The Day of Atonement (41 page)

Settwell came and stood beside me. “Take me with you. I can help you.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think you are made for such things.”

“Is this because you don’t trust me?” Settwell asked.

“In part,” I told him. I waved Franklin over. “Do you have any interest in giving the Inquisition even more reason to hate you?”

He grinned. “This is better than robbing the treasury all over again.”

It was growing dark, and night would be a far more dangerous time. We could not be the only ones who had realized Lisbon was full of wealth for the taking. Some of the fires that had raged before had burned out. Others had spread. There was no knowing which perils would grow and which would abate. The time to act was now.

We made our way upward once more, ignoring the suffering that we could not alleviate. We did not speak. We kept our heads down and skirted the fires and the rubble. We found the way around closed streets and avoided alleys. As we walked, the city began to shake again. The grinding and the screams struck up in what was now a familiar chorus, but the rumble was less terrible. Everything that could fall already had.

Franklin and I stood in the middle of a street, sticking our arms out for balance until the quake passed, and then continued on our way.

It is disorienting to travel in a city whose landmarks have been obliterated, so the gates of the Conceição dos
Cardais appeared unexpectedly as we trudged up the hill. It was a small and unexceptional Carmelite convent, but because it remained standing, it appeared a palace. Bricks and tiles had come dislodged, and statuary had collapsed, but for the most part the building and the grounds were unharmed, and the gardens looked calm and beautiful. Birds fluttered in the standing trees. Outside, Lisbon was hell, but this looked like paradise, safe and tranquil.

Inside, the nuns must be thanking God for sparing them. They must be wondering what they had done to deserve mercy when so many others had received none. I myself asked the same question.

I was tempted to speculate that it was the presence of Mariana, an innocent. But then were all who had been crushed and burned and trampled and drowned and torn apart by the sea evil? Was this earthquake the work of an avenging God, or was its joy and misery distributed merely by random chance? I had to believe the latter. The idea of a God that would wipe out an entire city—a city of vile Inquisitors and
fidalgos
, yes, but also one of beggars and children—was too dark to contemplate. I wanted no part of such indiscriminate violence. I much preferred the idea of justice narrowly delivered.

The door of the main building was unlocked. It was dim and cool inside, and even if it was not the finest convent in the city, I marveled at the beautiful wood carvings, the detailed paintings with their frames of gold. While most of Lisbon starved, here were grand staircases and elaborate tilings. Here were rich furnishings and tapestries. Everywhere I looked, I saw gold and silver and velvet and silk.

“Lovely place these nuns have,” Franklin observed.

“In two days it will all be worth less than a loaf of bread.”

Franklin nodded with some satisfaction. “The earthquake is leveling in more ways than one.”

A nun in her drab Carmelite habit came toward us slowly, arms folded in her sleeves, head slightly lowered. She was an older woman, perhaps fifty, with olive skin and a face that would have been considered ugly in her youth, but now gave her a distinguished appearance.
Her habit was filthy and streaked with blood, and her face was covered with soot. “What is it, my sons? Are you hurt? Do you want shelter?”

I took a step back in surprise. Given all I had seen and done in the past twenty-four hours, nothing could have shocked me more than a nun offering kindness unbidden and with no motive but the desire to do right. I had forgotten such people existed within the Church.

“Your convent is open to all?” I asked.

“We have been spared this terrible destruction,” the nun said. “God has preserved us for a reason. I pray you do not abuse our charity, for we wish to serve as many as we can.”

“You believe God preserved your convent? Do you then think God destroyed Lisbon for its crimes?”

“I cannot know the answer to that,” she said, now studying me with skepticism. “It serves me nothing to ponder God’s plan. I can only ponder His plan for me. Senhor, there are men who will choose to take advantage of the chaos in the city. If you are one of them, I beg you leave. There is gold enough to be dug up from the ruins. Let us be to tend the sick and feed the hungry as long as we can.”

“I would never keep you from that task,” I said. “We do not need help, however. I seek someone within, the mother of the Jesuit Pedro Azinheiro.”

The nun looked startled. “Sister Juana Maria? What do you want with her?”

“She has something that does not belong to her.”

“What is that?”

“A child,” I said.

The nun, to my surprise, took a step forward. “You sound English. Are you her father?”

“No,” I said. “I am his friend. I’ve come to fetch the girl for him.”

“Why does he not come himself?”

“Searching the streets of a ruined city is a task for which I am better suited than he,” I answered. In the hopes alleviating her concerns, I added, “The girl knows me. She will tell you so, and that I am her father’s friend.”

“I am made to understand he is not a good Catholic,” the nun said, again quietly.

“He is not even a good man,” I replied. “I cannot say he is a good father, though I do not believe he is a terrible one. But I do know he loves this girl, and what is more important, she loves him. The Inquisition took her from her father as a pawn in a larger game, not because it had any concerns about her soul. Sister, my father was taken from me by the Inquisition. I do not want this girl to become what I have.”

“You do not fear the Inquisition’s wrath?” she asked.

Franklin snorted. “I’ve never met a man who feared it less.”

