Cathedral of the Sea (94 page)

“How is your master?” he heard behind him.

Guillem turned, and saw a
bastaix
carrying an enormous sack on his shoulders. Years earlier, Arnau had lent him money, which he had returned coin by coin. Guillem shrugged and twisted his mouth. Almost immediately, he was surrounded by a line of
bastaixos
who were unloading a ship. “What’s happened to Arnau?” he heard. “How can they accuse him of heresy?” That man had borrowed money from Arnau as well ... for his daughter’s dowry. How many of them had turned to Arnau for help? “If you see him,” said another
bastaix,
“tell him we’ve lit a candle for him beneath the statue in Santa Maria. We make sure it never goes out.” Guillem tried to explain he knew nothing, but they all launched into attacks on the Inquisition before continuing on their way.

Emboldened by their passion, Guillem strode off determinedly to the royal palace.

Now, with Santa Maria silhouetted against the night sky, Guillem found himself once more outside Arnau’s countinghouse. He needed the bill of payment that the Jew Abraham Levi had once signed, which he himself had hidden behind a stone in the wall. The door to the countinghouse was shut, but there was a window on the ground floor that had never closed properly. Guillem strained his ears: there was no one around. The window grated in the nighttime silence. Guillem froze. After all, he was a Moor, an infidel entering the house of a prisoner of the Inquisition in the middle of the night. If he were caught, the fact that he had been baptized a Christian would be of little help. But the nighttime sounds around him made him realize that the universe did not depend on him: the lapping of the waves, the creaking of the scaffolding at Santa Maria, babies crying, men shouting at their wives ...

He opened the window wider and slipped inside. Abraham Levi’s fictitious deposit had allowed Arnau to put the money to good use and earn healthy profits, but each time he did so, he made sure that a quarter of the earnings were noted down in Levi’s name. Guillem waited until his eyes grew used to the darkness and the moonlight could guide him.

Guillem knelt by the wall. It was the second stone from the right. He began to pull at it. He had never confessed to Arnau about that first operation he had done behind his back, but in his name. The stone would not budge. “Don’t worry,” he remembered Hasdai telling Arnau once when he had mentioned the Jew, “I have instructions for the deposit to remain as it is. Don’t worry about it.” When Arnau turned to look at them, Hasdai stared at Guillem, who limited himself to shrugging and sighing. The stone began to move. No. Arnau would never have used money that came from the sale of slaves. The stone came away, and behind it Guillem soon found the document, carefully wrapped in a cloth. He did not bother reading it, because he remembered exactly what it said. He pushed the stone back and went back to the window. He could hear nothing unusual outside, so he slipped out again, and left Arnau’s countinghouse.

T
HE SOLDIERS HAD to come into the dungeon to get him. Two of rhem lifted him under the arms and dragged him out, while Arnau JL struggled to stand. His ankles banged against the stairs up to the palace; he did not have the strength to make his own way. He did not even notice the monks and priests peering at him as he was led to face Nicolau again. Arnau had not been able to sleep for a moment: how could Joan have denounced him?

When he had been thrown back into the dungeon the previous evening, Arnau had wept, cried out, and flung himself at the wall. Why Joan? And if Joan had denounced him, what role was Aledis playing in all this? And the old woman in the dungeon with him? Aledis had reason to hate him: he had abandoned her and then refused to receive her. Could she be in league with Joan? Had they really gone to fetch Mar? If that were so, why hadn’t she visited him? Was it so hard to bribe a simple jailer?

Francesca listened to him weeping and crying out. When she heard her son in such pain, her body shrank still further. She would have loved to look at him and respond, to console him even if she had to lie. “You won’t be able to stand it,” she had warned Aledis. But what about her? Would she be able to bear this situation for much longer? Arnau went on howling his anguish to the world, and Francesca crept closer to the dank walls of the prison.

THE DOORS TO the chamber opened and Arnau was pushed in. The members of the tribunal were all assembled. The soldiers dragged him to the center of the room and let him go: Arnau fell to his knees with his legs splayed out beneath him. He heard Nicolau’s voice breaking the silence, but could not understand a word of what he was saying. What did he care what this friar could do to him, when his own brother had already passed sentence on him? He had no one. He had nothing.

“Make no mistake,” the bailiff had told him when he tried to buy him off with a small fortune, “you don’t have any money anymore.” Money! Money had been the reason the king had married him to Eleonor ; money was behind his wife’s accusations; it was money that had led to his imprisonment. Could it have been money that led Joan to... ?”

