The Inquisitor's Wife (39 page)

My father lay helpless beneath his chains while a guard struck the Franciscan with the flat of his sword, causing him to drop to his knees. One of them pulled back his brown hood.

It was no monk, but Antonio.

A soldier kicked Antonio in the head; he fell onto his side and was dragged back onto his knees again. They bound his hands behind him. One of them took his horse and chased down the renegade wagon.

The soldiers laid claim again to the berm, swearing at the crowd until the screaming stopped and a form of calm descended. The majority of the guards once again encircled the rise, their swords drawn so no one could pass.

The remainder prodded the prisoners, each to his own place in front of a stake. There my father was made to strip off his black tunic, leaving him naked. The same was required of each prisoner, at which point all were forced to kneel in the kindling—this so that death would come faster, either from the smoke or the roasting of the internal organs. The auburn-haired executioner lifted the heavy iron chains and forced my father to put his hands behind him, an act that evoked a cry of pain from him. The executioner bound the chains around my father’s wrists and oddly dangling arms, binding him fast to the stake.

But one of the victims cried out before the chains could be applied: “I confess! I abjure my sins! I admit to all and beg the forgiveness of the church! Please, not the fire!”

This caused a stir among the guards and executioners. The auburn-haired one hurried over to the fearful victim, as did the priest. And after the male victim—wild-eyed, his dark hair disheveled, his shoulders visibly dislocated so that his arms dangled in peculiar fashion—was allowed to stand and answered several questions posed by the priest, the latter anointed his sweating forehead with holy oil and administered extreme unction.

After the priest had finished his prayers and benediction, he nodded to the executioner. The auburn-haired man produced a narrow rope from his belt, and the other, heavier executioner fastened the chains around the prisoner’s arms, binding him fast.

In a thrice, the younger man slipped the rope around the vainly struggling victim’s neck. As the crowd watched, entranced, he strangled him. The prisoner struggled mightily against his chains for several seconds, turning crimson faced, until his eyes and tongue protruded. After a great shudder, he sagged against the chains and fell still.

A man in the crowd let go a great cheer, echoed thoughtlessly by the children. But as soon as their cheers died, one of the victims—a woman—cried out feebly:

“Aleinu l’shabeach l’Adon hakol, latet gedulah l’yotzer b’reishit.”

“The martyr’s prayer,” Máriam whispered in my ear.

The woman’s cry broke off abruptly as one of the executioners struck her full in the face, but it was soon echoed by one of the doomed men:

“Aleinu l’shabeach l’Adon…”

He too was struck silent. The executioners then finished fastening each prisoner to a stake. When this was done, and no one else cried out for forgiveness, the priest departed while the other two men finished their grim business. Each fetched a pole, at the end of which was tied an oil-soaked rag; these they lit in the small fire. And when each rag had caught sufficiently, they began to walk to each prisoner, lighting the kindling.

Máriam and I held each other as my father’s kindling was lit.

For a time, it smoked, covering his face with dark billows. They eased, revealing soot covering his cheeks and brow as his pale eyes streamed. He began to groan uncontrollably as the fire caught in earnest, searing the flesh of his knees and shins. Soon, the cries of the suffering muted the sounds of the onlookers, who stood entranced by the spectacle.

The executioners went from stake to stake, adding more kindling and dousing each fire with oil; the flames around my kneeling father leapt up, singeing away the hair on his chest. His eyebrows melted away, and the skin of his face turned red, as if it had been boiled.

When at last the hair on his head caught and flared brightly, he seemed a living candle, and all those on the pyre looked like flaming tapers on a gruesome candelabrum.

Most called out the name of God, but my father’s only words were: “Magdalena! Magdalena!”

I do not know how long I watched, how much time passed since the fires were lit. I only felt that my heart, like the skin on my father’s bones, was bubbling and darkening and sloughing away, poisoned by smells that should not have been: that of roasting human flesh, of burning hair. But in time, when my father ceased crying out and slumped, bald and blackened, against the stake, Máriam tugged at my arm.

