The Angel Court Affair

by Anne Perry

  Except that if you had the power, you also had the obligation. It was not society that told you that, it was your own inner consciousness. So there was nowhere to escape.

  Some of the time the pathway was steep and it was natural to ride behind rather than beside his guide, but on the occasions when he could, he struck up a conversation with him.

  “Señor Delacruz comes to this monastery often?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the guide agreed.

  “How often? Every month?”

  The guide shrugged and smiled. “Maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “Is good place.” The guide crossed himself absentmindedly. “Good men. Care for poor, for sick.”

  Was this where Sofia had hidden the fugitive she was protecting? Perhaps Nazario was looking after him now?

  “And penitents?” he asked aloud. He had no idea how to say “fugitives seeking asylum” in Spanish. And if he did, he might be taken for an agent of the Spanish government, or an informer in general.

  The guide shrugged and turned his face forward, evasive again. The conversation was finished.

  They arrived after dark, when the summer sky was burning with stars. They were so dense here, far from any city lamps, that the arch above them was like a milky smear across to the darker rims of the horizon.

  The monastery stood alone on high ground, its squared outlines like battlements. The path toward it was steep and the horse slowed. Narraway dismounted to walk his animal, and found he was indeed horribly stiff. He was glad of the darkness to hide it. Not that his guide would have been rude enough to have remarked on it.

  The guide knocked on the huge iron ring mounted on the oak door and when it swung wide he explained in Spanish as much as he knew of Narraway. There was no mistaking the warning in his voice as he told the gatekeeper why Narraway had come. Narraway understood enough of it to know that their earlier conversation about the penitent was repeated.

  The monk rang an iron bell hanging from the rough stone of the entrance. Within a couple of moments another monk appeared and took the horses.

  Narraway and the guide were led in, everything said once in Spanish and again in English. They were offered food and shelter, but before accepting, Narraway explained to the abbot that his business was with Nazario Delacruz, and concerned a profound danger to his family. He must be informed immediately, and privately.

  The abbot made no demur, and within ten minutes Narraway sat across a wooden table, polished by centuries of use, and faced Nazario.

  “What can I do for you, señor?” Nazario asked courteously. He was a man of approximately Narraway’s height, perhaps an inch taller, but he was also lean and wiry, and dark.

  Narraway hated what he had to do, but there was no possible escape. To be evasive only added to the inevitable pain. He must stop visualizing himself in the same dilemma. And remember that this man had apparently left his wife and children for Sofia, the grief of which had brought about their deaths. Narraway wondered if this had been deliberate cruelty, or simply self-indulgence, weakness, Nazario’s yielding everything to his own needs.

  And of course nothing ruled out the possibility that he himself was in some way, directly or indirectly, responsible for Sofia’s abduction.

  Narraway must tell him what he had to in such a way that if there was anything at all to be learned from Nazario’s reactions, he would do so.

  “My name is Narraway,” he introduced himself. “I used to be head of British Special Branch, to do with—”

  “I know who they are,” Nazario interrupted him. “What do you want in Toledo? If we have revolutionaries here, I don’t know of them. And before you ask any further, I don’t wish to know.” He spoke in fluent and easy English, even though Narraway had spoken to him in Spanish.

  “Actually, so far as I know, this has nothing to do with revolution,” Narraway replied. “But it is interesting that that is the first thing that comes to your mind.”

  Nazario frowned. “You are British Special Branch. What else could it have to do with? What do you mean, so far as you know?”

  Narraway drew in his breath to explain that he was retired, and then changed his mind.

  “I’m deeply sorry, Señor Delacruz,” he said, his mouth unexpectedly dry, “but your wife has been kidnapped. We don’t know by whom. We have done everything—” He stopped, seeing the stunned incomprehension on Nazario’s face, and then almost immediately the beginning of a terrible comprehension. “Do you have any idea who would do this?”

  Nazario shook his head as if words were impossible for him.

