Chapter 15

The Canon of Eymstadt

This latest Act of Faith, Don Felipe felt, had cost him more, almost, than it had the official sufferers and penitents. Three afternoons later, doubts and fears still chased one another through his soul, with far greater disturbance to his siesta than the burning crimson flashes which clouds chasing one another across the face of the sun marked on his closed eyelids.

Ah, good father, dear lady mother, beloved sister Serafina and all the rest of you, my family, my family…did I do well in letting the chief of your murderers walk free, when crushing him would have required no more of me than allowing my confrere to have his way? But I am a priest doubly tainted…trebly, in that my own sin, so much greater than that of any heretic whom we sentence, lies concealed in the deepest, most secret pit of conscience…

“Lord, my lord!” came Gubbio’s voice. “Still snoozing? The market has been abustle this past hour.”

Opening his eyes, Don Felipe regarded the Italian. “Surely, Gubbio, you exaggerate.”

“Your Holiness thinks so? Be sure I do not exaggerate when I tell you I bought us this for the price of a cabbage.” Gubbio dropped into his master’s lap a leaf-wrapped lump, the size of a man’s fist, of that Moorish confection Felipe had loved since boyhood but tasted more and more rarely as the years went on.

Felipe cocked a brow at his servant. “From the same market as yesterday’s dinner? Gubbio, my Gubbio, I rejoice that I am not your confessor!”

“Rejoice at whatever you please! That market shows greater charity than our fellow Christians in trading with the servant of a servant of the Holy Inquisition, and not even our longest-faced brother questions the beef and mutton he deigns to eat when not fasting, as long as it is tender enough and sauced with sufficient bacon to prove its piety. So everyone is well pleased, from market to table, and if it still naggles at your reverend conscience, here is a trifle to distract your Sanctity.” Producing a letter from his doublet, the Italian touched it quickly to his head before dropping it into his master’s lap almost on top of the sweetmeat.

It bore the seal of Rome.

“I am sure,” Don Felipe said, laying it down again on his lap in hopes that his servant would not see the slight trembling of his hand, “that the bearer did not simply chance upon you there in the market.”

“And if he had? Who should trust one another better than a pair of Italians in a foreign land?” Grinning, Gubbio shook his head. “Your Generosity still being at siesta, our pious servant of the Holy See decided to trust me, with my certain privileges, to bring him back whatever reward you see fit to offer him for his dangers and inconveniences.”

“Tell him,” the priest replied carefully, “that I shall reward him generously, but all in one lump sum, tomorrow. This message will beyond doubt require an immediate reply. Now go and see to the man’s feeding and lodging.”

“Fed, he is already.” Gubbio cast another look at his master, saw that Don Felipe was not about to open the missive in his presence, and yielded with grudging grace. “We will see to his bed for the next night or two.”

Felipe closed his eyes and sat back, as if the epistle waiting in his lap were a less important thing than his broken siesta. Not until he had heard Gubbio’s footfalls safely retreat did he venture another look.

In truth, this letter was anticipated—long awaited in something between eagerness and trepidation. God willing, it might contain the answer to Felipe’s request of 1492.

Anno Domini 1492. That ill-fated year—although as a good Catholic Spaniard Felipe de Alhama de Granada must hold locked within his own breast, alongside the secrets of his great sin and his ancient hatred of the murderer Manuel Urtigo, his true emotions at the fall of Karnattah to their Catholic majesties of Aragon and Castile and at those same majesties’ final pious expulsion of every unbaptized Jew from all their domains.

Like a sign from God to brighten that dark year with its long, doleful processions of Abraham’s children filing to the seaports at the end of July, Don Felipe’s old patron Cardinal Borja had been elected to the papal throne. Among his earliest acts had been the welcoming of all such rejected Spanish Jews as chose to make Rome their refuge—among them, Felipe dared pray, Gamito.

In his own congratulatory missive to the new pope, Don Felipe had reminded Alexander VI, as Cardinal Borja now was, of his own efforts in the field where his patron had placed him, by pledging to continue them. At the same time, he had hinted his readiness to undertake some farther-ranging service, some errand to France, perhaps, or even to the ever-restive and troublesome Germany, which might enable him to offer further proof of his loyalty and also increase his knowledge, thus improving his labors at home.

(And also, though this he hardly dared subvocalize even in his own heart, provide him the chance to discharge his poor conscience in Confession to some obscure and anonymous parish priest, far from both Spain and Rome, and preferably having more bastards at his knee than Latin in his head.)

