Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  For many years, Don Felipe was to send scouts and messengers in search of the Calé. At first Pilar’s nephew, Fernando Lepecheur, who had escaped his people’s fate by bringing her husband the news, served as one of these scouts; but the boy failed to return from his third journey beyond the mountains. Hoping that he had found and rejoined his people, but fearing that he had not—else why would they not have accepted Don Felipe’s offer of safe conduct and a new home nearer his own town of Ainsa?—the inquisitor arranged to have Masses sung for him…for all of them…in perpetuity.

  Part of the priest, and that a very large part, ached to do the very thing his enemy had proposed in cruel jest: leave everything behind, take horse, and ride alone over the mountains in search of his wife and her people. Time and again, especially late at night or in the toils of some tedious case, he formed the resolution to do it. If he were as vigorous as he had been only a few seasons earlier…but, though upon his first visits to Agapida he had felt like a youth just entering the springtime of life, now he felt weak and aged beyond his actual years. Accepting the blow as the final—he hoped—repayment for that mortal sin of his true youth, he bowed his spirit beneath the weight of the work God had apparently given him to accomplish, offered unremitting prayers for his wife and her people, and let her absence slowly become a deep and tender scar.

  In Heaven, surely, as God was merciful, they would come together again.

  Chapter 26

  The Dream of the Barrel

  He did not recognize the city, but it seemed to be nowhere in Spain. The air had much that same chill he had found in Ireland, and faint mist blurred the details of upper stories and roofs.

  People filled the street. Some wore bright colors trimmed with lace; others dark and unfrilled stuff; and the poor, as always and everywhere, went patched and drab, even in their holiday best. That it was a holiday he guessed by their mood. Some chattered in merriment, while others strode in sedate anticipation, their eyes shining and mouths twitching upward at the corners. Only a few looked grave, and most of them walked with heads lowered and shoulders hunched, as if trying to escape their fellows’ notice. Don Felipe doubted that their precaution was necessary, for no one glanced at him, despite the great difference between his garments and theirs. He was clad in the Italian fashion of his youth, and all their clothing—bright or sober, rich or poor—was as simple in its cut as so many Doric columns. He surmised that he was seeing distant descendants of his own contemporaries. He felt no surprise when Rosemary, in her even simpler tunic and trousers, pushed through the crowd to join him.

  “Where are we this time?” he asked, and merely nodded when she replied,

  “Lancaster, England, 1628. For now.”

  As they followed the happy throng, he grew aware of a series of ringing thuds. At first he thought them a clock, but as he counted thirteen, then fourteen and fifteen strokes…and they had been going on for some time before he began to count…he understood them to be blows, perhaps of a heavy hammer or mallet. Unless they were some giant heartbeat. They had the regularity for it.

  Still flowing with the crowd, Felipe and Rosemary emerged in an open place where he saw, to his horror, a stake raised high on a great mound of faggots, and a man already chained to it.

  “No!” he exclaimed, for a moment remembering only his waking custom. “Never have I attended the place of burning!” He struggled to turn back, but the crowd pressed him in on every side. They still hardly glanced at him—they seemed impersonal as the ocean—but their merriment mocked his efforts. The sound of blows, whether hammer, clock, or heartbeat, pierced through their jollity without drowning or diminishing it. They paid no more attention to it than to the inquisitor.

  At his shoulder, Rosemary said, “Don’t you want to see one of your own get his martyr’s crown, or palm, or whatever?”

  He managed to work around and face her. “A Catholic? They would burn a Catholic? In Catholic England?”

  “Henry the Eighth changes all that.”

  “What? The Defender of the Faith?”

  “Just until he wants to divorce your own Fernando’s daughter for not giving him a son,” she answered tightly. “You’ll hear about it in a couple of years, your time, when it happens.”

  “And this is what his apostasy will bring about!” Don Felipe looked again at the stake. He could not quite make out the features of the martyr to be.

  Rosemary shrugged. “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic—you’re all Thunder God exclusionists.”

