City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “What about the silver we put in the convent for safekeeping?”

  “It is already gone.”

  She gripped her chair. “And the ingots you hid in our bed?”

  “They are Beatriz’s dowry.”

  “Barco would not require a dowry.”

  He blew out an exasperated breath. “I told you not to even speak of that,” he growled. “Beatriz must marry Rodrigo. It is our only hope.”

  “Because he is rich? Can he save us?”

  “He is not only rich. He is the Viceroy’s nephew. He can protect me from prosecution.”

  “Prosecution?” Alarm tightened her grip on her chair.

  “For the debt I owe the King. You don’t understand, Pilar. They are saying Nestares is coming to investigate the false money, but he will be much more powerful than that. He comes as Visitador General. He will be able to have anyone thrown into jail, even executed, simply by shouting an order from his balcony.”

  “Why would he want to do such a thing to you? What have you done?” She was rigid with fear.

  Antonio came and knelt at her side. “I have done nothing. But times are turning even more dangerous and nasty than before, Pilar. Nestares will have to show that he is controlling the problem. He will be a very dangerous man. And the Inquisitor is coming, too. Both of them arriving together means the King is doing the utmost to show his power and exert complete control over Potosí.”

  “You once told me miners had royal protection from such things.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “And how will Rodrigo save us from Nestares if he is in Lima?” It was one of the reasons she had not supported his suit. She did not want Beatriz to live so far away.

  “Rodrigo is here right now,” Antonio said. “He arrived two days ago with dispatches from the Viceroy.” He put an arm around her in a gesture he had never made before in daylight. “May I introduce him to you? Will you convince Beatriz of the importance of this match?”

  She laid her hand on the embroidered breast of his doublet. “Let me meet him.” She prayed to the God whose houses she had visited all morning not to force her to choose between Beatriz’s future happiness and Antonio’s.

  Five

  FRAY UBALDO DATRIESTA saluted Padre Junipero Pimentel cordially as they passed each other in the Plaza Mayor. The local Commissioner of the Inquisition pretended not to notice the grief in the eyes of the Jesuit who hurried toward the Calle Linares. DaTriesta needed no explanation for the priest’s pained expression. Word of Inez’s death had come to him almost immediately from his source within the convent. He thanked his God that the Jesuit, not he, carried the dreadful news to Alcalde Morada.

  In gratitude to his God, and under His gaze, the pious Commissioner of the Holy Tribunal dropped small coins into the outstretched hands of two beggars on the cathedral steps—Doña Clara, the ragged former courtesan, and the nameless mad, bearded hermit who mumbled to a human skull he had been carrying through the streets of Potosí for twenty years. It was edifying for the populace to see this poor creature constantly contemplating mortality. The Commissioner placed an extra coin in the hermit’s filthy hand. “Yes, my son,” he said. “Keep your soul always ready for God’s judgment and continue to remind other sinners of death’s ever-present threat.”

  From an Indian woman who sat impassive with her dirty children on the doorstep, DaTriesta bought a candle decorated with red-and-green scrolls and a cross of silver foil. He swung open the thick oak door of the cathedral. The beauty and grandeur of the Mother Church immediately enveloped and soothed him. The sweet scent of incense and a hundred burning beeswax candles. Mellow chanting of monks reverberated in the vault of the nave. The faithful murmured the Stations of the Cross in the side aisles. Soft, warm light glowed on the gold-leafed altars and pure silver candelabra. The red sanctuary lamp guarded the presence of the Holy Sacrament in the tabernacle. Serene faces gazed down on him from statues and paintings of the saints and God’s Holy Mother. In this perfectly ordered world, joy swelled his heart. Unlike the sinkhole of chaos and depravity that surrounded it, God’s house was all beauty and tranquillity.