There had, of course, been much to occupy the new pope during the first five years of his reign—wars and rumors of wars; the French king’s attempted invasion of Italy; the need for papal arbritration of property rights in the newly found lands beyond the ocean… Yet now, at last, his holiness had remembered one relatively obscure yet loyal satellite helping bind the unruly Spanish church in allegiance to Rome.

Remembered him to grant his request at once, or to bid him continue his service in patience and obedience? Anxiety casting out dread, Felipe finally broke the seal.

The pope’s dictated words were formal, yet to his relief Don Felipe drew from them a sense that his patron had forgotten neither him nor the conversation that had determined his life’s course, all those years ago, by placing him here in Aragon. In words doubtless duplicated, with small variations, to satellite after satellite, his holiness said in effect, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: continue thy loyal labors in the field wherein I have placed thee.” But after this, in words that seemed tailored to Don Felipe alone, the pope added that a certain mendicant canon, formerly belonging to the Augustinian house of Eymstadt of the Congregation of Windesham, had lately brought to the papal attention a matter of ancient abuse and imposition, involving blatant superstition and quite possibly simony, long practiced upon the simple in a diocese of Ireland: namely, this canon claimed that the Purgatory of Saint Patrick was no more than a fraud. Considering the ancient fame of the site, Alexander wished to make some further inquiry before ordering it to be shut down; and, on Saint Benedict’s admirable principle that a change of labor was as good as a rest, he proposed sending his good and loyal servant Felipe de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida de Aragon as legate to accompany the said mendicant canon back from Rome to Ireland, there to serve as the pope’s own eyes and ears in the matter of this so-called Purgatory.

The so-called Purgatory of Saint Patrick, long renowned as a sure place of visions…if not, indeed, of actual visitation to that world beyond the grave! How many travelers’ accounts had been written of it through the centuries? True testaments, or fabulous odyssies akin to those of Dante and—the inquisitor smiled, remembering—of young “San Juan de Calamocha”? Difficult, sometimes, to say for sure. And what of the middle ground?—pilgrims whom that site at the very edge of the world had inspired with dreams of a nature so luminously visionary that they afterward wrote them down in the sincere if misguided belief of their actuality.

Well! Ireland might no longer lie at the very edge of the known world, but among its simple priests Felipe de Granada y Aragon could surely find one sufficiently obscure and unlettered to serve the purpose of his spiritual salvation.

* * * *

Two decades and three changes of pope seemed to have made less difference in the Eternal City than Felipe would have expected; almost, he felt, he could still name some of the cows at their placid grazing, recognize certain of the scavenging swine by their markings. He felt the days of his youth heavy about him here, clinging close as a woolen cloak to his shoulders, while at the same time such changes as he saw served to encrust that cloak with the stiff weight of his own encroaching middle age. He would not again see forty! What had become of all those high spirits and higher ideals of his youth? Our Lord’s solemnly ordained priest-knight—stained with such mortal sin as must have cost him his Lady Morayma’s favor forever if she had not been lost to him already—now wasting his years away with the tedious minutiae of combing other souls’ lives for hidden heresies! And to what use or purpose? Saving a few poor, sinful bodies here and there from the zealous excesses of a Fray Junípero or the harsh judgment of the secular arm which saw heresy as treason not only against Heaven but against the state as well…and all the while remembering, with every decision rendered and every punishment decided upon, the condition of his own soul before the judgment seat of God. When had Ihesu ever addressed mere heretics as “whited sepulchers”?

Meanwhile, finding the holy city as much as ever a haunt of unholy knavery, Don Felipe rejoiced that he had prudently left his Italian servant at home to care for his properties in Aragon, well removed from the temptations of earlier years.

Although he could not avoid an inward chuckle of regret on meeting the canon of Eymstadt. Gubbio’s moist, warm, earthly humors rubbing against this canon’s cool, dry, celestial ones must surely have provided ample entertainment for the longest journey!

The canon was staying in an Augustinian house far too reformed for the comfort of the secular priest’s body, spirit, or digestion. Don Felipe elected to remain in the home of one of the pope’s favorite cardinals while completing his arrangements for the mission. The canon, professing himself ready to depart at once, raised a thin brow and cited Ihesu’s words to the Apostles to “carry nothing” for their travels; but Don Felipe—already weary from the trip across Aragon, Catalonia, and the Mediterranean to Rome, and facing a far longer and more arduous journey to Ireland, cited the duties of a guest to his host and the need for a papal legate to furnish his mind with certain additional study of precedents and analogous situations, which could be done only here in the libraries of Rome. Diplomatically, he forebore to point out that his future traveling companion had already enjoyed a considerable respite from the road while presenting his case to the pope’s penitentiary.