“Come away,” she said, sobbing. “Come away; there is nothing more to see.” She tugged again, this time with all her strength, forcing me toward her. “Come away—don Gabriel will be looking for you now. And they have captured don Antonio. We must hurry quickly to save the statue and take it to don Francisco. There is no time left.”

“I can’t leave Antonio,” I whispered. “I can’t.…”

“They’ve already taken him.”

Disbelieving, I looked to where Antonio had been kneeling in the dirt, bound and under guard. Somehow, during the executions, they had taken him away.

“Who will rescue the statue of Santiago?” Máriam hissed in my ear. “He would want you to do it.”

I did not answer her. I turned away from the horrible sights—not back toward the carriage, but the other way on foot, as it was far faster to make our way through the crowds. She understood and followed me.

Part of me longed to surrender to the grief, to let myself be taken, to join my mother and father in death. But another part found me lifting my skirts and running in earnest for the living, back beneath the archway of the city wall, down the broad avenue only half filled with pedestrians who had chosen to avoid the crowds by leaving early.

Sorrow dulled my perceptions: I do not remember traversing the distance to San Pablo Street, but soon we were there and running into the large overgrown grove behind Antonio’s house. I remember a blur of images: of Máriam pulling away the stone in the old fence where Antonio and I had played as children; of the dark, stifling tunnel beneath the earth; of emerging once again into my mother’s workshop, where the spiders had been spinning their webs unimpeded.

The statue of Santiago—his killing sword brandished above his head, his expression one of righteous wrath toward the heretic he slew—sat on the dusty worktable where I had left it. I clutched it with both arms—it was heavy with the Torah shield inside and required effort—and clung to it as if it held the spirits of my mother and father. Still dazed, I followed close behind Máriam and obeyed her gestures.

Soon we were in the wagon Antonio had left behind for his own use; I nestled the Santiago statue beneath a tarp left on the wagon bed, while Máriam harnessed the horse she had brought from the near-empty stable. The only gate, however, led us back onto the cul-de-sac and past the Hojeda mansion.

As Máriam drew open the gate, she said grimly, “Pray we encounter no one.”

The gate opened onto the dusty cobblestones not far from where Antonio and Gabriel had fought years before as children, where Gabriel and his cohorts had attacked the hapless Jew—no doubt one of my relatives—who had left the Madonna with my mother.

Máriam gave the horse the whip; it was a strong young gelding, shining and black, and the wagon rattled as the creature lurched forward out into the cul-de-sac. We had barely made it past my father’s house and the Hojeda mansion, when Gabriel’s familiar carriage rolled into the intersection at San Pablo Street.

My husband leaned out the carriage window and yelled a command at the driver; immediately, his carriage hurtled toward our wagon, then pulled to a fast stop sidewise, blocking our way. Máriam barely managed to rein in our horse before we collided with the carriage; our wagon spun about, kicking up dust, and came to an abrupt halt.

Gabriel and Fray Hojeda climbed out of the carriage, their expressions contorted with self-righteous rage, and called to the driver to accompany them. The latter moved to seize our horse’s halter, but Máriam coaxed the horse to move just beyond reach, and made the wagon spin around in an arc as she prepared to make a run past them. Dizzied, I clutched my seat, huddling low in order to keep from falling off onto the cobblestones as the wooden wheels groaned with effort.

Even in my disorientation, I called to Máriam to remain with the wagon at all costs, to abandon me if need be. When Gabriel managed to capture the reins, holding our neighing horse in place, I tucked the Santiago statue more firmly beneath the tarp—foolishly giving away its location—and stood at the edge of the wagon, preparing to jump off.

“Take me!” I shouted. “I’m the one you want!” I looked back to Máriam, silently urging her to take flight in the wagon, but Gabriel still held the halter fast.

Fray Hojeda, sweating and pale, ordered the driver to examine the wagon. The man headed directly for the covered Santiago, but before he could find it, I pulled it from under the tarp and jumped from the wagon, barely managing to stay on my feet without dropping the statue—though how I expected to outrun the three men with my heavy burden, I do not know.