  He took holy water from the font near the door and blessed himself. Kneeling before the painting of Saint Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin, he lit and placed his candle in the wrought-iron stand. He spoke in his heart to his own mother in heaven, one of those few chosen women who had the grace to rise above her sex. Unlike the hypocrites who called themselves ladies and looked down their noses at her, she attained, poor woman that she was, the true nobility of saintliness. Uncomplaining in her suffering, she instilled in him the faith and devotion that were the mainstays of his life. I will not fail you, Mother, he whispered to her in his heart. After touching again the candle as he wished he could touch her dear hand, he stood and bowed and turned away.

  At the front of the church, he genuflected as he passed the main altar. He continued through a side door into the vestry, where he expected to find the Bishop preparing for the benediction service. Instead, three young priests, four altar boys in miniature clerical garb, and a gaggle of musicians carrying guitars, mandolins, and flutes awaited the Bishop’s arrival.

  “Finally,” José, the tall, skinny sacristan grumbled from the door to the street.

  DaTriesta looked out. The Bishop’s gilded carriage, with the Villaumbrosa coat of arms on the door, came clattering down the paving stones. It was one of His Grace’s most annoying affectations that except for solemn processions, he would not walk through the streets. He always rode in his coach, even the few steps from the door of his residence around the corner to here. What would the Bishop’s father, the Duque de Villaumbrosa, think of this scene? The coach that bore his insignia and his illegitimate son was pulled not by four handsome horses, but by mules, which though inelegant had the stamina to survive such heavy work in this rarefied climate. The Duque’s bastard emerged and strode majestically into the building. “Forgive me, Brothers,” he said without a hint of regret, “I was unavoidably detained.” He scowled at DaTriesta and deposited his cloak on the long arm of the long-suffering sacristan.

  “A brief word, my lord Bishop,” DaTriesta whispered.

  The Bishop gave him an exasperated look but demurred.

  DaTriesta drew him out of earshot of the others. “Padre Junipero is at this moment taking shocking news to Morada.”

  The Bishop raised a gray, unruly eyebrow.

  “Inez de la Morada is dead.” The Commissioner paused while the Bishop blinked and sucked air in surprise. “She took her own life.”

  The Bishop’s eyes glazed over with shock. “How do you know this?”

  “She was found dead in her cell with the door barred.” He did not add that the disgusting little virago was naked at the time.

  His Grace remained stupefied. “How do you know this?”

  “God is all-seeing, Your Excellency, and we servants of His Holy Tribunal, in our efforts to be God-like, seek also to be all-seeing.”

  The Bishop curled his lip and moved to open an ornately carved wardrobe door and began to don the vestments for the service. “This is dreadful news,” he said mechanically as he pulled an alb of rich Venetian lace over his head and tied a silk cord at his thick waist.

  “Dreadful, yes,” the Commissioner said softly, “the loss of a soul—always painful, very painful. But—” He paused to make sure he had the Bishop’s full attention.

  “Go on,” the Bishop said impatiently. He drew a long, narrow silk stole from a shelf, kissed the cross embroidered in its center, and placed it around his neck.

  “Maria Santa Hilda intends to give the Morada girl a Christian burial despite her apparent suicide. This may be the opening we need to rid our city of the meddlesome Abbess once and for all.”

  The Bishop donned the chasuble and over it swung a heavily brocaded cope, which he fastened at his neck. He pulled DaTriesta farther into the corner. “Are we sure the girl took her own life? Are we sure about the burial?”r />
  “Reasonably. More information will come out. They will, of course, inter the body as quickly as possible, and if the Abbess errs in this matter, we have her.”

  The Bishop looked intrigued but hesitant. “If we know she is about to err, is not our first duty to prevent the sin rather than stand by and watch her commit it so we can punish her for it?”

  DaTriesta could not believe his weakness. “She is a very dangerous woman. You yourself have told me about her questionable opinions. Remember how she instigated those women to ostracize Don Fulgencio when he took the life of his wayward daughter and her lover. The man was within his rights. Our Holy Roman Catholic Majesty’s kingdom is vast and cumbersome. Here on the outskirts of the empire, where there are more dancing schools and gambling houses than churches, we must be doubly vigilant against wrong thinking such as Maria Santa Hilda’s. When Satan worms his way into the empire, he will choose just such a vulnerable place as this. The purity of the Faith is paramount.”