Emerging from a visit to his Italian bankers, Don Felipe thought he felt the wickedness of the city brush his own person in the form of a young cutpurse. Catching the boy by one scrawny arm, he pulled him face to face and demanded, “Well, lad, do clerical purses make thieves the best pickings, here in Rome?”

“Not a thief!” the boy protested, anger seeming to war strangely with terror in his countenance.

Without loosing his hold, Don Felipe groped one-handed for his purse and found at its top a folded paper that had not been there before. Intrigued, he drew it out and worked it open. It was scribed with the name of a certain house in the Jewry, and the words, “Come as if buying.” Years fell away as Felipe recognized the hand.

Nodding, he released his young captive—who promptly dodged into the crowd—and made his way to the Jewry, rejoicing that the lad had found him alone: having spent much of the morning at his researches, he had given the old familiar and former soldier, Luis Albogado, whom he had brought with him as manservant in Gubbio’s place, an errand elsewhere.

Half an hour later, Felipe found the building. Even as he began to investigate the shops of its arcade, he caught sight of a familiar figure standing at the far end. No sooner had he opened his mouth to call a greeting, than Gamito nodded and vanished into his shop.

Wondering, but slowing his steps with an effort, Don Felipe proceeded to the spot where he judged his friend had stood, and entered in his turn. It proved to be a tiny pawnshop, a place of antiquities and modernities, velvets and brocades, books and musical instruments, all cleanly stored in such a manner as to show without ostentation. Felipe’s old friend sat behind the small counter, studiously turning the pages of a book after the Hebrew fashion, left to right.

“Gamito!” Felipe exclaimed.

The other looked up with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Glancing at the door as if through his visitor, he said, “Your Reverence mistakes me for someone else. But if you please to come closer, I may have some trinkets here to interest you.”

Stepping to the counter, Don Felipe lowered his voice in deference to his friend’s obvious wishes. “I have mistaken no one. My God! Gamito, finding you answers my most heartfelt prayer!”

“And mine,” Gamito murmured, rising from beneath the counter, where he had bent to retrieve a small coffer. Placing it on the surface between them, he opened it and said more loudly, “If it is antiquities your Reverence seeks, I can offer a fine denarius from the time of the second Caesar, or even an obol from Plato’s Athens, though this last has been with me but two days past its promised time of redemption.”

“I will look at them both, and at anything else you may care to show me, but why this secrecy? Has the city’s spirit of intrigue infected even you, Gamito? Or is there truly some need, some danger—”

“None of which we know,” Gamito murmured reassuringly. “No, we have been made welcome here, by both his Holiness and our own Roman compatriots. But a Jew learns caution. Overmuch caution, perhaps—even, at times, a caution that may seem ludicrous to a free Gentile—but our fathers had been welcome in Spain for many generations, and now there is talk that this same pope who welcomed us is about to honor Fernando and Isabel officially with the title of ‘Most Catholic,’ for their Christian charity in exiling us.”

“Among other deeds,” the priest added, “including the glorious reconquest of Karnattah, with its rape of our beloved Alhama.” Hearing the bitter notes in his own voice, he added, “But his Holiness must tread a razor’s edge of diplomacy, Gamito, if he would keep any control at all over rebellious Spain. And, for the sake of that God Whom we both worship, let there be no more talk of ‘Gentile’ or ‘Jew’ between us two!”

“Do you chide me,” his friend inquired, “for the pains I have been at to protect your name among your own kind?”

Taken somewhat aback, Don Felipe pondered a few moments before answering slowly, “No, old friend, I thank you. These are not the habits I have learned in Aragon of late years. There, I ventured not even to inquire of the banker where—and if—your letters of credit had been presented, lest my interest should be known to concern more than my own newly acquired properties. Being in Rome again, I seem to breathe once more the freer air of my youth. It may have made me reckless.”

Over the coffer of antiquities, Gamito’s forefinger found the back of Felipe’s hand and rested there for a heartbeat or two. “As Spain made us cautious,” he repeated softly. “If your pope walks the edge of a razor, so do we—and, I think, a sharper razor than his! But I thank you, old friend. Your purchase of our property—at a price more than fair, when so many other good Christians were fattening themselves upon our need—and payment in letters of credit upon the Fuggers, rather than in specie which we would have needed to smuggle from the country with great risk of confiscation, made this shop and our livelihood from it possible.”

“I rejoice in your welfare,” the priest said sincerely. “And all of you are safe?”

