The Sisterhood (24 page)

“Garroting,” said the guard, sucking air through his teeth disapprovingly, “for them as can afford it.”

“They killed our Lord—make them suffer. Long live the Inquisition!” people around them shouted. The little girl and her mother were crying and clutching each other, and the mother was pleading with the soldiers as the music began again. Friars holding torches lit them, and waited until all the penitents, including the girl Esperanza had waved to and the woman who held her hand, had been pushed and crowded and tied tightly together. “Now comes the fun,” the nurse exclaimed.

A roll of the drums drowned out the cries and prayers, and the friars bent their torches to the pyre. Smoke billowed and then flames rose around the feet and legs of the people tied together, climbing higher and higher until searing heat scorched the watching faces. The child Esperanza had waved to was engulfed in flames, and horrible sounds of torment filled the air as the people on the pyre twisted and writhed horribly, and then seemed to melt and sink down. Esperanza watched, transfixed with horror, until the wind suddenly fanned the flames and sent a cloud of thick smoke over the spectators, heavy with the stench of burning human flesh and carrying the unearthly screams of the dying. The plaza darkened with another cloud of smoke and Esperanza lost consciousness. When she woke in her own bed, the stink of roasting flesh was in
her lungs, her hair, and on her skin, and she was violently, repeatedly sick.

Her father found Esperanza shivering in her own vomit, her eyebrows singed away, feverish and hysterical, and the nurse entertaining her guardsman in the kitchen. Normally the gentlest of men, Esperanza’s father pulled the nurse up by her hair, and swung her against the wall like a madman until she confessed to the escapade, gibbering that she had treated the child to a joyous spectacle. He threw her from the house with terrible oaths and curses.

A calm and steady older woman took her place, watching over Esperanza while she slept and comforting her when the nightmares came. Now when Esperanza closed her eyes she saw the face of the child in the fire and screams filled her sleep. She was frightened of everything, barely touched her food, chewed her fingernails until they bled, and grew thinner and more nervous with each passing day. Her desperate father decided the only way to banish the demons from her mind was to occupy it with study.

He hired a roster of tutors and set his daughter a daily schedule that would have daunted a university scholar—Greek, Latin, French, Italian, astronomy, philosophy, and history. She would learn drawing, painting, and poetry composition. There were religious lessons, music, embroidery, and dancing. Even tailored for a small child it was rigorous, but it had the desired effect. Esperanza regained her appetite and fell asleep at night, too tired for dreaming.

Esperanza was no longer banished to the nursery. Instead she became her father’s companion. They read and studied the stars, and over dinner he would quiz her about mathematics or philosophy. Afterward he would set up the colored pieces on the
alquerque
board and show her what moves would take his knights. Her father’s old friend, a musician named Don Jaime, was often with them.

When Esperanza was thirteen, her father revealed a secret, against Don Jaime’s advice—a secret inner room in the house filled with books forbidden by the church. There were the Qur’an of the Muslims and the Kabbalah and Talmud of the Jews, Moorish translations from Arabic and Greek of medical texts and natural history, the Persian Ibn Sina’s great medical text
The Book of Healing
, and Al Masudi’s history of a voyage to a distant land across the Sea of Fog and Darkness hundreds of years before the
Reconquista
. These books were works of art, bound in leather and gold, decorated in intricate patterns, with brass or silver clasps—exquisitely beautiful, and anathema to the Inquisition.

Esperanza and her father read these books together, especially the Ibn Sina, which held a special place in her father’s heart. He taught her that these books contained knowledge and wisdom given by God, who revealed himself to people in different ways with the help of the blessed prophets of many faiths. Having witnessed the terrible auto-da-fé, Esperanza must never accuse anyone of heresy. She must never mention this secret library either.

Esperanza understood her father’s views were at odds with those of her religious instructors, and that he particularly disapproved of celibacy among nuns and the clergy. She sensed this was somehow connected to her mother, but when she asked about her mother, her father only sighed and said he would tell her when she was older.

