City of Silver (37 page)

“You must help me defend this house, which is under attack,” the priest implored.

“How can we, Padre?” said a tall man a little older than the others, a stranger to the priest. He held up a guitar. “We have come armed only with our music.”

THE DRUNK OUT in the street shouted, but before Beatriz could go and have another look, an explosion so loud and sudden that it made her scream came from the outer patio. The sword Gemita was holding clattered to the floor. With the second crash, Beatriz knew. “They are inside the outer wall. They are battering the door of the high inner wall.” The crashes came one after the other, and in between, the sounds of men shouting. Still gripping
her saber, Beatriz picked up the fencing sword and handed it again to Gemita. “We will have to fight.” This has to be fantasy, she thought.

Gemita began to wail. “We cannot. I cannot. How can we fight?”

“The Abbess will die if we do not. We will die.” They would die anyway.

The crashing continued. The right-hand door began to move.

“Hide. We have to hide behind the bed curtains.” Gemita’s voice was now three octaves higher than her normal squeak.

“They will find us.”

A huge crash, and the door began to splinter. Gemita dropped her sword again.

“Go,” Beatriz commanded. “Get the packet of letters and go to the balcony of the sitting room.”

The door cracked with a huge explosion of wood on wood.

“Now!”
Beatriz screamed. She shoved Gemita in the direction of her room. “Bring that long green silk ribbon. Go.
Go!
”

She picked up Gemita’s sword and stood with the saber in one hand and the sword in the other. Her heart and stomach and knees all trembled with each thud. A huge log crashed through the door, and a gauntleted hand reached in. Men came in, wearing armor and helmets bearing the red plume of the Alcalde’s guard.

Gemita came screaming down the hall and into the sitting room, trailing the ribbon.

“Up there!” a man shouted from the patio. More men were pouring through the door. Panting, Beatriz waited until the first two were at the bottom of the steps, and then, still holding the swords, with the heels of her hands she launched her mother’s stone planters off the balustrade directly on them. They howled.

Without looking to see the damage she had done, she ran into the sitting room and slammed and bolted the door. “Quickly,
move the furniture over here.” She put down the swords and with Gemita piled five heavy chairs in front of the door.

“To the balcony.”

Gemita opened the French door. Beatriz took the packet of letters and strapped them to her body with the ribbon. She took up the swords again as something slammed against the corridor door. “Out.”

She followed Gemita onto the balcony. “Jump!” she commanded.

Gemita screamed. “There are men down there.”

Beatriz gasped.
“Oh, Dios.”
The oath slipped out.

“Jump, Gemita. We will catch you.” It was Padre Junipero’s voice.

“Thank you, God,” Beatriz whispered. Facing the door, a sword in each hand, she glanced back over the balustrade and saw four men holding a cape. Gemita climbed up but hesitated. Beatriz shoved her off. Inside the sitting room, the door was opening.

Beatriz clambered up to the balustrade, still gripping the swords.

“Throw me the weapons,” called a tall man standing to the side, next to the priest.

She dropped the saber.

The man leapt aside, covering his head. “Hilt first!” he screamed.

She let the other one go.

The men at the sitting room door crashed through and spilled onto the floor. Beatriz leapt. The hem of her broad skirt caught on something and she found herself upside down, dangling over the open cape. She yanked at the skirt, but it would not come free. Morada’s men were on the balcony, grabbing for her. She swung herself away and kicked at their hands. The cloth began to rip at last. She swung harder and slowly, with the ripping of her skirt, fell into the cape. A man above her had
climbed onto the balustrade of the balcony and was about to leap into the street.

“Leave the swords and take the girls away from danger,” Padre Junipero called to the tall man, who tossed the swords to the others, grabbed Gemita and Beatriz by their hands, and ran down the Calle de la Paz in the direction of the Ribera.

