brazil. We all know that Rio de Janeiro is crawling with Jews.”

“You are right that blasphemy would mean only prison. Witchcraft could bring her to the auto-da-fé.” The Commissioner’s eyes glowed, as if he looked upon a plate of food he wanted to devour.

“Precisely!”

“With a charge of witchcraft, we could close the convent. Their coca plantation at Cochabamba, their vineyard at Pelaya, the cattle ranches in Tucumán, these would all revert to the Church. That is, to your control.”

The Bishop held his breath. DaTriesta saw even more benefit in it than he did.

The Commissioner’s expression suddenly soured, as if the food and wine of victory had turned indigestible. “No. I am sorry. I can see why you would favor such an approach, but I remind you, I am a university-trained lawyer. I cannot bring false charges against the Abbess.”

What? Was he giving up the meal entirely?

“No,” DaTriesta said with specious sympathy. “I am afraid we must charge her with the sin she has committed. Defiance of Church law by burying a suicide in a sacred place. This blasphemy can also bring her to the stake.”

FOR THE FIRST time in her life, Mother Maria Santa Hilda could not even pray. She sat on the hard oak chair in the corner of her tiny private chapel, her breviary open on her lap, looked up into the faces of the expensive paintings on her walls, and despised herself.

Several of her sisters had come to counsel or console her. She was too fearful or proud to take their words into her heart. Sor Olga had accused her of flouting Church law and insulting the memory of their dead sisters by interring Inez among them. Sor Monica feared for her Abbess, not because of the burial of Inez, but because on Good Friday they should think about no other death but Christ’s. Mother Maria knew Monica was right.
She should give up this idea of investigating Inez’s death. She should let the Bishop and DaTriesta do their worst and submit to whatever judgment the Holy Tribunal would impose on her. The pious thing to do would be to accept their accusations as one of life’s tests to destroy her love of self. If she were striving for virtue as she ought, she would remain passive, as befitted the role of a woman who had given herself as a bride of Christ.

But her old pride welled up in her, and she could not put it down. The Bishop and DaTriesta were so like her father and her brother-in-law—so sure of themselves, so certain of their rights to dictate to all women. Her mother had died because of her father’s selfishness. She would not let herself die or even be disgraced because the Commissioner and the Bishop thought her insolent.

She had always counted herself fortunate to live at a time when passengers regularly crossed the great ocean and to have crossed it herself. Now she felt isolated among the whitewashed stone buildings huddled on this vast, desolate plateau. She had made a life for herself here, but that life was threatened. She could be banished from her beautiful convent. Her carved and painted beams, wainscoting of oak, stone from Panama, wood from Guayaquil, red ebony from the islands of the Main. This tiny chapel, her pride and joy, a retreat where she could come and meditate or play on her small foot-pedal organ the beautiful music of Bocanegra. To study and write. These simple joys. And the complex satisfactions of command of the convent, the hospital, the missions.

In Spain, she might have been able to save herself by appealing to her father. He would entreat the King. But only after he gloated at her having to humble herself before him. She had told him she would never forgive him. And she would not. That was twenty-five years ago, when she was fourteen. The day after her mother’s funeral.

The doctor had told her father another pregnancy would kill
her mother, but he had indulged his appetites—gotten the poor, weak woman with child for the tenth time. Both the woman and baby, like six of its pre de ces sors, had died. Her father was a pig. He deserved no humble petition from his daughter, though she be threatened by the Inquisition. Besides, any letter of appeal to him would take three months to cross the ocean. His reply would take a minimum of six months. By then, the Abbess of Los Milagros would be dead.

She was more and more afraid.

Christ had been afraid, too. In the garden of Gethsemane, He had prayed to be spared. Like Him, she—

What was she thinking? How could she compare herself to the Lord?

She rose and went out. She rang the bell and gathered all the sisters to the common room. She stood before them and watched their somber faces. Perhaps one of them would give a sign of discomfort, betray a guilty conscience. “My daughters,” she said, “we must face the serious fact that one of our number has died mysteriously. Sor Monica has fed the water from Inez’s carafe to the cat, yet the animal lives. If not by poison, how did Inez die? Even if there were an easy answer, we would still have some explaining to do. Inez was barred in her room by means of a plank. How did she come to possess such a thing?”

At that moment, young Beatriz bowed her head. The Abbess watched her for a moment, but the postulant did not look up. Did she know more than her harebrained theories revealed? The Abbess went on. “Sisters, I am reluctant to say this—my heart does not want it to be true. But Inez’s death reveals the certain existence of secrets among us. Secrets that must be uncovered.”

Young Hippolyta, standing near Beatriz, stared straight ahead, her eyes filled with terror and her pudgy hands gripped so tightly together that the skin on her fingers was mottled. What could these young women have learned in a few weeks that the Abbess of the convent did not know?

“We are a community,” Maria Santa Hilda continued. “We must be able to trust one another.” Even as she said this, she knew she had been hiding from herself all these years the knowledge that this convent, like the Mother House in Madrid, like every convent or monastery, like every family’s home, held secrets, animosities, small or large depravities. Even in God’s strongholds, wherever humans entered, sin entered also.