“Bring in the mother!”

The barked command stirred a response in Arnau’s befuddled brain.

MAR AND ALEDIS, with Joan a few paces away, were waiting outside the bishop’s palace in Plaza Nova. “The infante will see my master this evening,” was all that one of Guillem’s slaves had told them the day before. This morning, at first light, the same slave had appeared and told them his master wanted them to go to the Plaza Nova.

So the three of them waited, wondering what reasons there could be for Guillem to call them there like that.

ARNAU HEARD THE doors opening behind him. Then he heard the soldiers come back in and approach the center of the chamber close by him. After that, they marched back to stand guard at the doors.

He could sense her presence. He saw her bare, cracked feet, filthy and bleeding. Nicolau and the bishop smiled when they saw Arnau apparently fascinated by his mother’s feet. He turned to look at her properly. Although he was on his knees and she was standing, she was so shrunken that she was only a hand taller than he. The time she had spent in the dungeons had left its mark: her sparse gray hair was matted and stiff; her profile as she stared at the tribunal bench was a mass of slack skin. The eye in the side of her face he could see was sunken so deep into what looked like purple, mottled flesh that Arnau could scarcely make it out.

“Francesca Esteve,” said Nicolau, “do you swear on the four gospels?”

The old woman’s strong, firm voice took everyone by surprise. “I swear,” she said, “but you are wrong; my name is not Francesca Esteve.”

“What is it then?” asked Nicolau.

“My name is Francesca, but not Esteve. It’s Ribes. Francesca Ribes,” she said, raising her voice.

“Do we have to remind you that you are under oath?” the bishop said.

“No. On my oath, I am telling the truth. My name is Francesca Ribes.”

“Are you not the daughter of Pere and Francesca Esteve?” Nicolau insisted.

“I never knew who my parents were.”

“Did you contract marriage with Bernat Estanyol in the lands of the lord of Navarcles?”

Arnau stiffened. Bernat Estanyol?

“No. I have never been in such a place and have never been married.”

“And did you not bear a son by the name of Arnau Estanyol?”

“No. I know of no such Arnau Estanyol.”

Arnau turned to her again.

Nicolau Eimerich and Berenguer d’Eril whispered together. Then the inquisitor addressed the clerk.

“Listen,” he told Francesca.

“Declaration by Jaume de Bellera, lord of Navarcles,” the clerk began to read.

When he heard the name Bellera, Arnau’s eyes narrowed. His father had told him about that family. He listened closely to the supposed story of his life, the story cut short by his father’s death. The way his mother had been called to the castle to suckle Llorenç de Bellera’s new son. A witch? He heard Jaume de Bellera’s version of how his mother had run away when soon afterward he had begun to suffer from the Devil’s sickness.

“Arnau Estanyol’s father, Bernat,” the clerk went on, “succeeded in eluding the guard after he had killed an innocent youth, and then abandoned his lands and fled to Barcelona with his son. Once in the city, they were taken in by the family of Grau Puig, the merchant. The witness is aware that the witch became a common whore. Arnau Estanyol is the son of a witch and a murderer.”

“What do you have to say to that?” Nicolau asked Francesca.

“That you’ve got the wrong whore,” the old woman said coldly.

“You!” shouted the bishop, pointing an accusing finger at her. “How dare you challenge the Inquisition’s evidence?”

“I’m not here for being a whore,” Francesca said, “and that’s not what I’m being tried for. Saint Augustine wrote that only God can judge fallen women.”

The bishop went bright red with rage. “How dare you quote Saint Augustine? How ... ?”

Berenguer d’Eril went on ranting and raving, but Arnau was no longer listening. Saint Augustine wrote that God would judge fallen women. Saint Augustine said ... Years ago ... in an inn at Figueres, he had heard those words from a common whore ... Hadn’t she been called Francesca? Saint Augustine wrote ... Could it be?

Arnau turned to look at Francesca: he had seen her only twice in his life, but both were crucial moments. Everyone in the tribunal saw how he reacted to her.

“Look at your son!” shouted Eimerich. “Do you deny you are his mother?”

Arnau and Francesca heard his accusation reverberate from the chamber walls. He was on his knees, staring at her; she was looking ahead of her, straight at the grand inquisitor.

“Look at him!” Nicolau raged, pointing at Arnau.

Faced with all the hatred of that accusatory finger, Francesca’s entire body quivered. Only Arnau noticed how the skin of her neck pulled back almost imperceptibly. She did not take her eyes off the inquisitor.