The Inquisitor's Wife

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  No reply ever came, although others in Seville had heard from him and knew that he was well and still at the university. Bitterly, I took the sapphire ring from my finger, hid it away, and forbade my parents to speak of Antonio.

  * * *

  In the Chapel of the Fifth Anguish, I had finished my vows and stood with my hands steepled—the gold wedding band alien and cold upon my finger—and my head bowed, while the priest asked God to make me fertile in order to give Gabriel many sons. I silently informed God that I wanted no part of it. When the priest began to recite the Lord’s Prayer—“Pater noster, qui es in caelis”—I repeated it calmly along with the others, but I began to panic at the realization that the service was coming to an end. I was almost Gabriel’s wife, and while I’d submitted to the marriage out of pure spite toward my father and myself, my fury had ebbed to the point that I understood I was letting my fate take a stupid, wretched turn, one that couldn’t easily be undone. My voice began to shake, and I lowered it to a whisper.

  What would my mother have thought, if she’d lived to see me marry Gabriel Hojeda? Had she known that her death would bring about such an unhappy union, surely she would have spared herself. Like me, she despised the Hojedas, especially Gabriel’s older brother Alonso, who became head of the Dominican monastery and was renowned across Spain for his preaching against “the filth of Judaism, whose taint is so strong in the blood that no convert, however sincere, can overcome it.” We were agents of the Devil, Fray Hojeda said, and used lizards and serpents and the blood of Old Christian babies in magical rituals in order to cover up the stench that normally exuded from Jewish flesh.

  When the Queen of Castile, Isabel, came to visit Seville a few years earlier with her husband, Fernando the King of Aragón, Fray Hojeda told Her Majesty that the conversos of Seville were all off practicing obscene rituals in their homes. Together with the Jews, the friar said, conversos were plotting to destroy Christianity. Hojeda would have far preferred another violent pogrom, but as Isabel’s hold on Castile was still tenuous and she wanted no more civil unrest, he suggested an Inquisition, beginning in Seville.

  A few months ago, in September, rumors began that the Inquisitors were already in the city among us, spying on conversos and soliciting denunciations. Much to Fray Hojeda’s disappointment, he was not chosen to participate in the very process he had instigated, although he had hoped to be appointed its head.

  And here I, the dark-haired, dark-eyed child of a converso mother, was marrying his youngest brother.

  “… sed libera nos a malo. Amen.”

  The last line of the prayer died on my tongue; I couldn’t say Amen. Instead, I raised my head for the priest’s blessing, and when he pronounced Gabriel and me man and wife, I forced myself to lift my black veil. The world was suddenly too close, too bright; I yearned to cover myself again, but instead I turned toward my husband.

  My eyes came to rest at the level of his heart, hidden beneath the matte black of his wool tunic. I tilted back my head to look up at his large, pallid face and his green eyes, as clear as colored glass and full of abject panic. I instinctively recoiled, but he lowered himself from the waist—keeping a respectable distance between us—and abruptly pressed his mouth against mine.

  His lips were soft, but their touch reignited my rage and sorrow. I squeezed my eyes shut and fought the violent urge to pull away, to run from all memory of the last week. Yet I remained motionless as Gabriel’s chaste, timid kiss lingered. He took a half step closer until I could feel the sudden heat of him on my cheeks; his lips pushed more insistently against mine, and I felt him tremble faintly.

  I opened my eyes and pulled away, thinking of the sweating young bully in the street, his expression one of entrancement, his soaked linen undershirt clinging to the muscles of his broad back and the arm wrapped around my beloved Antonio’s neck. Blotchy scarlet blooms on his cheeks, my husband straightened with a gasp, then glanced surreptitiously at my father, as if worried his lapse of dignity had been noted.

  I couldn’t look directly at my father, but from the corner of my eye, I saw candlelight glint off his tears. I hated him so much at that moment that I successfully repressed my own—some of which sprang not from grief over my mother or from leaving my father’s house, but from the memory of my friend Antonio, fourteen years old, hanging upside down by his knees from the branch of a great olive tree in my father’s sprawling orchard. It was the week after his fight with Gabriel, and his bottom lip was still faintly swollen and bruised.