  “But you understand?” Narraway insisted.

  “Of course I understand,” Nazario said sharply. “I speak English!”

  “I know you do,” Narraway said gently. “I meant that you are not amazed, not incredulous.”

  “No…no, there have been threats against her, many times. None of them has resulted in anything beyond unpleasantness before though. This is different, isn’t it?” His voice wavered a little. His eyes searched Narraway’s. “I see by your face that there is more. What is it? Please do not play games of words with me. You are speaking of my wife. Is it to do with anarchists or not?”

  “We don’t know what it is to do with,” Narraway said frankly. “But two of the women who were with her were killed.” He watched Nazario’s face intently.

  “Who?” Nazario asked.

  “Cleo and Elfrida,” Narraway replied.

  Nazario’s face was pinched with grief and he maintained his composure with difficulty. “But you think Sofia is still alive?” There was a desperate hope in his eyes, and yet also an even sharper fear than before. He knew something far beyond what he was revealing.

  “I am almost sure of it,” Narraway answered. “I know nothing for certain, or I would tell you.” With a vividness he would rather not have felt, he imagined this man’s terror. His love for Vespasia, his total commitment to her, had altered his ability to play the game of interrogation in the old way. Perhaps it would also give him a compensating new insight? He needed it, however painful it would be.

  “What do you know?” Nazario pressed. He was clearly clinging on to his dignity with difficulty, trying not to break down in front of a stranger, and a foreigner. Narraway knew it did not help that he was English, of all things. They were a famously unemotional race.

  “They have asked for a ransom,” Narraway told him. “They know that before we paid anything at all we needed proof that she is alive. As of seven days ago she was.”

  Nazario leaned forward.

  “Ransom? How much? I have very little, enough to live on, no more. But there are many people I can ask.” There was a lift in his voice as if he dared to hope. “How much, Señor Narraway?”

  Narraway felt sick at what he would have to say to this man sitting across the table from him.

  “It is not money,” he replied. “Señor Delacruz, I need your help, your honesty and clear sight in this. The situation is, I believe, extremely complicated. You know some of the people involved but possibly not all of them. I am not willingly playing with your feelings in telling you this a piece at a time, I am trying to learn from you all that I can. I think knowledge is the only effective weapon that we have.”

  “Knowledge?” Nazario said hoarsely. “Knowledge of what? What do you need?”

  “I will tell you what has happened as far as we understand it, and I expect you to explain it for me, if you can.”

  Narraway told the facts simply, without complicating the narrative with other names.

  “We were warned that there might be threats against your wife. We took what we thought were reasonable precautions. However, she disappeared, along with the two women who were very brutally murdered, in a house on Inkerman Road, only two miles from Angel Court, where they had been staying.”

  Nazario remained motionless.

  “We had thought at first that it might be a deliberate tactic to gain some attention…” He saw Nazario’s fa
ce darken with anger, and that he controlled himself with difficulty.

  “Melville Smith has admitted to helping them, and finding the place in Inkerman Road,” Narraway went on. “Not for publicity, although he did cash in on that, but he said to protect Sofia, and we believe that was true, even if his motives were mixed.”

  “He wants a simpler teaching,” Nazario said, his voice tight with strain. “Gain more followers by making it softer, easier…and untrue. He has for years, and she would never agree with him. Even so, I did not think he would kill.”

  “Neither do we,” Narraway agreed. “The house belongs to Barton Hall, whom I believe was the real reason your wife went to England…” He waited, watching Nazario.

  “Yes,” Nazario conceded, lowering his eyes. “Hall is a cousin of hers.” He looked up again, his eyes desperate. “She would not tell me why she was going, only that it was absolutely necessary. I begged her not to, or to allow me to go with her, but she insisted I had business here, which I do, and that this was something she must do alone. She said my being with her would attract more attention, and therefore more danger.” The muscles of his jaw tightened and a tiny nerve ticked in his temple. “I should not have allowed her to persuade me!” His anger was directed at himself and again he looked away, as if Narraway had voiced the same thoughts of blame, and he could not face him.

