City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “Does Antonio Tovar know that his mayordomo visits you in the house of his enemy?”

  Her thin lips curled. If there had been any joy in the expression, he might have called it a smile. “Yes.”

  “And does—”

  She held up two brown, callused hands. “Let us just say that both gentlemen have reason to believe I am loyal to them and that the information that passes between me and my son is useful to both.”

  “And to whom are you loyal?”

  The cold smile broadened. “To my son. And myself.”

  He could not fault her for that. He knew better than to underestimate her intelligence. Many Spaniards thought the Indians simple because they spoke Spanish with thick accents and believed in pagan gods. But this woman came from a race that had a complex civilization here before the Conquistadores arrived. She had borne a son by some Spaniard, who probably got her with child and abandoned her. It was against the law for a Spanish man to violate an Indian woman, but if caught, the man paid only four pesos and nine reales, a fine for the public Treasury. No more than he would have given a prostitute. Unlike a whore, the Indian woman got nothing for her trouble. But, perhaps, a child. A child who might become everything to her. “Do you know that your son seduced Inez de la Morada?”

  Evalin snorted. It was a masculine sound. “You have it the wrong way round, Padre. My poor boy succumbed to her wiles.”

  He was speechless.

  She laughed the louder. “And so did you, I see. Well, she is dead now. I do not care. She endangered my son. I only hope that love is like the pox. That if you have had it once and survived, you cannot catch it again.” Her hard eyes were dubious, as if she knew, with her son, such hopes were in vain.

  Yet another suspicion flickered. “Endangered Domingo?”

  “Yes, by putting him in the way of the Alcalde’s wrath.” Her tone said he was a fool not to see it. He was a fool not to see so many things.

  The priest sought a sign of guilt in her. She could have murdered Inez. Anyone could be guilty. People were not as good as he wanted them to be. Or so much better than he, as he thought they must be. Anyone could be guilty. Barco. He could have—if he knew about Sebastian and was jealous. “She had another lover.”

  “I knew that, but my son did not. I kept it from him to protect his heart. But it broke anyway, when she went into the convent.”

  “Did the Alcalde know of her liaison with your son?”

  “No,” she said too quickly.

  He looked at her and waited. She would never give evidence against her son. If he was accused, this woman would confess to the crime herself to save him.

  She held the priest’s stare.

  “If I tell the Alcalde, he will kill your son. He will have to if the word gets out that Domingo defiled his daughter.”

  She gripped the edge of the table. “The Alcalde knows. His bitch of a daughter told him herself.”

  But Barco lived.

  “She blackmailed her own father.” The tiny woman’s eyes dared him not to believe it.

  The priest was beyond astonishment. “Tell me.”

  “She had letters of her father’s. Letters that could cost the Alcalde his life. She entrusted them to my son. I took one and kept it.”

  The priest doubted her.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Yes,” she said. “I can read. My son taught me. I took the damning letter, and then I made a pact with Morada. The letter I stole is in the hands of a secret person. If any harm comes to my son or to me, no matter how innocent the Alcalde seems, the letter will be revealed, and Morada will be ruined.”

  “Treason? What does the letter say?”

  “If I tell anyone that, Morada will kill my son.”

  A QUARTER OF an hour later, on his way back to his monastery, Padre Junipero passed Don Jerónimo Taboada and Don Juan Téllez, Morada’s closest allies on the Cabildo, with a group of young thugs, lounging against the carved stone façade of his chapter’s church. As he approached them, to his utter astonishment, they drew their swords.

  Fourteen

  THE ABBESS CLENCHED her fists. “What was Inez to you?” she asked. She tried not to turn away from Sor Eustacia’s smoldering gaze. In the end, she gave up and looked up at the high, dark window.

  “You have always been the holiest person I knew.” The younger woman’s voice shook. Her vow of humility evaporated in the crucible of her anger. “The threat of the Inquisition has turned you into an Inquisitor yourself. I would perish in the flames in your stead, yet you ask me such a question?”

