Chapter 21

Our Lady of the Pillar

So this, thought Don Felipe, is the benefice that has given me income so many years—my only income, excluding what Gubbio used of his own questionable earnings to maintain my household and myself, all that time I lay in the secret cells.

They first caught sight of Agapida from the top of a low rise, looking more across than down into an expanse of not quite fertile land, mostly pasture, with some planted fields visible around the distant huddle of stone buildings, too small a village for more than the single church, Our Lady of the Pillar, standing like an ageless guardian angel between the tiny dwellings and the still more distant castle. Don Felipe guessed that both church, castle, and the greater part of the houses had stood here unchanged since before the Synod of Toledo, an unbroken link with the Visigothic past. The whole value of this site may have been military, yet its present appearance suggested that, as a fortress, it had never really been needed. Unlike that once far more prosperous stronghold far to the south, Alhama de Karnattah, this village might never have been sacked, its people never forced to crowd inside the castle walls.

Why have I never visited my own church until this day? his thoughts continued. It brings my boyhood back to me. Why has it required my duty as inquisitor to bring me here, when my duty as incumbent of the benefice would have sufficed?

“Here they come,” Gubbio observed.

True enough, a line of dots was threading its way to the village outskirts. Already Don Felipe could hear their chant, make out the fine, blur-topped pole that would be his parish’s best processional crucifix.

He had seen all of it before, not in every place of his visitation, but in the greater number of them. The welcoming procession, planned no doubt from the hour of learning that the Holy Office would visit this town, set into motion by the arrival of the familiar sent on ahead of the inquisitor’s main party, and designed to demonstrate a holy zeal and religious fervor that might or might not mask secret failings.

“Come,” Don Felipe said. “Let us see how near to town our mounts can meet them.”

Don Enrique de la Santa Cruz rode forward, unrolling the inquisitorial banner that his merits had earned him the honor of bearing before the holy inquisitor. Both fiscal and scrivener rode a little behind Don Felipe, with him as the apex of their triangle. The remaining three familiars followed in single file, and Gubbio brought up the rear, leading the pack animals along. Don Enrique and the two Juans rode horses; Don Felipe, his fiscal, and the last familiar good mules; the little scrivener Pablo de María—who, pleading overwork in the Daroca tribunal, had followed Don Felipe into the tiny and obscure one of Ainsa when King Fernando appointed him to its solitary inquisitorship as if in pique at his refusal to accept the Córdoban post—had his little donkey Rosita; and Gubbio, the latest in his line of trusty asses. Don Enrique’s horse and Don Felipe’s Blanca were pure white, with a certain degree of fine stuff in their trappings. Even dusty and somewhat travel-worn, the inquisitor’s party made a fine short procession of its own.

They met nearer the village than the rise, for the village procession moved afoot, save for two men on horseback—in one of whom Don Felipe recognized the familiar he had sent in advance—and one man on a mule as gentle as any the inquisitor had ever seen, chosen no doubt for the rider’s age and infirmity. The younger of the two local riders proudly bore a banner showing two fiery swords crossed on a field of vair. Obviously these two were Don Alfons de Monsecore y Tequilador de la Castel de Agapida, and his son Don Gaspar. Their attire would have proclaimed their rank even had they, like their people, come forth on foot, as members of the local nobility sometimes did in such processions.

The acolytes and choir boys, of course, preceded them all, led only by their immediate shepherd, Don Felipe’s vicar, Don Fadrique Osorio. At first glance, Don Felipe was shocked to see the lean young new-made priest whom he had named to his church, after one brief interview so many years ago, grown corpulent and waddling as though unaccustomed to even the exercise of walking. In so poor a countryside, pastoring so underfed a flock, where had Don Fadrique found food to wax so luxuriously fat?

Beware, inquisitor, Don Felipe reminded himself, of seeing thine own weaknesses in others. Would you yourself not have grown equally large by now, if not for that same weak and too often delicate digestion which provided one of Fray Junípero’s charges against you? Gluttony is in itself no more heretical than abstinence.

Half a dozen men in the castellan’s colors came with the choir, bearing the church’s prize possession—the statue of its patron—on her garlanded litter. So that, thought Don Felipe, is Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida. If her gilding was shabby in places; if there were chips in the carved sword she held, her hands resting on its hilt while its point bit down into the serpent at her feet; if the choristers’ white linen surplices showed considerable fraying and more holes than quite seemly—still, all these defects became visible only at close range, while their singing remained as clear and sweet as at a distance, and the incense grew sweeter, because stronger.