While Fray Hojeda stayed close to the carriage and watched with the driver, Gabriel seized the statue in my hands. I would not let go and made an impossibly strong effort to hold on to it—but inevitably, Gabriel was stronger and pulled it from my grasp. I gave him such a fight, though, that the Santiago slipped and fell to the cobblestones.

I watched in horror as the statue that my mother and I had painted with such care shattered—revealing first the wadding and then, as Gabriel and the driver pulled it free, the golden Torah shield.

Gabriel stared down at it in amazement—at the gleaming gold hidden beneath the yellow wool wadding covered with shards of broken ceramic—then looked up at me wide-eyed.

“It’s
true,
” he breathed. “You
are
a crypto-Jew!”

“And you are a monster!” I slapped him with all my strength. “God damn you to hell!”

Behind him, Fray Hojeda called out in a quavering, panicked voice. “God help me!”

We all turned and watched him as he vainly clawed the side of the carriage for purchase; he slid to his knees and loosed black vomit onto the cobblestones before finally falling down.

“Plague,”
the driver said, crossing himself and staring at both Gabriel and his brother accusingly. He rushed back to his master’s carriage.

Gabriel instinctively went to his fallen brother’s side; I used the instant to pick up the Torah shield, still half trapped in its casing of wadding and broken ceramic, and push it up into the back of the wagon.

Immediately, I felt an iron grip seize my legs before I could crawl back onto the wagon: Gabriel had coldly chosen his priority. I struggled, but he pulled me facedown into the street, into the dust where he had taken down the old Jew and Antonio.

I lifted my head and screamed at Máriam. “Go!
Go!!!
”

Before Gabriel pinned me fast, I glimpsed dark figures looming at the intersection, making their way toward us: Armed guards on foot.

“Go!” I screamed at Máriam again. She whipped the horse, and remarkably the wagon finished its arc around the cul-de-sac before heading directly at the coming guards at high speed.

Compelled, I watched as the guards scattered to give way, and Máriam and the golden treasure careened into the intersection, then onto the half-filled street of San Pablo.

And I was left alone in the hands of the Inquisitor.

Twenty

Gabriel had no qualms about leaving his brother out in the street to lie in a pool of bloody vomit; if anything, he seemed to be relieved to be rid of him and ordered the armed guards to deal with him. I did not see what ultimately became of the so recently jubilant Fray Hojeda, except to know that none of the soldiers would go near him but stood around him in a leery half circle as he cried out weakly for help.

With the help of one of his guards, Gabriel dragged me into his house, into the dining hall where he had once swept all the dishes from the table in a burst of passion. I was made to sit in a chair while the guard tied my hands behind my back. Gabriel, far from being concerned about his brother’s grave illness, seemed pleased and revitalized by the prospect of questioning me.

He stood over me, a pale-haired, hawk-nosed giant, his pallid face pushed near mine, his breath warm on my face.

“You are a crypto-Jew. The evidence is clear. That was some sort of Jewish ritual object.”

“I am a crypto-Jew
,”
I admitted softly. There was no point in denying the obvious, and speaking the truth aloud brought relief.

He grinned. The disturbing light in his eyes was the same one I had seen the day he had beaten Antonio and the Jew, the same as when he had swept all the dishes from the table, the same as the instant he had realized that I had no choice but to submit sexually to him. All his shyness, his timidity, had been an act in order to placate his brother, but Gabriel had been no less ambitious—only more patient.

“Tell me the truth,” he demanded. “You and Antonio are working together as spies for don Francisco.”

“I know nothing of either man,” I said.

He struck me across the face with his open hand. The pain caused a flash of blue to shoot across the gray landscape of my closed eyelids.

I opened my eyes, and Gabriel said, “You are a whore who has lain with Antonio Vargas.”

“No,” I said, and he struck me again, this time causing me to bite my tongue. I spat blood on the stone floor but made no other sound.

“You have spoken with don Francisco. The proof is the golden ritual object. You got it from him and were hiding it inside the statue of a saint. How many other statues have you used to smuggle Jewish gold out of Seville?”

“I have never spoken alone with don Francisco,” I lied. “The treasure was given me by my mother. I have never used a statue to smuggle anything out of Seville.”