  Maria Santa Hilda sat straight in her hard wooden chair and gripped her hands together to stop their trembling. The naturally dulcet Eustacia’s assertion stung and terrified her. The Abbess, who had the habit of command, had no words of defense. All she could do was repeat the offensive question: “I must know what your relationship was with Inez.” She prayed Eustacia would have a response to erase Hippolyta’s disgusting accusation.

  Like some great mythic bird-woman come to life, Eustacia leaned forward and grasped the edge of the table, looking as if she would fly across it at the Abbess and tear her apart. “You think I killed her.”

  Maria Santa Hilda’s stomach trembled under her heart. At this moment, Eustacia seemed capable of it. “Did you have reason to?”

  The younger woman’s powerful grip on the table tightened. The heavy table moved. Hate, then fear, then despair, paraded in full sight on Eustacia’s lovely face. At last, she dropped back into her chair and bent over, gripping the sides of her head. “I have borne everything,” she sobbed. “I can bear this, too.” She lifted her head. Her eyes were defeated. “I was her lover. For only one night.” She paused, and in the silence, torture passed over her countenance. She stared back at the Abbess, her soft eyes filled with guilt. “For only one night, but I did it. And I have been in hell ever since.”

  Waves of horror and shock, of pity and suspicion, crashed over Maria Santa Hilda. “Speak to me, Eustacia,” was all she could say.

  “I came to this convent to be worthy, to try to be truly holy. Since I entered the order, I have not taken a glass of water without permission. I have accepted this slow, monotonous life, of obeying the bells, of endless repetitions. I thought it would bring me solace.”

  “But it has not.”

  Eustacia held up her head. “Before I became a nun, I had wealth, you know.”

  Maria Santa Hilda nodded, but she had not known. Eustacia was noble; otherwise the order would never have accepted her. But many noblewomen had only a scant dowry, enough for the order but not for a suitable husband.

  “I was not some English spinster—the victim of primogeniture. My mother was a widow, I her only child. A man came to ask for my hand, and my mother consented. In the chapel of our villa in Andalusia, he swore with the missal and the crucifix in his hands that he would be my husband. He begged my mother a moment, there in the chapel, to be alone with me. When she left, he seized and raped me. When I tried to scream for my mother, he beat me. At the point of his dagger, he molested me. And he threatened to stab me to death if I told anyone or tried to get justice from the King or the Church. After that he came to my house whenever he wanted and abused me. When, in desperation, I finally told my confessor, the old priest offered me the only remedy available. That we force the man to marry me immediately.”

  She straightened now and looked directly at the Abbess with eyes demanding justice that did not exist in this world. “My own mother, even after she found out about his brutality, tried to force me to go ahead with the marriage. No matter how I screamed and cried, no matter how many times I tried to lock my door against him. She became his ally. How can a mother subject her daughter to such a fate? Married to him, every night of my life would have been another rape. My mother told me no one would marry a girl who had lost her virginity. Marriage to him was my only hope for a normal life.” Eustacia laughed the laugh of a madwoman. “Normal life.” She leaned forward now like a supplicant in a pain
ting of the Virgin. “I told her if she forced me to marry him, I would kill him. So she sent me to the convent.”

  “Deo Gratias.” The words escaped the Abbess.

  “I told myself I would be a good nun.”

  “You were a good nun,” the Abbess said, for so the mild Eustacia had seemed—until Inez. “Weren’t you?” She realized she was speaking in the past tense.

  “I have broken many rules.”

  “How?” The Abbess heard the apprehension in her own voice. These were the things she had not wanted to know.

  Eustacia smiled indulgently, as if she were about to tell the harsh truth to a child.

  Maria Santa Hilda’s back stiffened. “Tell me everything.”

  “You are so good that you do not see how evil is the world around you.”

  “That is not true.” The denial came out too loud. “I know the greed that grips this city. I know about the brothels, where men fight to the death over the favors of whores.” She knew another, personal evil, but she must not think about it.

  Eustacia’s face was now inches from hers. “You know evil from arm’s length. You pray for sinners in the abstract. I know evil firsthand.”