If the nobles were a little shabby in their attire and trappings, it was less so than their villagers and no more so than the inquisitor’s party itself, after its weeks of travel from place to place. What most struck Don Felipe was the fact that, while the two he guessed were Don Alfons and his son came mounted, their attendants walked. Usually he had found either all the people of rank coming humbly on foot, or the dons and duennas riding as well as their lords and ladies.

The nearer they came, however, the more Don Felipe read age, even illness in the older lord’s countenance and the manner in which he bore his body. Don Alfons might be too feeble to walk, and his heir perhaps too proud—or too considerate of his senior’s pride—to move afoot beside a mounted parent.

Behind the people of the castle came the villagers, affecting but not entirely achieving seemly orderliness…yet a large group at the very rear, following a strange little gap between them and the others, proceeded with a solemnity to match that of the choristers and outshine that of both castle people and commoners.

Looking more closely, the inquisitor observed that this rearmost group seemed entirely blackhaired and dark complexioned, that a few more bright colors appeared in their clothing and a little more jewelry about their persons, than was the case with the other villagers as a group.

Casting his mind back, he found an old memory, from before his time in the secret cells, of one of his vicar’s very rare reports. In it, Don Fadrique had mentioned that some of those wandering Christians of Lower Egypt, who claimed to be on penitential pilgrimage for succumbing temporarily to Muslim ways, were attempting to settle in Agapida—what, if anything, should be done about them? Don Felipe had directed him to give them all the spiritual assistance they sought, and be thankful for anyone who actually sought it, a thirst which was all too hard to find in these days of waning fervor.

He barely had time to notice the Egyptians—if that was who they were—before his attention was called back to the formal ceremonies of being welcomed and brought in honor to a feast spread in the village square.

It was not much of a square, nor much of a feast. The Agapidans had done their best, but their village clearly served as market town only for its own locals and the very immediate vicinity. Appraising it, the inquisitor privately rejoiced that Acts of Faith were no longer to be held along the visitation route, but exclusively in cities housing permanent tribunals.

Wondering whether it might not have been better for them to hold this feast in the castle, Don Felipe suddenly felt some twinge of guilt at deriving part of his own income from these people.

At length, near the end of the meal, he turned to Don Fadrique on his left and inquired, “Where are the rooms you have cleared for us?”

A strange, stifled expression crossed the vicar’s face as he began, “Your Excellence…” and fell into an awkward pause, staring to Don Felipe’s right.

The young lord, who stood there between the inquisitor and Don Alfons, proud to serve them as cupbearer, took the word. “Let us offer you the hospitality of our castle. Your chambers have been swept and strewn with fresh flooring, you may have my father’s own hall for your courtroom, and all the resources of our own torture chamber will be available to you.”

“Oh?” Don Felipe studied the gleam of the young man’s eyes, the glint of his white teeth. “You have a torture chamber, have you?”

“An ancient one,” muttered the older lord, the eager stripling’s father. “Long disused…long shut up and forgotten…”

“Opened again!” his son protested. “I have seen to its cleaning myself, in preparation for your holy visit.”

“And the men to operate the equipment?”

“We will provide them!” Don Gaspar assured him with all the ready confidence of youth. “I will… If necessary, I would be honored to serve the Holy Inquisition in that office with my own hands.”

“I would not ask you to bloody your noble fingers with such menial work,” Don Felipe answered, making an imperfect effort to keep disgust from sounding in his voice. But for the secrecy that lent the Holy Office one of her most effective tools, he would have informed this over-zealous whelp that executioners and assistants to administer torture were not so easy to find, especially here in the northern kingdom; that, when pressed into service, they were more likely than not to prove bumbling at their task, which clumsiness had all too often resulted in heinous and unsanctioned crippling of the defendants under investigation; and that torture was never to be administered until after full and careful discussion and voting on each individual case by the Council of Faith—which certainly never, within the jurisdiction of any conscientious tribunal, took place on the site during a visitation. In any event, what of those ancient fueros of which Aragon was so justly proud? What business had any private torture facility, in no matter how ancient and noble a house, not to have been destroyed long ago beyond any chance of restoration?

Turning back to his vicar, he resumed, “We have much to do in the morning. Your people may celebrate into the night, if they will; but, as for ourselves, we will soon wish to retire. Again I must ask you, where are we to rest, where do our work?”

“But…your Excellence…” Don Fadrique protested, still looking over Don Felipe’s shoulder as if appealing to the young hidalgo, “my housekeeper, poor woman, lies sick abed. She could not serve your Excellence—she has not been able to cook nor clean the house during all this last week. Don Gaspar has offered you rooms in his father’s castle, rooms far more spacious and suitable than any I could provide.”

“The castle itself—” Don Gaspar began again.

Don Felipe cut him off with a wave of his hand. “It is too far removed from the village.”

