The Day of Atonement (9 page)

Shortly after I had escaped the country, Settwell had married a Portuguese woman named Mariana, and their daughter of the same name was now seven years old. To satisfy his bride, Settwell had converted to the Catholic religion. He was not a devotee to any church, and at the time it had seemed a small enough concession to affect devotion to one religion rather than another. Soon he discovered that his conversion was not viewed so liberally by fellow English merchants, who immediately treated him as a pariah. Trade opportunities vanished and men with whom he’d done business for years found excuses to avoid his company. The English might trade with the Portuguese, but to worship with them was unforgivable.

After they had been married for five happy years, Mariana died of a sudden fever. She had been well in the morning, delirious by nightfall, and dead two days later without having regained her senses. Settwell had been raising his daughter on his own since.

When he finished his tale, Settwell refilled our glasses. “We are but a pair of survivors, then, are we not, Mr. Foxx? We have been assaulted by all life has to throw at us, but we are not yet done.”

I raised my glass. “I should like to think we are far from done.”

* * *

Settwell had his servant bring down his daughter to meet me. The girl was a delightful creature with black hair and green eyes, and there could be no doubt that she would grow to be a beauty. I often felt more at ease around children than adults, perhaps because I knew it was less likely they would give me cause to break their bones. Quite charmed, I kneeled before the girl and shook her hand. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, senhorita,” I said in Portuguese.

“And it is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Foxx,” she answered in English. “Your accent is very good.”

I laughed. “As is yours.” Observing that she held a wooden doll in her hand, I said, “And who is your friend?”

“This is Senhorita Catarina,” the girl said very earnestly. “She’s only a doll, though. She’s not real, but my mother gave her to me. My mother is dead, you know. Is yours?”

“Mariana!” Settwell snapped. “Such questions are impolite.”

I met the girl’s gaze. “My mother is dead, and so is my father. But your father is a great friend to me and very much like family.”

“Then I am like family too,” the girl said cheerfully. I stood up again and stroked my chin. “You may be right. I suppose I shall have to buy you something on your birthday, then.”

“You don’t have to buy me anything if you will only visit,” she said.

“I should like the liberty to do both,” I told her.

Settwell sighed. “You are very indulgent, sir. I thank you.” He took his daughter’s hand and led her back to the mulatto serving woman. “Mr. Foxx and I must talk business now.”

“How dull,” the girl said.

“Terribly dull.” Settwell kissed her head and shooed her from the room. When he turned back, concern was plainly written upon his face. It had something to do with the girl, I was certain, but I would not press the matter. Not yet. Settwell would tell me what he wished me to know in due time.

We retired to a dining room, which could have used a few more candles in the sconces and upon the low-hanging chandelier. The table was unsteady, and tilted precariously at one end. The food was served by the same mulatto. In Lisbon, where servants and slaves were extraordinarily cheap by London standards, and even middling people employed several, Settwell appeared to have been reduced to but one.

The wine poured freely, though mainly into Settwell’s goblet. I drank enough to avoid the appearance of abstemiousness, for a man with a mind to drink can take offense when his companion desires sobriety.

“Your letter from London was vague to the extreme,” Settwell said at last, “and while I understood you meant to visit Lisbon, I could not glean your reasons.”

I dared not risk being direct in writing, but now, face-to-face, there was no point obfuscating my purpose. “I’ve come to find the priest responsible for the deaths of my parents and to kill him.”

Settwell said nothing for a long moment. He took another long drink of his wine and looked up at me, measuring my seriousness. “Gad, you mean it. Why should you attempt such a thing? You escaped! You did what so few can ever hope to do, and now you come back on some foolish quest. You will never leave the country alive.”

“I left my parents behind, and they died here,” I said. “I have an obligation.”

“No!” Settwell hit the table. Knives and goblets danced. The man’s face had quickly grown red with drink or fury or both. “I shall not have it! Your father knew his ruin at the hands of the Inquisition was a risk, and he begged me to make you safe should the worst happen. I did so because he was my friend and it was what he wanted. Do you think you honor him by returning here to throw your life away?”