  The Abbess unclenched her hands and reclaimed her calm. “So you have only now told me. But almost everyone who comes to this convent carries heavy troubles.” She had taken in hysterical, scrupulous girls who saw this as the only place to hide from temptation. Despairing daughters of widows whose dowries were not sufficient to entice anyone to take on responsibility for their mothers as well as themselves. Rejected girls who came here rather than feel like failures in the outside world.

  “Yes, and when they enter your care, you encourage them to forget. You expect that spirituality and scholarship will scrub their souls clean.”

  “I thought those comforts satisfied you, that you were serene in your silence.”

  “The stains of my old life remain.”

  The Abbess knew this was true of herself also. As long as she had been a nun, hardly a day passed that she did not think of the pain of losing her mother, of the ill will she bore her father.

  “In the night, I have been meeting with the newcomers.” The Abbess could not suppress a grimace. “For what purpose?” she demanded indignantly.

  Eustacia threw her a dagger glance. “Just to talk. To get them to tell me if they were troubled, what troubled them.”

  “They are supposed to confess to the padre, not to you.”

  “The sacrament takes away the sin, but not its scars.”

  “Those scars are between a soul and God.”

  “Those scars torment.”

  “Pain that can be offered to God.”

  “Pain that can be relieved. Sor Monica seeks to take away the pain of the body. I have sought to unburden the spirit. I talk to the young ones. Mostly I listen to what they tell me.”

  “In their beds?” the Abbess asked. It was a cruel barb. And wrong to have said. Worthy of Sor Olga or DaTriesta. She had lost control of the conversation. Of herself.

  Eustacia winced. “No,” she whispered, and turned away her gaze.

  The habit of silence descended on them, and neither seemed willing to break it. The Abbess knew she must take control, but her heart was too sunk in confusion to choose her words.

  Finally, Eustacia rose and went to the door. With her hand on the latch, she spoke again: “Do you know who was the father of Hippolyta’s child?”

  The Abbess stroked the smooth edge of the table. “Her father’s page. Don Diego killed the boy.”

  Eustacia shook her head. “It was her father himself.”

  Maria Santa Hilda’s jaw dropped.

  “Yes,” Eustacia said quietly but vehemently. “He started on her when she was only ten years old. He used her. And then when he had made his own child pregnant, he murdered that poor Mestizo boy and sent his poor children here, the one within the other.”

  The Abbess blessed herself and grabbed for the rosary that hung from her belt. In its impossibility, she knew it must be true. Her fast-starved stomach churned with disgust. “God forgive him.” God forgive her for being so ignorant.

  “I don’t know if I could love a God who would forgive such a thing.”

  “Please do not blaspheme.”

  “Poor Hippolyta felt guilty. Her father told her it was her own fault. And she believed him.”

  The Abbess’s belly heaved.

  “Well might you retch,” Eustacia said. “And you are a virgin. You cannot truly imagine the horror of such a thing.”

  The Abbess bit hard on the knuckles of her right hand. Eustacia was wrong, but she could not protest. She composed herself. “Eustacia, you speak of the horrors of others, but what of your own? What about Inez?”

  The younger woman, who now seemed to the Abbess suddenly older, looked away. “She seduced me.” She let go of the latch and dropped to her knees, bent over with anguish. “It does not wash away my guilt, I know, but she was beautiful. And—and skillful.” The last word slipped out of her, like a tear.

  The Abbess’s face burned. Shame, guilt, and outrage seared into her bone marrow.

  Eustacia’s broad, beautiful face twisted with pain and frustration. “I longed to be one of those mystical women who loses herself in Christ. But I cannot. If a surgeon opened my chest, I wonder if he would see the scars on my heart.”

  Maria Santa Hilda thought to ask directly if Eustacia had killed Inez. But she did not. She had no way to judge the truth of Eustacia’s replies. Beata Sor Elena would have known how to help her. But her old confidante was dead and under the boards of the choir, buried there along with Inez.

  The Abbess hardened her will. “You had better tell me all you know.”