  “Will you stay with me forever, Marisol?” he had asked, grinning, his golden red hair hanging in a thick straight shock below his bright flushing face. “Will you marry me?”

  At eleven, I was an agile climber. I’d sat straddling the branch beside him, my short skirts tucked about me, my bare legs dangling down.

  “You don’t want to marry me,” I’d answered, rather crossly. “I’m a conversa. All our children would be considered conversos.”

  “Nonsense!” he exclaimed, with genuine scorn. “You’re New Christian, I’m Old—and together…” Grinning, he pulled himself up and gave my arm a quick, playful pinch. Antonio always smiled so easily. “We could make a bunch of little Christians!”

  I shrieked in mock torment and swiped at him. I was laughing when I spoke, even though the words caused real pain. “Some say my blood is tainted.”

  “No more than mine,” he said, growing serious. “After all, wasn’t Adam Jewish?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, he was. He was in the Old Testament. And we’re all descended from Adam. Jesus himself was a Jew. So how can anyone’s blood be tainted?”

  I loved Antonio so.

  * * *

  Now, in the chapel, the priest made a shooing gesture at Gabriel, who gathered some confidence and took my arm firmly, formally. I felt childish panic at the realization that I had to take his arm because I was now his wife and required to obey him.

  As Gabriel and I stepped down from the altar to rejoin my father, I told myself that I should have run away, just as Magdalena had urged me on that last terrible night.

  I pointedly avoided my father’s embrace and tried to compose my expression pleasantly as the priest accepted a purse from my father and set to work snuffing out the candles.

  “Please take good care of her,” my father said softly to Gabriel, who nodded.

  As the candles were extinguished one by one, the gloom deepened. I turned my back to the Madonna and her wooden tear and rested my hand lightly in the crook of Gabriel’s arm as we set off down the long dark aisle. My father followed us in silence. I struggled against the painful tightening that seized my throat down to my heart, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from filling. I fastened my gaze on the faintly glowing archway leading out to the vestibule, where Gabriel and my father had left the lanterns; just to the right of the arched doorway stood the white stone font of Holy Water, gray and indistinct in the dimness.

  Beside it, something stirred. I blinked, letting the tear spill to clear my vision, and looked again.

  A figure bolted from the back of the chapel to the doorway and passed swiftly beneath the pointed arch. His black cloak caused the edges of his body to melt into the darkness, but his head was uncovered. Not even the weakest light could fall upon such hair and fail to gleam bright, golden red.

  Four

  At the sight of the man with the red-gold hair disappearing through the archway, I gasped and began to pull away from Gabriel; in the next instant, Antonio—or his twin—had vanished.

  “Don’t be frightened, doña Marisol,” Gabriel said softly, his baritone half whisper echoing off the cavernous ceiling. His use of the word doña startled me; I’d never been addressed as a married woman before, and the combination of my name with that word unsettled me and made me think again of my mother. He caught my hand to put it firmly back upon his forearm, just below the crook, and pressed his own atop it, to make sure I didn’t break free again. “It
was just someone praying.”

  I glanced up at him, studying his anxiety-bright eyes for any sign that he too had seen Antonio’s specter fleeing the chapel, and found none. I looked over my shoulder at my father, whose defeated gaze was downcast.

  It took all my patience not to shake free from Gabriel and run through the archway to see where the copper-haired man had gone, but I calmed myself with the thought that the red hair had been a coincidence, a trick of the light, or the result of my imagination. Our pace seemed agonizingly slow, but we soon made it out into the vestibule, whose hanging lamps made it much brighter than the chapel. It was as empty and silent as when we’d come. I squinted at the air, as if to read whether its wake had been disturbed; I stared at the massive wooden portal leading outside, to see whether it was still swinging shut, but it was motionless. If anyone had passed through it, he’d done so with great speed, as if he’d wanted to escape detection.

  Gabriel opened the door and held it for us, letting in a gust of cold air. The three of us stepped outside. The heavy rains had stopped, leaving behind the elemental smell of wet earth, but clouds still lingered, half obscuring a radiant moon.

