City of Silver (20 page)

Beatriz shuddered. “I don’t want to think about that.”

Hippolyta looked around at the door and tiptoed over to Beatriz. “I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of something worse.”

Beatriz nodded. “Spending the rest of your life in this place.”

Hippolyta looked confused. “I have no choice about that.”

Beatriz’s fingers flew to her lips. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

Hippolyta’s fat little hands grasped Beatriz’s arms. “I am afraid of something I did. I think the Abbess despises me for it.”

Beatriz was shocked and intrigued.

“The Abbess reminds me of my mother,” Hipplolyta said.

“She is very kind,” Beatriz said, hoping Hippolyta would tell her a secret.

“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean there are things going on under her own roof that she knows nothing about.”

Beatriz thought about Hippolyta making love with her father’s page and blushed. “You didn’t say that to her?”

Hippolyta’s grip tightened on Beatriz’s arm. “I did. And I told her worse.”

“What?” Beatriz demanded.

“Something very, very bad. I am so ashamed.” A tear rolled from her big, frightened eyes. “I have destroyed the life of my best friend in the world.”

“Inez?” Could harmless little Hippolyta have murdered Inez?

“
No!
Sor Eustacia.”

“Sor Eustacia?” What had the tall, kindly nun to do with anything?

“Yes. More than anyone else I have ever met, she cares about me. And I betrayed her.”

“Betrayed?”

Hippolyta nodded gravely. “I will confess it this afternoon when the padre comes, but I don’t think God can ever forgive me. I told the Abbess that Sor Eustacia was in love with Inez.”

“What?”

“That Sor Eustacia and Inez had an unnatural friendship.”

“A what?”

“I saw them. I went to Sor Eustacia’s room in the night a few days ago. I found Inez in her bed.”

“What? But they are two women! That’s not possible.”

“You don’t know anything,” Hippolyta said.

Beatriz blushed. “Oh, of course, I know all about that.” But she didn’t, and she couldn’t figure out how this child knew so much more than she did.

“It was Inez’s fault, not Sor Eustacia’s. I am sure Inez must have been the one to start it.” Hippolyta put her hand on her belly again. “I know how it happens.”

THE ABBESS ONCE again stood terrified before the sisters gathered in the community room. She held her body in a posture of command that belied the fear boiling in her belly. She did not want the knowledge she was compelled to search out.

All her life—she now realized—she had kept certain kinds of thinking at bay. She had muffled her doubts with carpets of the silence in which she lived, blanketed all strong emotions under layers of solitude, drowned out niggling suspicions with torrents of chanted prayer.

She breathed in and made her words strong. “I intend to search this entire building for an explanation of Inez’s death. Sor Olga, Sor Monica, and Sor Eustacia, you will join me. Except for Padre Junipero and Fray DaTriesta at the locutory, no one has entered or left the convent since Inez died. If any clue remains, we will find it.” She signaled to Monica, Olga, and Eustacia to come to her side. The tall, serious Eustacia immediately stepped forward. She was not quite recovered from her cold, but she would not keep to her bed, preferring to see to her
prayers and her duties. The Abbess refused to believe the rantings of the overwrought Hippolyta that Sor Eustacia had been in love with Inez. Eustacia was the most loyal and sensible sister in the convent. If it came to it, she had sworn, she would go to the stake in her Abbess’s stead.

Sor Olga stood, head high and hands together, one over the other, as if she held a trapped bird between them. This was her pose of command—a position that today seemed to sit much more comfortably on the Mistress of Novices than it did on Maria Santa Hilda. That Sor Olga had urged the Abbess to be more authoritarian made such an approach the more distasteful—as if disliking Olga meant rejecting all her advice, however wise. Now the older, cynical woman’s counsel could not be avoided.