“First of all, I will speak to each of you to try to piece together what led up to this tragic event. Before our Creator, I call on each of you to come forward with the truth.” Young Hippolyta’s gripping hands tightened. “Everyone here has sanctuary under the protection of this convent. No matter what you have to confess, it will never bring anyone here to temporal punishment. I assure you of this. Go to the chapel and pray silently. I will call you to me one by one. I will begin with the maids and then with the sisters who have been here longest.”

She led them across the outer cloister to the chapel and left them in the stalls along the walls. She went to the postulants’ refectory, next to the chapel, taking Clara, the youngest maid, with her.

The plainness of the room befitted the exercise she would perform here. Rough wooden tables, ordinary pottery, white walls, a plank floor unadorned by carpets. These stark surroundings were supposed to teach humility to the girls who entered the order. The only adornment in the room was a gruesome painting from Cuzco of Christ at the pillar, bloody, in agony, enduring the Roman soldier’s lash. Appropriate for the season and for the painful exercise the Abbess was to perform.

She faced young, shy Clara across the table. The girl stood behind the chair the Abbess had placed for those who would come to speak to her. Girls of Clara’s station never sat in the presence of noblewomen or lifted their eyes to meet the glance of their mistresses. How was one to judge their veracity without seeing into their souls? To encourage the girl, the Abbess addressed
her questions in Aymara, the Indian language. The girl squeaked out answers. Had she noticed anything particular about Inez de la Morada on the day she died? No. Had the postulant seemed ill? No. Had Clara herself entered Inez’s room that day to clean? No. Clara knew nothing. Or at least admitted nothing. The Abbess asked the girl to send in the next youngest maid, the garrulous, lazy Luisa, who for reasons the Abbess could not fathom hated her fellow maid Juana and always found excuses to accuse her.

Before the Abbess was able to formulate a proper question in Aymara, Luisa interrupted. “You should be asking questions of Juana, not of me.”

“But Juana was gone from the convent well before Inez’s death,” Maria Santa Hilda reminded Luisa. “She went to help her brother.”

“Yes,” Luisa whined, “and she is still not back. She always gets special privileges. She always has some excuse. She has to be away because her Mestizo nephew has joined a gang of thugs and been hurt in a fight. She has to go to her sister’s wedding. I never get so many privileges. And it is only because I don’t have so many relatives. Is that my fault?” Her voice had reached the shrill pitch of locusts.

“Do you know anything that bears upon Inez’s death?”

“I know that Juana usually cleaned the postulants’ rooms. She could have put the poison in Inez’s water.”

“There was no poison in Inez’s water. If there had been, it would have killed the cat.”

“Inez could have drunk the poison part and left only the pure water.”

Maria Santa Hilda sent the ignorant woman away.

The questioning went on for two hours. The maids undoubtedly knew the most but admitted the least. The nuns were not much more helpful. Sor Olga preached, which strained the Abbess’s nerves and added nothing to her knowledge. Sor
Dolores had heard strange sounds in the wee hours of the night before Inez died but eventually admitted she had heard the same noises many times before. Always overly cautious to speak only the truth, she would not speculate about what the noises were. They could have been rapists or shutters banging in the wind; if Sor Dolores did not see it with her own eyes, she would not say which she thought it was.

The Abbess spoke in turn to all the sisters—except Sor Eustacia, who was in bed with a cold—and then moved on to the postulants. She had chosen the order of questioning to give Beatriz and Hippolyta maximum time to mull over the knowledge that had disturbed them earlier in the common room. The more uncomfortable the girls became, the easier it would be to get them to confess.

Earnest and comical Beatriz Tovar began with her bizarre theories about who might have benefited from killing Inez.

The Abbess interrupted her wild musings. “I think you know something, something that bears on this matter, that you are not telling me.”

Beatriz’s eyes met Maria Santa Hilda’s and then found the gold-leaf frame of the painting on the wall infinitely more interesting.

The Abbess switched her attack. “You have been astute enough to conclude that Inez was murdered.” She leaned forward in an intentionally conspiratorial pose. “I agree with you on this point. My very life depends on my learning the facts to prove our theory.” This playacting was calculated to appeal to the girl’s romantic heart, but with a shudder, the Abbess realized that what she offered as drama was actually true.

“I will do anything to help you find the murderer, Mother Abbess,” Beatriz declared passionately.

“Then tell me what you know.”

The girl looked her full in the face and seemed genuinely puzzled. “I have already told you.”

“Something disturbed you when I spoke to the sisters in the common room.”

Beatriz’s eyes flickered. “I . . . I . . .”

“Tell me, my child,” the Abbess coaxed.

“I should have gone to stay with her. I could have saved her.” She raised her eyes, and they were full of searing remorse. “I thought locking her door would be enough.”

“Was it your idea to lock the door? Did you give her the plank?”

“Juana,” the girl said softly. Then quickly, “But I don’t want to get Juana into trouble. She is so nice to us. She is the only one who makes us feel at home here.”