Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  João had taken a huge gamble on his return from Tangier to wait on in Portugal for that rendezvous, and now he was paying the price. With the Inquisition closing in on all converso merchants who had returned, even those like him who had not openly professed Judaism while they had been away, every day that he had lingered had been a day of increasing anxiety. It was made worse by his decision to dispatch the package to Port Royal in the care of his eldest son Lopo, who might thus escape the immediate clutches of the Inquisition himself but who would be sailing into uncertainty and danger. For a son to disappear would not in itself attract interest—a common enough occurrence in a family with overseas business interests, and easily explained away—but for João’s wife and other children also to disappear would attract immediate suspicion.

  He had needed to play a very careful game, one that had stretched his nerves to the limit. Once a man was arrested by the Inquisition, the arrest of his wife and children would inevitably follow. As long as he continued to be at liberty, then so would they, but with every passing day the risk of discovery and denunciation grew greater. He had planned to remain in Porto for as long as he judged possible after his son’s departure in order to maintain an image of normality, to allow the ship a good head start and to make the arrangements for his family’s departure. He had ordered them from Viseu to the waiting ship only when he knew that his own arrest was imminent, in the knowledge that their absence would be reported to the Inquisition by the town priests the next day but that his attempts at explanation might buy them the critical hours they would need to escape.

  Even after he had been dragged to the cells, every day that passed, every day that he had survived deprivation and anxiety before his processo, was one more day’s sailing from the clutches of these people, from those who would take the greatest symbol of Christendom and use it in their crusade against any who refused to bow before them, Christian, Jew, and Moor alike. If holding out against confessing meant that he bought more time, even a matter of a few hours, then he could endure further gnawing, crushing uncertainty about his family, and the remorse he knew would follow should he find out that they had not escaped in time. All he could do now was stand firm and say nothing, knowing that to refuse to confess would aggravate the tribunal and seal his fate, but that in so doing he would be keeping faith with those who had gone before him and sacrificed their lives in order to prevent the greatest treasure of Christendom from falling into malign hands.

  The door to the chamber suddenly swung open. He felt a rush of hot air from outside, and tasted the tang of burning in his throat. He took a deep breath, and steeled himself. He knew that his time had come.

  11

  A man came forward from the door of the audience chamber and stood in front of the lectern on the edge of the shaft of light. The door clanged shut, shaking the dust in the air, and they were alone. The man was tall, thin, with a hooked nose and a bald head, his face cadaverous and pale. He wore the tight-fitting black robe of a Jesuit, and hanging by a golden chain from his neck was the Grand Seal of the Inquisition, something that not even the president of the court had worn. João stared at him and felt a cold stab in the pit of his stomach. He had seen this man before, officiating at an auto-da-fé in Lisboã, a spectacular affair where the King himself had been present; never at a provincial court such as Coimbra or at a straightforward case of heresy. He swallowed hard, trying to keep his composure. Something had gone wrong.

  “You know who I am,” the man said.

  “Cardinal Diego da Silva, Bishop of Ceuta and confessor to the King.”

  “And Grand Inquisitor of Portugal.”

  João’s mouth was dry. “Why are you here? Your court is at Lisboã, not Coimbra. I am a mere converso, one of thousands. I am of no special interest to you.”

  “You know that is not true.”

  “I know only of what I am accused.”

  The cardinal opened a scroll he had been carrying. “Do you have business dealings in Jamaica?”

  “It is common knowledge. A branch of my family has lived at Port Royal for several generations, ever since the English took over the island from the Spanish.”

  “Your cousins provide brokerage for the English pirates who prey on the Spanish treasure ships, converting their stolen goods for a profit. It is how the Jews of Port Royal have grown rich.”

  “And those goods we sell on to the Portuguese colonists in Brazil, benefiting the coffers of the King through the cut he takes on the sale of all imports into the colony. Dealing with the English in Port Royal is hardly a crime against the Church, or against the King of Portugal. And we are surely not beholden to the Spanish.”

  “And what are your dealings with the former English colony of Tangier in North Africa?”

  João felt his heart pounding, but he held the other man’s gaze. “You know full well that I had warehouses there until the English King Charles decided late last year to abandon the colony. My family had business interests there from the time when Tangier was ruled by the Portuguese. As the English had intended, I and the other Portuguese merchants there hoped to use the free port to increase our trade with the East, in my case to broker the shipment of fine textiles from India and include them in my consignments to the Portuguese colonists in Brazil, also to the benefit of the coffers of the Portuguese king. When that trade failed to materialize, when the Moors besieged Tangier and the English decided to leave, I closed my office and departed.”

  The cardinal looked at the scroll. “Not before receiving a generous settlement from the English Admiralty official sent out to Tangier to pay reparation to those being dispossessed, a Don Samuel Pepys.”

  “The English king paid foreign merchants the value of their property in Tangier, and the cost of shipping them to their chosen destination. You doubtless have had the documents before you. Don Pepys was a scrupulous record-keeper. I received no more or less than the others.”

