City of Silver (38 page)

A cracking noise from above stopped Vitallina at the edge of the roof. “It is giving way. The window ledge is rotted,” the big woman whimpered. “I cannot do it.”

“Close your eyes,” Sor Monica whispered. “I will come to help you.” She grasped the rope and started to climb. The wood above gave a great crack and sounded as if it would have split if Monica had not dropped immediately to the ground.

“I am going back,” Vitallina called. “I cannot do it.”

“Please, you must come with me. I hardly know my way around the town. I have never been out alone.”

“Forgive me.” Vitallina had already climbed back to the window.

As Monica waited bereft at the bottom of the outside wall, the rope was pulled up and then dropped back down. At the end of it was the cloth bag containing the dead cat and a packet of ground red pepper, as if they were the ingredients for a bizarre stew. The window closed.

Monica stood there motionless for the space of a credo. At last, she recovered her own resolve. She took the bag, ran across the Campo del San Clemente, and slipped away into the night.

THE ALCALDE WAS relentless. He was the most powerful, the richest man in the richest city on earth. He had amassed a king’s ransom. He had tracked the infamous Chocta, found and arrested hundreds of wily Mestizos. No mere silly girls in the company of some effeminate swain would elude him.

That interfering youth’s friends—typical of their thin noble blood—ran off once they saw they were outnumbered. The priest might know where the girls had gone, but the Alcalde’s guardsmen had come to the point of almost drowning him in the frigid river that powered the mills and still he would not talk. They finally gave up and threw him into the water to certain death.

The Alcalde sent his men to all parts of the city to look for the girls and their protector. In the meanwhile, Morada set out to learn the identities of those young serenaders. They were strangers to him and therefore most likely had entered the city this morning with Nestares.

A place under the Alcalde’s heart trembled, a tiny place that seemed like the center of his anger, the source of his rage and power. His essence was evaporating. His life could be over.

But Spanish men did not think such thoughts. The sons of Conquistadores were fearless.

The Alcalde gripped the hilt of the sword at his side and with the captain of his guard, his stalwart Carlos, awaited news of the whereabouts of his daughter and her naughty friend.

He did not have to wait long.

BEATRIZ AND GEMITA waited in the upper room where the Marquesa had left them. Beatriz examined the appointments. The house was all luxury. She ran her fingers across the polished
surface of a beautiful Flemish desk. She picked up a Venetian glass bottle and opened it. It held the same perfume from Arabia that scented the tall stranger’s beautiful taffeta cloak, which lay now over the couch where Gemita reclined.

“I think this is the antechamber to his bedroom,” Beatriz said. She opened the
armario
that stood next to the door. It contained a man’s clothing. “Look at this beautiful English hat.” She took it out and put it on.

“I wouldn’t wear a Protestant hat.” Gemita still dabbed at her nose with the stranger’s linen-and-lace handkerchief.

Beatriz wished she had been the one to receive it. It would be wrong, but she wanted to keep it, as a token of him. “He must look so dashing in this hat,” she said wistfully.

Gemita sat up. “I thought you were in love with Domingo Barco.”

“That’s silly. Where would you learn such a thing?”

“From Inez. He was her lover. He told her that you fancied yourself in love with him.”

Beatriz ignored the flush that rose from her chest to her throat. “That is nonsense.” She doffed the hat, swept it across her body, and bowed in the fine gesture of a cavalier. “I would rather be in love with a handsome stranger who smells of perfume from Araby.” His voice. In the shadowy streets, she had not seen him clearly, but she knew his voice from somewhere.

Gemita tucked his handkerchief in her sleeve. “What is going to happen to us?”

Beatriz put down the hat. The packet of letters was still tied to her waist with the green ribbon. She undid it. “I don’t know. We must get these letters to the Visitador. They are the only proof that the Abbess is innocent.” A plan began to form in her mind.

“Do you think the Marquesa’s nephew will come back for us,” Gemita asked, “and help us take the letters to Nestares?”

“He doesn’t know about the letters.” A nasty suspicion ambushed Beatriz. Suppose that tall, graceful man owed allegiance
to the Alcalde. Suppose he had brought them here to keep them out of the way. They would fall into the same trap they hoped to escape. “We must leave here now, Gemita. It is nearly dawn. We must take these letters and go directly to the Visitador.”

“Are you crazy? Two girls cannot go out in the dark alone.”

Beatriz took the hat and put it on Gemita’s head. “We will not be two girls.”

They stripped to their fine linen undergarments and took the stranger’s clothing out of the
armario
. Their breasts were already bound according to the fashion of the day to make them appear flat-chested. They put on tunics and Neapolitan hose and shoes, doublets, and mail shirts. Gemita refused the English hat, which Beatriz gladly wore, giving her friend a good Spanish one of white beaver. They took two fine Toledo swords, stout bucklers, and pistols for each, which neither knew how to operate.

“Everything is too big, especially the gloves and shoes,” Gemita complained.

“Pull the belt tight, like this. Here.” She knotted a sash snugly around Gemita’s waist, took a pair of stockings from the
armario
shelf, and shoved them into the toes of the boots. She shoved the packet of letters inside her own coat, then slipped out into the dark corridor. Gemita followed.

The house was silent, but just as they reached the top of the stairs, a sudden pounding sounded at the postern, raising the hall servant, who shouted up the steps, “My lady . . . my lady. It is the Alcalde and his guard.” The Marquesa was nowhere to be seen.

“My father!” Gemita’s voice shook.

Beatriz pushed her back through the room where they had dressed and into the adjoining bedchamber. Then she tore a sheet from the bed, tied it to the bedpost, and threw it out the window. While the Alcalde and his henchmen swarmed over the house, the girls they sought slid down the sheet to the roof of a stable and thence to the street.