I took a breath and leaned back. I wanted to explain myself, if only to this one man. “Everything that my parents did to save me, that
you
did to save me, was intended to give me a better life, but the life I have is broken.
I
am broken. I have become something my parents would have despised.”

“I can never believe that Weaver would have raised you up to be something so terrible.”

“Mr. Weaver did his best for me, I assure you. I have never blamed him. For a long time, I blamed myself, but of late I’ve come to understand that it is not my fault either. I have this anger inside me, and it burns every moment. It leads me to do awful things. This dark seed was planted by the Inquisition. I cannot destroy the institution, so I must destroy the man. Then, perhaps, the sacrifices made by my parents and by you will not have been wasted.”

Settwell studied me for a long time. “Is there nothing I can say to dissuade you from this course?”

“No.”

Settwell sighed. “Then there is something you should know. If you have come to address old wrongs, then you will want to hear of it.”

“Is this something to do with my father?”

Settwell nodded, and then fortified himself with a gulp of wine. “You have seen how it is with me now. I am ruined, my boy. There have been reversals, and not honest ones either. Yes, my fortunes suffered with my conversion, but I believe I have been deliberately ruined because I began to ask questions about your father. There were rumors about him—rumors that his arrest was not what it seemed.”

“Explain,” I said. No matter how quickly Settwell spoke, it would not be quickly enough.

“In the space of but a few months, I heard the same rumor twice—from two unrelated and unconnected sources. It concerns your father and the fact that he may have been betrayed.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. This was nothing. Settwell, in his comfortable world of English merchants, could never know what it meant to be a New Christian. “The Inquisition has made betrayal as much a part of life as breathing. I do not wish to know who informed against
my father. How can I hate a man who had to choose between my father’s life and his family? It is the Inquisition’s fault, not its victims’.”

“You are a wise young man, and I will not dispute what you say, but I learned that your father was not simply a victim of the Inquisition. There were others, outside the New Christian community, who manipulated him. The Inquisition never found his money. Your father was not betrayed by a neighbor who gave up a name in order to preserve himself. No, I fear he was the victim of a plot to take his wealth and throw him to the dogs that he might not expose the crime.”

There were, Settwell said, two sources. One was a merchant, a member of the Factory, who had mentioned, in passing, that he had heard it was possible to deceive a New Christian into bringing hidden money—converted into a foreign currency and stored elsewhere—back into the country and then to steal it just before the Inquisition takes the man. This merchant had not done it himself, but he had heard rumors of past success, and thought it a remarkably clever exploitation of the natural order. “He’d said that as it was inevitable the New Christians were going to be arrested and have their property seized, it was better we should get the money than the Inquisition.”

I said nothing of this logic. It had no bearing upon the matter at hand. “The other source?”

“An overheard snippet of conversation between two Inquisitors. One was the priest you have come here to kill, the Jesuit Pedro Azinheiro. He spoke of money that had never been recovered, how it rankled him still. The name he spoke was Raposa.”

I said nothing for some moments. I did not trust myself to speak, for if I were to let one thing out, how could I stop the flow of words, end the tumult of thought. Better to stay bottled up than to erupt. At last, when I felt I could control myself, I said, “It was an Englishman who betrayed him?”

“It seems so, though I cannot be certain.”

“You inquired into this?”

Settwell held out his hands, gesturing toward the room. “I made the attempt, and you see the results around you. It is true that I had suffered some ill fortune before this, but once I began asking questions, my enemies moved in for the final blow.”

“You said the Factory men did not care,” I observed.

“The leadership,” he corrected. “But there are people within its protection who were willing to pounce upon me when they believed me vulnerable. I was ill used, and yet I cannot have my grievances redressed. I find myself penniless and without influence simply because I asked the wrong questions about your father.”

I did not know what to think about this intelligence. Everything buzzed inside my head like a thousand mosquitoes. I had come here with a simple goal: to kill one man. Now, it appeared things were to be far more complicated.

