City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “But Juana was gone from the convent well before Inez’s death,” Maria Santa Hilda reminded Luisa. “She went to help her brother.”

  “Yes,” Luisa whined, “and she is still not back. She always gets special privileges. She always has some excuse. She has to be away because her Mestizo nephew has joined a gang of thugs and been hurt in a fight. She has to go to her sister’s wedding. I never get so many privileges. And it is only because I don’t have so many relatives. Is that my fault?” Her voice had reached the shrill pitch of locusts.

  “Do you know anything that bears upon Inez’s death?”

  “I know that Juana usually cleaned the postulants’ rooms. She could have put the poison in Inez’s water.”

  “There was no poison in Inez’s water. If there had been, it would have killed the cat.”

  “Inez could have drunk the poison part and left only the pure water.”

  Maria Santa Hilda sent the ignorant woman away.

  The questioning went on for two hours. The maids undoubtedly knew the most but admitted the least. The nuns were not much more helpful. Sor Olga preached, which strained the Abbess’s nerves and added nothing to her knowledge. Sor Dolores had heard strange sounds in the wee hours of the night before Inez died but eventually admitted she had heard the same noises many times before. Always overly cautious to speak only the truth, she would not speculate about what the noises were. They could have been rapists or shutters banging in the wind; if Sor Dolores did not see it with her own eyes, she would not say which she thought it was.

  The Abbess spoke in turn to all the sisters—except Sor Eustacia, who was in bed with a cold—and then moved on to the postulants. She had chosen the order of questioning to give Beatriz and Hippolyta maximum time to mull over the knowledge that had disturbed them earlier in the common room. The more uncomfortable the girls became, the easier it would be to get them to confess.

  Earnest and comical Beatriz Tovar began with her bizarre theories about who might have benefited from killing Inez.

  The Abbess interrupted her wild musings. “I think you know something, something that bears on this matter, that you are not telling me.”

  Beatriz’s eyes met Maria Santa Hilda’s and then found the gold-leaf frame of the painting on the wall infinitely more interesting.

  The Abbess switched her attack. “You have been astute enough to conclude that Inez was murdered.” She leaned forward in an intentionally conspiratorial pose. “I agree with you on this point. My very life depends on my learning the facts to prove our theory.” This playacting was calculated to appeal to the girl’s romantic heart, but with a shudder, the Abbess realized that what she offered as drama was actually true.

  “I will do anything to help you find the murderer, Mother Abbess,” Beatriz declared passionately.

  “Then tell me what you know.”

  The girl looked her full in the face and seemed genuinely puzzled. “I have already told you.”

  “Something disturbed you when I spoke to the sisters in the common room.”

  Beatriz’s eyes flickered. “I . . . I . . .”

  “Tell me, my child,” the Abbess coaxed.

  “I should have gone to stay with her. I could have saved her.” She raised her eyes, and they were full of searing remorse. “I thought locking her door would be enough.”

  “Was it your idea to lock the door? Did you give her the plank?”

  “Juana,” the girl said softly. Then quickly, “But I don’t want to get Juana into trouble. She is so nice to us. She is the only one who makes us feel at home here.”

  “What exactly did she do for Inez?”

  “She gave us the plank and showed Inez how she could use it to lock herself in.” The girl’s face pleaded with the Abbess. “She was just trying to help. She wanted to protect Inez.”

  “Do you know against whom or what?”

  “No, Mother. Inez said it would be dangerous for me to know.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I was never sure any of it was real. You know how she was. Making herself the center of attention and then teasing. Always trying to make another girl the goat.”

  “Was she?” The Abbess hadn’t known, but she was not surprised. Inez was . . . what? Maria Santa Hilda had always been compelled to admire her, though hardly anything she did was admirable in itself. There was something in Inez that did that. Made her more important than anyone around her. The more the Abbess learned, the more her love and hopes for Inez now seemed a baseless fantasy. “No, Beatriz,” the Abbess said finally. “You must not blame yourself for anything that happened. If you want to redeem your conscience, I ask that you stand ready to help me. There may be things I cannot do that I will need your help with. In the meantime, tell no one what you have told me.”

