The Inquisitor's Wife (31 page)

Don Francisco managed a faint grin. “Did he?”

“He wants me to get to know you so that I can inform on you. The Inquisition wants your property and wealth.”

He let go a feeble chuckle. “You’re not telling me anything I haven’t known for some time, my dear.” For a long moment he studied me intently, then spoke again, his tone sharper. “Marisol, the Inquisition will come for you next. Considering that the queen is disposed to listen to Fray Tomás de Torquemada over Fray Alonso…”

“I want to help you,” I said, with half a heart. Yet at the same time, I didn’t know these people very well, and I knew I lacked the resolve to keep their secrets if it meant my father had to die. “But I have to do what’s necessary to free my father. So I don’t think we should meet again, don Francisco. I shouldn’t have come here.”

All trace of humor fled the old man’s features. For a long time, he gazed on me solemnly, sizing me up; I knew he sensed my lack of determination. Finally he answered, “Perhaps not. But I would ask one favor of you.”

I lifted my brows questioningly.

“Honor your mother by finishing her work. See that no statue remains unfinished.”

“Why?” I demanded.

He remained silent.

“But her work is locked up in my father’s house; I can’t get to it.”

A longer pause followed. At last he said, “You’re intelligent enough to figure out a way. And stay on good terms with don Antonio. I’ll make sure he does you no harm.” He paused again. “You alone can finish the work she began for us. But I must know that you are sincere.… You and she never spoke of me or my family?”

“Never,” I said, with a bit of shame. “I … judged her harshly for being a
conversa
. It was cruel of me to do so.”

“I see,” he replied sternly.

Before he could utter the next sentence, I interrupted. “You speak as though my mother’s work were somehow important.”

Don Francisco frowned. “I’ve already told you too much. Any more would put you and us at higher risk. Go home. And if by chance you decide to share this conversation with Torquemada—be aware it’s grounds for
your
arrest, as well. Don’t worry about your father. Just remember … my offer to help you escape still stands.”

I nodded but inwardly had every intention of going to see Her Majesty as soon as I could to beg for my father’s life … and of figuring out the secret that my mother and don Francisco had kept.

Fifteen

On my return from don Francisco’s house, the driver let me out of the unmarked carriage on San Pablo Street a good walk from my house. I was glad he did; the instant I turned the corner onto the Hojeda cul-de-sac, I saw another black carriage waiting in front of Gabriel’s house, this one bearing the standard of the Inquisition—a wooden cross flanked on its right by an olive branch, on its left by a double-edged sword, the whole set beneath the Crown of Spain.

The sight made me quail. I was tempted to turn around and run from it—but the thought that my father waited at the other end of the ride made me steady myself and walk up to it.

Blanca, her eyes starkly wide, stood out in front of the house walls beside Máriam. Her pale features conveyed suspicion. “How can there be
two
carriages for you in one day? And what am I to tell don Gabriel if he returns home and you’re not here?”

I shrugged. “What will you tell the queen, the Inquisition, if I don’t go?”

Máriam stepped up to me and put a tentative hand on my elbow, a bold move for her. “I won’t leave you, doña Marisol.”

“You will,” I said shortly, and not at all nicely, despite her show of loyalty; it was the only way to show her I was serious.

I waited as the driver climbed down and opened the coach door for me. As he helped me inside, I started at the sight of Antonio Vargas, again dressed all in black. The color leached away the ruddiness of his flesh, but not the intensity of his red-gold hair.

“The world is determined to put us together,” he quipped wryly at my dismay, twisting one corner of his mouth to reveal a dimple. He reminded me so much of the old Antonio that I gave a short, humorless laugh despite myself.

But when he offered a hand to steady me as I settled on the seat beside him, I pulled away coldly. “Who sends you?” I demanded.

The light left his eyes. “Fray Tomás de Torquemada,” he answered. “He wishes to question you himself.” He cleared his throat. “My superior, Fray Morillo, has given me leave to attend to Fray Tomás while he is visiting. You’re a person of particular interest to him.”

“Only because don Francisco took a liking to me last night. Torquemada wants his hands on the money.” Anger welled up in me. “I swear to you, he’ll never get his hands on anything belonging to my father.”