“I wish I could help you learn more, Mr. Foxx, but I cannot even help myself. Worse, I cannot help my daughter. I have not enough money to flee Lisbon, and flee I must. Mariana is now seven years old, the age of religious consent in the Catholic Church. Priests have already come to see me with questions about the manner in which I raise her, for in truth, I am a poor Catholic. I fear they will take her from me, and if they do, I will never see her again. They will tell me she has chosen to live with a devout family, and I will have no recourse. None. More influential Englishmen than myself have had children spirited away by the Church, and once they are taken, they are gone forever.”

I swallowed. Here, at least, was something I could do. “How much do you need? I will find you the money to flee Lisbon. I’ll shake it out of Jesuits on the street if I must.”

Settwell rose and embraced me, throwing too much weight upon me as he did so. He blasted sour breath in my face. Drink had made
him unsteady and sentimental, and his eyes glistened in the candlelight. “I hardly know what to say. That my daughter might be made safe would mean more to me than I can say. I shall not forget this generosity.”

“Only tell me what you need, and when you need it.”

“I’ll not have you robbing Jesuits, of course.”

“I spoke figuratively,” I said. “Such money as you might need is already in my possession.” In truth, I had little enough for my own ventures, but I would find what money he needed if his wants exceeded my supply. The option of stealing from Jesuits was certainly not to be eliminated. In fact, it was to be embraced.

“I must have some time, perhaps a few weeks, to settle my affairs. Of course, I will have to be very subtle. If the Inquisition should suspect I plan to leave, they might come for Mariana.”

“If you believe her to be in any danger, you must put her in my care. I shall defend her with my life.”

“I do believe you mean it, sir.”

“Do not doubt it.”

Our meeting over, I took Settwell’s hand. “You’ve been most generous, but now it is time to take my leave.”

Settwell stepped forward too quickly for a man who had been drinking without restraint. He nearly fell over, and reached out to the wall to steady himself. “You’ll go nowhere. You can see it’s dark outside. ’Tis no trouble for you to stay here until morning.”

I bowed. “I should very much prefer to sleep at the inn, though I thank you for your hospitality.”

Settwell laughed indulgently. “You have been away a long time, so I remind you that this is not London. A man does not walk the streets at night. Honest Portuguese remain within doors after the sun goes down, and there is no one about but Gypsies and escaped slaves and
renegados
—if you are lucky. If you are not, it will be a pack of drunken
fidalgos
, who will slit your nose for the delight in watching you bleed. You’ll not go ten feet before you are assaulted.”

“I well recall the dangers of the city,” I said, heading toward the door. “Ten feet is a bit of an exaggeration.”

Settwell followed after me, catching his foot upon a threadbare rug and stumbling two or three steps. “Then fifty feet. A hundred. Regardless, there is little chance of you returning to your inn unmolested.” He flushed. “I know my house is none the best, but we are hard by the Alfama, and this street is unsafe once the sun goes down.”

I turned to Settwell. “Do not think I refuse to stay because your hospitality is insufficient. Such a suggestion insults me.”

Settwell bowed. “You are quite correct. I apologize.”

Honor was satisfied, and no more needed be said on the subject. “Then I shall go. I have affairs to which I must attend.”

“You can hardly have any affairs on these streets at this hour. In fact, I shall not let you go. I am your elder, and I forbid you to—”

“You have a daughter,” I said quietly. “If the Inquisition comes for you, you must tell them whatever they wish, because your first duty is to protect her. Therefore the less you know about how I do my business, the better off we both shall be.”

Settwell swallowed and nodded. The heat had gone out of his argument. “Your point is well taken, but even so, damn it. Do you know what you are doing, going out in the black of night? Are you truly aware of what awaits you?”

I had listened to stories about how my father had been sold to the Inquisition for profit, and how a kind man had been ruined simply for inquiring into the truth of it. My muscles were coiled and tight, and I could feel my rage, like a living thing, pulsing in my veins. I did not fear that thieves might set upon me. I craved it.