The Devils of Cardona (4 page)

“It was, Your Excellency, but it would have been worse were it not for Pelagio Calvo. We served together on the Genoese galley
Guzmana
, on Don Juan's right. Calvo and I boarded a corsair ship from the rear in a
longboat. I was shot in the hip while climbing onto the deck. An infidel was about to finish me when Calvo cut him down and lowered me back into the boat. He saved my life.”

“But you
were
wounded.”

“A minor inconvenience that has never interfered with my ability to perform my duties.”

“Then what the army lost the law has gained,” Villareal said graciously, handing him the white baton. “I look forward to your first report.”

Mendoza got up and bowed, and Saravia accompanied him out into the hall.

“This is a very important assignment for you, Mendoza,” he said in a low voice. “The king will be following your investigation personally. Don't fail him. Because if you fail, it means I fail, too.”

“I will do my duty to the best of my ability as always, Your Worship.”

“I don't doubt it.” The president smiled unctuously. “Good luck, Licenciado.”

Mendoza shook the other man's soft white hand. He knew that some benefits from his expedition would have already accrued to Saravia, and as he walked away, he could not help feeling that Saravia would not be entirely disappointed if he never came back.

t the age of thirty-four, Licenciado Bernardo Francisco Baldini de Mendoza could look back on a reasonably successful career within the Hapsburg bureaucracy for the son of an Italian mother and a Granadan silk merchant of converso descent. At the age of seven, he had seen his father accused of Judaizing and forced to spend a year in an Inquisition jail. Though the elder Mendoza was eventually acquitted, the stress provoked a heart attack that killed him, and the family business fell into difficulties. To reduce the economic burden on the family, Bernardo's mother sent him to her brother-in-law's care in Valladolid. His uncle had financed his education and paid for his studies at the University of Salamanca, where he studied for seven years, enough to add the title “Licenciado,” but not “Doctor,” to his name. Though he was considered by his tutors to be an excellent student, too many years of having Latin
beaten into him by his grammar-school teachers had left him with an aversion to academic study, and his early years at the university were tumultuous and disorderly.

In 1569 he left the university as a result of the tavern fight and joined the army, with his uncle's assistance, to escape criminal charges. In his five years in the king's armies, he had fought the Moors in Granada and the Turks at Lepanto, where a musket ball had shattered his left thigh and ended his military career. Had it not been for Calvo, that shot would have ended his life as well. Instead he recovered from his wound and returned to Valladolid, where his uncle persuaded the university authorities in Salamanca that he was a changed man. This was true, because unlike Calvo he had lost his appetite for war and would not have returned to the army even if he'd been able to. He went on to complete four more years of study without incident, at which point his uncle was accused by the Inquisition of secret Jewish worship.

The evidence against him was slim. A disgruntled servant claimed that he wore a white shirt on the Sabbath and refused to eat pork. His uncle denied these charges, but his brother's previous record with the Inquisition worked against him, and he confessed in order to avoid a more severe punishment. His uncle always insisted that the charges were invented by a business rival. He was punished with a large fine that left him without funds to finance the education that might have transformed his nephew into a fully qualified law graduate, or
letrado
. Having spent much of his life trying to rise from the ranks of the lower nobility, his uncle now found himself ostracized and died two years after his appearance at the auto-da-fe broken and bitter.

By that time Mendoza had received his first post as a lawyer at the Granada Audiencia, and he had now been one of the four criminal judges at the Royal Audience and Chancery of Valladolid—the second-highest court in the land after the Council of Castile
—
for nearly four years. This was a long time for a relatively minor position, but it was better than might
have been expected, given his Jewish origins and the sanbenito bearing his uncle's name, which was still kept in the Church of San Ildefonso as a mark of the infamy that was also shared by all his descendants.

Elena, like his mother, believed that he lacked ambition, because some of his fellow students had risen much further and become high-salaried advocates, attorneys and judges in the secular judiciaries or the Inquisition, or they had gone on to become governors and judges in the Indies. Some had risen through their own ability. But too many of them were men like Izarra who had achieved promotions through bribes and family connections or who faked their degrees and called themselves “Licenciado” when they had not even been at university for three years and who had achieved their positions by bowing and scraping to their superiors or taking on cases for the sole purpose of extracting fines that would pay for their rents, their lifestyles and their mistresses.

Mendoza had nothing but contempt for such behavior. If the officials who enforced the king's laws did not obey these laws themselves or used them to their own advantage, he often argued, then there was no reason his subjects should feel obliged to obey them either, and without the law there was nothing to distinguish human society from the beasts of the forest.

Nevertheless these principles were beginning to put a strain on his finances. The cost of living was rising, there were always new taxes to be paid, and it was expensive to keep Gabriel and a housekeeper, in addition to the payments that he sent to his mother. For all these reasons, he was glad of an assignment that might bring him a promotion or a financial reward that did not require him to be corrupt. Even before leaving Saravia's house, he had begun to think about the men he needed. Most of them he could find in Valladolid, but there was one man who would be especially suitable for an assignment like this and who, depending on the weight of his purse and the presence or absence of female company, might be only too glad to accept it. Mendoza had a very good idea where he might be found, and no
sooner had he returned to the Chancery than he dispatched a messenger to find him.

•   •   •

“B
LESS
ME
, Your Reverence, for I have sinned.” Luis de Ventura, former sergeant in the Tercio of Naples, looked expectantly at the abbot, who nodded at him to continue. Ventura began, as he usually did, with the venial sins first. “I have not been to Mass in many months. I have not observed the holy days. I have doubted the existence of God. I have coveted another man's wife. . . .” Ventura reconsidered this. “I have
lain
with another man's wife. I have slept with public women. I have taken pleasure in these things.”