  Ignoring her, he squinted harder at the man chained to the stake. “But it—it is El Santon!”

  “If you’ve seen one,” his guide remarked Delphically. “Look to the right of the pyre.”

  He did so, and finally located the source of the ringing blows. A black-haired, swarthy young man was bending over a carpenter’s table, hammering boards together.

  “What is he making?” Felipe asked.

  “You tell me,” Rosemary replied.

  The victim screamed. Looking back at the pyre, Felipe saw it speckled with dots of orange fire, like a rosebush breaking into bloom. The mob burst into a tumult of ecstasy which drowned out the carpenter’s blows, but not Rosemary’s voice. “Thunder,” Felipe heard her say—or, perhaps, think, her mind directly into his. “One more burnt offering and a little thundershout for that Big Old Whitebearded Thunder God in the Sky.”

  The pyre with its flame-blossoms, the carpenter working as if noiselessly at his table, and the roar of the crowd all blended into a kind of veil, behind which everything shimmered, wavered… When it steadied again and the veil lifted, the city had changed. Now it looked Spanish…definitely Spanish or, perhaps, Portuguese, though he could not have named it. Old Moorish buildings glowed as if with sunset in the light of the pyre—for, against all custom, the place of burning had been set in the town square—and the people of the crowd, while clad still more strangely than their predecessors, now wore the mark of Iberia, the strains of Gothic, Moorish, and Hebrew blood mingled together for centuries, with traces of even more exotic elements. Don Felipe fancied he saw more children of Ham among the paler faces than there were in his own lifetime, and more Calé…so not all the efforts to drive out Pilar’s people were to succeed.

  He thought he might have felt at home among them, were it not for the bloodthirsty joy that warped their shouting faces. He forced himself to look once again at the object of their derision, who had begun to writhe.

  To Don Felipe’s eyes, the victim remained El Santon; but Rosemary observed, “Still Arrowsmith, only this time he’s an English Protestant who made the mistake of honeymooning in Spain. The Inquisition got them both, him and his bride.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Of course, some historians say this Arrowsmith is really the first one, the Catholic martyr of 1628, and English folk memory changed details around to ease the collective Anglo conscience.”

  At his table beside the pyre, the carpenter hammered on. Somehow, in spite of the distance and the crowd between, Don Felipe could see great tears falling upon the wooden staves where he bent over them.

  “I still do not understand,” the inquisitor repeated.

  “Neither do I, but I think maybe it’s a smack of how God sees things. Past, present, and future all mixed together.”

  “But if this burning is not really to happen…”

  “Who says things aren’t real just because they don’t actually happen?”

  Again the martyr screamed—a shriek so piercing that it shot pain through Felipe’s own body from head to heels. “I can watch no more of this,” he protested, turning his back to the stake and finding himself at the cathedral doors.

  Rosemary pushed them open and walked in at his side. The great doors closed behind them, like huge boulders rolling back into place, and for a moment all was murky to Don Felipe’s eyes. Bit by bit, he made things out. First the candles. A tiny orange flame here, another there, several more yonder…casting their glow over al
tar and congregation…how could it have appeared so dark at first? Hundreds of ducats’ worth of candles illuminated some ceremony of singular importance. Some royal wedding…or funeral…or both at once? He seemed to catch glimpses of bride and groom before the altar, and in momentary confusion he thought he heard that they were that same pair of English Lutherans seized honeymooning in Spain…but looming much larger and clearer than they was the royal catafalque.

  “Let’s see…” Rosemary said, as if consulting unseen notes. “Fifteen ninety-eight and fifteen fifty-two. Obsequies of El Rey Felipe Dos and Mr. William Gardiner. Two desecrations. Your choice which one is worse.”

  “Those people sitting on benches,” said Don Felipe.

  “The civil judges, with their wives and other attendants,” Rosemary replied dryly.

  “Their benches are draped with black cloth. I see other benches, but none of them are so draped.”

  She nodded. “Watch.”

