City of Silver (9 page)

Sor Olga gave the Sister Herbalist a look of patronizing indulgence. “You are letting your hopes get in the way of your judgment. Inez’s words could just as easily mean she was afraid of what she might do to herself.”

“I refuse to believe that,” the priest said softly.

“Then we must find irrefutable proof that you are right,” the Abbess said. “Before the Inquisitor arrives with the Visitador General, we must know exactly who or what took Inez’s life.”

“In just four days,” Sor Monica whispered.

AN HOUR BEFORE the padre delivered the dreadful news to the house of Francisco Rojas de la Morada in the Calle Linares, word of Inez’s death had already crossed the canal to one of the huge
ingenios
.

On her stone balcony, Pilar Tovar sat as she did every evening, waiting for the work of the refinery to stop at eight and for her husband to return to the house. She pondered and prayed for a way to relieve the grief of her maid Rosa over the murder of Santiago. Murder she was sure it was, but no one cared about the stalwart Santiago’s death three weeks ago. Pilar longed to discuss the problem with Beatriz, who had a New World sensibility
and would see a way to solve the problem. Pilar’s heart ached in the absence of Beatriz.

She gazed out on the interior patio below her and saw in her mind’s eye a thousand images of her daughter. Beatriz as a baby, taking her first marionettelike steps, her chubby arms held out stiffly. As a little girl with a crown of white feathers, dancing in her first satin shoes. At thirteen, bowing demurely to the Bishop when he came to bless her the morning before her confirmation. And the desperate young woman shouting and screaming the day her father told her of the man he had chosen to be her husband.

Pilar had no memories of other children. Only the infant ghost. The son. She turned away haunting thoughts—calculations that would tell her how old he would be now. What he might look like. But sadness and loneliness beat in her heart like the pounding of the waterwheel beyond the wall, where the Indians broke down the ore from the mine and prepared it for refining.

At the very beginning of her first pregnancy, her husband had insisted that she go down into the valley of Tarapaya until the birth, but she had been afraid to have her baby alone. She had longed to be in Spain with her mother or Luz, who had nursed her from infancy. Bad enough to give birth without them in this remote place, but to go away even from Antonio?

He could not leave the mine at that time. They had a new overseer, one he was not sure he could trust. As if one could trust anyone with the temptation of all this wealth. Pilar had insisted on staying in Potosí, desperate to have at least Antonio at her side. She dismissed his and the doctor’s predictions as exaggerations meant to convince her to go. What did men know of childbirth? So, their son had been born in this house and had died within two weeks. She found out only later—when she became close enough to other wives to discuss pregnancy—that no European babies survived longer than a month in the thin air of Potosí.

She chewed her knuckles. Pain and remorse gripped her still. She had confessed the sin over and over. Padre Junipero had told her for years that it was a greater sin to hold on to guilt after God had forgiven her.

In fact, God had shown her His forgiveness and meted out His punishment. The gift of forgiveness was Beatriz, whom Pilar had gone down to the benign green valley to have and to raise for the first year of life. The punishment was infection, the crucible of pain that blessedly passed but left her as barren as the Altiplano—useless to give Antonio a son with whom he could face his responsibilities.

She rang the small silver bell she kept in her pocket—three rings to alert poor, bereft Rosa that she needed more of the green Indian tea for her headache, the pain that ebbed and flowed but never completely went away in this thin, unbreathable air.

Antonio, the middle son of a noble but impoverished father, had come to the New World to seek his fortune. There had never been a better place on earth to do so than in Potosí. Pilar had followed him on his great adventure, but today she would trade half of her possessions to live away from the constant pounding of the mill that throbbed in her head. Where was Rosa? If Rosa could not come, then Sagrada or Ascensia should. The hot water was supposed to be always ready. All Rosa had to do was pour it over the leaves. Pilar rang again and, before the icy pinging faded, again.

Sagrada’s small brown face appeared below in the patio at the kitchen doorway. She crossed and stood under the balcony, looking up at her mistress. Fear showed in her dark eyes, but greater fear than of having been late with the tea. Fear for Pilar, not of her.

“What is it?” Pilar demanded.

“Rosa says—” She broke off her sentence, as she always did when speaking Spanish. “A boy was walking with the priest . . . Rosa was coming from the Plazuela Arche with the meat—”

“What did she say?” The throbbing in Pilar’s head put a sharp edge on her voice.

“She heard a boy tell Padre Junipero that Alcalde Morada’s daughter Inez is dead.”

Pilar gasped. “Dead? Is she sure?” It could not be.

“Yes,” Sagrada said. “They saw Padre Junipero running toward the convent.”

God forgive her, Pilar gave no thought to Inez. The shock of the news flamed into terror. Beatriz! A plague! If some disease was in the convent, it could kill Beatriz. She thought to send Sagrada to fetch Antonio, but she ran herself. Her cousin, her sister-in-law, and three nephews had died the year before in a plague in Spain. Suppose it had come here? She sped down the stairs to the door that led to the mill, a door she never passed through because it was considered unseemly for a woman to show herself in such a place. She flung it open.

What she saw in the gray light of that dusk was what she had seen many times through the jalousies of her window above, but never in twenty years at eye level. Indian men, their heads bowed with fatigue, arriving from the mine with donkeys and llamas laden with leather bags of ore. Pilar picked her way among them. Their astonished faces looked away from the Spanish woman who wore not even a shawl over her hair.

Domingo Barco—the handsome, always so polite and deferential overseer—came and blocked her way. “My lady!” he exclaimed. “What can I do? Please go back into your house. I will help you if you have any errand here.”

“I must speak to the Captain immediately.” She was breathless from the small exertion in the rarefied air.

Barco grabbed an Indian by the shoulder. “Go and bring Captain Tovar here at once.” Then he raised an arm to block Pilar’s path and indicated the door with his other hand. “If you will only return to the house, Doña Tovar, I will send the Capitán to you at once.”

She stood there, unwilling to push past her husband’s overseer but unwilling to obey him, either. In the awkward silence between them, the braying of the mules and the bursts of Quechua and Aymara spoken by the Indians hung in the air.

“Please, my lady—” Barco began.

“I heard you,” she said. They were the words and the tone her daughter used when she meant to defy her. Barco did not press her further.

They both saw Antonio, the red plume on his hat blowing in the wind, striding across the yard. His approach made further argument unnecessary.

He accepted the greetings of the workers, grinned at the children, showing white, even teeth and a glint of mischief in his eyes that had stirred her sex when she first saw him and still did whenever he entered her bed. Theirs had not been a marriage of dutiful coupling through a slit in the sheet, as her mother had taught her to expect. In the daylight, they never spoke of the passion of their nights, but it buoyed all that passed between them.

Nevertheless, Antonio’s winning smile disappeared when he saw her standing there in the
ingenio
yard behind Barco, who still posed, arms outstretched, like an actor declaiming a verse in a play on the feast of Corpus Christi.

“Captain,” she addressed her husband, her lover, “I must speak with you most urgently.”

Without a word, Antonio swung his black alpaca cape off his shoulders and used it to cover her. He dismissed Barco with a look and hurried her through the door back to the patio of the house. “What is the meaning of such behavior? Do not tell me this has something to do with your notions about the supposed murder of Santiago Yana.”

“Inez de la Morada is dead.” She watched his face.

A cloud of fear passed his eyes before the heat of anger returned. “How can you know such a thing?”

“The maids.”

He accepted her answer immediately, as she knew he would. The maids knew everything. And they were never wrong.

He raised his hand to stop her next words, ushered her into his study, and sat her in the carved wood and tooled leather chair where Domingo usually sat when they discussed men’s affairs.