Shouts and clanging of steel echoed behind them. They ran and ran until they reached the Bridge of San Sebastián. Gemita was out of breath and stumbling. The man stopped. “Rest a moment.” He put his hand in his doublet and drew out a handkerchief and gave it to Gemita.

Beatriz shivered in the wind that whistled down the narrow streets. The man took off his beautiful cloak of double taffeta and wrapped it around both girls. Footsteps pounded on the stones in the dark street behind them. “Come,” he said, “we must run.”

In the middle of the bridge, a criminal’s head had been left on a pike as a warning to others. Gemita looked up at it and began to scream uncontrollably and would not walk past it. Beatriz threw the cloak over her head and dragged her.

A pursuer charged them from behind. Their protector, whoever he was, feinted to avoid the slash of the guardsman’s sword and with a lithe and graceful gesture, like the step of a courtly dance, tripped him and pounced on him. The two men rolled over. The assailant’s weapon threatened their unarmed protector’s throat. Beatriz slipped out from under the cape and charged, kicking at the side of the attacker’s head with the sharp heel of her shoe. He groaned, and their protector got the better of him. In seconds, the guardsman was over the side of the bridge and in the water. The tall man had the sword.

“Run. Run!” he commanded.

More footsteps followed, but when they reached the other end of the bridge, the Calle San Benito was crowded with people marching in the
mascarada
. Suddenly, the breathless girls were surrounded by people in colorful disguises and regional costumes.
Laughing men and women dressed as historical or mythological characters. Looming next to Gemita was a huge fat man dressed as the infidel Turk. His white, bejeweled turban was askew, and his droopy fake mustache had detached from one side of his face.

“Smile, laugh,” their escort said. “Pretend you are here to join the merriment.” He glanced often behind him but put his hands on their shoulders and pretended to joke. When they reached the Calle Zarate, he turned them, following a band of revelers to the Plaza del Gato. The heat from a bonfire in the plaza warmed them, and they sat for a moment on one of the stone benches. Candles burned in the windows and on the balconies. Their guardian watched down the street for their pursuers and scanned the other entrances to the plaza. “I think we are safe for the moment,” he said.

Beatriz gazed up at him. He was a soldier, she was sure, well proportioned, with a proud line to his jaw and black hair that shone in the firelight. There was something about this man, his voice. She ransacked her memory. His hand still lay on her shoulder, like the hand of a guardian angel in a painting in church. Warmth and comfort spread from it and infused her thoughts, which were so powerful that she thought they must perfume the air around her. She was certain he sensed them.

“Where are you taking us?”

“To my godmother’s house. Let us go.” He led them to the home of the Marquesa de Otavi. He rang the bell and was immediately let into the outer courtyard. “Don’t tell my aunt about the danger,” the man whispered as he pulled the bell cord. “I don’t want to worry her. Her health is delicate.”

The Marquesa herself came to the door of her palace to give them welcome and usher them in.

“Aunt, please shelter these young ladies I found in distress. I will return presently.” He took a sword and a heavy cape from a shelf there in the entryway and quickly left.

The elegant old lady ushered Beatriz and Gemita to a chamber on the second floor decorated with tapestries from France and Persian rugs. “You are the Tovar girl,” she said to Beatriz. She touched Gemita’s red and puffy eyes. “Lie here on these couches. My maid will bring you some maté.”

IN A DANK stone cellar, Mother Maria did her best to chant her prayers. She wanted to calm Eustacia, who like her was chained to a wall.
“Gloria Patri et Filio—”
Her voice cracked. She waited for Sor Eustacia’s beautiful contralto to respond. Pray. They had to pray. Prayer was their only hope.

“I cannot stay chained to this wall.” Eustacia jerked and beat the heavy iron links against the brick. “I will go mad.”

Tears flowed from the Abbess’s eyes. Eustacia seemed already mad.
“Et Spiritui Sancto.”
She chanted the response herself and went on, focusing her thoughts on the words, words that could drive away all thought.