Once outside, they had no idea where to go. In an hour or so they could go to the Alcaldía to find Nestares. Until then, where could they shelter themselves?

They moved quickly away from the Marquesa’s house around to the Calle Zarate. At the deserted corner of the Calle de Santo Domingo, they encountered a cart heaped with skulls, left from the penitential parades of Good Friday.

“We have to go where boys go and pray we are not discovered,” Beatriz whispered.

They made their way to the Tianguez, where vendors, scriveners, and sextons gathered during the day and where the bullfighting ring was erected during Christmas. Beatriz had always imagined it was where young men congregated while good girls were safe behind the draperies of their beds.

In the dark of this awful night, the square was deserted. The weak moonlight and the torches burning on the buildings cast grotesque shadows. A shutter flapping in the wind thudded and echoed off the façades of the dark buildings. The girls went to warm themselves near a dying bonfire. They barely spoke. Beatriz patted Gemita’s shoulder from time to time while they huddled inside their heavy masculine cloaks and waited.

Suddenly, just as dawn was breaking, three men entered from the Calle de Copacabaña. They drew their weapons and charged toward the two slight young boys who lingered beside the near dead embers in the corner of the square.

AT DAWN, THE bell ringing resumed, continuing the festival to welcome Nestares. The church wardens around the city were taking their turns so that from first light until midnight, the sound of bells could be heard.

Just as the pealing started, stern soldier-priests entered the secret prison near the Augustinian monastery and unchained the Abbess of the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros and her sister accused. They took the two frightened women to join the procession along the Calle Zarate to the Church of Santo Domingo. Though the Inquisitor General de la Gasca was a man of severely simple and elegant tastes, he had approved this pomp and ostentation for the opportunity of making an impression on the popular mind. The faithful must be shown the rewards of goodness and the punishment of evil.

Seven Potosino noblemen led the parade, richly dressed, mounted on white horses, and carrying palms of victory. Behind them were the Inquisitor and the officers of the Tribunal, followed
by Commissioner DaTriesta and his prisoners, guarded by armed and armored priests.

Maria Santa Hilda walked beside Sor Eustacia and sought to bear the yellow robe with dignity. She held her head high and forced herself to look at the buildings and into the eyes of the observers as she passed. Blessedly, at this early hour, on the morning after raucous reveling, the streets were nearly empty.

The Abbess gazed up at the Cerro, barely visible against the dark gray sky. When she had first arrived in the City of Silver, that same year, a large earthquake had destroyed almost the entire city of Cuzco and its surroundings. The night of the earthquake, a ball of fire appeared in Potosí, coming from the hills of Caricari and exploding at the summit of the Muynaypata with such force that it shattered all the pines and knocked down the Indian ranches on the bordering hills. If such an event happened now, what would these men who accused her make of it? That God’s wrath was warning them that they threatened two innocent women? No. They would see in it more proof that these women were instruments of Satan who placed the faithful on the brink of eternal damnation.

When the marchers reached the church, Maria Santa Hilda took Sor Eustacia to a corner and tried to comfort her. In these past two days, the Abbess had come to believe that Eustacia’s silence and devotion, which the Abbess had always admired, covered a reservoir of anger hotter than the ovens that smelted the ore, in danger of exploding, like the volcanic mountains out in the cordillera. The Abbess understood some of the ingredients of Eustacia’s boiling cauldron of rage, and she forgave her, but she wondered why, with all that she herself had suffered, she was not mad as well.

Meanwhile, in the main part of the church, the trial of some priests proceeded quickly. From what the Abbess could hear, they were accused of solicitation—the crime of seducing women
in the confessional. Presently, five friars left the main church, passed through the vestibule, and exited by the street door. Their hoods covered their faces, and their arms were folded into their sleeves. The cords that they ordinarily kept about their waists were hung around their necks to indicate their guilt. They seemed strong and young, but they marched gravely behind a solemn friar whose face was also covered but who had the frail step of an old man and wore his cord around his waist.

DaTriesta came to usher the Abbess and Sor Eustacia before the Tribunal. His long arms gestured dramatically, as if he were preparing for the dance of the Moors and the Christians.

The two women entered the main church, where three Inquisitors sat on a dais under a canopy of green velvet lined with blue silk, making it seem as if they were under a perpetually sunny sky. A life-size crucifix hung from the shallow dome above them. The table in front of them was covered with the same green velvet trimmed in blue. Candles burned at either end, and there was a large tome covered in green leather tooled with gold. Except for de la Gasca, who sat in the center, the seated men were strangers to Maria Santa Hilda. The thin, pale ascetic on the right reminded her of her father’s confessor—a severe and humorless man. He glanced at her and turned away in disgust, as if she were a plate of mutton that he found greasy and unappetizing. On the left sat a heavy, sweating man with a black stubble of badly shaved beard, jet eyes in his fleshy face. He was probably more interested in his next meal than he was in her guilt or innocence. In the center, the dangerous de la Gasca—perfectly groomed, with his beautiful complexion and an expression completely devoid of emotion. His mind was sharp and precise, like the movements of his thin, immaculate hands as they arranged the pen and inkstand before him. He was a man who saw a straight line between right and wrong, like the perfect seams in the black and white marble squares beneath the
Abbess’s feet. He looked at the Abbess, and she saw doom in his eyes.

THE TRIBUNAL THAT prepared to judge the Abbess would have immediately arrested Sor Monica for witchcraft had they found her where she hid in the Jesuit cemetery under a cape, with a dead cat and some hot pepper in a bag. The beads she fingered, the prayers on her lips, would have only incriminated her more. Her one hope would have been to be considered mad rather than evil. She was not sure herself.