“The Inquisition is broken,” I said. “If not forever, then at least for now. Its priests will be too busy protecting their gold to worry about a little girl, and if you wish to protect yourself, you need only say she vanished in the chaos. I have seen people crushed and buried alive. I have witnessed I do not know how many thousands swept away by the sea. No one will disbelieve you.”

Still the nun remained motionless.

“You say you believe you were spared to do God’s work,” I pressed. “Do you believe keeping a child from her father is God’s work?”

She sighed. “You speak the truth, senhor. We live or die by the Inquisition’s pleasure, or at least we used to. Perhaps, as you say, things may be different. For now, at least, all this suffering and destruction will allow me to tell a plausible lie. Do you swear by the blood of Christ that you will return this girl to her father, and that you will keep her safe?”

“This could complicate things,” Franklin muttered.

“Sister,” I said, “I am a Jew, and I will not take that oath.”

She blanched, turning white beneath the grime on her face. “You are the priest killer.”

“I am someone who did not wish to be killed by priests,” I offered.

“And if I do not do what you say, will you kill me too?”

“If you attack me with a knife, I may be forced to handle you more roughly than I should like, but if you only try to block my path, I believe walking around you will prove sufficient.”

The nun continued to stare. “For a murderer, you speak with a great deal of reason.”

“Then perhaps what I did was not murder,” I proposed. “Perhaps it was justice. Perhaps it was even God’s justice. You, too, give every sign of being a woman of reason. I shall let you decide if it must always be murder to kill an agent of the Inquisition.”

“This man has been wronged by the Inquisition priests,” Franklin said. “He has seen his family and friends imprisoned and killed. The Inquisition came to drag him to the same fate. That’s why he killed those men. It can’t be a crime to destroy those who would destroy you.”

“Killing is always a sin, but not all of us believe the Inquisition does God’s work,” the nun said very quietly. “I will help you if you swear by whatever you value that you will do what you have promised.”

“I do swear,” I said, “upon the memory of my father, and of his parents, and of all those who have died in the Inquisition prisons. I swear by the God who led my ancestors out of Egypt and who set me free from Lisbon long ago.”

She stared at him. “Set you free? Then you have come back? By choice?”

“Yes, Sister. I returned here to atone for the crime of leaving others behind.”

“It seems to me you have done much to atone for since your return,” she said.

“That,” I said, “is one point on which we shall not disagree.”

* * *

The nun led us up a long staircase whose gloom had not been broken by the lighting of its lamps. “Do you also promise not to hurt Sister Juana Maria?”

I began to grow weary of these promises, but I said, “I have no desire to hurt anyone. I want to bring the child to her father. I would like to believe I will not have to harm an aging nun in my efforts to do that.”

We approached a door, and the nun knocked. There was no answer from within.

“It is odd,” she said. “I thought she was in there with the girl.”

I heard the muffled sound of a child crying, and I recognized it as Mariana. “Have you a key?” I asked the nun.

She shook her head.

I examined the door. It was too heavy to break down, and it was clearly barred from the inside, which meant picking the lock would do no good. “Fetch me an axe,” I said.

“No,” she answered. “I cannot let you destroy holy property.”

“Do you mean to say that your desire to return this girl to her father vanishes if doing so means harming a door? It is too late for such niceties. I am here, and the girl I have come for is in there. That means the door is opening or coming down.”

Unwilling to leave the room unattended, I sent Franklin to go with the nun to find the axe. While they were gone, I pressed my ear to the door. I thought I could hear Mariana crying again, but maybe it was just my pulse pounding in my ear.

At last, Franklin and the nun returned. I went to take the axe from Franklin, but the big man shook his head.

“Let me be of some use,” he said. “I’m stronger than you. And you will need to rush in once the door is down. If I am good at anything, it is mindless work. If there is thinking to be done, better it should be done by you.”

I managed a thin smile. “That may be the most eloquent confession of stupidity ever uttered.”

Franklin began to swing the axe. With each strike, the nun winced, as though something she loved were being hurt. It took five blows and then the lock was off and the inner bar broken. I pushed through the door. Inside I saw an elderly nun sitting with Mariana on her lap. In front of them, with a sword brandished in his hand, was Pedro Azinheiro.

It was a spare room with a wooden floor and a single bed. By the large window was a bench with a red velvet cushion, and upon the wall was a massive painting of the Virgin holding the infant Jesus.

“Mr. Foxx!” Mariana cried. “Have you come to take me back to Papa?”

I didn’t take my eyes off Azinheiro, but I managed a smile. “That is exactly what I’ve come to do.”

“I don’t like it here,” she said.

“Hush, child,” the older nun said. “We have treated you well.”

“You can’t have her,” Azinheiro said, though he took a step back as he spoke. His skin was all bruises and bandages, but none of his wounds struck me as serious. He thrust the sword in my direction, but the action did little except inform me that he had likely never before handled a blade.

How many times would this man attempt to take what mattered to me? It was enough. I would endure it no longer.
I did not want to savor his death or make him suffer or beg. I did not need him to understand his crimes or repent them. I wanted him dead.

“Why can I not have her?” I said, speaking slowly, planning how I would approach. In just a few seconds, it would be over. I would do what I had come here to do. At long last, Azinheiro would be gone.