“Yes,” Eustacia moaned. “This is the way it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Men abusing me. Men torturing me.” She continued to beat the chains in an odd bass rhythm to her Abbess’s chant.

“Et in saecula saeculorum.”
Maria Santa Hilda rocked her body.
“Et in saecula saeculorum.”
She repeated the words over and over, unable to keep away their piercing truth. World without end. Pain without end. Fear without end.
Saecula saeculorum.
Unending misery. Only death would remove it. Death on the pyre. Death that could lead to the flames of hell.
“Credo in unum Deum,”
she chanted. “I believe in one God.”

“I do not believe. Not in a God who allows me to suffer so.”

Maria Santa Hilda condemned herself. So renowned for her intelligence, she had let her pride blind her. It had taken her too long to see the truth. Now she knew nothing of how the wheels she had set in motion turned. Had Sor Monica found the evidence inside the convent? Had the padre gotten the letter? She
might never know. She struggled to focus on prayer. “Sister, please try to quiet yourself. We may yet be released.”

Eustacia, suddenly still, glared at her and then, like a ghost in a nightmare, stood, her arms weighed down by the chains hanging at her sides. She howled, a deep, crushing cry that sounded as if it came from the bowels of the earth.

THE LONG DAY of festivities wore on for Nestares. Finally, past midnight, his hosts took him to the Calle de Contraste and the home of Don Francisco Gambarte, the finest house in the city. Its own opulent furnishings had, in the past few days, been augmented with items borrowed from other noble houses of the city—six gorgeous settees and a splendid bed hung with scarlet silk.

There, after nineteen hours of continuous adulation, Nestares was finally allowed to retire into the arms of Doña Ilena Nieves, the most beautiful, and skillful, of Potosí’s scores of courtesans.

On Easter Monday night of 1650, Doña Ilena’s task was the ecstasy of the Visitador, but the exhausted Nestares welcomed her soft body as a source of warmth rather than stimulation. In her naked arms, he fell immediately into a deep, nearly comatose sleep.

In another part of the house, the Cape Verde slave in whose place the beautiful courtesan slept prepared to retire. She thought of the white flesh that yielded to her master and lover. She laid out her best green silk dress for the morning and beside it, in the hopes of the signal from the Alcalde, the packet of deadly herbs she had received from Captain Ramirez.

WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, in the second-floor hall of the convent, at the only small window that overlooked the field next door, the Sister Herbalist had been more than an hour at difficult work. The other sisters would soon rise for the third Nocturne—the last of the prayers during the night. She had to be gone before they assembled.

She forced her frozen, stinging hands to continue to saw at the lock that she had always thought kept intruders out but that she now realized also kept her in. She pressed her fear into the sawing motion of the rasp, and the lock finally gave way.

“Vitallina,” she whispered to the big woman who dozed on the floor at her feet, “wake.” She poked her assistant’s flank.

Vitallina started. “Yes, Sister.” Her voice was thick with sleep.

“Do you have the red pepper?”

“Yes. In the sack with the cat.”

Monica herself carried the vial with the poison and the two flails wrapped in many folds of linen to make sure they pricked
no one. They were rolled up in the apron of the maid’s uniform she wore.

She swung open the iron gate that barred the windows of the upper storage room and looked out on the vacant field behind the rear cloister. Clouds obscured the moon. What little light there was painted a terrifying picture of rocks and shadows and desolation. She climbed out onto the roof.

A tile let go. She lost her footing and slid to the edge. She did not make a sound. “Throw the rope,” she whispered to Vitallina. “Dear Mother of God, protect us,” she murmured.

Her assistant tied the rope fast to the window grate and dropped it to her. The Sister Herbalist grasped it. “When I reach the bottom, you follow,” she whispered. She lowered herself to the ground. “Now.”

Just as Vitallina started down, the distant pealing of the convent bell startled them both. “Hurry,” the Sister Herbalist urged.