  It was the moment to press, and Narraway did not allow himself to hesitate. “Why, Señor Delacruz? What was the additional threat? This is not the moment to protect anyone! Whoever it was, they murdered Cleo and Elfrida to show us that they are in earnest. They cut them open with knives, and tore out their entrails, just to ensure we knew that they are not only capable of anything, but willing to do it.”

  Nazario was white, as if he had been drained of blood. Narraway was afraid that he had gone too far. A witness horrified into paralysis was no use.

  “Señor Delacruz…” he said more gently. “They have kept Sofia alive because they very badly want to give her back, in exchange for certain actions on your part. They will win nothing from you if she is not alive and well. You have some fearful decisions to make. You need as cool a head as—”

  “What decisions?” Nazario demanded, glaring at Narraway. “What can you mean? I will do whatever they want. Are you suggesting that I would refuse? What kind of a man are you?”

  Narraway almost smiled; it was no more than a tightening of the lips. “One who is also married to a woman of courage and conviction, who would not have me do something I know to be wrong, even in order to save her. And certainly would not thank me for making a decision she would consider a coward’s way out, whatever I thought.”

  “I don’t understand.” Nazario’s voice cracked and he was close to losing control. “For the love of God, stop talking in riddles and tell me what you want! Who is it? Do you know who it is? Is it something to do with your government? Do they want somebody else in her place?”

  “No.” Narraway realized he was drawing it out more than he had to. “The government has no hand in it at all, and nothing to lose or gain, except whatever morality they believe in,” he replied. “What the kidnapper wants is for you to come to England and say that Sofia is a fraud, a woman who deliberately seduced you from your first wife, and your children, and was the immediate cause of their suicide by fire. That you both covered up those facts to avoid the disgrace of it. Of course, it would ruin all that she has fought for and preached for these years, but the reward would be her life.”

  For terrible, aching seconds there was absolute silence.

  “And if I don’t?” Nazario said at last.

  “Then she will be killed, in the same manner that Cleo and Elfrida were.” Narraway felt sick as he said it, and he thought Nazario looked like he was going to faint. “I’m sorry,” he found his own voice almost strangled in his throat.

  “It is not true,” Nazario said slowly, choosing his words as if English had suddenly become a strange language to him and he had to think to frame his sentences. “Luisa and I had parted before Sofia came to Toledo. Of course we were not divorced. Our faith at the time was Roman Catholic, and such a thing was forbidden. We could not obtain an annulment because there were no grounds.” He stopped, the memory clearly painful.

  Narraway did not interrupt or try to hasten him. It was not out of practicality so he could observe him, but for the compelling need for a decency toward a suffering he could not help.

  “Luisa went to live in a small house her family owned, and she took our children with her,” Nazario continued. “I did not stop her, for the sake of the children, as well as the fact that I could see no way in which we could be reconciled. I think now that Luisa was ill in her mind. I did not realize it at the time. Perhaps I did not want to.

  “I lost myself in whatever good work I could find, mostly connected to this monastery here, but based in Toledo.”

  “And Sofia?” Narraway asked.

  “That was when she came to Toledo. She was a companion to an elderly woman of some means. As the woman became ill, I was of assistance to her.”

  “You are a doctor?” Narraway asked.

  “I qualified in medicine,” Nazario said, nodding. “Then my father died, leaving me sufficient means for the rest of my life, without practicing. I did it for mercy’s sake, not for payment. I came to know Sofia during that time. It was a friendship in the service of the woman whose companion she was, and for whom she had the deepest regard. More, I think, than for her own mother.”

  His face became bleak. “But Luisa mistook the relationship for something else. As if I would fornicate with a woman I had come to love, in the house of her dying patron and friend!” His voice was raw with pain. “So little did Luisa think of me! She tried to persuade me to abandon them, even as the poor woman lay in agony. I would not do it.”