As Esperanza approached her sixteenth birthday, her father developed a racking cough and began to suffer fevers and breathlessness. Esperanza saw him pass whole days with
The Book of Healing
, trying one remedy after the next as he held a handkerchief to his mouth and coughed blood. She read it with him, memorizing symptoms and concocting medicines and poultices, but they helped no more than the doctors and apothecaries. When they
played board games, she saw that his hands had grown thin and white and shook as he moved the pieces.

Her father reassured her he would not die yet. And sometimes he would eat and walk about and seem like himself again, and she would hope that he was indeed better. Then suddenly, he took a turn for the worse, and when she wanted to send a servant for the priest he shook his head. With his life fading, he took her hand and said it had once been a matter of regret that he had no son, but he had long since ceased to feel the loss. He gave her his blessing, told her she was the last of a distinguished family, and made her swear never to embrace a celibate religious life, but to marry and bear children that the family line might not die out.

Esperanza begged him to speak of her mother before it was too late, but her father signaled her to be still. Gasping for breath he held up three fingers to indicate he must tell her three things. One, she was heiress to all his fortune and must always remember the poor; charity was an obligation. Two, lest she be prey to fortune hunters, he had assigned her guardianship to a friend, a nobleman noted for his piety who had pledged to find her a suitable husband. Esperanza must promise to accept her guardian’s choice and not be swayed by girlish notions conceived from reading chivalrous poetry and romances. With his last, rattling breath Esperanza’s father whispered, “Three…your mother…Don Jaime…ask Don Jaime.”

After her father’s death, propriety obliged her to make her home in her guardian’s house where she realized that her father’s confidence in her guardian had been misplaced. Though a nobleman, outwardly pious, and a patron of many charitable institutions, he was both less wealthy than he appeared and less honest. Despite his obsequious condolences, Esperanza was uneasy.

She avoided him and his wife as much as possible, keeping to her rooms and immersing herself in her books, until one day a servant
summoned her to her guardian’s presence. Esperanza braced herself to hear of her betrothal. But when she and her duenna entered the salon her guardian was pacing furiously. Walking directly up to her he thrust his angry face close to hers, shouting and swearing so furiously that spittle flew into her eyes as he cursed Esperanza and her father as deceiving heretics. Shocked and astonished, Esperanza cried, “Sir, what do you mean? Who accuses us?”

“Do not play the fool, your father’s secret collection of forbidden books is discovered. They accuse him
and
you. The infidel filth was consigned to the fire, as your father should have been and you with him.”

Esperanza covered her face with her hands, feeling her father had died again. Those beautiful volumes, her father’s treasures, all reduced to ash. By ruffians, fools, barbarous zealots! Rage flamed so hotly in her heart that she forced herself to keep her eyes down, lest it show. The rest of her guardian’s tirade she heard in silence—that the books had been the property of her grandfather, a Muslim merchant, whose forbidden books proved him a false
converso
, whose son impregnated an infidel whore.

Esperanza looked up at him in utter disbelief. He thrust his face close to hers again, snarling that to arrange Esperanza’s marriage, he had had to furnish proof of her
limpienza sangre
, only to discover she had none. Her mother had never relinquished the Muslim faith of her family, and had hidden a deceiving heretic heart beneath a nun’s habit at Regina Coeli Convent in Seville and born another
converso’s
bastard.

The ugly words rang in Esperanza’s ears, the floor swayed from side to side, and everything grew dark. When she regained consciousness she was lying on the cold marble floor and her duenna was holding a strong-smelling pomander under her nose, looking at her with suspicion and dislike. “Your mother was a whoring novice! You can be no better!”

“But how can this be true?” Esperanza protested, in tears. “Nuns cannot leave their convent. My father was goodness itself. He would never…a nun would not…”

The duenna would not say more.

Alone in her bedroom, Esperanza paced, unable to sit still and badly frightened. She was trapped in this house. Then she recalled her father’s last words: “Ask Don Jaime.” There was certainly no one else she could ask. As the horrible day turned into evening Esperanza scribbled a note in Latin, worded ambiguously lest it fall into the wrong hands, beseeching the counsel of the mendicant Friar Jaime to whom she wished to make her confession. Esperanza had no one to trust with it but her page, who could not read and was devoted to Esperanza. She gave her little messenger a coin and some sweetmeats and sent him off.