  Eustacia rose and took the chair opposite the Abbess. “When Inez came to the convent, she was not truly repentant. She tried to convince me that she was, but I saw through her fabrication. Her secrets came out too easily, too well formed. If they are truly afraid or guilty, they cannot tell the truth so facilely. Often they do not admit the truth to themselves.”

  Mother Maria saw the logic of that.

  Eustacia folded her hands into her sleeves. “I was able to bring out one thing that sincerely troubled her.”

  “Which was?”

  “Her father killed an Indian over some secret documents and had somehow made her feel guilty about it. I think that almost everything she said to me was a lie, but not that. She said that if it hadn’t been for her, that Indian would still be alive.” Eustacia placed her hands over her mouth, as if suddenly she had thought of something unthinkable. “Perhaps her father killed her because she knew about his murder of the Indian.”

  The Abbess threw up her hands. “That is absurd. The Alcalde must have killed many Indians in his life. He hunts down all manner of fugitives. How could his killing one more Indian make such a difference? Besides, Captain de la Morada is the very last person who would have harmed his daughter.”

  “I agree,” Eustacia said. “She loved him, too. Of that I am also certain. She mourned the loss of his company.”

  “She told me she came here to escape his influence for a while.”

  “Nevertheless . . .” Eustacia’s voice trailed off. “I think Inez seldom told the truth.”

  Considering the surprises and shocks Eustacia had revealed today, Maria Santa Hilda wondered how often she had hidden the truth.

  “Inez was very troubled,” Eustacia said. “I have come to believe that harboring secrets unbalances the mind. And Inez harbored many secrets.” Her eyes turned furtive. “Perhaps we should return to the theory that Inez took her own life.”

  The Abbess saw how wrong that was. “More than ever, I doubt it. All her cleverness and greed for power could not reside with despair. Inez wanted something too much to give up her life before she got it.” The actor, she thought. He must have something to do with why she died.

  “MURDERER!” TABOADA GROWLED. His powerful fingers dug into Padre Junipero’s arms.


  The stunned priest felt himself lifted and tossed like a sack of maize against the façade of the Compañia de Jesus. His breath left him, and before he could get it back, they were on him.

  “You killed her. I heard the Alcalde say so.” Ramirez spat the words at him. “You priests claim to be holy, but everyone knows priests carried Toledo steel and used it in Cortez’s army.”

  The padre opened his mouth to object. A big, gnarled hand gripped his throat. He gasped for air. Thudding, crushing blows, on his chest, his shoulders, his back. He crumpled to the pavement. He tried to cover his head. A hand wrenched his arm back. His shoulder screamed in pain, but he could not utter a sound. A cracking kick knocked a searing pain down his spine. Sprawled and heaving for breath, he could only pray: Make them stop, Lord. Make them stop. His eyes would not focus.

  Ramirez drew a sword. Raised by strong arms and backed to the wall, the padre squirmed and darted and managed to maneuver to the portal. He clung to the slender column that guarded the front door of the chapter house. “Please.” He humiliated himself. “You are mistaken. I swear by the soul of Santiago.”

  “I heard the Alcalde accuse you,” Ramirez said. “Through the door, on the night you told him of her death. He said you killed her.”

  “If I had, would not the Alcalde have killed me himself?” The priest raised his hands over his head, like a condemned man before a firing squad. “Why did he not arrest me? Why did he not avenge himself on me?”

  Ramirez’s sword prodded his throat and stopped his heart. “The Alcalde could have been too overcome with grief to act.” Ramirez said. “Now I am here to do it for him.”

  The priest folded his hands in front of him. “Please,” he said, “ask him again. If he says he is convinced that I killed her, I will submit to your swords. But in the meantime, do not slay me unshriven.”

  Juan Téllez, the third of the group, a man the padre knew was devoted to the Blessed Mother, crossed himself and grasped Ramirez’s sword arm. “Give him a chance to confess before he dies, Felipe,” Téllez said to Ramirez. He turned to Junipero. “The logic of your famous mind has saved you this time, but it will not the next.”