  Out on the brick street, a two-horse carriage with lit lanterns waited; the driver was huddled inside for warmth, but at the sight of us, he scrambled out with as much dignity as he could muster. The streets were quiet on this third night after Christmas, some three hours before midnight, and not an hour ago, it had been raining solidly; droplets clung glittering to the lanterns’ glass casings. I lifted my face to the sky for an instant, listening. In the near distance, galloping horse hooves clattered against brick; in the far, the wooden wheels of the plague cart rumbled, harmonizing with the undertaker’s singsong summons for the bodies of the dead. The latter sound no longer frightened me, though it added to my melancholy. The plague came and went with great regularity in Seville and worsened when the weather warmed, but it usually confined itself to the poorest quarters near the riverbanks.

  The driver held the door open while Gabriel helped me and then my father up into the coach. The ride home was mercifully short, the silence punctuated by Gabriel’s few tentative efforts at conversation and my father’s and my monosyllabic replies.

  When we pulled up to my father’s house—mine no longer, now—the torch was burning near the front entrance. In its yellow glare stood the motionless African, Máriam, her dark features impassive, her black gown hanging upon her bony frame, leaner in the days after my mother’s death. She’d spoken barely a word to anyone since then, except to gain permission from my father to be the sole person responsible for seeing to my mother’s belongings. Máriam didn’t smile as our carriage approached; Fray Hojeda had been adamant about not permitting her to attend the ceremony, as she’d been born a Muslim and therefore wasn’t welcome at San Pablo. Her rose-full lips, lightening at the seam, had thinned with determination. Sitting on the pavement next to her was a small trunk.

  My father leaned out the window and signaled for the driver to stop. The driver reined the horses in, hopped down, and opened the door so that my father could get out, even though our ultimate destination was the Hojeda house across the street, several long strides away.

  My father slammed the door shut behind him, leaving Gabriel to look questioningly at him. There was supposed to be a small supper at the Hojeda house, followed by wedding cake, but I saw the agitation and tears in my father’s dark eyes and knew he couldn’t bear to stay. He had never before set foot beneath his neighbor’s roof—he’d never before been welcome to do so—and I knew that, like me, he was thinking of how horrified my mother would have been to have seen me wed to a converso-hating Hojeda.

  He turned, put his hands upon the edge of the open window of the carriage, and with his troubled gaze fixed firmly on my husband, said to Gabriel, “I wish to give my daughter a wedding present.” My father gestured with his chin at Máriam, standing nearby.

  “A slave?” Gabriel asked politely enough, although his tone conveyed reluctance at the thought of permitting this exotic creature to dwell under his roof.

  My father shook his head. “A servant. I’ll pay her wages—and extra for her room and board, if you wish. She cared for my wife and…” His voice grew thick and trailed off. When he recovered, he added, “And she helped to raise my daughter. It would be a great comfort to Marisol if…”

  Embarrassed by my father’s proximity to tears, Gabriel’s expression grew kindly. “Of course, don Diego,” he murmured in a low voice.

  As my father turned away abruptly from the carriage window, Máriam stepped forward and curtsied to Gabriel with exceptional grace.

  “Don Gabriel,” she said distinctly, her head bowed; she’d come to Spain as a girl, so her Castilian was as fine as any Andalusian lady’s. “My name is Máriam. I’m a good Christian and would be honored to serve in your household.”

  I stared hard at Máriam.

  “Of course,” Gabriel repeated, flushing, though I heard resistance in his courteous tone. He gestured to the coachman, who fetched the heavy trunk with difficulty; he needed my father’s help to set it up on the driver’s seat. As the two struggled, Gabriel spoke again to the Nubian. “Do you know where the servant’s entrance is?”

  Máriam lifted her face to nod politely, and headed on foot across the street as Gabriel called for the driver to take us home. Neither my father nor husband had mentioned money; if Máriam represented my entire dowry, it was a poor one indeed.

  Had I known at that moment the terrible price my father had agreed to pay, I would have bolted from the carriage and run to him screaming. But I was selfish and bitter, thinking only of my unhappiness, not his, and I turned my back to him without a word.