“All of us, although the exodus from Spain nearly killed my dearest wife, who was big with our firstborn. No blame to you, my friend, and Heaven’s blessing upon those few who laid aside their Christianity, at great risk to themselves, long enough to offer us a little help along the road.”

“No, Gamito, theirs was the true Christianity, the mercy which our Lord enjoined upon His followers—but you see, I say to you, here in Rome, things that not even a holy inquisitor would dare say aloud in the Spain of Fernando and his Castilian queen!”

“Perhaps you should not whisper them even in Rome. Who knows what Christian ears may overhear, what side of the razor’s edge your pope may land upon when he falls?”

“I will buy both obol and denarius for a visit with you in your home, where we may talk more freely than even here.”

“Felipe, both coins are yours for my great pleasure in seeing you again, but appear to haggle a little while longer. I think it safest to converse quietly here, rather than that any eyes should glimpse you seeking out a Jewish household.”

“I have already set inquiries in motion for you and your family. Of all people in Rome, I judged my bankers best suited to the task. But how could even they have worked so quickly? That lad slipped me your message on my way out of the bank.”

“My brother saw you at the wharf on your arrival.”

“Truly? I did not see him.”

“Thinking it more prudent that you should not, he stayed hidden in the crowd. He was there to collect certain merchandise for the good man who lodged my mother and sister when first they fled here to join my brother’s family. As for the boy, he is a street urchin, but recommended by an acquaintance who has found him trustworthy on errands of a delicate nature.”

Felipe sighed. “Have you ever thought, Gamito, that this ‘New World’ beyond the ocean may offer your people a second Promised Land?”

“But you frown, my friend,” said Gamito.

“No—it is nothing—only some vague fancy of having once seen something of the sort in a dream. Long ago…very long ago, if, indeed, it ever occurred at all.” Unable to plumb his memory for further details, Felipe shrugged it off and went on, “But see here, Gamito. Why, when I have already begun inquiries for you through the Fuggers, should I not visit you in your home?”

“Bankers, even Gentile bankers, can guard confidences very well.”

Better, perhaps, than Spanish priests! Don Felipe reproached himself on two counts, remembering both his great sin and his own failure to question his bankers in Aragon concerning the whereabouts of his Hebrew friends. “But I am forming a resolution: invite me into your home, and upon my return to Aragon I will enter into correspondence with you through my bankers.” Seeing his friend’s hesitation, he added, “If need be, I shall pretend an effort to convert you, mixed with sufficient pious sentiments to satisfy prying eyes. You will know how to crack through them for the true meat of my letters.”

“I will, indeed!” With a low chuckle, Gamito accepted the handclasp Felipe offered over the antique coins. “You will find us a stubborn family, Felipo, and very difficult to convert, but any letter you dare send will be welcome for its own sake. Ask for us in the street of the fishmongers.”

* * * *

By the time all preparations for the mission to Ireland were completed, leaving no further excuse for delay, Don Felipe had enjoyed no fewer than three visits with his old friend. By going quietly but not furtively, he felt that he had attracted little if any comment; and the late hardships suffered by the Hebrew family while still in Spanish lands had in no way impaired its cooking.

They queried each other about their third boyhood friend, but Gamito had learned no more than had Felipe about Hamet and his family. They could but hope that the Moors were safe somewhere and living in comfort, Morayma with the husband to whom she had long ago been married, and Hamet, perhaps, with his own little harem.

(Not even to Gamito would Felipe speak of his love for the lady lost to him forever. How could he speak of it, even to God, without remembering the great sin with which he had dishonored his devotion? He cringed to think how Morayma would have viewed his secret disgrace; for, while her people might not understand the Christian sacraments, they had their own strong sense of honor and religion. As things stood, she might never have so much as suspected Felipe’s adulation. It was better so.)

Nevertheless, two of the old comrades had reunited, and when they parted again, it was with promises to maintain contact with letters exchanged through the bankers.

* * * *

Those letters must wait, of course, until Don Felipe was back in Aragon; or, at least, until he had parted with the canon of Eymstadt, who was likely to lend him scarcely enough peace and solitude to read his Office during what small leisure the rigors of travel might allow.

Their party was small, very small. His holiness insisted that two Roman guards accompany them in addition to the old soldier Luis Albogado, but agreed, after raising one fine if heavy eyebrow briefly at Felipe’s failure to bring along a Spanish chaplain, that legate and canon might provide each other as well as their three men-at-arms with the comforts of Mass, Confession, and holy counsel when required.

