City of Silver (28 page)

The Abbess remained stupefied. Shock and shame froze her deeper into inaction.

“What witnesses do you offer?” de la Gasca asked in his maddeningly calm, nearly bored voice.

“I call the postulant Beatriz Tovar.” With a gesture, he signaled her forward.

Poor little Beatriz, silly romantic girl, stepped out of the shadows. The smooth skin of her face was still lined with the impression of her pillow. Her white postulant’s veil was askew. Her dark eyes were huge with awe and fear. She smiled awkwardly at the severe man in the chair. “Do not be afraid, my child,” he said in a kindly voice.

But be careful what you say. Oh, be careful. Silently the Abbess prayed to her young charge as if she were a saint in a painting.

DaTriesta did not look at the lovely girl. “Tell us what you know about the sinful practices of this place,” he said. “If you but tell the truth, you will be saved.”

Beatriz gazed at the tall, ugly priest standing behind the table, at the Abbess, and back at the elegant, seated priest. Who were these men? The ugly standing one who asked her the question wanted her to say awful things. She could tell. He looked at her the way her father did when he expected her to confess some sin. But her father was a chirimoya pear—hard on the outside, but soft and sweet underneath. This tall priest standing so proudly was like an ear of old maize—hard and dry all the way through. Being near him made the damp and cold feel worse. He wanted her to say bad things. She shivered and gazed up at the sky. She would not. Not to this ugly one. The moon was still visible, even though the sky was light.

“Again I ask you,” the ear of maize said in a low, nasty voice, “make a full confession or we have ways to make you talk.”

She stepped back, confused.

The handsome priest at the table held up his hand. He wore an elegant ring and looked very noble in his plain clothing. “There is no need to threaten her yet.” He turned to her and smiled. “Please, my child, tell us what you know.” His accent was beautiful, making the words sound like a lovely song. He was an avocado—a layer of soft sweetness over a huge hard stone.

Beatriz’s sleepy brain flashed into wakefulness. Threaten? Ways to make her talk? This was the Inquisitor! Oh, God! These men had come to take Mother Maria away. She could not let them. She folded her hands in front of her, the way Inez used to do when she was about to tell a lie and wanted to be believed. “Evil, Father? I know of no evil here. We pray. We only pray for the repose of the souls of the dead, for God’s grace on Holy Mother Church. This is a good place. The very best place in this city.” She opened her eyes wide and smiled right into the faces of the two men, the way Inez would have. She looked at the Abbess, who did not meet her gaze. Beatriz pressed her clenched hands beneath her breasts. A screaming child in a nightmare in her heart insisted she should have told the truth. But that little coward was wrong.

“What do you know about the way Inez Rojas de la Morada died?” asked the seated priest.

“Nothing,” Beatriz answered. “Mother Maria is a good and holy woman.”

The corncob came near her. He smelled like dead flowers. “What about midnight meetings of coveys?”

Beatriz tried hard not to wrinkle her nose. Inez would not have wrinkled her nose no matter how he stank. “I have never heard of such a thing. We only pray and chant.” She tried to smile beguilingly at him, but he would not look at her.

“I have heard a rumor about women having illicit relations with other women.”

Beatriz widened her eyes. “Here, Padre? That never happens here.”

He smiled at her, and her breath halted. His eyes had turned cold and triumphant. What had she said? She hadn’t said anything to hurt Mother Maria. His big, pink tongue darted at the corner of his mouth. He turned to the avocado, who sat sipping maté from a gourd. “You see. This child shows no shock, no confusion, at the mention of such depravity. She knows of such liaisons. How else could she, but that she learned about them here? May even have been taught to participate in them.”

The panicked child in Beatriz’s nightmare escaped. “
No!
That is not true. No bad things ever happen here. None. Mother Maria is good. She is very good.”

“You are endangering your soul and your body by lying,” the corncob rasped at her.

Beatriz could hardly breathe. “All I know is that Mother Maria is the holiest woman I know.”