  * * *

  I spent my childhood staring across the street at the Hojedas’ Moorish palace, three times the size of my parents’ house and at least two centuries older. Many times, I tried to imagine what lay beyond the vine-covered wall separating the property from the street. Now, sitting beside Gabriel, I peered through the carriage window as the side gates swung open before us. A few weeks earlier, I would have been eager to explore these new surroundings—but that night, my curiosity was damped by grief and a rapidly escalating sense of dread.

  We rattled onto worn, uneven brick pavement; in the darkness, I got the impression of an immense property that stretched back to infinity. We pulled up to the north side of the house—the side facing the abandoned olive grove where, years earlier, Gabriel had beaten the old Jewish man—and came to a stop beside a one-story covered walkway. Beneath its tile roof, in the glow cast by torches freshly lit after the rain, a young woman in a white veil and plain gray dress curtsied as my husband and I climbed out and approached her. In one hand she held a flickering lamp. Beside her stood a thick-boned, brawny hunchback of about forty; had he been able to straighten himself, he would have been the taller by far. As it was, he barely came to her shoulders, for once his spine left his waist, it swelled outward and then in again so that his face naturally looked down at the ground. He was forced to bend his neck at a harsh angle in order to meet his master’s gaze. I looked at his broad, ponderous features and pale, vacant eyes and realized that he was an Hojeda, like my husband, if a less fortunate one. Both of them wore an odd look of terror, as if they wished to warn us of some impending danger but could not.

  “This is Lauro,” my husband explained, gesturing. “My valet. And this”—he gestured at the young woman, who I guessed was a few years younger than I—“is Blanca. She’ll be your chambermaid and provide whatever you need.” He looked sideways at me. “Whatever the African—what was the slave’s name again?”

  “Máriam,” I prompted, looking behind us to see whether she still followed the carriage, but she’d disappeared. “She’s a paid servant, not a slave.”

  A thunderous roar drowned out my words before I finished them. “Gabriel! In God’s name, with is this?”

  Gabriel’s brother Alonso—known by his monk’s title as Fray
Hojeda—moved his white-robed, black-caped girth with impressive alacrity to push aside Lauro, while poor Blanca jumped aside in fear. The friar’s livid round face was contorted with fury, his mouth drawn in disbelief and disgust.

  I had wondered whether Gabriel had told his brother and how he intended to get around the friar’s hatred of conversos. Or, as their father, don Jerónimo, had called me, that little marrana. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Gabriel had lacked the courage to confront his brother before the deed.

  “What are these women doing here?” Fray Hojeda demanded, as Gabriel’s height visibly diminished beneath his brother’s full-on rage. In a flash, the friar slapped Gabriel, leaving a bright red mark on Gabriel’s already flaming cheek.

  Both Blanca and I cringed; Blanca took two steps back, her eyes huge.

  “Why does she hold those silk blossoms?” Hojeda’s hands gesticulated wildly; he loomed toward me to scrutinize me more closely. I did my best not to flinch. “Good God, there is a ring upon her finger! Gabriel—you pathetic fool—you have married her! Don’t lie: I watched from the balcony. I saw her father leave the carriage, I saw the African bringing her trunk into this house!”

  “It’s true,” Gabriel said, his hand still pressed to his smarting cheek. He clearly intended to sound defensive and determined, but his voice quavered on the second word. “Brother, I have good reason. Please, if you will just listen.…”

  Hojeda was in no mood to do so; his lip twisted. “Your lust has gotten the better of you! Lust and idiocy! Insanity! We’ll go at once tomorrow and have the wedding annulled. What are you thinking, bringing her of all people under this roof? You bring dishonor to our house.”

  Gabriel straightened as he found a modicum of courage; he stepped between me and his brother. “Alonso, listen to me.”

  But Hojeda was beyond listening. “I come here wanting to see my baby brother, and I find him gone at a time that he is always home. Lauro would not tell me where, or why this little piece of work”—he gestured at Blanca without looking at her—“was saying that you’d hired her as a chambermaid when there’s no money for it. I was stupid enough to be frightened for you! Frightened! But no! You were in a strange church in front of a strange priest marrying…” He gestured at me, unable to find the right word.