Don Felipe had neglected to bring a chaplain along with him precisely because of his deeply private plan to unburden himself to some chance-found parish priest far from either Spain or Italy. Life was uncertain, especially upon a journey to the end of the civilized world, and the canon of Eymstadt would be preferable to the demons of Hell; but, granted time for any other choice whatever, Don Felipe would as soon have made his crucial Confession to the inquisitor general of Spain—Fray Tomás de Torquemada himself—as to this educated Augustinian zealot who had deliberately abandoned the cloister with its library for the austere hardships of life as a mendicant friar.

Who seemed, moreover—to his companion’s discomfort—already to suspect that some heavy weight lay in Don Felipe’s soul. The first day that they stood side by side aboard the ship from Rome to Narbonne, the secular priest began, speaking in the one language that both clerics understood, “Tell me of your experience at this place called Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.”

“Was not my report among such papers and documents as need required you to study there in Rome?”

“It was,” Don Felipe agreed mildly, “but spoken testimony, for which written merely substitutes, is always to be preferred.”

The canon stared at him with piercing pale eyes and said in tones just barely on the right side of civility, “Is this your training as inquisitor?”

“In part, it is my experience—rather than training—but in larger part, it simply follows Holy Church in her ancient wisdom, which advises Scripture to be imparted and expounded orally wherever and whenever possible.”

With this, no churchman who had chosen the itinerant life could well argue. After a moment, the canon coughed, turned his gaze to the waters of the Mediterranean, and said bitterly, “I found it all lies, imposition upon popular credulity, and blatant simony.”

“You must explain more fully, and in proper order.”

Again the stare that seemed to pierce through Felipe’s body into his soul. “Do you interrogate me in your capacity of inquisitor?”

“I serve Holy Church as one of her inquisitors,” Don Felipe answered, remaining calm with some slight effort, “and it is for that reason, among others, that his holiness has named me to this our present mission. But I question you in your capacity of accuser and witness, not as one himself under suspicion.”

“Well and good! You have enough of them to suspect, hypocrites and simonizers all, every last one. When first I came to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, and thought myself at my goal, Terence—in their own language, ‘Turlough’—Maguire, who is prior and presider of that so-called ancient holy place, claimed to require consent in writing from his bishop before permitting me to enter. All part of their fraudulent game, as I finally came to see, but meanwhile behold me duly seeking out his Excellence Cathal Og MacManus, whose servants treated me in my poverty as so much dirt. Does this befit those who claim to serve our Lord, poor as He was in His earthly life?”

Privately musing that the canon’s tone betrayed as much contempt for the bishop’s servants as they could possibly have shown him, Don Felipe shook his head in sympathy and prompted his informant, “But they finally admitted you to see Bishop Cathal?”

“They thrust me prone before him with jeers and mockery. And he—this high churchman boasting his true service to our Lord—demanded money for his written consent to enter his saint’s Purgatory!”

“On what grounds?” inquired Don Felipe.

“On grounds that such was his due from any who entered that place of supposed vision and pilgrimage! But in obedience to our Lord, Who commanded His disciples to carry no purse in their travels, I had no money, and even if I had, I would not have dared to pay, on account of simony and its contagion. So at last, yielding to my long arguments and tears of devotion, his excellency vouchsafed me his letters of admission, but sent me to his highness Nellanus MacGrath, secular prince of that territory, on grounds that I must have his permission as well.”

“Perhaps amicable cooperation,” Don Felipe mused, “or perhaps unseemly truckling to secular authority.”

The canon indulged in a sneer. “Ah, it was amicable cooperation! Completely amicable cooperation between spiritual arm and secular—both at work to reap profit from pious deluded pilgrims. For what does his highness demand of me, but money! Enough money to have made up for his churchman friend what I had refused to pay there.”

“But eventually you prevailed upon Prince Nellanus MacGrath, also, without rendering payment.”

“Without payment of money, but with long payment of tears, pleading, argument, and even threats—pointing to his excellency’s permission, gained without coins. So back at last I returned, with both their letters of admission, and on reading them, what does Prior Terence demand but money in his turn, as ‘customary payment’?”

“It is unfortunately true,” Don Felipe observed, “that without alms, no steward can long maintain any shrine in this imperfect world. Does not Saint Paul himself command us not to muzzle that ox which treads our grain?”

The canon snorted. “It is one matter to collect alms offered in free generosity, as much or as little as their givers can afford, and another matter to fix some certain sum and call it ‘customary,’ as if God’s grace could be purchased for any set fee. That is what I call blasphemous simony!”