  The Bishop put on a magnificent cross encrusted with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. He handed DaTriesta his miter and bowed while the Commissioner placed it on his large but apparently empty gray head. “That does not mean we must abandon civilized behavior,” the smug Bishop said. “I insist you go and speak to the Abbess tomorrow, before the burial.” Crowned with the miter, the Bishop had let his voice become annoyingly authoritative.

  DaTriesta did not have to obey. He was answerable only to the Grand Inquisitor in Lima, not to this noble son born on the wrong side of the sheets. The Bishop was not debauched and riotous like so many who gratified their desires through an ecclesiastical career far from the seat of power, but he was idle, worldly, and self-indulgent. DaTriesta bowed to him. “And if I warn the Abbess and still she goes ahead? Then will you cooperate in her prosecution?”

  “Maria Santa Hilda has the highest pedigree of anyone in Perú. She is first cousin to the Marqués of Catera, to the Count of Villafranca, and also to Juan Ponce de Léon, a distant relative of my own. We must be careful with one who is so powerfully allied.”

  “She will never use those connections. She has severed those ties forever. You know that.”

  The Bishop moved toward the others waiting near the arch leading to the sanctuary. “Speak to her tomorrow morning. I insist. If our paternal warnings do not dissuade her, we shall be obliged to put the yellow robes of the heretic on her.” He gave the signal, and a young man holding a tall gold-and-silver crucifix opened the small door to the main church. The musicians fell into line and struck their instruments. Somber music filled the small vestry and opened to a huge echo as the players exited under the stone arch. The altar boys swung their censers; clouds of sweet, pungent blue smoke billowed forth. The Bishop adjusted his miter, firmly grasped the golden shepherd’s crook that was the symbol of his authority, and followed the deacons into the cathedral.

  DaTriesta went out and took a place in the first pew and prayed. He basked in the glory of the ritual, forcing himself to separate the holy ceremony from the unworthy man who performed it. Eventually, sentences he would have to say to Mother Maria Santa Hilda began to form in his mind and interrupted his thoughts of God.

  PADRE JUNIPERO PRAYED unceasingly as he made his way to the Casa de la Morada in the Calle Linares. He had lingered too long on his knees before the statue of Santa Isabella in the dark, deserted convent church, listening to the muffled chanting of the nuns, struggling to banish from his mind the powerful image of Inez’s corpse. Finally, totally unprepared to break the news to the Alcalde but driven to escape the scene of Inez’s strange, troublesome death, he had set out on his grievous mission.

  His pace slowed as he rounded the corner of the Calle Zarate, where he met a train of llamas carrying the last silver to the Mint. Work would stop now for the Easter holiday and for the festival in honor of Visitador Nestares.

  Each beast bore up to two hundred pounds, yet they stepped gracefully along between their flanking guards. Would that he could bear his own burden so lightly. But unlike the Lord’s beasts, men must endure the pain of consciousness and conscience.

  The Alcalde, who had always respected the padre, had been angry and vindictive the last time they had talked. He had blamed Padre Junipero for Inez’s flight to the convent. Evidently, she had told her father that the priest urged her to live her life at the highest level, but Padre Junipero had not urged Inez into the convent. In fact, it had never occurred to him that she would contemplate such a move. He had been as surprised as anyone when the girl had presented herself there. In fact, Inez had never discussed her intentions with him, not even in confession. Until the Abbess told him Inez was in the convent, he would have doubted the girl’s commitment to a spiritual life. He had sensed a wrestling within Inez’s soul. He never succeeded in learning what it was she struggled with, but whatever it was, she was settling it now before the Almighty.

  Had the girl perhaps taken her own life? Sor Olga was right—Inez’s note could be interpreted either way. But that seemed impossible. The taboo against such an act was so strong. Besides, when she had confessed after entering Los Milagros, she had told him that she wanted to repent for the sins of the world. Her eyes were clear and earnest, her countenance luminous with the peace of true contrition. She would never have committed the ultimate sin. The passion of her dedication burned away any doubt.