“It rules the village,” the young lord answered stiffly.

The inquisitor replied, carefully measuring tact into his speech, “My friend, I do not for one moment question that your father and you understand the art of secular government. But neither is it for you to question my knowledge of how best to carry forth the work of the Holy Office. Experience has taught me that more souls are saved and heretics discovered when we locate ourselves closer among the people.”

Old Don Alfons made one of his rare contributions to the discussion. “Summon Don Sagesse.”

The younger man looked surly, but bowed his head and beckoned a page. Bowing in turn, the page made his way to one of the lower tables, a little apart from the others—the table of the Egyptian pilgrims, if so they were—and spoke to the lean brown man of late middle age who sat at its head. Though at some distance, Don Felipe had already observed that the table manners of these people compared favorably with those of the other locals, even of the castellan’s petty courtiers at his own table. Now he noticed the delicate care with which the Egyptian rinsed and wiped mouth, mustache, and fingers before rising to follow the page back to the head table.

After a glance to right and left, as if to reassure himself there had been no mistake, the Egyptian approached the head table and made a low, graceful bow to the inquisitor and his immediate companions.

“Your Reverence,” murmured the frail old lord, “allow me to present Don Sagesse Labaa, count of the Calé, as they call themselves.”

“Don Sagesse,” the inquisitor acknowledged, with a courteous inclination of the head. “Your Grace.”

“Your Reverence.” The man whom Don Alfons called “Don” and “count” even while seating him at the lower tables among the peasantry made another bow, so dignified as to show respect completely unmarred by either the obsequiousness or the half-hidden hatred the inquisitor met more often than he liked.

Well pleased so far with the count of the Calé, Don Felipe inquired, “Your Christian name is French, is it not?”

Don Sagesse smiled, displaying a broad expanse of slightly crooked but very white teeth. “Your Reverence, our pilgrimage has been long and difficult. I was born in French territory. Those of my people who had the good fortune to first see day on this side of the mountains are proud to have been christened with Spanish names.”

The inquisitor nodded, briefly eyed Don Alfons and his son, and cleared his throat. “Well, Don Sagesse, we were just discussing where I am to set up residence and offices for myself and my people during this visit. By my host’s choosing to present you in the middle of that same discussion, may I guess that you can offer an opinion in this matter?”

“Indeed, your Reverence,” the Calé count replied with another slow bow. “Something less than a mile to the north of the village, the nearest mountains crowd close, with many snug small caves in their folds. When first we came to this place, my people pitched their tents and began to build their houses among these caves, and found the site so pleasant that we live there still, a generation and more afterwards, partly under roofs of our own raising, partly in the fair sunlight, and partly in the cool warmth of our mother the earth. We have room and to spare, your Reverence, and upon hearing that the question had arisen, having taken council with my people, I most humbly offer accommodation in our poor quarter of Agapida, if so be that by any chance you should deign to choose it.”

The inquisitor nodded. “Your Grace, I may well do so.”

Sucking in his breath, Don Gaspar exclaimed, “Your Reverence! These Calé are vagabonds and outcasts!”

“I have seen no such evidence,” Don Felipe replied, leavening his voice with a touch of gentle reproof. “On the contrary, the face they have shown me thus far disposes me to think well of them, and to thank them for offering the hospitality which my own vicar, whose office it should be to house us, seems inclined to withhold.”

“Your Excellence…” Don Fadrique stammered, his heavy face flushing deep crimson. “If you insist…of course we must do what we can…but it would be much more seemly—your Excellence would find it so much more comfortable, more convenient, in the castle…”

“Where rooms are prepared and ready for you,” Don Gaspar repeated. “Our torture chamber—”

“We will remember that,” Don Felipe promised the young lord, “should any need for it arise. Until then, before making our final decision, we will see for ourselves what the Calé offer us so kindly and generously.”

“Kindly?” cried Don Gaspar. “Generously? Your Reverence, have we not offered our castle with greater kindness and generosity than can ever lie in the power of penniless knaves and outcasts?”

Less to spare the hotblooded son than the ailing father, Don Felipe applied a double thickness of velvet glove. “If they are penniless, that in itself makes their generosity nobler than that of the wealthy can ever be, as Christ Ihesu Himself taught us in His comment upon the widow’s mite.”

“What widow?” Don Gaspar demanded, glaring about as if seeking to make his own example of any such poor widow.

Don Felipe cast a searching gaze upon his vicar, who immediately shook his head and spread his hands helplessly, as much as to say: I have taught them all of the Gospels that it befits them to know—can I be blamed if they refuse to listen?