“You call it well,” Don Felipe conceded. “Yet, for all that, this prior may have been guilty of no more than thoughtless adherence to long custom as convenient guide. He did admit you finally, did he not, without payment?”

“Oh, aye, he admitted me, more grudgingly than freely, even deigning to hear my Confession and give me Viaticum—as if his mouth were worthy to grant absolution, or his hands to fondle our Lord’s sacred Flesh—”

“Such sacraments,” Don Felipe protested with a secret cringe, “remain equally valid, no matter any individual priest’s state of soul.”

“That is matter for debate,” the canon replied, his own opinion evident in his tone of voice. “In any case, thus prepared and fortified—in all good will on my own part, at least, if not on that of this prior—I followed him to that deep pit they call Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, into which his sacristan lowered me by rope, along with bread and one small flask of water, and left me therein all night in perfect comfort, expecting demons and visions in plenty and never seeing as much as one!”

Musing on the degree of aceticism that could refer to the bottom of a deep pit, presumably hard, very probably damp or rocky or both, perhaps too narrow to lie down in at length, with no other amenity than bread and water, all for the length of an entire night, as “perfect comfort,” Don Felipe asked—he was hardly sure why—“Did you not even sleep, and suffer dreams?”

“None!” the canon said decisively.

* * * *

The canon would have traveled afoot from Narbonne to Bordeaux. Indeed, Don Felipe would scarcely have felt surprised to see him, for all his stubborn humility, try setting his foot upon the sea. When, on reaching port, the Spaniards and Italians turned their attention to finding mounts, the mendicant grumbled,

“You secular priests pride yourselves on taking no vow of poverty.”

Felipe responded, “Would you delay our mission?”

“I would have set out at once upon your arrival in Rome. Afoot, wherever there is land, as our Lord and His disciples traveled.”

“Not even with His miracles could He always impress every authority to do His will. We bear such orders as men may not receive willingly, even from his holiness. Would you have us appear to their eyes in less dignity than befits papal emissaries? Moreover, there are our men-at-arms to consider.”

“Does this mean you are in full agreement that that place of fraud and superstition must be closed?” the canon demanded eagerly.

“I shall neither agree nor disagree until after personally inspecting Saint Patrick’s Purgatory and judging for myself whether or no it is worthy of credence and pilgrimage.”

“You will agree! You will not—you cannot—fail to see their imposture for yourself! At least let me run afoot beside you.”

“And make us appear hard-hearted, as well as slowing our journey? Whereas,” Don Felipe added with a wink, “riding, you will save your breath for arguing with me.”

At last, still under protest, the canon was persuaded to ride a mule, as the one mount which none of the Evangelists described as sanctified by the touch of our Lord’s posterior. He breathed no word of protest against the horses chosen by Luis Albogado and the two Italian bodyguards, as befit their soldierly status; but he seemed to look askance at his clerical companion for perferring an ass, named by Matthew, Luke, and—arguably—Mark as the breed upon which Ihesu rode into Jerusalem, John alone remembering a donkey. Though the canon kept his glances veiled, Don Felipe renewed his resolution to make Confession to this man only in case of absolute and dire need.

* * * *

The prior of the small Benedictine house of Notre Dame de la Charité, where they passed two nights between Marmande and Bordeaux—the canon insisting on full observance of the Sabbath whenever possible—was an ardent scholar of all visions and accounts of the afterlife, those of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory included, and seized the chance to discuss it as eagerly as Don Felipe and at least two of their three men-at-arms (one Italian making no comment either way) seized the excuse to rest a day from travel.

“So,” the prior asked plaintively, “there were no demons at all?”

“None at all,” the canon returned with the merest hint of smugness, as if he enjoyed having the advantage of superior knowledge over a man of higher religious authority, but at the same time possessed enough grace of conscience to repent his enjoyment.

In his own disappointment over the lack of demons, the prior seemed to take no notice of his guest’s attitude. “And no fires?” he went on.

“As I understand our friend’s situation that night,” Don Felipe put in, “one or two small fires might have been welcome, whether fed by burning sinners or some less exotic fuel.”

Both men looked at him, the canon frowning very slightly. After a moment, the prior inclined his head deferentially and said, “Whether poor sinners actually fuel those flames with their own souls’ substance, has long caused me confusion. All in all, I think not, for damned souls must survive to burn forever, and souls in Purgatory must survive to pass on, in due course, into Heaven; and therefore it must be their sins alone which burn away, or, for Hell’s eternal fire, some other fuel, which ‘dies not, nor is ever quenched.’”