  Narraway maintained his silence.

  Nazario drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Luisa’s belief in my infidelity became more and more hysterical. She threatened to kill herself, and our children. To my everlasting grief, I did not believe her. I should have. She did exactly that. Killed the children quickly, I have to believe, mercifully, then set fire to the home and cut her own wrists.”

  Seconds ticked by.

  “The police doctor told me this, but he allowed the coroner to say that it had been an accident. Luisa’s family is powerful. They are old and respected, with considerable wealth, but more than that, there are many priests, even a cardinal in her recent ancestry. It would have been an appalling shame for them. Suicide is an unforgivable sin, not to mention killing her own children.” The tears now ran down his face, in spite of his attempts to blink them away.

  “They allowed it to be recorded as a terrible accident, and she was buried in a Christian grave. Of course, when I married Sofia there were those who said Luisa died of grief. Perhaps she did, but it was not for that reason. I committed no sin and Sofia even less so. But I let it be, for the sake of my children. And I suppose for Luisa also.”

  He smiled with a bitter self-blame. “And of course you could say that Luisa’s family would not have allowed me to do anything else! But Sofia felt for her, even though they had never met. Sofia loved me, and she knew how another woman could have also. But that’s Sofia. Now tell me, Mr. Narraway, how do I let her die?”

  Narraway could not answer, and even to try would be insulting.

  “Or how do I tell the world that she is a whore who lured me from my wife and children? She was a woman who nursed her dying patroness, whom she loved as a mother, and only came into my arms, or my bed, after I had married her, and Luisa was dead, by her own hand. How can I do either of those things? Tell me!”

  “I can’t tell you,” Narraway said honestly. “I don’t know what I would do myself.”

  “Don’t you?” Nazario asked. “Wouldn’t you say that there must be a third way, and I will give my life to find it?”

  “Yes,” Narraway said in a whisper, seeing Vespasia’s fa
ce in his mind. “I would.”

  There was a knock on the door and Nazario stood up to open it. The abbot came in, glanced at Nazario, then at Narraway. He read the distress and the exhaustion in their faces.

  “Brothers, I think it is time you allowed yourselves time to rest, perhaps meditate a little, and certainly sleep. With peace will come new strength.” He turned to Narraway. “We have prepared a room for you.” He gestured toward the door and Narraway was happy to stand also, and follow him.

  In the morning, long after sunrise, which was very early at this time of year, Narraway arose and inquired his way to the refectory. He was welcomed and shown to the table where Nazario was dining. He looked weary, his eyes hollow and heavily shadowed.

  He looked up as Narraway pulled out the heavy wooden chair and sat down. After the table had been set with bread and finely sliced ham, olives and herb butter, Nazario broke the silence.

  “I have been thinking about this most of the night.” Nazario looked up from his plate. “Sofia did not tell me so, but there were other events that I believe may have caused her to feel impelled to speak to Barton Hall. She did not discuss it with me because she knew I would rather she did not take the risk herself, and God knows, I wish I had been wrong!” He stopped abruptly and took a long drink from the pewter mug of rough wine beside him.

  “I had better tell you the whole story, so you may judge which parts of it, if any, may have connection with what has happened. You mentioned that the house where Cleo and Elfrida were killed was owned by Barton Hall. I had not thought it relevant before, and it may not be.”

  “Tell me anyhow,” Narraway insisted. Perhaps at last this was going to be about the fugitive she had protected.

  Nazario thought in silence for a few moments before he began.

  “Several weeks ago, not two weeks before Sofia went to London, a man came to her in great distress. It is not an unusual happening. She is widely known for her mercy. This man said that he and a friend of his, whom he named only as Alonso, had perpetrated a hoax of almost unimaginable size. It had succeeded beyond their dreams, and now threatened their lives. Alonso had been murdered, very violently. Knifed to death and left almost torn apart, out in the country, but near the road where he was bound to be discovered.”