Antonio turned his face sharply toward the window. “Ahh, innocent Marisol. Did they not tell you?” He glanced back at me, his lids half lowered with an emotion I decided was shame. “Your father’s property and money has already been seized by the Crown. Even if he’s found innocent, it’s unlikely he’ll see any of it returned.”

The Inquisition had no right to ruin my father’s life forever over a baseless charge. Even the most feared Inquisition in France, a century earlier, respected the accused’s rights. “But that’s impossible! Illegal! Surely Queen Isabel—”

“Isabel knows what is going on,” he said. “She and the king are deeply involved in the workings of the Inquisition.” He focused his eyes on the sights outside the window.

“How can you know that?” I demanded. “The queen is a very pious Christian: She came all the way to Seville in secret to make sure the Inquisition was carried out properly.”

He shrugged. “Believe what you wish, doña.”

“I believe you’re jaded from listening to the Inquisitors. And I believe the queen is a good person who would be scandalized by the greediness surrounding her.”

Antonio shrugged again. We both fell quiet as he again directed his attention outside. I didn’t speak until our carriage pulled alongside the Church of San Pablo.

“So,” I said coldly, “you’ve betrayed me twice.”

He quickly drew his attention back from the scene beyond the window. “I never betrayed you,” he said evenly. “You abandoned me.”

“Liar!” I snapped. “You’re—”

He interrupted. “You never answered my letters. Not one of them—”

I talked over him. “You never sent me any letters. I sent you dozens!”

“—and I returned to Seville to discover you were marrying Gabriel Hojeda. What was I to think, Marisol?” He stopped abruptly as my words registered.

“I told you,” I said heatedly, lowering my voice. “I wrote you and never heard back. So one of us is lying.”

His expression was perplexed. “Or neither.”

That gave me pause. It didn’t matter, I told myself bitterly. I could never love a man who served as Torquemada’s lackey.

We didn’t speak as we rode past the church and through the monastery walls, up to the three-story dormitory near the outbuilding where the Inquisitors worked and where I had met Antonio and the queen. The dormitory windows were still all shuttered, holding in the day’s warmth but not the wafting stench of human waste. It seemed wrong that a building of such graceful design, with its rows of archways and slender turrets, should contain such misery.

Our carriage rolled to a stop in front of the main entrance; a guard hurried over to make sure of our identities and that I was not carrying a weapon. Antonio shouldered a satchel of papers before following me inside the building; I felt both oddly reassured and unsettled that he was accompanying me.

Finally we were allowed to pass beneath the central archway—flanked on either side by a pair of guards—into the prison, where the smell grew so foul I pressed a kerchief to my nose. Antonio seemed not to notice. A guard led us down a broad corridor with doors on either side. Clearly, the rooms had previously served as cells for monks, as the archways above the doors were painted with religious tableaus: the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Assumption of Mary. But now the heavy wooden doors were fortified with black iron bars and padlocks.

Near the end of the hallway, one of the doors sat ajar. Here the guard stopped and gestured for me—but not Antonio—to enter. I felt a thrill of panic. What if I was being tricked—and being arrested now, at this moment?

My nerves weren’t helped by the fact that Fray Tomás de Torquemada was sitting behind a small desk, waiting for me; behind him—as if he needed protection from me, a mere girl—stood a burly man bearing a long sword.

“Come,” Fray Tomás said, in the warmest, most inviting tone he’d used yet. “Please, doña Marisol, come sit and talk with me.” He noted my reaction to the guard standing behind him and gave a short, insincere laugh, more like a bark, as the guard stepped around us to close the door behind us, leaving Antonio standing in the corridor. “Don’t let Ignacio cause you any concern. He’s simply here as a chaperone. Please, sit down.”

Reluctantly I obeyed and sat on the stool across the desk from him.

And he smiled at me, the penetrating, lipless smile of the serpent in Eden. I was surprised yet again by how ugly he was—his tiny eyes embedded in a face full of flesh that looked like a child’s clumsy effort to throw a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel; his nose thick, pockmarked, and shapeless; his head crowned by the coarse, curly silver and brown fringe encircling his grayish white scalp.