The page returned safely, but Esperanza passed a sleepless night. Had Don Jaime understood? But the next day she was summoned to the hall where a filthy, cowled, barefoot friar waited, scratching himself for lice. As she entered, Don Jaime’s deep voice boomed accusingly, “Repent! And make your confession to prepare your soul for what lies ahead.” Esperanza burst into tears and led him to a quiet corner. She fell to her knees with her head in her hands. No one would object to a man of God in this hypocritical household.

Under his cowl Don Jaime murmured, “Keep your head bowed and listen. You are the child of a true marriage, a Muslim marriage, and a baptized Christian as well. But your guardian’s information is partly correct. Your mother was a sweet and well-educated lady, whose parents and grandparents were forced to convert. Her family were forced
conversos
and an impediment to her marriage. When her parents died, your mother’s fortune opened the doors of the Regina Coeli convent. It was known for its apothecaries and nuns skilled in medical matters, and she hoped to use her skills for good there.

“But seventeen years ago, before she completed her novitiate, a strange and deadly pestilence appeared in one of the poorest, most crowded quarters of Seville, near the docks where ships from America are loaded and unloaded. Two sailors just ashore from a galleon from Hispaniola were its first victims. They were drinking in a tavern in the docks when they grew ill, burning with fever. Within a day, their bellies had swollen to bursting point, they bled from the ears, and screamed with the pain in their heads until death ended their torment. Some whores with them fell ill soon after, with the same symptoms, suffered the same agonies, and also died. Soon other men who had lain with the whores were ill as well, and the disease spread like fire in dried timber through the quarter where so many sailors lived and beyond, killing many able-bodied seamen, then shopkeepers and butchers and others, then soon servants in the homes of the rich, and the rich themselves.

“It was the busy season when ships cross to and from America ahead of autumn storms, and the loss of sailors at such a time was a catastrophe. Spain expected an attack by Muslim forces gathering in North Africa, and maintaining its defenses depended on the wealth coming from the New World.

“The dead were soon too numerous to collect from the streets, and all who could fled Seville. Your father was one of the few with medical knowledge to remain to help. And he reminded a desperate official that a novice at the Regina Coeli convent was said to be skilled in treating New World diseases.

“Sor Maria Caterina was a skilled apothecary before she entered the convent, and afterward she came to the notice of the archbishop when she successfully treated returning missionary priests suffering from ailments contracted in the New World. These priests often recovered under her care, and from them she learned much of New World illnesses and native cures. Spanish
doctors envied her success and called her an infidel witch, but the archbishop would allow no steps to be taken against her.

“Sor Maria Caterina would normally have given advice from the
locutio
, but the problem of the pestilence was too urgent for relaying messages in and out of the convent. Maria Caterina was ordered to treat the patients in person. By the orders of the archbishop, she was hurried into a waiting carriage with her chest of medicines on a stormy night when few were about to notice.

“It was a violent summer storm, with heavy rain and winds that sent debris flying, which spooked the horses. The streets were slick and wet, and finally a great clap of thunder caused the horses to bolt. The coachman lost control and Sor Maria Catarina had a terrifying ride as the plunging horses dragged the carriage sideways along the river. Just before plunging over a precipice onto the riverbank, the carriage uncoupled from the horses. The coachmen and outriders went into the river, but a passenger was thrown out. Your father witnessed the accident. He had gone out to observe the lightning and hurried down to assist the passenger—who, to his surprise, was a woman, shaken but uninjured, and concerned only to recover the medicine chest she had been carrying, and insisting she was bound for the quarter where the fever raged. Your father insisted on escorting her and her medicines to her destination.

“They were soon deep in a discussion about the pestilence. Both recalled Ibn Sina had mentioned similar symptoms, and they considered the distinguishing aspects of this new disease. It was only when the lady impatiently threw off her cloak to better see what she was doing that your father saw that his interesting companion wore a novice’s gown.”