“And if your Reverence fears that our townspeople will not come to the castle to report on heretics,” Don Gaspar went on fiercely, “be sure they will be far less likely to find their way to the camp of these filthy rascals who call themselves Christians and pilgrims! At least the castle has people of its own to bring you reports of sin and heresy.”

“I do not doubt it,” the inquisitor remarked.

“While as for these Calé, they are the very ones who should be cleansed from our land!”

The Calé count eyed him with proud anger, but remained silent and dignified.

“Remember, young man,” said Don Felipe, “that the Holy Office frowns as sternly upon false witness as upon heresy itself. If you slander these people, we will hope that you do so only in error and not in malice. If you speak truly, where better for us to find it out for ourselves than among their own dwellings?” Standing up to indicate that he would hear no further argument, Don Felipe bestowed a smile on the lord of the Calé.

Lifting his head slightly, his attitude seeming to blend relief and respect, gratitude and the offer of friendship, Don Sagesse returned the smile.

* * * *

The Calé quarter pleased Don Felipe well. That it lay half a mile from the rest of Agapida made it seem more like a neighboring village than a new section of the old one; but, if poor even for this region, it was cleaner and sweeter-smelling than most places of human habitation he had known since his boyhood.

The few houses were not entirely impressive, seeming imperfect imitations of the older Agapidan constructions. Don Sagesse himself still dwelt in a tent, pitched before a double-chambered cave that lent him and his family additional space for living and storage. Don Felipe soon selected this for his temporary tribunal. The foremost cavern would provide an excellent interview room, its atmosphere suitably somber and tinged with mystery; while the rearmost chamber could be used for any prisoners he might need to hold. The count of the Calé stated that he would be honored to give up his own bed to his reverend visitor, and Don Felipe saw no reason to question his sincerity. Gubbio would sleep, as usual, within call of his master; and the rest of the inquisitorial party would be quartered here and there with other Calé families.

Only half of Don Felipe’s men complained within his hearing:

The little scrivener Pablo de Maria had a great appetite, and his complaints ceased upon his first Calé meal.

The grievance of the well-born familiar Don Enrique de la Santa Cruz ran deeper. Coming directly to the inquisitor, he complained that he was accustomed to rest where the company best suited his rank and birth.

“The old castellan,” Don Felipe pointed out—sympathetically, as befitted Don Enrique’s loyal service—“is clearly too ill to play host, and I mislike the looks of his son.”

Don Carlos Cascajo, the other gently born familiar of the party, who had ridden ahead with word of their coming and thus seen more of the castle people at closer hand, agreed with Don Felipe. “There is something unwholesome in the air of that place,” he said. “I feel it could well be what has settled in the humors of Don Alfons and made him sick. There is also, to a lesser degree, something unwholesome in the air of the village. For myself, I prefer the air in this quarter, encampment of outcasts though it is called.”

His testimony, and the deference with which the Calé treated their guests, finally laid Don Enrique’s complaints to rest.

The fiscal, Fray Giuliano de la Trinidad, had another concern. While he made no complaint of the place for living and working, he did come to his master with certain private reservations regarding the manners of their hosts. “Your Excellence, is not their great and scrupulous cleanliness in itself grounds for suspicion? Why, they even keep separate basins for washing their hands and their garments!”

Don Felipe sighed. His fiscal was young, and learning. God grant he did not learn too much from those who scented relapse in every fresh-washed shirt. “In and of itself, Fray Giuliano, love of cleanliness is no particular proof of secret adherence to the Law of Moses. A person can enjoy being clean, and yet remain as good a Christian as Saint James. You may trust my word in this matter: I grew up neighbor to Jews and Moors—I know that there is much more to their practices than mere cleanliness. Or even than abstinence from pork. I commend your vigilance in the observing of detail, but habits of washing and diet must always be weighed in combination with other evidence, never used by themselves as grounds for suspicion or arrest.”

The fiscal looked confused, as well he might be by the discrepancy between Don Felipe’s words and the actions of too many of his fellow inquisitors. (As who should know better than Felipe himself?) Nevertheless, having learned nothing if not obedience to his immediate superior, the young Franciscan bowed his head and accepted the penance of living and working, for the time, in comparative comfort.

The last source of discontent was Gubbio, and his misgivings were most difficult of all to quiet. “You have made an enemy of that green shoot at the castle, my Don,” he muttered that night while heating Felipe’s wine, “and I give the old lord another six months at the longest.”

“You have never told me, Gubbio, from which university you hold your degree in medicine.”

The Italian grunted. “No more do I hold a university degree in statecraft, but a man hardly needs one to guess that being enemies with the castellan could prove less than convenient when one holds the churchly benefice in the same lord’s village.”

“I should not worry about that, old friend. Whatever Don Gaspar may feel toward me after today, or I toward him, my vicar has obviously snuggled his way well under the young lord’s wing.”