  Beatriz stood, her face aglow with determination. “I will help you find the murderer, Mother. Remember we are Spaniards, and there is nothing a Spaniard cannot do.”

  It was a line right out of the history of the Cid. The Abbess did not remind the girl that she was born here—not in Spain. Nor did she remonstrate with her for having read a secular book, for how could the Abbess do that without admitting that she knew the book herself? “You can do one thing for me right now, Beatriz.”

  “Anything, Mother. Anything. Just command me.” No young lieutenant in Cortez’s army could have been more zealous.

  “Go back into the chapel and send me Hippolyta,” the Abbess said with a wry smile.

  Downcast and disappointed, Beatriz left the room.

  Sounds from the street penetrated—hammering and scraping of tools. Indian workmen were out there erecting floats for the vain parade in honor of Nestares. Nestares, who approached with the Grand Inquisitor in his entourage. The Abbess’s smile died.

  Hippolyta entered and, without raising her eyes from the floor, took the chair opposite the Abbess. The girl was young and sullen and beginning to take on the weight of her condition. She had been so closely guarded by her family that scarcely anyone knew of her existence. Until she came to the convent, she had never even heard Mass outside the oratory in her own home. Yet she was with child. Her outraged father had publicly accused and slain his young Mestizo page for the crime and sent the girl here to have her baby and to spend the rest of her days doing penance for her sin. When the baby came, one of the maids would place it in a basket and carry it to the steps of the Convent of Santa Teresa on the other side of the city. The Abbess there would keep the child in her orphanage, just as Maria Santa Hilda accepted babies left before her portal and sent them to be cared for in Caricari.

  “My daughter,” Maria Santa Hilda said to the child who was with child, “I will not dissimulate. I saw your fear in the common room this morning. It told me you know something that bears on Inez’s death. Please reveal all you know.”

  Again the girl’s pudgy hands grasped each other. They went to her forehead in supplication. She said nothing.

  “Look at me, Hippolyta.”

  “I cannot, Mother.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Of harming the person who has been nicest to me of any person in the world.”

  That had to be Inez. They had arrived, as it had happened, on the very same day. Maria Santa Hilda noticed a special bond forming between them as the strong and confident Inez took a protective attitude toward her shy sister postulant.

  “You cannot hurt Inez now.”

  Hippolyta burst into tears. “I know I am not supposed to weep about her, Mother. I know she is better off with God than she ever was in this world, but I cannot help it. She was my friend.”

  The Abbess moved to a chair near the girl and handed her a handkerchief.

  The tense hands unclasped to take it. She stroked the Venetian lace around the edge. “This is nice—” She sobbed and blew her nose.

  “Tell me,” the Abbess said firmly.

  “I have an even better friend here who will be hurt if I do.” She sniffed and offered to return the handkerch
ief.

  The Abbess raised her hand. “You can return it to me another time.” She reached out and lifted the girl’s chin.

  Hippolyta’s eyes were large and soft—like the great, sad eyes of the llamas in the pack trains. There was desperation in them.

  “I promise you no harm will come to anyone because of what you tell me.” The Abbess considered explaining to the girl the dangers the coming Inquisition threatened, but she did not want to test the girl’s loyalty. Instead, she took Hippolyta’s hand and waited.

  The Indian workmen in the plaza shouted to one another in quick, staccato Aymara. Something about nails.

  Hippolyta sighed. “No harm?”

  “None.”

  “How can that be? If she has done something evil.” The llama eyes searched the Abbess’s face.

  “If someone in this convent has done something evil, she will have to answer to God’s judgment, child. But she belongs here. She will have sanctuary here from prosecution. I myself will pray for the remission of her sins.”

  A final sob shook the girl’s chest. “Must I betray the only person who has truly understood me?”

  The Abbess’s heart twisted with guilt. Whose life would she ruin to save her own? “You must say.” She looked gently into Hippolyta’s anguished face.