  He looked at the altar, where Mass was commencing. All seemed in order there, at least. Moving his gaze back to the congregation, however, he beheld confusion. The judges and their wives sat quietly enough in their draped benches—looking, indeed, more like statues than living flesh—but the inquisitors’ benches prickled with pointing hands. They, who ought to have set the people an example of how to attend Mass, had their heads together buzzing like wasps.

  At length they pushed one of their underlings out of his place and sent him scuttling to the benches where sat the city magistrates. They, who had also been staring and pointing at the judges’ black drapery, now commenced pointing at the inquisitors as well, arguing with one another until they became a second wasps’ nest.

  Mass was continuing, but not without small hesitations on the part of priest and servers as they glanced down from time to time at the various groups of benches. It was becoming difficult even to hear, let alone follow, the solemn Latin phrases.

  Four or five officials squeezed themselves out of the magistrates’ benches and scurried over to those of the judges, pointing to their black drapery. The noise from below rose until it completely drowned the holy chanting. Someone shouted, “Never! To the jail with them!” and some ten or a dozen of the judges’ attendants clambered from their places to seize the four or five magisterial messengers and haul them, kicking and protesting, from the church.

  “This is worse than tobacco at the altar,” Don Felipe observed to Rosemary.

  “They don’t like that black draping. They want it taken off. Something about precedence.”

  “They are right,” the inquisitor agreed. “The initial blame lies upon those judges. Yet to protest it in this fashion…”

  A man whose clothing suggested that of a secretary left the inquisitors’ benches and approached the judges. Met by a wall of raised fists, he hesitated, looked around, and finally climbed to the royal catafalque itself. From here, he turned and cried an inquisitorial excommunication down upon the city judges unless they left the cathedral at once.

  The ghostly bride and groom looked around in distant annoyance at the wasplike people below. The priest had given up and stood in silence before the altar, head bowed and shoulders—Felipe thought—shaking a little, his acolytes crouching near his feet to stare wide-eyed at the tumult.

  The secretary, having returned to the inquisitors, had gone from them a second time toward the judges with a paper in his hand, and suffered a second repulsion, climbed the catafalque once more and shouted out that the judges were all excommunicate and must leave the premises before the Mass could continue. A man in the judges’ benches stood up and shouted back that they declared all the acts of the tribunal null and void, and were at that very moment drawing up the proper instrument to deprive the inquisitors of citizenship.

  Someone from the magistrates’ benches went to the inquisitors hoping, as nearly as Don Felipe could make out by the movements of his hands, to calm them; but their faces waxed more wrathful. One of them stood and thundered, “Not though Saint Paul himself were to come down from Heaven and order us to act otherwise than as we do! Not though it cost us our souls!”

  From a chair of honor, a high churchman rose and called out, “Let the Mass continue, under pain of excommunication for the officiating priest!”

  But the officiating priest had disappeared, no one knew where. In the confusion, no one had seen him slip away. Don Felipe hardly knew whether to blame him for deserting a half-said Mass, or applaud him for escaping and leaving it unfinished in the presence of so many who cared less for God’s heavenly than for their own earthly privileges. Besides Don Felipe and the pagan Rosemary, and the now-visible, now-unseen bride and bridegroom, one person alone in all that riot appeared to take any interest in seemly decorum, and he was a quiet, not unhandsome young man who stood as near the sanctuary as permissible, keeping his nose buried in a small book.

  The inquisitor looked at him again, and asked Rosemary, “Who is that?”

  “Gardiner,” she replied.

  For one moment, Don Felipe had thought him to be El Santon, reading a pamphlet from his own press. But Juan de Calamocha was outside, undergoing his passion. Don Felipe had come into the cathedral so as not to witness his agony.

  “Let the Mass continue!” the high churchman cried out once more, and pointed his forefinger at the inquisitor. “Under pain of excommunication!”

  “They’re calling you,” said Rosemary, and Don Felipe found himself, unvested as he was, standing before the altar, with Host and Chalice waiting before him.