“Aye, that vicar of yours.” Gubbio snorted. “Does my memory miscarry, or is our Don Fadrique Osorio de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida something less and quite a bit more than that earnest young priest of the highest morals we set in place here thirty-three years ago?”

“So long as that.” Don Felipe sighed. “The total lifetime on this earth of our Lord. How years speed on when one has been…abroad for fully one third of them! Well, my friend, which of us remains the youth he was so many years ago?” The inquisitor chose to overlook his servant’s use of the plural in mentioning who had appointed Don Fadrique. Possibly Gubbio had tactfully meant to lighten the responsibility for setting this unworthy fop—no, Felipe reminded himself, we do not as yet know anything of real gravity against him—to shepherd his own flock of simple Christian souls.

“Some of us,” Gubbio was saying, “wear our old garments better than others. I am far more nearly the man I was when a stripling, only, I flatter myself, a little wiser, a little shrewder.”

“Wiser, I question; and greater shrewdness than was yours already in youth would be difficult for any man to acquire. Somewhat greater familiarity and even looseness of tongue when alone with your master, that I grant.”

“Hmmm. And if I may make so bold as to measure your Excellence, the years have considerably improved you.”

“Who would not return from so long a pilgrimage with a sense of coming back to life?”

“I would have said,” the Italian suggested, “calmer and quieter. Less easily tempted to any act of foolhardy heroism.”

Don Felipe thought, As when I imperiled my own soul to save Jewish lives. He could remember no other grounds for his servant’s present veiled caution (unless the servant were aware that the letters taken to and received from his master’s bankers sometimes concealed private correspondence with Gamito). “Well, well,” he replied mildly, “I hope and pray that the years have not stolen too much of my youthful ardor in return for this greater calm and prudence you see in me. As for Don Fadrique and young Don Gaspar, we will do our work both warily and very watchfully.”

* * * *

Next morning they published the Edicts of Faith and of Grace, proclaiming it the duty of all good Catholic Christians to report any suspicions of their neighbors and promising benign mercy to all who would admit their own questionable doings within thirty days, which was customary, although three times as long as Don Felipe planned to spend here. After reading both edicts aloud at Mass, with all due solemnity, Fray Giuliano posted them on the door of Nuestra Señora.

Then, having slept upon Don Gaspar’s argument that the villagers would hesitate long before trudging out to the Calé settlement, the inquisitor spent that day in the church itself, along with his fiscal and scrivener, waiting. And waiting. For informants who did not come.

It was not that this had never happened before, as Don Felipe knew from his years of accompanying Fray Junípero on visitations, and from talking with fellow servants of the Holy Office. Occasionally a small and close-knit community would refuse to tattle on any of its members. Faced with such a situation, he himself would choose to do as his old mentor Fra Guillaume would doubtless have done, and bless the hamlet for its love and Christian charity. Had not Saint Paul himself admonished the Church that charity covered a multitude of sins?

More often, however, the Edicts of Faith and Grace brought in a spate of gossip so obviously petty and malicious that the inquisitor and fiscal, having nodded over it gravely in the presence of the informant, could dismiss it after, at most, one interview with the accused and a parting sermon to the parish as a whole regarding the spiritual dangers of scandalmongering.

Don Felipe would have guessed Agapida to be more the second type of village than the first. Yet no one came.

Moreover, Don Gaspar, in his misplaced and mistaken eagerness to put some dubious ancient facilities of torment at the service of the Holy Office, had all but promised informants from among the castle people. Yet still no one came.

“His young lordship may, in some fit of pique, have forbidden them to come to me,” the inquisitor remarked late that afternoon.

“If so,” said the fiscal, “he himself may well merit investigation for obstructing the Holy Office in its pious work.”

“Let us not act hastily,” Don Felipe replied. “I prefer no accusation at all to false or empty ones, of which I rather fear our lordling is preparing all too many against the Calé, intending to flood us with them after allowing us some few days to stew in idleness. My impression is that he imagines himself a great manipulator, does young Don Gaspar de Agapida. Tomorrow, however, we wait in the cave, as I originally planned.”

Fray Pablo said nothing, gently snoring as he was with hands folded over his honest belly and writing implements piled neatly at the foot of his chair.

* * * *

Don Sagesse Labaa had a niece, a darkly handsome woman of about thirty, born in Agapida and baptized in its church, being named Pilar after Nuestra Señora. Orphaned, widowed, and childless, she lived in her uncle’s tent almost as if still a young girl, although Don Felipe could see that she was accorded a certain affectionate deference, in keeping with her maturity and experience. She it was who served his supper.