“Well, the devil's temptations wouldn't be tempting if they weren't pleasurable,” the abbot observed.

“I have gambled.” Ventura was getting into his stride now. “I have frequented taverns and brandy houses. I have killed men.”

“To kill in the king's wars is not a sin, my son. The wars of Spain are God's wars.”

“It wasn't only in war, Your Reverence. I have fought in taverns and duels.”

“And when was the last time this happened?”

“A week ago. A man sent two assassins to kill me. They were not men of quality.”

“And why did he do this?”

“He believed that I was having intimate relations with his wife.”

“And were you?”

“I was, Your Reverence.”

“I see.” The abbot sighed wearily. “And so you decided to come here for concealment?”

“No, Your Reverence,” Ventura protested. “I came here to repent! Even though the dogs deserved it.”

“No doubt.” The abbot gave him a skeptical look. “Do you remember when you first came here? You were just eleven. Your parents had high hopes for you, Luis.”

“I know that. God rest their souls.”

“But you disappointed them. And now you are carrying a weight that will only get heavier as you get older. If you want peace, you must surrender yourself to God. Give yourself to him completely and unconditionally. Open your heart, and you will find him willing to embrace you, whatever you have done—and so will we.”

“I will try, Your Reverence.”

“For your penance I would like you to perform some exemplary work. An act of goodness that your parents could be proud of.”

“Here in the monastery?”

“No, Luis. It's easy to be virtuous when virtue is untested. The world is where you belong, not here. When you leave these walls, I want you to devote yourself to goodness and virtue for at least two months. Who knows? It might even become a habit. No drinking. No gambling or fighting. And no women—married or not. Now, go and pray to God for guidance on how to achieve this.”

The abbot made the sign of the cross and blessed him. Ventura kissed his hand and went into the chapel, feeling mildly cleansed. He knelt in front of the altar and tried to pray. Apart from his shoulder-length black hair, he looked the image of piety and devotion in his white tunic and black scapular. Normally the Monastery of Santa María del Parral near Segovia was one of the few places on earth where he felt something like peace. No matter what brought him there, the sight of its ancient sand-colored walls and pink slate roofs rising up in layers above the fruit orchards and vineyards, the rows of trees and the wells and fountains, seemed to him like a vision of earthly harmony each time he saw the place.

In the daytime he liked to wander the gardens and watch the monks or their workers cultivating vegetables or picking fruit, but he rarely spoke to
them. With few exceptions the monks were as thick as shit, and no more thoughtful or intelligent than many unlettered peasants he'd met who had never been anywhere near a church or a monastery. And so although he ate and occasionally prayed with them, he mostly kept his own counsel, either in his cell or walking the grounds and cloisters like a ghost in his own skin.

Now, as he sat alone in the same chapel where Isabel the Catholic had once prayed and which he had first attended when he was only ten years old, his loneliness seemed far more difficult to bear than his sinful life. There'd been a time when his parents had set their hearts on his becoming a Dominican monk and even an Inquisitor, but the spirit had proved weaker than the flesh so often that he had long ago ceased to believe that it could ever be victorious.

Yet he did not believe that he was a bad man, and he had met many men who were considerably worse. The commandments said that he should not covet another man's wife, but sometimes it was difficult to resist, especially when men's wives coveted
him
. The Bible also said that he should not kill, but most of the men who had died at his hands had been Turks, Moors and heretic rebels. And those he'd killed in peacetime had mostly been bad men or men who had tried to kill him. And at least he hadn't killed anyone for money. He had not offered himself as a sword for hire. He had not cheated anyone at dice or cards who did not deserve to be cheated, and he had not robbed anyone.

The abbot was a saintly man who walked in God's path, but he had spent most of his long life in a monastery. Luis, on the other hand, lived in a world whose temptations would have tested the resolve of even the most ardent monk. He could testify from personal experience that not all wars were God's wars. He had seen men behave like beasts, and at times he had behaved like one himself. And even as he prayed for guidance on how to do good, he was not entirely sure if he was capable of it.

By the time he returned to his cell, the brief serenity that always followed confession had worn off, and he lay down on his cot in a state of
restless agitation. Outside, the blue sky was slowly turning red and pink through the grilled window, and the sound of vespers wafting up from the chapel mingled with the songs of the swallows and the deep, heavy notes of the church organ. Normally he liked this time of day, and the chanting stoked memories of the religious fervor that he had once felt when he first came to the monastery, but now he looked at his sword and his short parrying dagger and his two pistols leaning up against the wall next to his saddlebags and boots, and he knew that his refuge could only be temporary. He knew that he could not return to Madrid, at least for a while, because the husband of Ágata Fernández de la Prada was powerful and rich enough to send any number of assassins to hunt him down.

For a man in his position, there were essentially three options apart from the army. He could go to the Indies and seek his fortune, he could take to the roads and become a highway robber, or he could continue to advertise himself as a master of arms and find people rich enough to pay him to teach them to fence
.
But the age of heroes was over, and the days when even the poorest soldier could come back from the Indies bearing cases filled with gold and silver were gone. Now wealth was accumulated slowly, if at all, by farmers, businessmen and administrators who ground their lives away in endless, tedious work that he had neither the patience nor the aptitude for. Robbery was more suited to his abilities. With his skills it would be easy, almost effortless, for him to relieve the first traveler he came across of his possessions and even his life, but the old voice of the would-be knight-errant that he had first encountered in his grandfather's stories still insisted that it was more noble and more honorable to defend the weak and helpless than it was to prey on them.