  “Sor Eustacia,” the girl wailed as if she had found her mother dead. “Sor Eustacia is the only one who could have killed Inez.”

  The Abbess reeled in shock. “How can you say such a thing?” she demanded in a voice harsher than she intended. Not Eustacia. Never Eustacia—her strongest, most stalwart ally. She had to force her hands not to take the child and shake her. “Tell me,” she commanded as calmly as she could manage.

  “Sor Eustacia must have killed Inez. Because Inez knew a horrible secret about her.”

  Ten

  IN A REMOTE corner of the darkened Mint, the Alcalde drained his chicha cup. The liquor burned his throat but did nothing for his spirits. “Enough. I’m tired. I buried my daughter just this morning.” He pushed back from the rough wooden table and stood.

  A candle tottered, and Felipe Ramirez caught it and set it upright. He was quick, Ramirez. The very man to have at one’s side when danger approached.

  Jerónimo Antonio Taboada and Juan Téllez, who with Ramirez were Morada’s closest allies on the Cabildo, stood as well. Taboada grasped the Alcalde’s shoulders and said, “Again, let me say how sincerely my heart and that of Doña Manuela are with you and Doña Ana in this hour.”

  Morada embraced his friend who spoke of hearts. There used to be a heart beating in his own breast. But it was gone now. Ripped from him by his loss. But it ached still, as they said the hand of a man would if it was cut off. “It is God’s will,” he said, scarcely believing it.

  Téllez embraced him. “We will take responsibility for the fiesta. Leave everything to us. Everyone knows Potosí’s processions are grander, our bullfights bigger, our banquets more lavish than anywhere else. We will not fail to impress the Visitador General.”

  Morada could only nod. His poor naïve friends actually believed their festivities could stay the consequences of the debased currency. He knew better. He encouraged them to go through the motions, but he had seen it coming for some time. Their hospitality would never win over Nestares.

  He watched the short, stocky Ramirez take a shovel full of ashes from the scuttle near the brazier and smother the charcoal fire. It was what the devaluation would do, smother the life force of the city, set them all back a hundred years. Their isolation on this windswept plateau gave them the illusion of independence, but Madrid ruled the earth, no less here than in Sevilla or Manila or Naples. They had been arguing for hours in secret, criticizing the shortsighted Viceroy, who stayed in Lima coddling his collection of ragtag aristocracy in a mockery of the royal court. Every Potosino worth his salt was sick of the faraway central government’s interference in their affairs. Even the Basque bastards hated sending their tribute to a monkish King who left their fate in the hands of the Council of the Indies—a womanly lot too invested in their own jealousies to see what they ruined here. But these thoughts were treason. And given the least provocation, that clique of Basques would string up everyone not of their brotherhood. The Council of the Indies knew of the civil rivalry in Potosí. Probably approved of it. As long as the city’s Basques fought with the other Spaniards, neither group would challenge the Crown.

  There was a glimmer of a solution in these traitorous thoughts. Morada’s absent heart ached anew. He longed to talk over the problem with Inez. Sometimes just speaking his thoughts to her made them clearer to him. “Enough!” he said, more to himself than to his companions. He flung open the door.

  Outside, his guardsmen awaited him with torches. The Vesper bell had rung only a few moments ago, but it was already dark. “Home,” he said to his captain, and followed his men through the gloomy, eerily quiet Mint, closed for Holy Week. No smelting fires burned, no hammers clanged, the giant wheels of the mill did not creak. Only their footsteps echoed in the silent, arched brick vaults.

  In the torchlit outer courtyard, workers had stored floats for the Visitador General’s entrance parade. Ramirez, Taboada, and Téllez paused to admire an image of the King fashioned by Indians completely out of feathers.

  Morada drew his cloak around him against the penetrating cold. “Adios.”