On the morning that followed the day of publishing the edicts, she came to Don Felipe in the outermost cavern.

“Father,” she addressed him carefully, after making her reverence to all three of them, “I wish to make my Confession to you.”

“I am not your father confessor, Doña. That would be your own parish priest, Don Fadrique Osorio. Nor have I come to hear sacramental Confessions.”

“You are also the true priest of Nuestra Señora, are you not?”

“I hold the benefice, true. Nevertheless, it is Don Fadrique, my vicar, who stands to you as parish priest and father confessor.”

“There are reasons, Father, why I do not wish to confess to that one, ever again.”

Don Felipe exchanged a glance with his fiscal before turning back to the lady. “In that case, Doña, are you sure that it is a sacramental Confession you wish to make?”

“It is,” she answered in a calm and steady voice. “I have not washed my soul for several years. I would seize this chance to bathe it clean.”

“I see. Perhaps you would prefer that we went to the church, as the place best befitting the sacrament?”

She shook her head, causing her lustrous black hair and light veil to ripple a little, her gold earrings to send forth a tiny, bell-like clicking. “I would prefer here, in my uncle’s cave, among my own people.”

“I will hear your Confession,” Don Felipe decided, directing Fray Giuliano and the little scrivener, with a glance and a nod, to leave them alone.

Fray Giuliano looked back shrewdly and inquired, “Shall we retire to the far side of this cavern, your Excellency?”

Don Felipe would actually have preferred it; but the cavern was small. Trained brothers of unquestioned piety though they were, he desired as little chance as possible of their accidental overhearing; his own ancient fall from grace had made him exceptionally scrupulous about the secrecy that must surround the Sacrament of Penance. “Wait outside,” he answered. “I shall want you to prevent anyone else from entering.”

With yet another long glance, the fiscal left, drawing Fray Pablo out with him by one sleeve.

“Your last words,” Doña Pilar said softly, her dark eyes fixed on Don Felipe’s. “You meant them in honor and innocence?”

“In all honor and innocence.” He met her gaze steadily. “My companions remain within call, as do your uncle and the rest of your people. You have only to raise your voice at need, but there will be no need. Doña, my sole concern is for the sanctity of your Confession.”

“Not every priest is so honorable.”

He sighed. “Do you think we of the Holy Inquisition suppose otherwise? Do you think that my fiscal and even my scrivener have failed to understand the full implications of your refusal to confess your sins to Don Fadrique?”

“How else could I have said it? To catch you alone, at any other time, would have looked still worse to gadje eyes, would it not?”

“‘Gadje’?”

She hesitated, as if searching for words to explain. “Foreigners,” she said at last. “Strangers. Other people.”

“Such as the other folk of Agapida?”

“You will leave again, Don Felipe,” Pilar told him. “You will leave, and bit by bit, small sin by small sin, my soul will grow dirty once more. But your vicar will still be our priest, well enough to sing the Mass—when he remembers to sing it—to marry people, baptize their children, and bury them when that time comes. I would not make him more my enemy than he is now. What your fiscal and your—scrivener?—may do with what they have already heard, I think that I cannot be blamed for that, pressed as I am.”

“They have guessed, Doña, but even so, all that you said before the three of us remains insufficient for drawing up an accusation. Other interpretations could be placed upon it. Gossip might even say, however improbably, that you had dark designs upon my virtue.”

“My own people would never say that. They know me, as I know our customs.”

“I do not doubt this. I merely point out that you have not given us enough to shape into a formal accusation. Nor can anything you tell me under the Seal of Confession be so used. Indeed, to deliver any charges you may have against Don Fadrique to me as part of your sacramental Confession would render it all the more impossible for me to act upon your testimony to the relief of my parish. Doña, let me beg of you now, at once, if you have charges against my vicar, bring them to the Holy Office as a formal accusation.”

She stood awhile in silence, as if stirring his words through her brain. “The Seal of Confession, Father,” she said at last. “Does it not bind me, also?”

“No. It does not. The penitent is the one person who remains free to repeat all that passes in Confession.”

“The priest’s words and deeds as well as my own?”

He nodded.

“This is not what Don Fadrique has told us.”

“If my vicar told you other than what I have just told you, that compounds his sin. But you must report it to us formally, outside the Seal of Confession, before we can act upon it.”

“Ah! So I remain free to speak of it—all of us to whom he has done it remain free to speak of it?”

“‘All of you’?”

