Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  She was no longer Rosemary, but Raymonde.

  Chapter 13

  The Council of Faith

  “Adsumus Domine, Sancte Spiritus…” Fray Junípero began the prayer, the others bowing their heads and joining in their voices to implore the blessing and guidance of God upon their day’s work. Six grave men, sitting in quiet dignity around the long table with its pitcher of water and tray of wafers intermingled with dried fruit.

  “…in Nomine Tuo…”

  Six grave churchmen, facing what for them was a morning’s work, but for the subjects of that work, pain or release, death or life. And for one of the six churchmen… Ah, God, have You truly delivered my ancient enemy into my hands? Or is it Your holy will to test my poor honor?

  “Veni ad nos…”

  Fray Junípero de la Sangre Sagrada, Spanish Dominican of the strictest observance, senior inquisitor for Daroca and all her environs, according to the new order thrust upon the people of Aragon by their king and his Castilian queen. Incorruptible, upright, and zealous—sometimes, it might seem, overly zealous—in his efforts for the glory of God, Fray Junípero would hear of no other refreshments than water and wafers to sustain the Council in its dry labor, with a few figs and raisins as grudging dispensation to the less austere among his fellow laborers.

  Don Guillen de Valderrobles, who had replaced Don Felipe as ordinary to his grace the bishop of Daroca. Of middle years, round face, and little ambition, Don Guillen seemed manifestly content to take his ease at the apex of his mortal career. As much as a middle-aged Spanish secular priest could resemble an aged French Dominican, Don Guillen resembled his near namesake Fra Guillaume (who had retired, following the triumph of the new Inquisition, to his motherhouse beyond the Pyrenees, there to die within a few years in comfortable odor of sanctity).

  And Don Felipe de Granada, still secretly bemused at finding himself Fray Junípero’s fellow inquisitor for Daroca and her environs. Surely, he might have refused King Fernando’s appointment, which had taken him by surprise after his steadfast, if quiet and prudent, protests against bringing the Royal Inquisition into Aragon. Had the monarch wished to enlist one more former foe into the ranks of his friends and allies, or had Fernando even been aware of Felipe’s opposition? And had it been some idealistic thought that he might help temper the new Inquisition in its most fiery excesses that prompted Don Felipe to accept the apointment, or had it been the secret worm of guilt driving him to condemn himself to the long penance of sitting in inquisitorial judgment on his fellow offenders against divine and churchly law?

  “Esto salus et suggestor et effector judiciorum nostrorum, Qui solus cum Deo Patre et Ejus Filio nomen posides gloriosum.…”

  Here, also, their chosen consultors, one jurist of Canon Law and two learned students of theology:

  Fray Juan de la Misericordia de Dios, Dominican theologian, Fray Junípero’s creature though outwardly resembling him in little, being silver-fringed around the tonsure to his principal’s black-fringed prime, and having obviously indulged in all the dietary privileges and dispensations to which his venerable age entitled him—already, half furtively, he was eying the fruit. Yet if his body was soft and wrinkled, his theology was not.

  Fray Clemente de María, wiry and vigorous, his eyes appropriately closed in full concentration upon the prayer. It was he, ironically, whom the uninformed eye might pick out as the most fiery ascetic, after the senior inquisitor himself, at that table; yet Fray Clemente’s formation in the wise old order of Saint Benedict led him to forgive much, understand more, and seek always for balance. He had been Don Felipe’s candidate for this table, against whom Fray Junípero could find no sufficient grounds for exclusion.

  And Fray Roberto de la Sagrada Familia, sportively called “The Silent Franciscan” for thinking more than he spoke. He was their jurist, a studious conventual of moderate frame and late middle age, the ordinary’s nominee to this Council of Faith.

  “…ut in sinistrum nos ignorantia non trahat, non favor infectat, non acceptio muneris vel person‘ corrumpat…”

  The senior inquisitor had proved himself, time and again, ever and always to prefer the harshest way, whereas the ordinary favored leniency in almost all cases. I have but to follow Fray Junípero’s lead for once, thought Don Felipe, and Manuel Urtigo suffers in this life as well as in the next—the murderer of my family enters Hell through the most fiery of mortal gates! Let me but vote with my fellow inquisitor, and it matters not which way Don Guillen casts his vote. The simple majority of us three, no matter how our consultors may vote: that, until such time as the Suprema may clearly direct otherwise, is the rule we follow, in accordance with the wisdom of his eminence our bishop of Daroca. And, while the consultors’ votes may sometimes sway Don Guillen’s opinion, they never sway that of Fray Junípero, and they need not sway mine.

