Read City of Silver Online

Authors: Annamaria Alfieri

City of Silver (26 page)

BOOK: City of Silver
5.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She straightened now and looked directly at the Abbess with eyes demanding justice that did not exist in this world. “My own mother, even after she found out about his brutality, tried to force me to go ahead with the marriage. No matter how I screamed and cried, no matter how many times I tried to lock my door against him. She became his ally. How can a mother subject her daughter to such a fate? Married to him, every night of my life would have been another rape. My mother told me no one would marry a girl who had lost her virginity. Marriage to him was my only hope for a normal life.” Eustacia laughed the laugh of a madwoman. “Normal life.” She leaned forward now like a supplicant in a painting of the Virgin. “I told her if she forced me to marry him, I would kill him. So she sent me to the convent.”

“Deo Gratias.”
The words escaped the Abbess.

“I told myself I would be a good nun.”

“You were a good nun,” the Abbess said, for so the mild Eustacia had seemed—until Inez. “Weren’t you?” She realized she was speaking in the past tense.

“I have broken many rules.”

“How?” The Abbess heard the apprehension in her own voice. These were the things she had not wanted to know.

Eustacia smiled indulgently, as if she were about to tell the harsh truth to a child.

Maria Santa Hilda’s back stiffened. “Tell me everything.”

“You are so good that you do not see how evil is the world around you.”

“That is not true.” The denial came out too loud. “I know the greed that grips this city. I know about the brothels, where men fight to the death over the favors of whores.” She knew another, personal evil, but she must not think about it.

Eustacia’s face was now inches from hers. “You know evil from arm’s length. You pray for sinners in the abstract. I know evil firsthand.”

The Abbess unclenched her hands and reclaimed her calm. “So you have only now told me. But almost everyone who comes to this convent carries heavy troubles.” She had taken in hysterical, scrupulous girls who saw this as the only place to hide from temptation. Despairing daughters of widows whose dowries were not sufficient to entice anyone to take on responsibility for their mothers as well as themselves. Rejected girls who came here rather than feel like failures in the outside world.

“Yes, and when they enter your care, you encourage them to forget. You expect that spirituality and scholarship will scrub their souls clean.”

“I thought those comforts satisfied you, that you were serene in your silence.”

“The stains of my old life remain.”

The Abbess knew this was true of herself also. As long as she had been a nun, hardly a day passed that she did not think of the pain of losing her mother, of the ill will she bore her father.

“In the night, I have been meeting with the newcomers.” The Abbess could not suppress a grimace. “For what purpose?” she demanded indignantly.

Eustacia threw her a dagger glance. “Just to talk. To get them to tell me if they were troubled, what troubled them.”

“They are supposed to confess to the padre, not to you.”

“The sacrament takes away the sin, but not its scars.”

“Those scars are between a soul and God.”

“Those scars torment.”

“Pain that can be offered to God.”

“Pain that can be relieved. Sor Monica seeks to take away the pain of the body. I have sought to unburden the spirit. I talk to the young ones. Mostly I listen to what they tell me.”

“In their beds?” the Abbess asked. It was a cruel barb. And wrong to have said. Worthy of Sor Olga or DaTriesta. She had lost control of the conversation. Of herself.

Eustacia winced. “No,” she whispered, and turned away her gaze.

The habit of silence descended on them, and neither seemed willing to break it. The Abbess knew she must take control, but her heart was too sunk in confusion to choose her words.

Finally, Eustacia rose and went to the door. With her hand on the latch, she spoke again: “Do you know who was the father of Hippolyta’s child?”

The Abbess stroked the smooth edge of the table. “Her father’s page. Don Diego killed the boy.”

Eustacia shook her head. “It was her father himself.”

Maria Santa Hilda’s jaw dropped.

“Yes,” Eustacia said quietly but vehemently. “He started on her when she was only ten years old. He used her. And then when he had made his own child pregnant, he murdered that poor Mestizo boy and sent his poor children here, the one within the other.”

The Abbess blessed herself and grabbed for the rosary that hung from her belt. In its impossibility, she knew it must be true. Her fast-starved stomach churned with disgust. “God forgive him.” God forgive her for being so ignorant.

“I don’t know if I could love a God who would forgive such a thing.”

“Please do not blaspheme.”

“Poor Hippolyta felt guilty. Her father told her it was her own fault. And she believed him.”

The Abbess’s belly heaved.

“Well might you retch,” Eustacia said. “And you are a virgin. You cannot truly imagine the horror of such a thing.”

