City of Silver (25 page)

“I have not come to see the Alcalde,” Padre Junipero said. “I want to see his daughter Gemita.” The soldier rightly raised his eyebrow. It was highly irregular to visit the girl after dark, but with less than two days left before the Grand Inquisitor arrived, the priest had no choice. “Please ask her mother if it is permitted.”

The burly guard received the priest’s request with a sniff, opened the door, and escorted the padre into a sitting room that overlooked the mountain. The Cerro rose, multihued in the silver moonlight. The night sky was clearer at this altitude than anywhere else on earth.

Within a couple of minutes, Inez’s sweeter but not as beautiful or intelligent younger sister entered the room, accompanied by her mother’s African maid. The liveried servant was dressed more richly than her little mistress.

“May I offer you some Paraguayan tea, Father?” It was what an adult would have said, and it touched him that she tried to act the grown-up.

“No, thank you.”

Gemita eyed the maid askance, and the padre saw she was looking for a way to get Bernardina out of the room.

“On second thought,” he said, “yes, I would.”

Once the maid was gone, he came quickly to the point. “Does your father know that your sister, Inez, had a lover?”

The girl showed no shock. She put her small hands behind her and paced to the window. Her frock was spring green, a curiously bright color for a girl who had just lost her sister. “My mother says it is not right to speak ill of the dead. That they will get revenge on you.”

“God’s Blessed Mother will protect you if you tell the truth.”

The girl hesitated only a few seconds more. “I am not sure my father knew about the actor,” she said as innocently as if she were talking about her dolls. “But he did know about Domingo Barco.”

The priest’s thoughts froze. “Domingo Barco?”

“He was her lover before Sebastian Vázquez.”

“Impossible.” Barco was the
mayordomo
of Morada’s chief enemy—Antonio Tovar. And a Mestizo to boot.

“Being alone with him was easy for Inez. His mother is our cook. When he came here to visit, Inez dressed him as a maid and sneaked him into her room.”

The priest suppressed a gasp of shock. Scandalous, how this seemingly innocent girl matter-of-factly described her sister’s debauchery. He would have preferred to disbelieve her, to imagine Gemita was inventing this story out of some sisterly jealousy. But he had already invented every defense for Inez his mind could produce. And they had all fallen before the onslaught of her history. His dream of what Inez had been, what she might have become, blackened and burned in his heart.

The girl went on blithely. “When she took up with the actor, she had to get out of the house alone.” A hint of glee glinted in Gemita’s round, dark eyes. “Then she invented a million deceits. Once she stole a key from the maid who carries in water from the fountain in the plaza. After everyone was asleep, she dressed herself in robes so that only her eyes showed. She let herself out by the kitchen door. Another time, when my father and his men were not here, Inez even pretended she heard people shouting a warning in the street that the Caricari dam had broken again.” The girl was speaking rapidly now. Recounting the story with relish, as if it were an adventure from a chronicle. “Mother started screaming that we would all be washed away. She pushed us and the maids out the door into the street,
shouting, ‘Run. Run towards the Mercaderes.’ Inez ran, but toward the theater. And another time . . .”

While the girl rattled on, the priest went back over the facts. Barco. She had jilted Barco. He could have killed her, then. Beatriz Tovar. The Abbess said Beatriz fancied herself desperately in love with her father’s
mayordomo
. Spanish girls were notoriously jealous. Beatriz could have—

By the time the maid’s bracelets clanked outside as she turned the door latch, he was on his feet, pacing. He had a vague recollection of the Alcalde’s cook—a wiry woman, handsome despite her pockmarked face, who had once sent her Mestizo son to learn reading and mathematics at a small school run by the Mercedarian order. Evalin, her name was. That boy must have been Domingo Barco. The priest had never put the two together.

Junipero gestured away the gourd of maté the maid offered. “I must speak to the cook.”

Bernardina peered at the tea and frowned. “Is something wrong with it?”