  “…ut hic a Te in nullo dissentiat sententia nostra, ut in futuro pro bene gestis consequamur premia sempiterna. Amen.”

  The opening prayer was over, and the Dominican theologian reaching for a date with one hand even as he finished crossing himself on forehead, lips, and chest with the other.

  Ah, God, am I to serve You as instrument of vengeance, or of mercy? Which way, for this man—this murderer, this “Scourge of Axtilan,” this Manuel Urtigo—lies justice? It was the question with which Don Felipe’s secret heart had wrestled since Manuel’s accusers had first brought the case to the Holy Inquisition.

  Fray Clemente poured water for himself and held the pitcher poised, with an inquiring look at his patron. A beam of sunlight piercing the glass vessel cast small spangles of rainbow like divine largesse over the table. Finding his mouth dry as sawdust, Don Felipe nodded and held forth his goblet. The well in the courtyard of Don Feliz de Sarmiento y Tobogo de Luna gave clear, delicious water—water befitting everything else in this fine, modern house which the wealthy merchant had in his piety turned over to the Holy Office—water much more grateful, to Don Felipe’s tongue, than the lead-piped stuff of certain great cities.

  There were other cases to discuss before that of Manuel Urtigo. Among them that of the unfortunate printer Maestre Juan de Calamocha, or Mehmoud Aben Fazoud as he might still properly be called, once again under investigation.

  “First,” said the senior inquisitor, “we must consider the case of Doña Jeronima de Mesquita y Valderrama, accused of wilfully and contumaciously cleaving to the heresy that fornication is no sin.”

  “This is no heresy, as such,” said Don Felipe’s Benedictine. “It is merely grievous error and mortal sin.”

  “It is heresy!” roared Fray Junípero.

  “It is mortal sin, pure and simple,” the Benedictine threw back quietly but stubbornly. “The Inquisition has no right to hold this woman imprisoned for…it is the fifth month now, is it not?”

  “How carefully he keeps count of the months!” Fray Junípero’s sleek Dominican put in. “Can our esteemed colleague be among those men who mourn Doña Jeronima’s absence as deeply as she mourns theirs?”

  Don Felipe kept his thoughts neutrally to himself. Even though she had tried to seduce him (at least, so he supposed), no doubt in some attempt to buy her freedom (and yet she was notorious, and he—he flattered himself—able enough to draw women’s attention had he so chosen), Doña Jeronima meant little to him. The lady was lovely, but in his heart and body the inquisitor remained true to his lifetime love, the lost Morayma.

  After a cough, the ordinary observed, “It is true that Doña Jeronima makes no secret of her error—”

  “No secret!” exclaimed Fray Junípero. “Why, man, she propagates and dogmatizes the heresy broadcast, among all who will listen!”

  “No heresy!” Fray Clemente repeated. “Sin and error only—a matter for her confessor, not for the Inquisition!”

  “Heresy!” Fray Juan shot back. “Arrant, wilful heresy!”

  “Error,” argued Don Guillen. “Error born of the royal tolerance of brothels. If you would stamp out this part
icular so-called ‘heresy,’ persuade your king to outlaw the free sale of love and end the popular confusion between what is moral and what is merely allowed.”

  Fray Juan snorted. “Next you will tell us that this error springs from the prophet Daniel’s taking the part of the seductress Susanna against her victims!”

  Remembering Doña Jeronima’s smile, her soft nudge and furtive wink, Don Felipe inquired, “Did not our Savior Himself take the part of the adultress against those who would have stoned her?”

  “He did not take her part!” thundered Fray Junípero. “Beware of imputing sin to our sinless Lord! He simply ordered that the first stone be cast by a man without sin.” The senior inquisitor’s aspect suggested that, had he himself been present, he would unhesitatingly have hurled that first stone.

