The Day of Atonement (29 page)

I was ready. I had saved Gabriela. Maybe this was for the best. Maybe it was the best thing that could happen to me. I had forgotten about Settwell and his daughter; I only felt tired, weary of my quest for revenge and the endless tasks that sprouted from it like hydra heads. I was tired of lying to everyone, to Roberta Carver most of all. I wanted it to be finished.

Then I saw a familiar face emerge from the crowd. Pedro Azinheiro approached, smiling smugly. He pointed at me. “Back away, my friends,” he said. “That man is to be taken to the Palace of the Inquisition. He is under arrest.”

I did not resist. My moment of surrender had passed, and I realized that being arrested was likely the best thing that might happen to me under these circumstances. The fact that it was Azinheiro who arrested me almost certainly meant I was safe. If the priest wanted to harm me, he surely could have done so without going to all this trouble. The question, then, was what the Inquisitor intended.

I was flanked by a soldier on either side, and Azinheiro walked before us. These were not unreasonable odds by any means. I considered killing all three of them and making my escape, but, as always, that would mean failure elsewhere.

I wondered what would happen when we reached the Palace. I had vowed I would not be brought inside, that I would kill and be killed first. Could I enter willingly now, hoping that I might eventually be released?

The breaking point would be chains, I decided. If they attempted to constrain me, I would fight. My greatest advantage would be surprise. I offered no resistance now,
and perhaps if I caught enough of them unprepared, I could make my way out.

I remained silent as Azinheiro led me the brief distance along the Rossio to the Palace. We passed through the doorway of the great building, and through an open courtyard. Azinheiro brought me down a set of narrow stairs, and then down another. Finally I found myself in a large basement room, at the center of which was a rectangular table, scratched and covered in wax and ink stains, with chairs alongside. Sconces lined the wall, but only a few were lit, and the room was full of flickering shadows. It smelled of old smoke and sweat and rat droppings.

With a sweep of his arm, Azinheiro invited me to sit, which was very polite. Good manners are important before torture.

“You created quite a stir in that church,” Azinheiro said. His eyes were wide and bright, and his face seemed to glow. This was pure pleasure for him. He lived for moments such as these and, I vowed, he would die because of them.

“Certainly one of us did,” I answered.

I was in the Palace. I was even possibly in the very room to which my father had been brought, where he spent too many moments of his last weeks on earth. None of it mattered. The building did not matter, and the man did not matter. This was only a place, the Inquisitor only an enemy; I had been in worse places and defeated worthier opponents.

Azinheiro made a clucking noise. “You are forgetting your place, Mr. Foxx.”

“What is this about?” I demanded, pretending to the arrogance of a freeborn Englishman. I imagined the liberties that were my birthright formed a sort of armor, strong enough to protect me from whips and pincers and red-hot irons! “You ask me to gather information on the Nobrezas, and then you nearly have them murdered in a riot of your own creation. Had I not been there—” I stopped talking.

Azinheiro smiled. “You are not so clever as you think, but not so dull as I feared.”

“You wanted me to intervene on their behalf. You wanted me to save them so they would better trust me.”

Azinheiro shrugged and said, “You’ve proven your willingness to assert yourself before. I was very impressed at the
taberna
.”

“What if I had not done so?” I demanded. “What if I had been too frightened and ran away? What if I had been hurt or killed?”

“Those things did not happen,” Azinheiro said.

So it had been a calculated risk. Perhaps I would have failed and the Nobrezas been killed, dragged down and torn apart by an angry mob. Perhaps I would have been killed as well. That would have proved a loss, but not a catastrophic one. The game goes on and on. There is nothing to be won—the goal is to continue playing.

“Now,” Azinheiro said, “Eusebio will be in your debt. I have driven him into your arms. He will confide his secrets to you, and he will lend you money. With your aid—and with his confessions—he will soon enough be in a position that he cannot ask you to repay it. His property shall become the Inquisition’s, and I give you my word you will not be asked to return the sum. You shall advance, and your creditor shall vanish. This arrangement will work very well, over and over, I should think, until your place in the Factory is secure. And then we shall discuss the menace of Protestant heresy.”

The priest was cunning. His plan would almost certainly have worked had I been what I pretended. But I wasn’t, and none of those clever machinations would do much good when I stuck a blade in his throat.

Azinheiro growled irritably at my silence. “You have no answer?”

“It is not just to deceive a man,” I said. “It is not Christlike.”

“I shall worry about what is Christlike,” Azinheiro said. “You worry about your choices, for they are stark. You may either grow rich and powerful, or you may become an enemy of this Church. I
suggest you bring me something useful soon, Mr. Foxx. I would hate to suspect you of having come under their Judaizing spell.”

“That is why you’ve brought me here,” I said. “You want to threaten me.”

“I want to show you what will be your fate should you succumb to the enemy,” Azinheiro clarified. “Let us visit the dungeons.”

“I do not wish to go,” I told him. I find it is good, every now and again, to say something honest, even in the most dissembling of relationships.

“I am not inviting you. I am telling you,” Azinheiro answered.

“No.” I placed my hands upon the table. “This little game of yours has gone on long enough. I am an Englishman, sir, and I shall not be treated this way.”

Azinheiro stood. “You may either go into the dungeons upon your own volition or carried by soldiers, but go you shall. Other Englishmen have doubted the resolve of the Inquisition, and they spent more time within these walls than they would have believed possible.”

I doubted that he would imprison me simply for defying him. Azinheiro orchestrated torment and death and useless confessions, but he was not, I believed, cruel for the pure pleasure of it. No, here was a man who liked to watch the wheels turn and the gears grind. And I was the Jesuit’s bait, not his fish. He would not squander what I had to offer simply to prove he could.

