City of Silver (17 page)

Many citizens ran ahead of the procession to the
plazuela
outside the church of the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Milagros, where a bonfire warmed the damp, overcast day. Those who managed to catch a glimpse saw the Alcalde alight and himself give a hand to his suffering wife. They and his guard and four or five others, including Doña Margarita de la Torre, a widow who was rumored to be the Alcalde’s mistress, entered the church. The doors were then closed, leaving the hundreds who had marched in the cortege locked out and Don Juan Pasquier, who had spearheaded the arrangements, stupefied.

Once inside the church, the Alcalde and his men repaired to a small room left at his disposal as the church and convent’s main benefactor. After they stored their cloaks and swords, the men returned to the main church and marched silently with the ladies up the center aisle. The Alcalde’s younger daughter, who had spent the night in vigil at the convent, prayed near her sister’s casket. In every corner, more than a thousand candles burned. Their light dazzled off gold-leafed altars and beams and the golden decoration on the richly colored paintings of the Virgin and the saints.

Up in the choir behind a rood screen, only two small candles stood watch at the coffin of Sor Elena. The church and the convent were built side by side and shared a common wall, but the only communication between them was through an arched opening to the second-floor choir room, where the nuns went to attend Mass and other services in the church. Otherwise, the
sisters used the chapel within the convent for their private community devotions.

Wearing their black veils over their faces, the Sisters of Santa Isabella chanted a piercingly sad requiem for the deceased.

“
Populus ejus et oves pascuae ejus
.”

Sor Olga’s lips chanted the words. She knelt erect and proud. She was one of God’s people and a lamb of His pasture, but she was dignified before God. Not some poor blasphemous servant who resented her master. She was clear on the object of her indignation. Maria Santa Hilda chanted distractedly at her side, nearest the remains of their blessed sister. Sor Olga seethed that Sor Elena’s holy memory was being polluted by joining her requiem with that of the damned soul whose body was down in the main church. Elena, who had spent nearly fifty years of her life in the order, was one of the first to come to Potosí. Olga remembered her face, luminous in prayer, inspiring them all in the daunting task of imploring grace and mercy from their Creator for this venal, violent city. Sor Elena deserved a Mass of her own. Deserved to have the whole city turn out to honor her holy life. Instead, all she had was this shambles—second place to the unworthy daughter of a worthy father. A daughter aided in defying her father by the proud Abbess who was every bit as willful as her young protégée.

The bell at the vestry door rang out. Father Junipero, two of his brother Jesuits, and two Indian altar boys entered the sanctuary of the main church. The sweet aroma of incense wafted up to the nuns in the choir, who intoned the
Introit
of the Mass for the Dead. Sor Olga prayed that God’s judgment of the Abbess, sure to come at some point, would arrive with due speed.

TURMOIL ROILED BENEATH the calm exterior of the Abbess. Compelled to bury Inez here by an irresistible conviction of the girl’s innocence, at least of the crime of suicide, she
had committed an act the Bishop and Fray DaTriesta were sure to call defiance. The power of Inez’s personality, even in death, had seduced her into endangering herself and the reputation of her convent.

A force that she could not withstand had taken possession of her. Something that had nothing to do with her orderly life of carefully planned steps taken to achieve ends of obvious merit. Something outside herself, or so deep within that it seemed outside. Like the sexual passion of sinners. Or the ecstasy of the saints.

She chanted the mellifluous phrases of the requiem and, by slow, quiet concentration of her will, absorbed their peace and beauty until they calmed her spirit and surrounded—but did not soften—the steel resolve within her.

After the coffins were placed in the vaults beneath the choir floor, she stayed behind while the other sisters went off to their cells to contemplate their loss in private. When she was sure she was alone, she took a lit candle from in front of the painting of Santa Barbara and stood in the center arch that overlooked the church. This was the prearranged signal—made necessary by the certain presence in her convent of a spy for the Inquisition. Her talk with DaTriesta had confirmed this. But still this clandestine act made her feel soiled, as if she were arranging a sexual assignation.

Three loud raps on the sanctuary door in the church below answered her. She blew out the candle, slipped behind the tapestry on the wall to her right, turned a hidden lever, and opened a secret door that only she knew existed. She had had the builders put it here because she had imagined they might one day need to take some innocent who claimed sanctuary in the church to safety in the convent. Now she was using the door to go in the opposite direction.

She closed it behind her and silently descended a musty, narrow stone staircase leading to another concealed door that from
the church looked like nothing more than a painting of San Juan Batista. She opened it and stood immobile, waiting for him to approach, heart beating as she imagined a girl’s heart would beat at the approach of a lover.

Long ago she had expunged all thoughts of physical love, turning her mind to the grief such weakness brought to women. Instead she had used her energies to relieve the misery of children brought into the world by indulging those appetites. In her current state of uncertainty and fear, those longings had perversely returned.

A door latch clicked and a shadowy figure passed under the painting of San Casimiro in his opulent red-and-blue robes. “Mother?” a voice whispered.

She grinned in the gloom. It was not the name a lover would have called. “Here, Padre.” She stepped down the last step into the church. “Have you found out anything?”

“I could not bring myself to ask the Alcalde probing questions at such a grievous moment. The only thing . . .” Padre Junipero’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Nothing important, really. Doña Ana collapsed at the news. She began to shriek that she had killed Inez. She was distraught, and I don’t think she would have shouted it out if she had actually done it.”

The Abbess reached her hands toward him, then pulled them back before they touched. “Yes, but she might have done it and then become overwhelmed with grief. Sinners do repent.”

“A mother kill her own child!”