“I mean you no harm,” he said pleasantly. “You’re of far too much use to us to be in any danger.”

If he meant to reassure me, he failed; I was more concerned about someone else. “Where is my father, Fray Tomás? What have you done with him?”

“You’ll see him presently.” He leaned forward over the desk, and his homely features shifted from welcoming to subtly intimidating. “First, I have a few questions for you. Remember, I am questioning you as a member of the Holy Office of the Inquisition; if you lie, therefore, you are not only committing perjury, you are endangering your immortal soul.”

I sent up a quick prayer to God, asking that He would protect those I loved from any careless remark I might make, and then braced myself for questions about my family. But Torquemada’s first question caught me off guard.

“How well do you know Antonio Vargas, doña?”

I started, but controlled myself quickly; Torquemada missed none of it. “Not well at all,” I said, feigning more scorn and outrage than I actually felt at the moment. “We played together when we were children. But he went off to university and never communicated with me again.”

“Hmm.” Something I’d said caused a light to flicker in his narrow eyes. “I had heard that he had told you he would marry you when he returned from Salamanca…?”

“That’s true,” I admitted after a pause. “But he stopped writing me a few years ago. Long enough for me to realize that he was a liar.”

“So you have no feelings for him?”

“No,” I said emphatically, cursing my burning cheeks.

He rested his elbows upon the desk, hands folded as if in earnest prayer, and brought his face uncomfortably close to mine; his gaze was breathtakingly cold. “So if you believed him to be guilty of a crime against Mother Church and the Spanish Crown, you would report it to me at once?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, with an ease that made me proud. I neither flinched nor looked away but held his gaze fast, knowing at that instant that I could never do such a thing to Antonio unless he had also committed a heinous crime against humanity. My childhood friend had betrayed me, hurt me—but I had no intention of doing the same to him.

“And you would come tell me if you suspected anyone else of heresy?”

I nodded eagerly.

“Then why,” Torquemada pressed, his tone suddenly icy with contempt, “did you not report your own mother for your entire life?”

I stared at him.

“Her suicide—for that is what rumor says—is itself an admission of guilt,” Torquemada said. “Otherwise, what had she to fear from us? Why kill herself unless she was trying to hide something from us?

“It is your duty, Marisol, to tell us why your mother felt she had to die.”

A clever man, Torquemada. In only a minute, he’d brought me to the edge of tears.

“She drowned accidentally. But of course, anyone with Jewish blood would be afraid of the Inquisition. Her parents were killed by Old Christians.…” The minute the last sentence was out of my mouth, I regretted it.

Another sudden spark in the tiny hazel eyes. “And her parents’ names would be…?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t know. I only know they died violently.”

“A pity,” he responded, in a tone so devoid of feeling it would have been infuriating if it hadn’t been so chilling. “Be that as it may, let me suggest a course of action to you. It seems that Francisco Sánchez has taken a sudden liking to you. That he invited you to his home. Is this not true?”

I became aware of my rapid heartbeat and forced myself to draw a deep breath. I meant no harm to don Francisco or his family, but it was very possible that a spy—even Antonio, despite Torquemada’s attempt to cast suspicion on him—had witnessed the warm exchange between don Francisco and me at the queen’s palace. Or worse, had somehow learned of my visit to his home that very morning. And so I was forced to tell the truth, in hopes of playing along for a little while.

“Yes,” I told Torquemada.

He leaned back, and the ghost of a smile crossed his features.

“I would suggest, doña Marisol, that you consider denouncing don Francisco in order to save your father’s life. We have more than enough evidence to convict your father and sentence him to death. But you could change that—and save your own skin as well—by gathering evidence against don Francisco.”

I struggled to keep my tone from sounding ragged. “What sort of evidence?”

The friar didn’t hesitate. “That don Francisco engages in crypto-Jewish practices. More importantly, that he is funneling large amounts of gold, silver, and gems belonging to himself and other
conversos
out of Seville. And helping fellow
conversos
escape. All these are mortal crimes against church and Crown, punishable by death.”