The Abbess bit hard on the knuckles of her right hand. Eustacia was wrong, but she could not protest. She composed herself. “Eustacia, you speak of the horrors of others, but what of your own? What about Inez?”

The younger woman, who now seemed to the Abbess suddenly older, looked away. “She seduced me.” She let go of the latch and dropped to her knees, bent over with anguish. “It does not wash away my guilt, I know, but she was beautiful. And—and skillful.” The last word slipped out of her, like a tear.

The Abbess’s face burned. Shame, guilt, and outrage seared into her bone marrow.

Eustacia’s broad, beautiful face twisted with pain and frustration. “I longed to be one of those mystical women who loses herself in Christ. But I cannot. If a surgeon opened my chest, I wonder if he would see the scars on my heart.”

Maria Santa Hilda thought to ask directly if Eustacia had killed Inez. But she did not. She had no way to judge the truth of Eustacia’s replies. Beata Sor Elena would have known how to help her. But her old confidante was dead and under the boards of the choir, buried there along with Inez.

The Abbess hardened her will. “You had better tell me all you know.”

Eustacia rose and took the chair opposite the Abbess. “When Inez came to the convent, she was not truly repentant. She tried to convince me that she was, but I saw through her fabrication. Her secrets came out too easily, too well formed. If they are truly afraid or guilty, they cannot tell the truth so facilely. Often they do not admit the truth to themselves.”

Mother Maria saw the logic of that.

Eustacia folded her hands into her sleeves. “I was able to bring out one thing that sincerely troubled her.”

“Which was?”

“Her father killed an Indian over some secret documents and had somehow made her feel guilty about it. I think that almost everything she said to me was a lie, but not that. She said that if it hadn’t been for her, that Indian would still be alive.” Eustacia placed her hands over her mouth, as if suddenly she had thought of something unthinkable. “Perhaps her father killed her because she knew about his murder of the Indian.”

The Abbess threw up her hands. “That is absurd. The Alcalde must have killed many Indians in his life. He hunts down all manner of fugitives. How could his killing one more Indian make such a difference? Besides, Captain de la Morada is the very last person who would have harmed his daughter.”

“I agree,” Eustacia said. “She loved him, too. Of that I am also certain. She mourned the loss of his company.”

“She told me she came here to escape his influence for a while.”

“Nevertheless . . .” Eustacia’s voice trailed off. “I think Inez seldom told the truth.”

Considering the surprises and shocks Eustacia had revealed today, Maria Santa Hilda wondered how often she had hidden the truth.

“Inez was very troubled,” Eustacia said. “I have come to believe that harboring secrets unbalances the mind. And Inez harbored many secrets.” Her eyes turned furtive. “Perhaps we should return to the theory that Inez took her own life.”

The Abbess saw how wrong that was. “More than ever, I doubt it. All her cleverness and greed for power could not reside with despair. Inez wanted something too much to give up her life before she got it.” The actor, she thought. He must have something to do with why she died.

“MURDERER!” TABOADA GROWLED. His powerful fingers dug into Padre Junipero’s arms.

The stunned priest felt himself lifted and tossed like a sack of maize against the façade of the Compañia de Jesus. His breath left him, and before he could get it back, they were on him.

“You killed her. I heard the Alcalde say so.” Ramirez spat the words at him. “You priests claim to be holy, but everyone knows priests carried Toledo steel and used it in Cortez’s army.”

The padre opened his mouth to object. A big, gnarled hand gripped his throat. He gasped for air. Thudding, crushing blows, on his chest, his shoulders, his back. He crumpled to the pavement. He tried to cover his head. A hand wrenched his arm back. His shoulder screamed in pain, but he could not utter a sound. A cracking kick knocked a searing pain down his spine. Sprawled and heaving for breath, he could only pray: Make them stop, Lord. Make them stop. His eyes would not focus.

Ramirez drew a sword. Raised by strong arms and backed to the wall, the padre squirmed and darted and managed to maneuver to the portal. He clung to the slender column that guarded the front door of the chapter house. “Please.” He humiliated himself. “You are mistaken. I swear by the soul of Santiago.”

“I heard the Alcalde accuse you,” Ramirez said. “Through the door, on the night you told him of her death. He said you killed her.”

“If I had, would not the Alcalde have killed me himself?” The priest raised his hands over his head, like a condemned man before a firing squad. “Why did he not arrest me? Why did he not avenge himself on me?”

Ramirez’s sword prodded his throat and stopped his heart. “The Alcalde could have been too overcome with grief to act.” Ramirez said. “Now I am here to do it for him.”