The innocent priest seemed really to believe that no mother could harm her own child. The Abbess knew better. The histories of the children who had passed through her care told her full well how much malevolence could live in a mother’s heart. “I would think that Doña Ana is too weak to accomplish much
at all, good or evil, but we must not eliminate any possibility until we are sure.”

“How could she have managed it? Did she come here yesterday to visit Inez?”

“No,” the Abbess said. “At least not that I know of. But she could also have employed an accomplice within the convent walls,” she said. The words uttered her most secret fear.

“You have, then, considered the idea that one of your sisters—”

“I intend to ferret out whatever evil may lie within my walls,” she said.

“Has anyone come forward with any information?”

“Only Beatriz Tovar. You saw the note she had.”

“She is a good girl.”

“And so full of silly notions—romantic enough to fall in love with her father’s
mayordomo
.”

“Is she?”

“So she says. She came to me after a conversation with Gemita. She has several theories of how Inez might have died, all of them highly imaginative. I sincerely doubt the veracity of any of them, but to be absolutely sure, we must not dismiss any notion before we have investigated it.”

“Does Beatriz suspect someone in particular?”

The Abbess smiled at him, not sure he could see her expression in the dark. “She said she thought Gemita stood to gain a great deal by Inez’s death.”

“Was she really accusing that poor child?”

“I don’t think she realized what she was saying. I told her I thought the notion that Gemita would actually harm Inez was absurd. So she came forward with an even more unbelievable theory—that Sor Olga had murdered Inez to get me into trouble with the Inquisition, so she could succeed me as Abbess.”

The priest snorted.

“When I pointed out that Sor Olga could not have been sure Inez’s death would accomplish such a thing, she said perhaps Sor Olga intended to poison me and that somehow the substance was mistakenly consumed by Inez.”

“Preposterous,” the priest said, but without much conviction.

“Yes,” said the Abbess. “But there is a worse story. One I fear is true. Inez was not exactly the person we hoped she was. Gemita told Beatriz about an actor.”

THE BISHOP, WHO shepherded a flock of 160,000 in Potosí, was forced to forgo the quiet contemplation of Christ’s passion on that Good Friday morning. He ought to have been preparing his soul to conduct the three-hour-long service that was to begin at noon, but while the wind howled and shook his shutters, he bore as best he could the constant interruptions to his meditations.

Ocampo, the cook, wanted approval of the menu for Monday’s luncheon in honor of Visitador Nestares. Ham, smoked sausage, blood pudding, stuffed suckling pig. “And let us give him some Peruvian specialties,” the Bishop told Ocampo. “Onions and chilies pickled in vinegar. Potatoes roasted in embers. And that delicious thin bread of maize.” The Bishop’s Lenten-starved taste buds watered at the thought. For the moment, he had to satisfy himself with stimulating but bitter Paraguayan tea while he pictured the sumptuous banquet table less than three days away. He wished he had fine porcelain plates to lay out. He had only
silver, which in Spain would be a sign of great wealth, but here everyone had them.

Bustling workers and several penitential processions clogged the streets beneath his windows. The noise of their comings and goings invaded his already discomfited thoughts. He had tried to get the Abbess to give up Inez, hoping his good offices would ally him with the Alcalde. Such a rich man could prove a great patron for projects of the Holy See. Look what he had done for the convent—the expansion of the building, the erection of the great church attached to it, to say nothing of the missions in Caricari and Contumarca. They said the Alcalde had given Los Milagros more than five hundred thousand reales—an amount greater than the Bishop’s total fortune, but only a fraction of what Morada possessed. Pack trains had gone into the country every night for a month. Everyone knew they carried away Morada’s silver and concealed it somewhere out on the craggy Altiplano. Now, with the girl dead, de la Morada was slipping through his fingers just when an alliance was so critical to his future.

As an appointee of the Crown, he, like all bishops, had civil as well as ecclesiastical responsibilities. Certainly His Majesty the King would approve of close cooperation between the most powerful temporal power in the city and the local head of the Church. Just as certainly, DaTriesta’s obsession with prosecuting the Abbess would spoil any chance of such an alliance. How could anyone hope to endear himself to the Alcalde by accusing his dead daughter of suicide?

The Bishop might win Morada’s support by siding with the Abbess against DaTriesta, but he had to be careful there, too. The local Commissioner of the Holy Tribunal kept detailed records of all he knew. Charges could always be trumped up, even against a bishop. His Grace had heard of a man who, viewing the heavens on a clear Andean night, said there were too many stars. The Inquisition brought him up on charges of blasphemy
because he implied that God had erred in His creation. Once he was accused by the Holy Tribunal, even a bishop’s reputation would be tainted forever. His chances of an appointment to the Viceroyalty would be ruined, no matter how much silver he could pay into the King’s coffers. He dismissed a niggling doubt that the circumstances of his birth had already negated his chances. He was noble. After his belated ordination, he had been appointed directly to the Bishopric of the most powerful city in the Western Hemi sphere. The King favored him. He did not doubt that. His Majesty could even legitimize his birth if he wanted to.

Such a dilemma. A chance to ally himself with local power and to profit thereby, or the slimmer chance for far, far greater riches by remaining out of DaTriesta’s clutches and in favor with the King. As his Dutch clock chimed eleven, His Excellency reached for the bell and rang for a small early lunch. Even on Good Friday, the denial of the flesh need not be complete. But before the silver pinging faded, a sharp rap at the door told him the irksome Commissioner was here to torture him anew. He sighed, offered up the anticipated annoyance for the souls in purgatory, and called out, “Come.”