Gemita and the priest left her in the salon holding the tray. The padre followed the child across the family’s central patio to the rear of the house and a small, messy courtyard filled with buckets, mops, and empty crates. A scrawny black-and-orange cat poked listlessly among the trash.

They entered a cluttered kitchen that smelled of good soup. Gemita presented the priest to the wary cook and took a place near a great stone fireplace in which a cauldron simmered over a charcoal fire. There were bowls of grapes and olives on the table in the center of the room.

“Thank you for escorting me here, Gemita.” The padre gave her his most charming smile. “I think I need to speak to this lady in private.” He purposely confused the girl by calling her cook a lady.

Gemita folded her arms across her burgeoning breasts. “Everyone treats me like a baby when I know more than anyone.”

The priest gestured her toward the door. “Nevertheless, you must leave us alone.” He waited silently the few moments it took her to acquiesce. She twisted her mouth and stomped out.

“What do you want with me, Padre?” Evalin demanded unceremoniously. Though there were two plain wooden chairs in the room, she did not invite him to sit down.

He remained standing with her as if she were the lady he had called her, and he addressed her in Aymara. “Is Domingo Barco your son?”

“Yes.” The woman’s black eyes hardened.

The priest waited, but she offered no further information. “Does the Alcalde know this?”

She wiped her hands on the long sleeves of her rough cotton dress. It was the color of river mud. She never took her sharp black eyes off his. “Yes.”

“Does Antonio Tovar know that his
mayordomo
visits you in the house of his enemy?”

Her thin lips curled. If there had been any joy in the expression, he might have called it a smile. “Yes.”

“And does—”

She held up two brown, callused hands. “Let us just say that both gentlemen have reason to believe I am loyal to them and that the information that passes between me and my son is useful to both.”

“And to whom are you loyal?”

The cold smile broadened. “To my son. And myself.”

He could not fault her for that. He knew better than to underestimate her intelligence. Many Spaniards thought the Indians simple because they spoke Spanish with thick accents and believed in pagan gods. But this woman came from a race that had a complex civilization here before the Conquistadores arrived. She had borne a son by some Spaniard, who probably got
her with child and abandoned her. It was against the law for a Spanish man to violate an Indian woman, but if caught, the man paid only four pesos and nine reales, a fine for the public Treasury. No more than he would have given a prostitute. Unlike a whore, the Indian woman got nothing for her trouble. But, perhaps, a child. A child who might become everything to her. “Do you know that your son seduced Inez de la Morada?”

Evalin snorted. It was a masculine sound. “You have it the wrong way round, Padre. My poor boy succumbed to her wiles.”

He was speechless.

She laughed the louder. “And so did you, I see. Well, she is dead now. I do not care. She endangered my son. I only hope that love is like the pox. That if you have had it once and survived, you cannot catch it again.” Her hard eyes were dubious, as if she knew, with her son, such hopes were in vain.

Yet another suspicion flickered. “Endangered Domingo?”

“Yes, by putting him in the way of the Alcalde’s wrath.” Her tone said he was a fool not to see it. He was a fool not to see so many things.

The priest sought a sign of guilt in her. She could have murdered Inez. Anyone could be guilty. People were not as good as he wanted them to be. Or so much better than he, as he thought they must be. Anyone could be guilty. Barco. He could have—if he knew about Sebastian and was jealous. “She had another lover.”

“I knew that, but my son did not. I kept it from him to protect his heart. But it broke anyway, when she went into the convent.”

“Did the Alcalde know of her liaison with your son?”

“No,” she said too quickly.

He looked at her and waited. She would never give evidence against her son. If he was accused, this woman would confess to the crime herself to save him.

She held the priest’s stare.

“If I tell the Alcalde, he will kill your son. He will have to if the word gets out that Domingo defiled his daughter.”

She gripped the edge of the table. “The Alcalde knows. His bitch of a daughter told him herself.”

But Barco lived.