  “Is there more you want to tell Our Lord?” he had asked her in that last confession.

  He had seen her shy smile in the dim light of the confessional. “Not if you must hear it, too, Padre.”

  “The impression you make on God’s poor servant is nothing. What is important is the impression you make on Him. Make a good confession, my child.”

  “Give me penance as if I had committed the worst sin you can think of,” she had said. “Perhaps the grace I receive from it will give me the courage to tell you everything the next time.”

  He had given her passages from the scriptures to contemplate and admonished her to mortify her flesh as was seemly during the holy season of Lent. He had felt safe in the knowledge that she was intelligent and serious. Whatever troubled her would come out, and he would help her rid her soul of it. Now, it was too late. He had failed her in the most important task she had asked of anyone.

  By the time he reached the Casa de la Morada at the angle of the Calle Linares and the Calle de la Paz, his pace had slowed to a funeral march.

  A man leaving the Alcalde’s house greeted him, and distraught as he was, the priest responded without recognition until the man had mounted his mule and ridden off. Only then did Padre Junipero realize it had been Domingo Barco, the mayordomo of Tovar’s refinery. Strange that he was at Morada’s. Morada and Beatriz’s father were sworn enemies. And Barco was a Mestizo—a group Morada was well-known to despise.

  The priest approached the Alcalde’s enormous wooden door. It was studded with bronze nails and framed in stone carved with rosettes and garlands, with a coat of arms on the lintel. Though Morada lacked noble blood, like many of his rich compatriots in this city, he had invented this insignia over his portal to give an aristocratic air to the house. In truth, an ancient coat of arms was the only thing the Alcalde’s lordly mansion lacked.

  Nothing grew or was manufactured in Potosí. The city produced only silver, but for a hundred years it had done so in such quantities that all other products flowed in, making its market the best supplied in the Americas. Stuffs arrived by mule and llama pack either through Lima as the law allowed or smuggled through the back door from the Atlantic ports in Brazil or Buenos Aires. Men like Morada, who had the cleverness to bring in goods, earned a return of as much as a thousand percent and made themselves richer even than the miners. It would be easy to condemn such a man for his well-known vanity, but the priest who entered under the red shield, which bore a Maltese cross and two lions, held nothing but pity for the coming grief of the rich commoner who pretended to nobility.

  Immediately inside was a torchlit entrance pa
tio, a kind of waiting area for petitioners who came to beg favors or entreat justice from the Alcalde. Four Indian men and a woman sat on benches, hoping for an audience. The woman wore a battered cavalier’s hat and had fallen asleep with her chin on her chest.

  The square space open to the sky, the brick paving overlooked by shuttered windows, reminded the priest of another such place and brought him a new mea sure of pain. “Give me penance as if I had committed the worst sin you can think of,” Inez had said. He himself had committed the worst sin he could think of, and he had done so in a place very like this, in Spain. The young men with him had laughed and enjoyed their sport. Fear had filled him. But he had proven his manhood. “Dear Lord,” he whispered up to the cold, dark sky over Morada’s patio, “accept the painful act I must now perform as penance for that crime.”

  At the far end of the entrance court, before a second portal, stood one of Morada’s armored guardsmen. “I must speak to the Alcalde urgently,” the priest told the burly man.

  “He is busy, but I will take you inside to wait, Father.”

  “Thank you. Please send word to him that I come on a matter of the greatest importance.” The priest fought to keep his grief from showing.

  The footman drew an enormous key from behind his breastplate and turned it in a complicated pattern in three different keyholes to open the inner door. He motioned for the priest to enter and then bolted the door behind them. They crossed the interior patio. Great balconies projected over it like the prows of ancient warships, each supported by humanlike figures—too ugly to be angels, not horrible enough to be devils. Like Inez’s soul? Like his own?

  The guard showed him into a spacious side room where the only light came from a meager fire in a brazier. On a stand in the corner was a saddle and a cloth embroidered with gold and encrusted with pearls and diamonds; above it perched the Alcalde’s ceremonial helmet, sporting varicolored plumes.