The priest folded his hands in front of him. “Please,” he said, “ask him again. If he says he is convinced that I killed her, I will submit to your swords. But in the meantime, do not slay me unshriven.”

Juan Téllez, the third of the group, a man the padre knew
was devoted to the Blessed Mother, crossed himself and grasped Ramirez’s sword arm. “Give him a chance to confess before he dies, Felipe,” Téllez said to Ramirez. He turned to Junipero. “The logic of your famous mind has saved you this time, but it will not the next.”

Ramirez lowered his weapon. “Do you have sins to confess? Shame on you, priest.” He spat out the last word as an insult.

“God help me,” Padre Junipero whispered.

Jerónimo Taboada grasped the front of the padre’s cassock. He brought his face close. He smelled of stale wine. “Go and confess,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “We will find you when we want you.” He reached around the priest’s trembling body, opened the monastery door, and tossed the padre into the dark entry.

THE BISHOP WAS disquieted. Perhaps because the weather had been so violent in the wee hours. Hailstones as large as dove’s eggs had fallen on the town and awakened him even earlier than the dawn Easter ritual required. The noise in the night had sounded like a volcano erupting out in the cordillera.

Soon the snow would pile up in the plazas and cold wind would torture him. In this comfortless city, with only coal to burn, noxious fumes could any moment cut off his life. He had endured three such winters, and he would endure another. The only alternative was to travel to Lima—mule sore and sickened by horrid meals along the way—and to be greeted by great expense when he got there.

Ordinarily, a ceremony such as this morning’s welcoming of the Easter sunrise satisfied his Spanish soul. Even on this treeless plain, the grandeur of the ritual matched anything they were capable of in Sevilla or Naples. At three in the morning, he rose and, over his warmest silk-and-vicuña undersuit, donned silver-and gold-brocaded garments befitting the most joyous day of the Church year. He was met at his front door by eight priests, who rode with him on mule back, as Christ had triumphantly entered
Jerusalem before his death. Worshippers, resplendent in furs and silk finery, streamed with them out of the center of the city, to the foot of the Cerro, where on a high promontory they faced the brightening eastern sky and awaited the first rays of the rising sun.

Nothing consoled the Bishop. Not even his entourage of great families with their trains of servants, all decked out in gorgeous clothes and jewels—many purchased within the last few days in anticipation of the coming devaluation. He himself had wished to convert his soon-to-be-diminished fortune of silver into precious stones. But during Holy Week, the head of the Church could not be seen, even through his agents, to be trading rather than praying. So the Bishop took no comfort from being surrounded by the wealthy in full plumage or from the Indians in their native regalia, ready to perform ritual dances to welcome the Risen Christ. His Grace’s mood was set by the thin, icy air, the shrieking wind, the brooding isolation of the vast Altiplano stretching before him, and the snapping of frost-cracked rocks.

On the horizon, the first light exploded forth—impossibly bright here where no mist obscured it. The Alcalde Morada touched his torch to the great bonfire prepared for the occasion. At once, the sextons of the ninety-odd churches in the town tolled their bells in a glorious cacophony of joy. The crowd of thousands on the mountainside sang out an Alleluia, their voices rich and fervent, but with a shrill brightness of desperation.

Within minutes, candles were lit everywhere. Shielded from the wind in glass globes, they were carried by the splendidly liveried pages of the wealthy families and glowed in the windows and on the balconies along the route of the holy procession. A canopy was unfurled to be carried over the Bishop’s head, but the wind whipped it so strongly that the men could not hold it and had to put it away. The members of the Cabildo struggled
to keep hold of the platforms on which they bore statues of the saints. Led by the
azogueros,
who—because they were the ones who produced the silver—since the founding of the town had the honor of leading the Easter procession, the faithful descended quickly toward the shelter of the cathedral. Tall, exquisitely handsome Antonio Tovar was at the head, resplendent in a red cape worked with gold, riding a proud black Chilean horse shod and caparisoned with silver. The other miners followed, and their wives traveled behind them in calashes drawn by mules. Their Indian
pongos
and the
caciques
of all the surrounding Indian villages followed after, their ostrich-feather umbrellas torn apart by the fierce wind.

BOOK: City of Silver
5.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Hitman: Enemy Within by William C. Dietz
Second Chance Ranch by Audra Harders
Death of a Stranger by Anne Perry
The Paris Secret by Karen Swan
Linda Castle by Territorial Bride
A Timeless Romance Anthology: Spring Vacation Collection by Josi S. Kilpack, Annette Lyon, Heather Justesen, Sarah M. Eden, Heather B. Moore, Aubrey Mace
Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst
Vale of the Vole by Piers Anthony
Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson