The Day of Atonement (38 page)

She hit the floor hard. Pain shot through her elbow. And then a rough hand grabbed her hair, pulling her back so forcefully she blacked out for an instant. She felt nothing but sickening confusion and nausea. She was on her back now, her hair wet with Isabela’s blood. Or was it her own? Or was it her vomit? Had she voided her stomach without noticing?

Inácio had her down, pinning her arms to the floor and breathing his fishy breath on her. He smelled of sweat and tobacco. Blood from his arm, the wound she had made, dripped in her eye and stung.

Inácio grabbed the collar of her gown and ripped. Her breasts were exposed, and she felt his hands on her, wet with sweat and her husband’s blood.

He didn’t have his dagger.

She lay very still, willing herself not to feel his rough pawing, while her hands gently searched the floor, feeling through the stickiness, probing around Isabela’s body. And then something hard and cool. Metal. The handle of the dagger.

She sliced through the air. She should have gone for his neck or his face, but she was too afraid. Instead she went for what was closest, the arm she’d already stabbed.

Inácio screamed and fell away from her. Somehow she rose. Her hair was wet with blood. Her breasts were still exposed. Her mouth opened as she screamed and lunged at him again, and she knew she looked like a demon of hell. Even as her mind closed, as reality fell
away, she knew she had to win, and she cried out to him that she
was
a demon of hell, that he had betrayed his oath to Christ, and that Satan was coming for him.

She stabbed at the air, hoping to cut him again, but he jumped back. And then he ran. He found the door, and flung it open, and disappeared into the night.

Roberta slammed the door shut, but she did not move from the front hall. She held the knife, ready for him to come back. She would wait, for he would return, she knew it, and she would kill him, and that would be so much better than going upstairs and finding her husband’s body and facing everything that was to come.

I listened to the story, my emotions ranging from maddening anger to admiration. She had fought off a man who possessed twice her strength. In the direst of situations, she had remained cunning and resourceful. She was a marvel, and I had destroyed everything she held dear.

She was very still after she’d told me what had happened. We remained in that house full of corpses, in a city full of even greater death, and neither of us said a word for I know not how long. Then she spoke again.

“You cheated us.” Her voice was frighteningly controlled. “You stole our money, and you ruined us. I offered myself to you. I gave you my heart, and you trampled upon it.”

“I did. I was deceived into thinking you a villain.”

She pushed herself back, scrambling like a crab in her haste to move away from me. She ignored the pieces of broken glass and brick that cut into her palms. “You make excuses for being a monster?”

“It is what happened. I wish to God it had not, but it did. I can’t change that, but I can help you now.”

“Help me with what?” she demanded. “Burying my husband?”

“I shall help you survive in this ruined city,” I said.

“What do you mean? What ruined city?”

She didn’t know. She had been sitting here for hours, and she hadn’t noticed the quake.

“Roberta, open your eyes. Inácio didn’t make the windows break and the plaster fall from the walls. Look outside. The city has been destroyed by an earthquake.”

She looked around, seeing her surroundings for the first time. Tears rolled down her cheeks. The world had become what she most feared, I realized. It was a place of chaos and disorder, where even the most meticulous care and carefully crafted plans would never provide a safe harbor. Above all else, Roberta wanted stability and safety, and now every last shred of those things had been taken from her. She was lost.

Except that I would not let her be lost. I would save her. She had nothing, and both of us—indeed every person in Lisbon—were now vulnerable in a city that would, over the coming hours, descend into bestial madness. What did Inácio matter when soon this city would be ruled by the desperate and violent, men who would make Inácio seem tame by comparison? I would let him go. I would let Azinheiro go. I would save the people who mattered.

“There are things more important than revenge,” I said aloud.

I rose and walked through the ruins of the house until I found the maid’s room. Two or three plain dresses hung upon her wall. One of them smelled fairly clean, and I brought it to Roberta. “Put this on.”

“Why? What does it matter what I wear?”

I took her by the shoulders and tried to make her look at me. “It matters that you live.”

She laughed bitterly. “You ruin me, then try to save me. You are mad.”

“I have wronged you, and you have come to harm. I cannot undo that, but I can do everything in my power to protect you now.”

She tried to push herself away, but I dug my fingers into her shoulders.
She leveled her gaze at me. “What do you care what happens to me now?”

I nearly told her I loved her, for I was now certain I did. What had stood in my way before? I had loved what was best about her, but I could not love the wily and deceptive Roberta Carver. That woman was a scoundrel, as broken as I was, caring for nothing but money. Now I knew that the Roberta Carver I had pushed away was a fiction. She had broken faith with her husband, certainly, but she had not been a trickster or a thief. I had been drawn to the woman as she was. The things that had repelled me were lies fabricated by Charles Settwell.

Someday, when she was safe, I would tell her this. I did not think she could forgive me, but maybe she would understand. “I was deceived. I hurt you,” I repeated. “Now I pledge my life to see you safe. That will have to be enough.”

I did not intend to go anywhere. I needed Roberta dressed so we could react quickly should we need to, but the streets were the last place I wanted to be. People would be frightened and their actions would be difficult to predict. While she put on the gown, I went to the kitchens, where I found food, water, wine, and ale. These supplies would keep us alive. Unfortunately, we were wealthy in the only way that now mattered in Lisbon. There would be people who would do anything to obtain what we possessed.

I went back to Roberta, who had returned to the floor, her arms wrapped about her knees. I sat beside her. She said, “You are all I have now, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I must accept your help, though I hate you, mustn’t I?”