A little uneasy at his own levity, considering the perilous state of his soul, Don Felipe offered his goblet to be refilled with good French wine, poured by the young lay brother in attendance, and agreed that the prior’s argument was sound. He might have discharged his conscience to this courteous old Benedictine, but for his secular’s shyness of any Order; as inquisitor, he understood mistrust, even enmity, between Orders for what it was…but, as ordained mortal, he was not immune to feeling it himself.

Turning again to the canon, their host went on, “Yet not every visitor even to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory has been blessed with glimpses of what awaits our souls after death. Perhaps our good God had some reason for withholding them from you, to your own salvation?”

The canon emphatically shook his head. “For one whose desire was as ardent, prayers as fervent, and soul as carefully tended, our Lord could have had one reason only: to use me as His tool for unveiling this simony in all its fraudulent superstition.”

After suffering his companionship across the Mediterranean and much of France, Don Felipe had little doubt that the canon of Eymstadt was as sincere, pious, and clean of life as his words implied. Between this canon and himself, it was less a question of Order versus secular vows, than of personal humors as discordant as vinegar and burgundy.

* * * *

Midway between France and Donegal, when Don Felipe lay below deck cocooned in a hammock, he woke from a dream that a great storm raged around their ship and he was the prophet Jonah, to find that it was true—at least in so far as concerned the storm. The very sides of the vessel shook with each crack of lightning and crash of thunder, while waves dashed against the planking as though fierce to free their brother laplets of bilge water within, and Felipe’s own stomach, for all its emptiness of prudent fasting, groaned along with the general tumult, in no way soothed by the swinging and jerking of his hammock.

Return to sleep seemed impossible; yet as he lay listening to the din of sea, storm, and sailors shouting above him in their unfamiliar tongue, in his suffering he began to feel that the other part of his dream was true as well: that he was indeed Jonah, fleeing in his guilt from the wrath of an angry God—that he could even understand the sailors’ foreign speech, and they were already casting lots to learn what sinner among them had brought so much divine wrath down upon their voyage.

Confess, he thought. I must find my fellow traveler and make my Confession! For death seemed very near, if not from the storm itself, then from the distress in his own poor body…and yet, crippled as much by this same distress as by fear of those rough sailors above deck, he lay during swing after swing of the hammock, adding no movement of his own to its already violent motion, but beginning vaguely to fancy it a gallows on which he swung…when he heard voices almost in his ear:

“According to his own belief, great-granddaughter, he should confess.”

“Great-grandmother, that’s all crackerjack.”

Trying to sit up, Don Felipe tumbled from the hammock. At first, he had feared they were sailors come down to seize him. But no, the voices had been women’s—at least, one of them, the softer one—though already his alarmed mind was letting go of what, exactly, they had said.

Once knocked from his hammock, he groped his way to the hatch and climbed, hand over hand, ignoring sickness and bruises alike—everything but the old, festering ache in his conscience. The canon, he must find the canon of Eymstadt, it was time and past time to make his Confession.

Finally on deck, he found himself in a great, boisterous grayness like dawn, although, with the heaviness of the clouds, it might have been midday. Like Peter sinking into the water and calling on Christ Ihesu, Don Felipe began shouting for his companion, clinging in desperation to shroudline, railing, whatever seemed secure, never daring to relinquish one handhold until he had found another, straining his eyes against wind and rain in his efforts to locate the canon.

He spied him at last, huddled head to head with Luis Albogado. Luis! thought Felipe. He, too, is making his Confession—and to this foreign mendicant rather than to me. As is wise…does he guess as much, or was it merest proximity in need? Like my own need—had they tried to wake me before now, and failed?

But what sins could the faithful old familiar have on his soul, to need any great time confessing? Don Felipe looked about for the nearest way across to them, prepared to lurch toward a handhold just beyond his grasp…

When a sailor, as he supposed, walked past him and remarked, in clear if strangely accented Spanish, “Irish priest at the mast, great-grandfather. Your choice.”

Squinting forward, Felipe saw that there was indeed a man tied to the mast—so the storm was truly as desperate as it seemed to him—and this man was making the sign of absolution over a sailor. It was half the distance to the mast as to the canon.

As the sailor kissed his confessor’s hand and turned away, Don Felipe thrust himself forward. A wave swung the deck up to meet him—sprawling, he reached out and found himself clutching the Irish priest—who had told him this was an Irish priest?—by one ankle. After lingering long enough to put the end of a rope in the papal emissary’s hand and help him into a somewhat more secure and less undignified position, face to face with the native cleric, the sailor returned with freshly washed soul to his work of striving, with God’s will, to help save the ship.