“She blackmailed her own father.” The tiny woman’s eyes dared him not to believe it.

The priest was beyond astonishment. “Tell me.”

“She had letters of her father’s. Letters that could cost the Alcalde his life. She entrusted them to my son. I took one and kept it.”

The priest doubted her.

She raised an eyebrow. “Yes,” she said. “I can read. My son taught me. I took the damning letter, and then I made a pact with Morada. The letter I stole is in the hands of a secret person. If any harm comes to my son or to me, no matter how innocent the Alcalde seems, the letter will be revealed, and Morada will be ruined.”

“Treason? What does the letter say?”

“If I tell anyone that, Morada will kill my son.”

A QUARTER OF an hour later, on his way back to his monastery, Padre Junipero passed Don Jerónimo Taboada and Don Juan Téllez, Morada’s closest allies on the Cabildo, with a group of young thugs, lounging against the carved stone façade of his chapter’s church. As he approached them, to his utter astonishment, they drew their swords.

THE ABBESS CLENCHED her fists. “What was Inez to you?” she asked. She tried not to turn away from Sor Eustacia’s smoldering gaze. In the end, she gave up and looked up at the high, dark window.

“You have always been the holiest person I knew.” The younger woman’s voice shook. Her vow of humility evaporated in the crucible of her anger. “The threat of the Inquisition has turned you into an Inquisitor yourself. I would perish in the flames in your stead, yet you ask me such a question?”

Maria Santa Hilda sat straight in her hard wooden chair and gripped her hands together to stop their trembling. The naturally dulcet Eustacia’s assertion stung and terrified her. The Abbess, who had the habit of command, had no words of defense. All she could do was repeat the offensive question: “I must know what your relationship was with Inez.” She prayed Eustacia would have a response to erase Hippolyta’s disgusting accusation.

Like some great mythic bird-woman come to life, Eustacia
leaned forward and grasped the edge of the table, looking as if she would fly across it at the Abbess and tear her apart. “You think I killed her.”

Maria Santa Hilda’s stomach trembled under her heart. At this moment, Eustacia seemed capable of it. “Did you have reason to?”

The younger woman’s powerful grip on the table tightened. The heavy table moved. Hate, then fear, then despair, paraded in full sight on Eustacia’s lovely face. At last, she dropped back into her chair and bent over, gripping the sides of her head. “I have borne everything,” she sobbed. “I can bear this, too.” She lifted her head. Her eyes were defeated. “I was her lover. For only one night.” She paused, and in the silence, torture passed over her countenance. She stared back at the Abbess, her soft eyes filled with guilt. “For only one night, but I did it. And I have been in hell ever since.”

Waves of horror and shock, of pity and suspicion, crashed over Maria Santa Hilda. “Speak to me, Eustacia,” was all she could say.

“I came to this convent to be worthy, to try to be truly holy. Since I entered the order, I have not taken a glass of water without permission. I have accepted this slow, monotonous life, of obeying the bells, of endless repetitions. I thought it would bring me solace.”

“But it has not.”

Eustacia held up her head. “Before I became a nun, I had wealth, you know.”

Maria Santa Hilda nodded, but she had not known. Eustacia was noble; otherwise the order would never have accepted her. But many noblewomen had only a scant dowry, enough for the order but not for a suitable husband.

“I was not some English spinster—the victim of primogeniture. My mother was a widow, I her only child. A man came to ask for my hand, and my mother consented. In the chapel of
our villa in Andalusia, he swore with the missal and the crucifix in his hands that he would be my husband. He begged my mother a moment, there in the chapel, to be alone with me. When she left, he seized and raped me. When I tried to scream for my mother, he beat me. At the point of his dagger, he molested me. And he threatened to stab me to death if I told anyone or tried to get justice from the King or the Church. After that he came to my house whenever he wanted and abused me. When, in desperation, I finally told my confessor, the old priest offered me the only remedy available. That we force the man to marry me immediately.”