“You must.”

“What will happen to us?”

“We will survive,” I told her.

She looked out the window, though still seeming not to see any details. “There are so many dead already.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Did they not believe they would survive?”

“They behaved foolishly,” I said. “They made poor choices. They stood when they should have run or ran when they should have stood. We will do none of those things.”

“I suppose I must be grateful, but how can I not hate you?” she asked.

“You may hate me if you like,” I told her. “You may swear to take revenge upon me, and I’ll not resent it nor resist it. I will help you plunge a dagger into my heart if you like, but you must promise not to harm me until you are safe. Once this disaster is past us, then you may do what you like. But not before. Do you promise?”

She nodded.

“Then we shall be well for now.”

The moment I spoke the words, I regretted them, for once more the earth began to shake. The groans of people and buildings and the earth itself echoed throughout the city. Roberta reached for me, but I broke away. I grabbed her wrist and yanked her up, tugging her out of the house and toward the street, which was wide and so the safest place.

Roberta was like a woman asleep. I had to pull her every step of the way. Her glassy eyes turned this way and that and saw nothing. We had hardly crossed the threshold and stumbled out into the street when her house swayed slowly to the left, then violently to the right. It shuddered and then folded in on itself, collapsing in an orderly pile, like a closed book. Only a cough of dust and debris betrayed any sense of violence.

All around us, houses were falling. They vomited stones and tiles and timber. Those buildings that had survived the first quake had been weakened, and now the second quake ripped them apart at their cracks and fissures. I wanted to flee, but there was nowhere to
go, and so I stood in the middle of the street, surrounded by the terrified, the wailing, the desperate and the dead-eyed, holding Roberta, who pressed her face to my chest, while everywhere the buildings of Lisbon came undone like soap bubbles popping in a basin.

The sound was incredible, all of it reverberating across the newly empty spaces. The church at the end of the block buckled. In the distance, another church began to heave back and forth like a pendulum, and then it was gone, as though the earth underneath it had vanished. And far off, the Palace of the Inquisition swayed and began to crack. Under the pressure of its movement, it ejected bricks like a fighter spitting out teeth. The massive structure rocked as though picking up momentum, and the walls began to bend in an almost beautiful rolling motion. Then the Palace, the seat and symbol of the Inquisition’s power in Lisbon, began to fall in upon itself. And Gabriela was within.

The world had turned to chaos, and I knew I needed to impose order and structure. I needed the destruction of the city to conform to my rules. I would not let the end of the world keep me from rescuing Roberta and Gabriela and Mariana. There was confusion and violence and death everywhere, and none of it would stop me. I understood that this was the place and the time I was built for. All my loss and anger meant I belonged here. My broken soul was made for this. I was a devil, and this was the pit. Everything in my life had led me here, to this moment, when the world around me at long last was a fit place in which I might dwell. I had come home.

I took Roberta’s hand and led her down the center of the street, farthest away from falling bricks, and together, with careful and wandering steps, we began to walk.

I guided Roberta through the streets, which were full of the crying, the wounded, and the praying. Twisted bodies lay everywhere. We saw severed limbs and heads, and corpses cut in half. Buildings burned all around us. Fissures had opened in the earth, five and ten and fifteen feet wide, winding their jagged way across streets and under the ruins of houses.

We reached a little garden where strolling
fidalgos
and English merchants had often liked to look upon the rolling hills of the city. Now we stopped to gaze at the wreckage. From our elevated position, Lisbon looked as though it had been blasted by an invading army. Hardly a church or mansion remained whole. Where there once were buildings now was smoldering rubble. Other sections were engulfed in violent flame, and great clouds of smoke and soot lingered in the air. Ironically, to the east the Alfama had taken some damage, but this poorest part of the city was also the best preserved.

A great swell of people moved toward the river. “They’re
trying to escape on ships,” Roberta said. “We should hurry before there is no more room.”

“No,” I said. All of Europe had read of the earthquake in Lima the year before, in which waves had followed the tremors. I would not risk such a fate—not with Roberta. “There are too many of them. There will be chaos and violence, and perhaps even great waves.”

Roberta looked down. “Then all those people will die,” she said.

I followed her gaze to the English quays and the collection of inns and taverns that had been built up around it.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “I believe I have to go down there after all.”

Still holding Roberta’s hand, I made my way down the hill toward the Duke’s Arms. The crowd of people grew thick as I approached the tavern. I pushed and punched by those eager to get on board ships, on barges, on anything that floated.

“You said it was dangerous down here,” Roberta said.

“That’s why we need to be quick. I have to find someone and get him safe.”

“Who?”

“Kingsley Franklin, the man who betrayed my father.”

Roberta studied me. “Why?”

“Because I think he’s sorry for what he did,” I said.

“I don’t understand you at all,” Roberta told me, but offered no more objections.

Pulling Roberta behind me, I entered the Duke’s Arms, which had been shaken in the quakes but was not seriously damaged. Every surface was covered with dust, and a few rafters had fallen from the ceiling. Pots and mugs and food lay on the floor. It looked like a great wind had blown through the common room.

No one was inside but Franklin, who sat at one of the tables, his mug full, his feet up. A grim smile was spread over his ruddy face.

“God took his deuced time, but He got the job done,” Franklin
said. “This city needed a good leveling.” He took a swig from his mug. “You and the lovely lady have earned a drink, I believe.”

I shook my head. “We need to get to higher ground. We should do it soon.”