Don Felipe had seen this Irish priest boarding at Dublin, but supposed him some petty tradesman. Small and lean, though with the smile of a well-fed uncle, he had settled among his ragged compatriots laughing and joking in their own language—Felipe remembered thinking that but for their strange tongue and their laughter, the mendicant canon of Eymstadt might have preferred their company to his own for its simplicity and poverty. No tradesman, then, but a priest? Obviously a secular, by his garb and the silvering red hair now rain-whipped across his face; obviously Christlike in his ability to eat and drink with sinners and as it appeared to share poverty with the poor; and obviously beloved and valued, to be tied already to this mast against the storm’s worst, while the papal emissary and his party were still left to their own devices.

“I beg pardon, brother,” Don Felipe began in Latin, half-shouting to be heard through the storm. “I did not know of your priesthood.”

Replying with a rush of words in his own language, the Irish priest ended by seizing Don Felipe’s hand and kissing it.

“You did not reveal your priesthood to us,” Felipe continued in Latin.

“…Holiness…I have…Latin, little,” the Irishman faltered, with bad case endings. “Little Latin. Latin, little.”

Beneath a prayer of relieved thanks to the merciful God, Don Felipe said in his slowest and most careful Latin, “I would make my Confession.”

His green eyes wide despite the rain, the Irish priest crossed himself hastily. “To me?”

“To you, my father.”

“Lamb of God who take away sin world’s have mercy us!” At least the Irish priest seemed to have enough Latin for some appropriate approximation of the liturgy.

So Don Felipe de Alhama de Granada y de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida, inquisitor of Daroca de Aragon, confessed at last, there on the deck of a small ship buffeted by the fury of the Irish Sea, burying the most mortal of all his sins amid a hurried litany of lesser and commoner offenses. There could hardly be even the pretense of whispering, here in the shriek of the gale, but he did somewhat drop his voice from time to time, including the time of the crucial words. In no way could the distant canon of Eymstadt have overheard, and no one else aboard was likely to have any better grasp of Latin than the little Irish priest, who seemed to understand the vital words of absolution and blessing in their meaning but not, by the way he uttered them, in their grammar and syntax.

Curiously, it appeared to Don Felipe that the storm began its abatement from the moment of his absolution.

* * * *

“Look with care,” Don Felipe instructed them. “This is that same, identical ‘Purgatory’ into which you caused my companion to be lowered?”

“It is,” Prior Terence Maguire replied, uneasily shifting his weight from foot to foot.

Don Felipe moved his gaze to the canon of Emystadt, who nodded sullenly and agreed, “It is. Never could I forget this place.”

During the last days of the journey, the canon’s gloom had seemed to deepen almost hour by hour, from the time he had glimpsed the papal emissary huddled in sacramental Confession with the Irish priest. “He was nearer,” Don Felipe had explained, “and I saw you already occupied in hearing our own people’s Confessions.” But no excuse would soothe the canon, who repeated that his papal holiness had meant them to act as each other’s chaplains, and apparently read in Felipe’s dereliction some portent of doom to his own purpose. This doom he must have come to fear more and more as Don Felipe refused to take monetary advantage of his status as papal representative, but smoothly and quietly paid every sum suggested by prior, bishop—or, more properly, acting episcopal vicar general, as Cathal Og MacManus proved to be—and the MacGrath who ruled as secular prince of this area. “But you seal their simony with papal approval!” the canon had cried, and kept shaking his head whenever the emissary tried to reassure him, “I merely put their custom upon trial.”

Now Don Felipe peered down the well, or pit. Meditatively, he dropped a pebble. It struck bottom quickly, and with a comforting dry sound.

“But, your Excellency,” Prior Terence whispered, bending as close to him as respect allowed, “this entrance is for paupers! It is but one of several entrances to our fine Purgatory of Saint Patrick, and your Excellency is surely no pauper—”

“It is this entrance I will use,” Don Felipe replied with tranquil authority. “Are not paupers as precious as princes in God’s eyes? But let all things be done in order,” he added aloud, for the canon’s benefit as much as the prior’s. “Tonight and tomorrow I will fast. Tomorrow evening I will make Confession—to this good priest whom his holiness has assigned me for chaplain on this pilgrimage—and take Communion from his hand and no other. Thus prepared, I will pass tomorrow night in this same pit.”

It might have been better to spend three or even four days in preparatory fasting, according to certain ancient precedents Don Felipe had found; but he mistrusted this Irish weather to hold dry for so long, and rain would certainly increase such natural discomfort as he expected to prove the Purgatory’s sole ordeal.