“What do you know about how the Morada girl died?” he asked her. His face revealed consternation but little sadness over the death. He and Morada had been enemies too long for him to mourn even such an event. Morada had killed his brother in the vicuña war, shortly after Pilar arrived from Spain, on that awful day when the men of Potosí, the Basques against the other Spaniards, went out—like knights in some pageant, plumes bobbing and armor shining—to the field of San Clemente to fight the battle that had decided nothing but at least exhausted them into an uneasy peace. Jorge, Antonio’s younger brother, wounded and knocked to the ground by Morada, had begged not to be finished off until a priest heard his confession. Priests had been running back and forth on the field of battle, trying to reach the dying, anointing, praying. The weeping Antonio had found one and brought him to Jorge, but too late. The brother Antonio had sworn to his parents he would protect died without confessing. Antonio had attacked Morada in revenge, but Morada protested he had not slain the unshriven man, that Jorge had died of the blow already inflicted in battle. Later, however, when they prepared Jorge’s body for burial, they found two wounds on it. Hatred had festered between Morada and Antonio forever after.

“My husband,” Pilar said, “I am afraid there could be a plague in the convent.”

Antonio dismissed the idea with the back of his hand. “One dead girl does not constitute a plague.”

“Let me bring Beatriz home. Please, Antonio.” She never
called him by his given name except in their bed, when the curtains were drawn. “Please tell her she does not have to marry Rodrigo. Let her come home.”

He paced in front of the painting that hung behind his desk—the Virgin de Cerro, the Madonna whose robes took on the conical shape of the mountain of silver to the south of the city. The picture had disturbed Pilar since he had first brought it into the house. To her, it symbolized a confusion of love of God’s Mother and faith in silver. Antonio called his refinery Ingenio de Corpus Christi. Was his devotion divided between God and Mammon? Or were they one in his mind?

“Do you remember when I awoke shouting from my sleep last night?” she asked.

He stopped moving and turned to her. “Yes,” he said softly. He had taken her in his arms and soothed her until her heart stopped palpitating from the fear. Then he had made it beat even harder with passion.

“I dreamt of two dead girls. One must have been Inez. I am terrified the other will be Beatriz. I cannot lose her.” She stood and grasped the side of the heavy table between them. “You must relent. You must.”

“You are becoming overwrought.” He came to her, touched her shoulders, and pressed her back into the chair. “When Easter week and the celebrations for the arrival of Visitador General Nestares are over, you must go to Miraflores and stay in the valley for a rest.”

Anger flared in her. She fought it down. She defied him in as sweet a voice as she could muster. “I will not leave, and I will not let you change the subject. I do not need a trip to the lake. I need my daughter. I will not see her perish in a plague.” Tears welled, unwanted, in her eyes.

He sat next to her and took her hand. There were splatters of reddish brown water on his white hose. “Then persuade her to marry Rodrigo de Villanueva y Silva. You have not even
tried. If you supported the match, she would have accepted it by now.” His voice was soft, but he held his shoulders stiffly in that way he always did when he was completely determined.

“You are unfair, my husband. I did urge her, in my own way. You credit me with having more control over her than I do.” She did not admit that her efforts had been halfhearted. She did not know this Rodrigo. She was not at all sure he was the kind of man for her daughter.

He raised one eyebrow and gave her a sardonic smile. “It is your own fault that Beatriz is so willful. You insisted that we send her to learn to read and write.”

“All the modern girls learn those things. I wanted her to have what they have.”

“Yes, and now she is beyond the control even of her father. She is seventeen. This is the year she should become betrothed. And yet she defies me. I cannot even talk to her without her flying off into a tantrum.”

“You do not approach her the right way.”

He leapt to his feet. “Are you questioning me? Do you criticize me, woman? Does a father have to follow a protocol when he speaks to his own child?”

She put up her hand, wanting to touch and soothe him, but she knew he would not accept that. He never understood his daughter’s emotions. He tried to reason with her, as if the choice of a man to marry were some engineering problem or an equation about how much mercury to put with the ore to extract the silver. It was always like that when their daughter became distressed. Beatriz would be sobbing in desolation, like a person vomiting, and he would try to talk practicalities to her and end up upsetting her even more. And Pilar would watch and weep and wonder why anyone would try to reason with someone who is vomiting.

She had to make him see that this recent defiance was more
than a girl’s stubbornness. Should she betray Beatriz’s secret? She must. A betrayal would be better than allowing her to perish of some plague in that convent. “She is in love with Domingo Barco. She says she will not marry anyone but him.” Pilar bit her lips and hoped she had not misspoken.