“I refuse,” I said. “Throw me in irons if you like.”

The priest smiled. “You are very clever, sir. You know I value you too much for that. You are only of use to me if you are free. Mariana Settwell, however, is another matter. She could quite easily be taken away from her father. Yes, I know about your friendship with that drunk. I know everything that happens in this city. Everything, sir. So now I give you another choice—a real choice. You may follow me or
you may walk out of this Palace right now, but if you do the latter, your friend will never see his daughter again.”

I cursed myself and I cursed Azinheiro and I cursed myself again. The Inquisition had been eyeing Mariana since before I had returned to Lisbon—Settwell had told me as much—yet my actions had placed the child in greater danger. My plans were slipping away from me. Innocent people were being caught in the swirling vortex of vengeance. The things I touched were withering. If only I had just killed the priest and fled when I first arrived, none of this would have happened. I had become too bold, too ambitious, and I now had to extricate myself from all of these tangles without further hurting Settwell or his daughter or the Nobrezas.

My body shook with rage as I rose from my seat.

Wordlessly, I followed Azinheiro down a series of corridors and another dark stairway. This one was guarded by a single soldier, who recognized Azinheiro and immediately proceeded to unlock a heavy wooden door. I yearned to reach out now, to snap the priest’s neck, but I controlled myself. Soon, I promised myself. I needed only to pass his test and get free. It would be but a matter of days.

The door opened, and the stink of excrement and rotting food assaulted me. Azinheiro did not seem to notice and, with a thin-lipped smile, gestured for me to step inside.

The floor here was dirt, and the gloom was broken only by the occasional low-burning torch upon a sconce. A space perhaps the length of three men separated two walls of cages, most of which were unoccupied. Three of them, however, held men who sat alone upon wooden benches that served as beds, staring at us with the wide-eyed expression of broken animals. I forced myself to look, to understand that this was what my father had endured. In one cage sat a familiar-looking man, head down, eyes red-rimmed and hollow. It was the pastry-seller. He’d lost a great deal of weight, and his head wobbled on his neck.

In one of the cells, a man rose and limped forward. He was dark-skinned,
clearly a Moor, and his beard hung long and tangled. Even in the dim light, I could see his hands were covered with cuts and clots of dried blood.

“What is that man guilty of?” I asked.

Azinheiro shrugged. “Heresy. He failed to condemn his neighbor for possessing a copy of the Mohammedan holy book, though he knew the book to be there.”

Unwelcome as this all was, I would not waste a glimpse into the fortress of my enemy. I noted the apparent strength of the cells, the kinds of locks used, the number of guards stationed within. If he would make me look, then I would let nothing be lost.

“I have seen enough,” I told Azinheiro.

“But we have only yet begun our tour,” Azinheiro answered. He led me along to the far end of the chamber. There another guard stood before a door, and this led to a similar room but smaller and with half as many cells. All of these were empty save one, which held a frail old woman curled upon on the earthen floor. She breathed loudly and in pained rasps.

“What is her crime?” I demanded.

“Heresy, I suppose,” Azinheiro said. “She is not one of mine and I forget the details.”

“It is obvious she is ill,” I said. “This is no place for an ailing old woman. Have you no doctors to see to her?”

“It is her soul that is in danger,” Azinheiro answered. “Her body is of no consequence.”

From there Azinheiro led me out the far door and up another set of stairs. This brought us to a hallway, at the end of which was a large chamber that smelled strongly of urine. Here were three tables with leather straps affixed to them. Chains hung from the wall, and in the corner stood a hellish contraption with a long pole arm, from which dangled straps of leather.

“If the Portuguese applied the same ingenuity to engines of commerce
as they do to those of torture, perhaps you would not be dependent upon foreigners to keep food upon your tables.”

Azinheiro shook his head. “I don’t think you sufficiently understand the point of this tour.”

“I understand everything,” I said. “You wish me to see what will happen to me should I fail to cooperate.”

“Perhaps you do understand. Your secret protects you, but only so much. Your Englishness protects you not at all. I would have every Englishman in Lisbon in these dungeons if I had the power.”

I turned away. “I see I have no choice but to act as you tell me.”

“None. You have two weeks to bring me actionable information about Eusebio Nobreza. Otherwise, you will understand the reach of the Inquisition far better than you would like.”

From the Rossio, I walked directly up toward the Bario Alto. At the Nobreza house, I was shown in at once, and Luis met me in the hall. He took both of my hands in his own and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he embraced me. His tears pressed against my cheek.

“I’d heard you were arrested,” Luis said, once he let go. “We feared the worst.”

“I was taken to the Palace, but nothing more passed. It is perhaps more desirable to frighten an Englishman than it is to take action against him.”

Eusebio and Gabriela now appeared, and together we all walked into the parlor. Gabriela began at once to pour glasses of Madeira, but all the while she kept her eyes upon me. I tried not to meet her gaze.

“You saved us today,” Luis said. “That crowd would have torn us apart had you not come to our aid.”

“He nearly set that crowd upon us,” Eusebio groused, “with that foolish comment denying the miracle.”

I could not deny the truth of the accusation. “That was a mistake. I sensed a crisis and spoke before thinking. I apologize for it.”

Eusebio sighed. “No, you must forgive me. Whatever mistakes you made, you had a clear head and a strong determination. I am in your debt.”

I bowed. “I did what I thought best. It is easy for me, as a foreigner, to take risks you never could. I depended upon my nationality to protect me.”

“Your Englishness may not be the shield you imagine,” Luis said. “I beg you to be careful for your own sake. You may not be so fortunate next time.”