He dismissed her with a wave. “You see, Your Excellency, how well trained they are. There is no guile or deceit they do not practice and teach the young.”

The avocado took up his pen and wrote something slowly and carefully in the big black book on the table in front of him.

“No. I am not lying!” Beatriz shouted. She tried to look in the face of the Abbess, but Mother’s head was lowered and her eyes closed, as if she already knew herself to be dead. Beatriz bit her lip until it bled. If they asked her another question, she would not say another word.

But they did not ask.

EUSTACIA SEETHED WITH indignation. When DaTriesta asked her the same sanctimonious questions he had asked poor, well-meaning Beatriz, she could not hold her pounding anger. It
boiled over like milk left too long on the fire. “How can you waste time investigating this holy woman? You are committing an outrage against a saint!”

Maria Santa Hilda shook her head vehemently. Her eyes pleaded with Eustacia to desist.

Eustacia could not comply. “Yes,” she insisted, addressing the Abbess rather than the Inquisitor. “You are. Especially compared to the evils they impute to you.” She glared at de la Gasca and DaTriesta. “There are real evils in this city. You should be striving to deal with them. Bigamists, for instance. Half the Spaniards have left wives in Spain and taken new ones here. Men abuse their own daughters. Get them with children. But then it is women you want to torture, isn’t it? Not men.”

The sisters around her all gasped. Shock registered even in the Inquisitor’s placid face. She bit her lip. She was insane, really insane to have said such things. She saw it herself. A cry of anguish escaped her.

DaTriesta shook his large, beastlike head. “Women, as you are all amply proving by your unconsidered words, are prone to spread evil. You poison God’s creation with your sins.” He turned in disgust to de la Gasca. “I think we have enough proof to take them.”

Eustacia abandoned any attempt at self-control. “Women were bishops in the early Church. They administered the Sacraments. There are Greek texts that prove this.”

De la Gasca, who toyed with his pen but wrote nothing, gave her a supercilious stare. “I would not mention the Greeks if I were you, Sister.”

Her veins burned with embarrassment and anger. “I? You think I am worthy of your notice? If you must torture a woman, torture one who deserves your wrath. Do you know there is an old woman in this city who used to be a wet nurse? Do you know that now that she can no longer give suck to children, she sucks them, but in a different place? She is harming them. In a
way that can never be fixed. I know. I have talked to her victims. If you are looking for witches, why don’t you go and take her?”

They looked at her, dumbstruck. Even the soldier-priests standing against the wall stared in disbelief.

Eustacia fell at Mother Maria’s feet. “Forgive me, Mother. Forgive me.” She wished she could take her own life. She did not care what happened to her. At that moment, she wanted them to take her away and burn her.

Monica rushed to Eustacia and tried to lift her from the ground. Mother Maria stood as still and hard as the columns of the cloister. She would not or could not move. Too small to lift Eustacia, Monica bent by her side. “She is ill,” the Sister Herbalist told the priests of the Inquisition. “Her humors have been out of balance. She has had a cold. Too much intensity. You must not take what she says to heart.”

But de la Gasca was already writing in his book. And once written, his words could not be canceled.

“We will deal with you in a moment, Sister Herbalist,” DaTriesta said. “We have particular questions to ask of you.”

De la Gasca held up his hand. “In the meantime, Sister,” he said softly, “would you bring me some more of your excellent elixir?”

She tore herself away from the sobbing, prostrate Eustacia and took the maté gourd from the table. She bowed and, marshaling all her strength, managed to walk slowly out of their sight. Then she ran. She did not want to miss a word of what transpired. She had to be there to hear any chink in their arguments, any false turn of logic that could be counterargued to save Mother Maria.

When she got to the infirmary, she refilled the gourd with Vitallina’s help and ran back.

She had to push her way through a crowd of sisters eavesdropping from around the corner. “Pray. Pray with all your might,” she whispered to them as she pushed past.