One lock of hair had escaped from beneath the side of Doña Pilar’s veil to tickle her left cheek. Lifting her long-fingered hands to tuck it back, she explained, “I suspect that there are many of us whom he has used so—or tried to use so, for I will tell you, Father, here where there would be no need to hide it were it otherwise, that he did not succeed with me. Nor, I think, with other Calé, for it is many years now since any of us have gone to him to confess our sins. Yet some of the villagers still confess to him, and once he excommunicated Isabel Garate for a year, for telling her husband what had happened when she went to confess. Don Fadrique said in his sermon, when he excommunicated her, that it was for lying slander, but even if it had been true, it would have been a greater sin for her to reveal anything that happened in Confession.”

“Wait!” said Don Felipe. “Your parish priest, my vicar, has taken it upon himself to excommunicate one of his flock? And for no other sin than slander?”

“For myself,” Pilar replied, “I do not think that it was slander. I think that Isabel Garate spoke truth, but he must punish her for breaking the secrecy of Confession, to keep others from speaking. And now you tell me that she had the right to speak of it, after all.”

“Doña, you must make formal accusation of these things!”

Once again she stood pondering. “And if I do this, and no one else does, what then? With Isabel Garate, he merely excommunicated her for a year, and no one else suffered anything. With me… I am Calé, and he and our lord Don Gaspar might make all my people suffer for my speech.”

This woman, Don Felipe thought, marveling, has already in her thirties as much shrewd caution as it has taken me more than half a century, and eleven years of that in prison, to learn. Aloud, he assured her, “It is true, Doña Pilar, that in such cases the Holy Office can rarely act upon a single accusation, for Scripture admonishes us that there must be at least two witnesses. But I myself will preach a sermon this Sunday to tell all the people here the truth concerning whom the Seal of Confession actually binds and whom it does not bind. And at worst, if no one else comes forward to accuse him, your report will lie privately buried in the secret records of the Holy Inquisition. I promise you this, Doña. If we cannot accumulate evidence enough to remove an unworthy pastor, then he himself need never know of our efforts. And, again at worst, as his benefactor I hold the right to remove him myself, stating no reason for it, and replace him with a better.”

After another moment of thought, Pilar nodded slowly and knelt before him. “I will do as you ask, Father. But later. First, if you will, I would confess my own sins to you. Mine, not his. His, I will save for my formal accusation.”

* * * *

She must have spread the word among her people, for within two days five more Calé women and—to Felipe’s horror—one young boy came into his cave to make formal accusation against Don Fadrique Osorio. The boy’s charge involved outright rape at about the age, as nearly as he could state his own age, of six. Three of the women, like Doña Pilar Labaa, stated that the priest had failed in his assault on their virtue; Don Felipe did not press the other two for exactitude on this point, but simply accepted as much as they chose to reveal in the presence of his fiscal and scrivener, to whose curiosity he afterward made it clear that they were to assume, if the erring pastor had indeed succeeded, it was without the women’s own will or consent. In any case, the Inquisition was to protect these witnesses and guard their privacy with as much strict care as it protected and guarded all its other informants. Neither their own people nor Don Fadrique—especially not Don Fadrique—was ever to know from any servant of the Holy Office the identities of any of his accusers. Although, Felipe began to fear, Don Fadrique would prove able to name them all simply by naming every woman and too many boys in his flock.

No Calé of either sex or any age came to the Inquisition with charges of any kind against anyone else and, after preaching his sermon that Sunday, between the statues of Saint James and Our Lady, the inquisitor made it his habit to pass his mornings, from Mass until dinner, waiting in the church. What he had told the villagers about the Seal of Confession, how it bound only the father confessor and any third party who might chance to overhear, while the penitent himself or herself always remained free to speak of it to anyone else at any time, bore fruit: Isabel Garate brought him her accusation immediately the next day, and by midweek three more village women added theirs.

Pablo Savarres, the husband of Isabel Garate, brought another charge: “This priest has his own woman. Yet he wants to make free with ours, as well.”

“His own woman?” asked Fray Giuliano.

“His so-called housekeeper. Beatrix de Córdoba.”

“Beware, man,” Don Felipe told him sternly, “of bringing us mere idle slander. The Holy Office knows how to punish sins against the Eighth Commandment.”

“The Eighth Commandment, your Reverence?” the informant asked, humbly enough. “Which is that?”

“Has your priest not taught them to you?” Fray Giuliano asked in turn, his voice betraying some shock. Already, as priest, Fransciscan, and fiscal, he had encountered too many parish priests barely able to mumble through their Latin with bad pronunciation and worse comprehension, who could hardly have named the Seven Deadly Sins, still less the Ten Commandments, without much hesitation and long pauses; but Don Felipe had told him of choosing his vicar, so many years ago, as much for Don Fadrique’s apparent learning as for his apparent piety.

Eyes turned down, Isabel Garate’s husband muttered, “Yes, he teaches us…when we are little children…and I remember well enough what they are, but I forget their numbers.”