  His friends saluted him, and he followed his guard, past some drunken, devil-worshipping Mestizos who were sleeping it off under the monumental carved stone portal. A sow and three piglets rooted through garbage in the gutter. Morada, surrounded by his guard, turned uphill, toward the Calle Linares and his cheerless mansion. In his pocket, he fingered a gold chain he had bought. Perhaps it would awaken some feeling in his distant younger daughter. She would never be as clever as her sister. But she was all he had left.

  MORADA’S FRIENDS LINGERED before the cunning image of their sovereign until the Alcalde was well out of earshot. “I wish there were a way to console him,” whispered the elderly Taboada.

  Téllez leaned close to his compatriots. Their faces were grim in the flickering torchlight. “Does anyone know how the girl died?”

  Taboada shook his head gravely. “I have heard a rumor of suicide.”

  Téllez drew a sharp breath. “But she was buried in the convent.”

  Ramirez grasped each of them by the forearm. “Through the door, on the night he learned of her death, I heard him accuse Padre Junipero of killing her.”

  “If that is so,” Téllez murmured, “her death must be avenged.”

  AFTER LAUDS AT daybreak on Holy Saturday, a day when the tabernacle was left open and empty and the sanctuary lamp extinguished to signify the entombment of Christ, the two remaining postulants in the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros set about their task of dusting and polishing the choir overlooking the church. Like all the noblewomen who entered the order, neither Beatriz Tovar nor Hippolyta de Escobedo had ever cleaned anything in their lives—not even their own feet—before they entered the convent. It was their lesson in humility that they learn to scrub.

  Beatriz always began the task in earnest but soon lost herself in daydreaming. She polished over and over the same spot on the same gleaming silver candlestick. The church below was empty and dark. All the statues and pictures were covered with purple cloths, as was the custom on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The silence of the convent and its church was dense and liquid, and Beatriz felt herself drowning in it.

  For reasons she could not fathom, her companion—the squat, sad Hippolyta—had lifted the purple cloth over the great crucifix on the wall and was dusting the carved skull on which the cross rested, poking a rag into the eye sockets. She caught Beatriz looking at her.

  They were not supposed to speak.

  Beatriz dipped her cleaning cloth into a bowl of vinegar and then in salt and rubbed again the silver candlestick in which she could already see her own distorted image. “My mother came to see me b
etween None and Vespers yesterday,” she whispered. “She has met this awful Rodrigo my father wants me to marry. She says he is lovely, but I don’t believe her. She agrees with my father that I must marry him. I am without hope if even she is against me.”

  Hippolyta put her hand on her stomach. “You should obey your parents,” she said.

  Beatriz turned away in distaste. Who was Hippolyta to give advice? Pregnant by her father’s page. She was a Castillian. Like the Estremadurans, enemy to the Basques. When it suited her, Inez de la Morada had ignored the old rivalry of their fathers, but Hippolyta made frequent references to Beatriz’s Basque ancestry.

  Continuing to polish the skull, Hippolyta said softly, “Inez will look like this soon.”

  Beatriz shuddered. “I don’t want to think about that.”

  Hippolyta looked around at the door and tiptoed over to Beatriz. “I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of something worse.”

  Beatriz nodded. “Spending the rest of your life in this place.”

  Hippolyta looked confused. “I have no choice about that.”

  Beatriz’s fingers flew to her lips. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

  Hippolyta’s fat little hands grasped Beatriz’s arms. “I am afraid of something I did. I think the Abbess despises me for it.”

  Beatriz was shocked and intrigued.

  “The Abbess reminds me of my mother,” Hipplolyta said.

  “She is very kind,” Beatriz said, hoping Hippolyta would tell her a secret.

  “Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean there are things going on under her own roof that she knows nothing about.”

  Beatriz thought about Hippolyta making love with her father’s page and blushed. “You didn’t say that to her?”

  Hippolyta’s grip tightened on Beatriz’s arm. “I did. And I told her worse.”

  “What?” Beatriz demanded.

  “Something very, very bad. I am so ashamed.” A tear rolled from her big, frightened eyes. “I have destroyed the life of my best friend in the world.”