“Go to your cells and remain there,” the Abbess said sternly to the sisters of her community. “The maids too must go to their dormitory and wait. In an hour, Padre Junipero will hear our confessions. Spend the intervening time examining your consciences.” She raised her hands, signaling the sisters to stand and be dismissed. The community scattered. Only the whisper of their swishing skirts and the creaking of their shoes broke the silence.

When they were gone, the Abbess turned toward the three women who had gathered around her. “We will begin with my quarters.”

They made their way around the front cloister to the street end of the building and Maria Santa Hilda’s suite of rooms. Their search of her office was thorough, unsurprising to her companions, and painless to the Abbess.

But in her tiny personal chapel, to her mortification, Sor Eustacia riffled through the music on her small foot-pump organ and found Maria Santa Hilda’s mediocre compositions. Eustacia was a good enough musician to see at a glance how simple and uninteresting the songs were. The Abbess held up her head and bore the younger woman’s wide, quizzical glance.

Eustacia, like everyone else in the convent, was becoming an enigma to the Abbess, whose heart refused any suspicion of this steady, intelligent, and devout sister—the dearest of the few Maria Santa Hilda felt she could count on as friends. Maria Santa Hilda’s mind saw, however, that she could not dismiss the information Hippolyta had so painfully and reluctantly given up. The Abbess’s duty was to take the child’s revelation seriously, and when she did, she saw the possibility that it was true. Passions of the soul and body often resided in the same person. Eustacia possessed the one. Why not the other? Maria Santa Hilda knew too well that the body’s longing for love did not cease with vows, and a soul’s loneliness grew in the silence of the convent. The Abbess lacked the moral indignation she was supposed to feel. She felt only sorrow that she must torment her younger sister with questions. God give her strength, she prayed, Eustacia’s secret life was just another misery to be faced.

Sor Olga, who read no music, glanced at the manuscripts and disapproved out of habit.

In the Abbess’s cell, where no one but the maids ever entered, Maria Santa Hilda barely endured their discovery of her secular books—Acosta’s
Natural and Moral History of the Indies
and the story of the Cid. They were not scandalous, but they revealed her love of adventure that she had hidden from the world as if it were a sin.

Sor Monica searched the
armario
without disturbing a single fold of the neatly stacked underlinens. When she was finished she went and stood by the door, her face red with an embarrassment equal to what the Abbess felt but concealed.

Noises from the plaza intruded and gave urgency to their search. Out there, Indian workers hastily sawed boards and mixed plaster for some construction to honor the arrival of Nestares—who would bring the Inquisitor with him.

“If you are satisfied, Sisters, that there is nothing suspicious here, we shall go next to Sor Olga’s quarters.” She took perverse
joy in the Novice Mistress’s shock and indignation and her silent—for a change—and stony submission. Of course, they found nothing to incriminate Sor Olga. In fact, they found nothing at all. The older woman’s cell contained her clothing, her breviary, her devotional articles, and not a single other thing—not a book, no ink or quills, not even a scrap of paper.

In the main chapel, they searched even behind the ebony-and-gold frame that held the jewel-encrusted Madonna before which the community prayed six times a day. Aristocratic ladies often came to the convent to petition the sisters to pray for special favors—the recovery of a sick child, the safe return of a husband who had to cross the sea to Spain, the rescue of a loved one trapped by a cave-in at the mine. If their prayers were answered, they gave a precious stone, pearls, or gold to adorn the Madonna. Over the decades, the artisans in the Calle de los Mercaderes had attached the jewels to the image, creating the splendid Madonna of Los Milagros. On Holy Saturday in the year of Our Lord 1650, the opulent Virgin looked down serenely on the Sisters of Santa Isabella. She concealed no secrets behind her exquisite frame.

The searchers went next to the vault that abutted the church. Wealthy Potosinos often deposited their valuables in convents and monasteries for safekeeping. Each religious order kept a secure place such as this to store jewels and silver. On a table in the counting room, the sisters found a canvas-wrapped parcel. “Dear Lord, forgive me,” the Abbess exclaimed. She had neglected her duty here. Captain Ramirez, the Tester of the Currency, had brought in some silver two days ago. She had sent Juana, the sturdy maid, to take the deposit. Then that evening, in the confusion following Inez’s death, the Abbess had forgotten to come and lock it away in the vault.