  The Benedictine protested, “The sins of the flesh are the sins of beasts: unthinking, and our Lord stands always ready to forgive such. Whereas heresy is a sin of the mind—”

  “Such creatures as La Doña Jeronima,” said Fray Junípero, “use the sins of the mind to justify those of the flesh. They wilfully make the mind into the slave of the body. This woman is a heretic, and her sin is heresy!”

  “Fray Roberto,” the ordinary asked his jurist, “what is your opinion?”

  The Fransciscan cleared his throat, smiled, and said, “The woman is guilty of mortal sin and grievous confusion. To win salvation, she must be absolved and corrected, but both these tasks are matters for her confessor—assuming she does not seduce him first—and not for the Holy Office. My brothers of the Inquisition, do you not have work enough, and more than enough, with true heretics and relapsos? I vote that this woman be set free and a confessor found for her whose age and sanctity place him beyond temptation.”

  “I cast my vote with that of Fray Roberto,” the Benedictine said at once.

  “And I,” replied Fray Juan, glaring at his fellow consultors, “vote that this is notorious heresy, and the woman belongs to the Holy Office by right!”

  The consultative votes were cast, with no power unless to sway the opinions of the principals…and in this case, as in so many others, the minds of both inquisitors and ordinary were already made up. By Fray Junípero’s expression, he understood in advance that he was defeated. The ordinary voted this proposition to be mortal sin only, because his reverence of Daroca, like all bishops, was determined to keep jurisdiction over such sins from the Holy Office as long as possible; and Don Felipe voted Doña Jeronima to be no heretic, not because she had smiled at him (of which he said nothing), but because he agreed that the Holy Office could best serve God by limiting its area of endeavor, like a lens concentrating the rays of the sun. A pretty argument; but, by the frown which the senior inquisitor cast along with his own fruitless vote, Fray Junípero once again regarded his colleague as a Ganelon, a Judas, and far more culpable than the ordinary, whose vote was mere loyalty to his bishop.

  “As to the case of Ximèn Ximenès of Tafalla,” Fray Junípero went on, with a disgruntled show of laying aside the documents relating to the lady and picking up those relating to the rogue, “will you also argue that the crime of impersonating a holy inquisitor is mere mortal sin and no matter for the Inquisition?”

  Their memories needed little refreshing on the facts of the case, nor were these facts in any dispute. Ximèn, a wandering rogue, had accosted one Doña Alvara de Santillon y Cortilla with the claim that neighbors had accused her to the Holy Office but that he, as an inquisitor of high standing, would bury the whole matter for a certain trifling consideration. Being an elderly widow of prouder name than fortune, of cleaner conscience and greater trust in her neighbors than the scoundrel credited her with, and of sublime confidence in the purity of her own, if not her late husband’s, Old Christian blood, the lady had informed him she had nothing to fear from the Holy Office, and then sought it out herself to report him.

  “It is not heresy, as such,” opined the Benedictine, “and yet by its very nature, I think we must agree that it belongs to the Holy Office to penance.”

  “Indeed,” said Don Felipe, “for it may well be said that we were its intended victim, equally with Doña Alvara. If this rogue aimed at her purse, he aimed tangentially at the Inquisition’s good name.”

  “The only question, then,” Fray Juan said, munching a date, “is how to make this scoundrel refund the money, when he has none, and how further to penance him, for example and public edification.”

  “He has no money that he has told us of,” Fray Junípero said darkly. “So far, God alone shares the secret of whatever funds he may hold hidden elsewhere, to make the Inquisition house and feed him at its own expense.”

  “For our own expense,” said Don Felipe, “we must lay the money to his charge until repaid, and hope. But for Doña Alvara, since she wisely gave him nothing, I do not see how we can force him to repay her.”

  “She gave him no money,” said the ordinary. “He has, however, cost her somewhat in reputation, grief, and time.”

  “The time of an old busybody of a widow!” Fray Juan snorted.

  “Time that she might otherwise have spent in prayer,” Fray Clemente rebuked the Dominican. “To judge by her fearlessness when threatened, Doña Alvara doubtless prays much and often.”

  The senior inquisitor said, “Too great piety in a lay person is in itself matter for suspicion.”