  The cardinal rolled up the scroll and stared at João, his eyes steely and merciless. “Then why did Don Pepys visit you in secret when he came to Portugal from Tangier three weeks ago?”

  João felt dizzy, and swayed. He had not eaten more than a few mouthfuls of prison gruel for days, and the water they had been given had been too foul to drink. He had been sustained by thinking that he had done everything possible to conceal his activities, but there were informers everywhere. All he could do now was to bluff for as long as possible. He took a deep breath.

  “I have told you that the English settlement with the merchants of Tangier was to arrange shipment of their goods and belongings to any port they desired. Don Pepys came to Portugal to facilitate the onward shipment of some of my trade stock to London, and that of other merchants who had also been inconvenienced. I had bought a large lot of surplus tools that had been used by the English engineers to destroy the great mole at Tangier, to render the harbor useless to the Moors. The tools had come on a Portuguese ship from Tangier to Porto, where Don Pepys arranged for them to be transferred to an English vessel bound for London. From there, I had intended to place them in a cargo destined for the Portuguese settlers in Brazil. I have traded in tools in this manner many times before, often with the English. Their iron is superior to our own, and the tools are much prized by the tree-cutters of the Amazon forest. You can easily verify the details. The name of the English ship is the Schiedam Prize. She was also carrying armaments taken from the city defenses, long guns and mortars, and many small arms. She departed Porto on her final return voyage to England on the day of my arrest two weeks ago.”

  “We know of this ship,” the cardinal replied, waving his hand dismissively. “And we know that she also carried silver coin stamped with your sign. That is of no interest to us. But there was another ship that you contracted from Porto, was there not? One destined not for England but for the New World. One in which you and Don Pepys had placed a cargo of far greater value than a few boxes of cast-off tools and your own paltry savings in bullion and specie.”


  João felt his resolve disappear. Fighting the Inquisition was always a losing battle. Once you stepped into the audience chamber you were guilty, and they always had proof. His words when they came out sounded distant, barely audible. “How do you know this?”

  “Because we have eyes and ears everywhere. Because your cousin the converso banker who transacted your gold, the gold that we intercepted when you put it on a Portuguese ship, knew that you had secretly passed another package to another English ship sailing out of Porto. He is a brave man, your cousin, evidently remorseful at informing us of your gold shipment, and it has taken us all this time with the rack and the thumbscrew to extract the full story of what he knows, enough for us to delay your processo for two weeks but enough for me to come here now. Yesterday, after we put his wife on the rack before his eyes, he finally confessed and said that he had seen a package with a leather case inside stamped with the arms of the Knights of Malta. A package that had been passed to you by Don Pepys.”

  João felt like retching. So they knew. He tried to stand firm, but felt himself swaying. “And what of it?”

  The cardinal stared at him. “We know what the Knights of Malta gave to the Moors in return for the freedom from slavery of their Grand Master after he was captured by Barbary pirates. And we know what the Sultan of the Moors gave to the English in Tangier in return for their gunpowder, and for not demolishing the main part of the city. Don Pepys had a most trustworthy secretary who came with him to Portugal but disappeared mysteriously, a man named Booth, who proved most compliant when we pulled out his fingernails, gouged open a recent wound that had been healing on his leg, and started to disembowel him, a process that his confession did nothing to halt.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  The cardinal leaned forward slightly. “We want the name of the ship, and its destination.”

  João shook his head. “I will take what I know with me to the stake. I have nothing to gain by talking.”

  “You have your family. Your wife and children.”

  “You cannot threaten me with that. By now they are safe in another English ship, two weeks out from Porto on their way to London. They are beyond the reach of the Inquisition.”

  The cardinal snapped his fingers and gestured toward the doorway. João turned, straining his eyes in the gloom. He could make out several figures being pushed into the chamber, a woman and four children, pale, emaciated, in rags, but instantly recognizable. His eldest son Lopo, whom he had sent to Port Royal, was not there, a small mercy.

  He tried to speak, but no words came out, and he fell heavily to his knees, his chains clanking around him. Even before they had begun to interrogate him, the priests of the Inquisition had known exactly how to break a man like him; had known that physical torture was as nothing compared to the mental torment they could inflict on a father who had seen with his own eyes other women and children being led out and burned at the stake, suffocating in the smoke of their own roasting flesh. He looked up imploringly at the man towering over him, his eyes welling up. “Have mercy on them,” he said, his voice choked. “I beg you, have mercy on them.”

  The cardinal stared down at him. “It is not the job of the Inquisition to show mercy. That is in the hands of the Lord. But tell me what I want to know, and I give you my word that they will not burn.”

  João stared at the man’s cassock, trying to think straight. The ship bound for Port Royal had been gone for two weeks now, since the day of his arrest, having left Porto on the same day as the Schiedam Prize; with a fair wind it could already be halfway to its destination. Even if the cardinal sent ships after it, they would be too far behind and would be outrun and outgunned by the English vessel, whose crew and weapons would be superior to anything the Inquisition would be likely to hire for the pursuit. He remembered the captain whom Pepys had introduced to him, a tough, no-nonsense man he felt he could entrust not only with the package but also with his son. Drawing on his last reserve of strength, he struggled to his feet, wiping his face, and stood before the cardinal.