Olga was speaking. Monica placed the maté on the table where de la Gasca was writing furiously. She bowed and took a place in the shadows.

Olga stood before de la Gasca, her thin, wrinkled face glowing with righteous joy. “—buried in our sacred vaults, when she so obviously took her own life. This Abbess has tolerated illicit love between women. She espouses dangerous notions about the rights of women. And”—Olga paused and looked defiantly into Monica’s stunned eyes—“she has condoned sorcery involving a cat.”

Monica began to shake. She backed against the wall and dug her fingernails into the bricks. Her neck, her jaw, were rigid. “No. Dear Blessed Mother,” she mumbled.

DaTriesta came toward her.

She clasped her hands in front of her and bit her fingers.

“Obviously,” the Commissioner said, “Sor Olga’s accusations have struck a chord with the Sister Herbalist. Come forward, Sister, and speak.”

Monica took a tentative step away from the wall and stopped. “I—I—” She wanted to say she knew nothing, but that was not the truth. So she told them all the facts—the circumstances of Inez’s death, about Hippolyta, about the cat, about the noises in the night. As God was her witness, every answer she gave was the truth, but she was certain that the sum of what de la Gasca wrote in his awful book was not the truth. He did not begin to understand. He did not even seem to want to. Despair fell on her like a pall.

“I say we take the four—the Abbess, the practitioner of perverted sex, that sorceress of an herbalist, and the lying postulant,” DaTriesta declared.

De la Gasca fingered the now empty gourd on the table beside him.

Oh, God, must I burn? Monica did not know whether her thoughts were a prayer or a curse.

“Not the herbalist. Not the postulant,” de la Gasca said. He began to rise from his chair. “By the authority of the Council of the—”

Suddenly, the stone Abbess raised her hand. She drew herself up to her full stature.

De la Gasca continued to rise but not to speak.

For the first time since she took her vows, Maria Santa Hilda allowed all of the pride she was taught to take in her bloodline to show in her face. A long-closed door had flown open in her heart. She was suddenly the daughter her father had always insisted she be. “A moment, please, Your Grace.” She addressed him as the Marqués he would have been had he been born a first son and inherited his father’s title, instead of a second son automatically dedicated to the Church.

His impassive aspect turned slightly wary.

“I believe,” she said, taking a tone of refined dinner table conversation, “that given . . .” She hesitated. Should she plead for time before her trial to put her convent’s affairs in order? Should she appeal to his gallantry, on the grounds of harm to her order?

“Yes?” He faced her squarely across the table.

“I believe, Your Grace, that, like myself, you are a cousin to His Royal Majesty.” Her kinship with the King was closer than his, counted for much more.

One of his eyebrows bounced. “Yes, that is true. Through my mother, as you are through yours.”

“I think, then,” she said, as if she were going to ask to borrow his carriage to take her home from a ball, “that you will want to allow me time to put my affairs here in order.”

DaTriesta fairly leapt forward. His stench came with him. “They must be taken at once. We must remove them and their sinful influence from this place today.”

De la Gasca eyed his local Commissioner but continued to face his distant cousin, the King’s near relation.

The Abbess smiled at him. The humility she had nurtured for twenty years seemed to have evaporated. She knew her own power. It could not save her from the stake, but it could buy her the time to try with logic to save herself.

DaTriesta stepped closer. “As long as she stays here, the debauchery will continue.”

The Abbess did not take her eyes from de la Gasca’s. “I have been accused, but not tried and not found guilty.”

“You will not leave your convent,” de la Gasca said at last. “You will not communicate with anyone outside these walls for any reason.”

“My confessor?”

“We will appoint a suitable priest.”

“This must not be,” DaTriesta sputtered. “We all know she vowed never to appeal to her lineage. She is breaking another vow. You cannot . . .” His voice trailed off. He must have finally grasped the futility of trying to overcome blood ties with argument.

“We grant a short time, a matter of a day or two.” De la Gasca reached down and slammed the book shut.