  “Let be Doña Alvara,” Don Felipe said, thereby undoing any redemption he might have won in Fray Junípero’s eyes by agreeing that the Inquisition should have the punishment of Ximèn Ximenès. “She is an Old Christian of blameless repute—which can scarcely have been scratched by the rogue’s assault, uttered as it was privately; and she showed little grief in reporting him.”

  “Nevertheless,” declared Fray Junípero, “in wholesome penance, he must repay the sum he tried to exact!”

  “Then let him repay it to the Holy Office,” Fray Juan proposed, with a comfortable glance at the senior inquisitor.

  “It cannot hurt to add it to his charge,” Don Felipe agreed. “Moses did succeed, by God’s grace, in striking water from the rock, though he had to strike twice.”

  “You have wilfully misread the passage,” Fray Junípero told him with a scowl, but Don Felipe paid it little attention, for thinking that, had he himself not saved his servant from a life of roguery and vagabondage, it might well have been Gubbio standing where Ximèn stood.

  “That,” nodded Roberto, “with two hundred lashes and a sentence of, say, five years in his majesty’s galleys, should make of Ximèn Ximenès a sufficiently colorful example for the coming Act of Faith.”

  So it was agreed, the vote quickly taken with not one dissenting voice, and the Council of Faith moved on to its next subject.

  “Francesca Cascajo,” said the senior inquisitor, glaring around the table as fiercely as though he had not had his will in the case of Ximèn the impersonator. “She is under grave suspicion of heresy on the following grounds: that she soaks meat in water before cooking, and fries in olive oil rather than honest lard; that she has been witnessed cutting the lump of fat from a leg of mutton before cooking; that she is known to have refused on at least three separate occasions to eat pork, and once to have refused the gift of a rooster found dead of natural causes; and that she openly slices bread with the edge of her knife turned away from her body.”

  If Don Felipe’s servant had somewhat in common with the rogue Ximèn, Felipe himself had somewhat in common with Francesca Cascajo. He pointed out, “She has correctly identified all of these charges save one, and explained her actions as springing from the delicacy of her digestion and, in the instance of the dead rooster, from a personal experience in her youth of falling seriously ill after eating a capon found dead of unknown causes.”

  Fray Junípero snorted, but before he could speak, Felipe’s Benedictine put in,

  “There is no heresy in these actions in and of themselves. They are merely signs and indications that there might be heresy in the
household.”

  Fray Junípero demanded, “Did not our Lord Himself, in the vision He sent to his first vicar, command us to eat all meats?”

  To Felipe’s astonishment, his colleague’s fellow Dominican, speaking around a mouthful of raisins and dates, said, “He declared all meats clean and worthy to be eaten. He did not command every good Christian to eat all these meats at all times. Else every Order that practises abstinence—indeed, the general rule of abstinence for all Christians on certain days—would fall under suspicion.” Fray Juan would probably never have requested such a luxury as dried fruits at this solemn conference, but he obviously knew how to avail himself of what he found set before him: already the plate was half empty.

  Don Felipe pointed out, “Francesca Cascajo has never, in all her months in our prison, refused to eat boiled pork, and both those two times that she left fried pork untasted, she also failed to finish the rest of the meal—fruit, cheese, gazpacho, even bread and cake—pleading the distress of her stomach and showing certain signs that she spoke truth.”

  “They are clever, these heretics!” said Fray Junípero. “The Devil knows how to teach his servants subtlety.”

  “It was a subtlety, then,” Don Felipe argued, “that eluded our own physician, who pronounced the woman distressed in fact, and directed that she be fed on porridge and certain herbs for several days. For myself, I am satisfied of her innocence.”

  “And the charge that she did not identify?” demanded Fray Junípero. “Are you also satisfied that her habit of cutting bread with the knife turned away from the body is another sign of innocence?”

  “So did my own mother turn the blade away from her body when slicing bread,” Felipe replied steadily. “And the reason for this was because once in youth, when cutting the common way, by accident she cut open her left breast. I myself saw the scar when she suckled my younger brother. Small doubt that Francesca Cascajo failed to identify the charge because to her this habit is so old and innocent a precaution that she understands no harm in it.”