  “You swear by God,” he said hoarsely, swaying again. The cardinal nodded, almost imperceptibly, and João wiped his mouth again. “Her name is the Black Swan,” he said. “Her captain is an officer of the English navy named Henry Avery. Others will attest that the Black Swan lay off Porto two weeks ago. Don Pepys arranged it. She is bound for Port Royal in Jamaica.”

  The cardinal stared at him a moment longer, as if making up his mind, and then nodded more emphatically, not at João but at two others, who came up behind and roughly took his arms, pinning them against his back and binding his wrists together. João arched his neck around toward the doorway, looking for his wife and children, but they were gone. For a moment he wondered whether they had been a phantasm, whether this was all a dream. “You gave your word,” he said, his voice hoarse and wavering. “Your word that they will be spared.”

  The cardinal leaned forward, his face only inches from João’s right ear, so close that he could smell his breath. “Do not think that what you sent away in that ship will ever be safe,” he hissed. “We will chase your treasure to the ends of the earth and the end of time, if needs be. We have a long memory.”

  He stood back, made the sign of the cross over his chest, and raised his hands in a brief gesture of prayer. In that instant, João saw it, the black mark on the palm of his right hand: the shape of a cross. It was the sign of the Altamanus. So it was true. He had only ever heard of it in legend, a story of darkness and evil that had kept him awake at night as a boy, that had kept them all vigilant in their task as guardians of the treasure, generation after generation. The Altamanus, the Black Hand, the emperor’s chosen henchmen, had chased Proselius from Rome, across mountain and sea, to the far reaches of the Empire and beyond, until they had lost his trail in the wilds of Spain. It was the Altamanus who had been most feared in 1492, when the expulsion of the Jews from Spain might make the guardians of the treasure visible again, exposed to malign eyes, those who were forever watching and hunting, a fear that led them to pass their precious legacy to the safety of the Knights of Malta. And now all that stood between the Altamanus and their goal was a boy at sea, his safety tenuous and his ultimate destination in the folds of legend itself, protected only by the bulwark that João had provided, each minute of his processo buying precious time for that ship somewhere out on the Atlantic on its perilous voyage into the unknown.

  The cardinal turned abruptly and left, making the sign of the cross again as he passed by the Great Seal of the Inquisition on the lectern. The priests of the tribunal filed silently back in and sat down, followed by the president of the court. High above them, the dove cooed and fluttered, disturbed by the commotion below, and then swooped down through the open door toward the courtyard and the sky beyond. João felt glad that it had escaped, that it had found a way out of this place of condemnation, but at the same time it was as if his last hope of reprieve, of surviving the judgment that was about to be passed on him, had disappeared.

  He closed his eyes, and thought of what Father Vieira had said in his final secret meeting with his followers before he had left for the New World: “We are what we do; what we don’t do doesn’t exist, and we only exist on days when we do. On the days when we don’t do, we simply endure.” Now João knew what he had meant. What João had done, what had come to define his existence, had been set in motion the moment he had taken that package from Pepys and stowed it on board the Black Swan. Since then, since his arrest, he had simply been enduring, in a shadowland on the fringes of existence. And now he knew that the next steps he took could lead only to one place, to the place where cruelty and wretchedness and pain would be expunged, where all he would know would be the light that Father Vieira had seen in the farthest reaches of the New World, a light of purity in a place untainted by prejudice and persecution.

  He remembered that Father Vieira had called that place El Dorado, the Place of Gold, the same term the Conquistadors had used for the f
abled fount of riches that had obsessed them since their arrival in the Americas almost two centuries ago, a place beyond the lands they had ravaged and pillaged in their unquenchable thirst for gold. Father Vieira’s El Dorado was another kind of fount, a place where the treasure that João had sent them would glow in the light of the sun, where a simple cup touched by the lips of their Messiah would take its rightful place as a greater treasure than any amount of gold and silver that the Conquistadors could have imagined.

  The president of the court put on his spectacles, positioned the scroll he had been carrying on the lectern, and nodded curtly at the men holding João. They dragged him forward into the dusty shaft of light, the chains tearing and digging into his ankles. In that moment of pain, João knew that this was no dream. As they positioned him and held him blinking in the light, he smelled the lingering waft of burning on their tunics, and saw the white flecks of ash. He realized that his legs were like jelly, and that it was not just from exhaustion. For the first time, he felt a cold shiver of fear, not for his family now, but for what lay ahead for him.

  The priest opened the scroll, found his place and began to read. “‘This tribunal, with the authority invested in it by the General Council of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Portugal, finds you, João Rodrigues Brandão of Viseu and Porto, merchant, guilty of the crimes of Judaism, heresy, and apostasy, and commits you forthwith to make your penance before the priests and people of Coimbra, and to suffer the auto-da-fé. May God have mercy on your soul.’” He rolled the scroll up and looked at the men on either side of João. “The work of the tribunal is done. Now it is your job to carry out the sentence of the Inquisition. Let him burn.”