While the others searched in the counting room cupboards, she unwrapped and weighed Ramirez’s ingot and entered the amount in her account book. She took a key only she possessed
and opened the fortified door to the adjoining vault. In the dank interior, she caught an odd whiff of candle wax and found a sprinkling of sand on the floor. This had not been here the last time she had come in. Under her wimple, her scalp went cold. A theft as well as a murder? Had someone penetrated the vault? She looked around quickly and saw nothing amiss. Yet something had happened here. Was there anyone she could trust? Instinct told her not to reveal this to the others. She would say nothing as yet to her sisters. She put down Ramirez’s silver, left the vault, and locked the door.

She focused on her search of the convent. In the kitchen storeroom, they found nothing untoward among the sacks of maize and barley and boxes of salted fish that had been their sustenance during the fasting season. And nothing among the vihuelas, guitars, and mandolins in the room where they taught the girls music.

In the refectory, Sor Eustacia searched even the bowl of ashes kept on a table by the door as a reminder of the dust they would all one day become.

By the time they reached the rear cloister and the living quarters, the silent sisters were filing out in answer to the bell that called them to confession. The Abbess and her sisters searched the cells and found many things that outraged Sor Olga—a stash of coca leaves here, a gold bracelet, the memento of a former life, there, quite a few hidden sweetmeats, even during Lent, and a number of forbidden secular books and diaries—but nothing that connected anyone to Inez’s death.

They passed to the upper floor, to the dormitory of the maids, whom Maria Santa Hilda dismissed. They went to prepare the noon meal while the sisters riffled through their meager possessions.

Like the others, Juana, the missing maid, kept her belongings in a wooden box under her bed. Among her things, they found religious pictures in frames marvelously carved with motifs of
the sun, the moon, and mermaids playing guitars. “These are beautiful,” the Abbess said.

Sor Eustacia fingered the fine carving. “Sculpted by her brother, the one she is trying to save from the
mita
.”

“I thought he was illiterate,” the Abbess declared. “Evidently he has found another way to express his thoughts.”

“It looks very pagan to me,” was Sor Olga’s predictable response.

From the bottom of the box, Sor Monica pulled a rough
pañete
sack. In it was an animal horn containing ground lime and coca leaf wrapped in a rag, and under it a glass vial. Monica held the vial up to the light from the window. “It is some sort of dark resin.” She pulled the cork and sniffed. “Very aromatic. It might be some drug the Indians inhale—like the one Vitallina found in the Plaza de la Fruta that relieves pain.” She wet her little finger on her tongue, thrust it into the vial, and moved to taste the stuff.

“No,” Sor Eustacia cried out. “It might be poison.”

Maria Santa Hilda stayed Monica’s hand. “You must not risk it. Feed it to the cat.”

Sor Monica recorked the vial and put it in her pocket. She put back the horn with the coca in it. Sor Olga snatched it up. “We must destroy this.”

“I don’t—” Sor Monica began to object, but in the face of Olga’s grim determination, she demurred.

“Leave the coca,” the Abbess commanded. Whatever it was to the Europeans, it was more like a tonic or elixir to the Indians.

Sor Olga dropped it into the box and pushed the box back under the bed with her foot. Wrinkles of resentment stood out around her lips.

“We are finished with this search,” the Abbess said. “Sor Monica, please try this new substance on the cat and report to me what happens. Sor Eustacia, I must speak with you in my office
after Vespers.” She knew they would follow her orders—they had vowed to obey—but neither showed enthusiasm. “For now, Padre Junipero awaits our confessions.”

They walked together in silence across the rear cloister, but then the Abbess broke off from the others. She indicated with a hand signal that they should go on without her. She doubled back to the counting room.