  Had the Consecration yet taken place, or not? He could not remember. Desperately though he searched his mind, he could find no recollection of how far the original priest had come, or at what point he had abandoned his post. Hands trembling, keenly aware of his secular garb—which must be long out of fashion—Don Felipe bowed over the Elements and said a provisional Consecration over the Host.

  He genuflected to the Body of Christ. He stood again, lifted It from Its poor gold paten, and raised It high above his head. The Elevation, at least, would have as much dignity as he could humanly lend it, no matter whether the buffoons on their benches were watching or not. By their continued hubbub, he thought not. In his opinion, that this Mass should continue was scandalous. Nevertheless, since he had been commanded to finish it, he would do so with as much—

  A blow struck his arms, so hard that it numbed them. The Host fell. Aghast, he tried to catch it. His arms swung like staves of wood, and a knife pierced his left hand. The pain doubled him over, half on the altar—but danger to the Body of Christ outweighed any personal grief. Calling all his will, he jerked himself up and around.

  He saw Gardiner—the hitherto quiet young man—in the act of casting the Host underfoot and stamping on it.

  That unthinkable sacrilege silenced the whole cathedral. They who had squabbled so long and loud about their worldly privileges now stood or sat frozen, mouths agape like wounds. The bridegroom shielded his bride’s face from the terrible sight. Blood flowed from the remains of Sacred Flesh where They lay mangled on the sanctuary floor.

  Rosemary stood frowning, arms folded tightly across her breast. Even she, Pagan though she called herself, seemed to disapprove.

  Staring at the man, Felipe whispered, “Why?” Then, his voice breaking out despite himself, “My God! You have assaulted God Himself!”

  As though his cry were the release, a roar burst from the assemblage. Contorted faces howling for vengeance, they surged forward, arms straining toward the desecrator like the spines of some vast hedgehog. Don Felipe threw himself down on the floor, striving to cover the broken Host with his own body lest the mob trample It themselves in the rush of their zeal. He saw more than felt Gardiner’s knife still transfixing his hand, its point coming through the palm. He desperately feared that it might scratch the Sacred Flesh.

  “Stop!” Rosemary shouted above the noise of the mob. Once again they fell silent, arms frozen in midreach, faces turning to watch her. A head or more taller th
an almost everyone else present, she strode up to the sanctuary steps, halting just short of Felipe’s hands. “All right,” she said, gazing steadily at Gardiner. “Why did you do it?”

  He answered: “To awaken them to their foul idolatry.”

  “Idolatry?” cried Felipe. “How is it idolatry to worship the very Body of the One True God?”

  Rosemary stooped and yanked the dagger from his hand. Some of his blood spurted down to mingle with Christ’s Flesh before he could prevent it. But his guide had straightened again and returned her gaze to Gardiner. Balancing the dagger between her hands as if testing its point with one finger, she said, “By stirring them into frenzy. Lot of good that does.”

  “I knew that it must cost me my life.”

  “You’ll be lucky if it doesn’t cost the life of every English Protestant in this country.” Turning to Don Felipe, she went on, “Your call, inquisitor. Who gets him? Due process of law, or the mob? The mob would be quicker.”

  He looked at them and shook his head. “Let Gardiner’s blood not be upon their heads.”

  “I’d call that academic,” she remarked. “But suit yourself.”

  Seizing the offender by one arm, she marched him in a straight line to the doors, the mob parting for them like the Red Sea for Moses, though not without many curses and much shaking of fists.

  Don Felipe remained to gather up the Sacred Fragments as best he could and lock Them safely in the Tabernacle. It seemed to take him a very long time. When at last he finished and looked up, the cathedral was empty of everyone save Rosemary, who stood in the doorway beckoning.

  “I turned him over to the justice of 1552 Portugal,” she told Don Felipe. “Come watch it.”

  “I should prefer to stay here and pray for—”

  “Great-grandfather, this time you haven’t got the choice.” Seizing his arm as moments ago she had seized Gardiner’s, she led him outside.