The inquisitor breathed a sigh of qualified relief. “The Eighth Commandment, Pablo, is that one which forbids us to bear false witness against our neighbor. By ‘neighbor,’ as our Lord Himself taught us, we are to understand any and all of our fellow human beings.”

“False witness, your Reverence? Beatrix de Córdoba has borne him three sons and a daughter, and is lying abed big with yet another of his getting. All Agapida knows this! One of the brats died, and Don Gaspar has taken the other three into the castle while you are here.”

Don Felipe nodded slowly. “Have you ever heard it said that your priest married this woman openly and publicly?”

The informant looked as though, if not for whose presence he was in, he would have spat. “Beatrix de Córdoba is his whore, not his wife.”

“So. Well, then, Pablo Savarres, I must tell you, this matter of your priest keeping a concubine is not in itself heretical, and therefore does not fall within the business of the Holy Inquisition, as does the matter of abusing the sacrament of Penance. Nevertheless—not as inquisitor—but as holder of the benefice of Nuestra Señora del Pilar, and thus the immediate superior to whom Don Fadrique must make account, I thank you for bringing this to my attention. As inquisitor, I ask if you can tell me in what manner Don Fadrique gave you cause to complain, regarding your wife?”

“The holy devil tried to rape her when she went to him to confess her sins!”

“And how do you know this, Pablo Savarres?”

“How do I know it, your Reverence? Am I not her husband? Did she not run home to me with tears running down her face, and tell me all?”

Don Felipe thanked him again and dismissed him with the admonition that he might be called upon to repeat his testimony at another time.

When they were alone once more, Fray Giuliano observed, “His testimony agrees with what the Calé woman told us concerning the manner in which Don Fadrique’s attack upon Isabel Garate became known.”

“My thought exactly,” Don Felipe agreed, twitching not so much as one corner of his mouth at the bound his heart took upon the fiscal’s reference to the niece of Don Sagesse Labaa. “It may turn out that my inquisitorial duties will suffice for removing this man from my parish, with no need of my personal jurisdiction over him.”

* * * *

Whether Don Gaspar had indeed planned all along to leave the Holy Office a few days in idleness before feeding it with whatever local suspicions could be garnered, or whether Don Fadrique observed those who entered his church as the Inquisition sat there, and applied to the young lord in some attempt to point inquisitorial attention elsewhere, that Tuesday and Wednesday saw a small press of other informants, from castle and village both, armed with tales and suspicions, mostly of the Calé.

Many charges concerned such matters as presumably stolen chickens and suspected illicit love affairs between laypeople. Dolores Banet and Beatrix del Sol had torn each other’s hair in a quarrel over one of the castle squires; Manuel Cardoza had knocked Vicenzo Oblaño unconscious for borrowing his donkey halter without permission, and so on and so forth. All such complaints were naturally discarded at once. Don Felipe directed his fiscal to file all the rest, the ones which did touch upon matters of the Faith, very scrupulously, knowing that, unless brought forth again immediately, they would safely vanish amongst the mess of other, similar documents.

Some few he glanced into immediately. Where two or more informants agreed, especially if they seemed unconnected with each other—in so far as any member of so small a community could be called independent of any other member—he and Fray Giuliano read their reports through a second and third time. In half a dozen cases, they sent their familiars to conduct the accused parties to Don Felipe’s afternoon tribunal in the Calé quarter. Each time, the accused guessed at once, either exactly or closely enough, why he or she had been summoned. Several identified and explained the incident—washing a soiled shirt on Saturday, forgetfully eating bacon on Friday, and so on; the others guessed and named their accusers as personal enemies. Only one of this class of cases involved a Calé.

Fray Giuliano was young and earnest enough still to worry a little over Don Felipe’s custom of hearing such cases on the spot and closing them without further ado. The putative irregularity seemed to bother him less in this place, however, than it had in other villages, where there was no such young lord as Don Gaspar offering the castle prisons and panting to put the ancient torture chamber back into use. Don Felipe needed to remind his fiscal only once that in no way could their own secret cells of Ainsa house so many accused persons for all the months that full investigations would have required.

“I think,” Fray Giuliano replied on that occasion, “that we may need one of our cells, at least. May we not?”

“I think it very likely,” the inquisitor agreed.

As for little Fray Pablo, he scrivened away as usual, making no comments and—Don Felipe suspected—thinking as few thoughts as possible upon the matters he set down with so much obedient diligence between his stifled yawns.

* * * *

And yet, had it been only the niece of the Calé count, had all those other women and at least one young boy not also been involved, had it been only Doña Pilar who had tempted Don Fadrique, all innocently and unintentionally, with the swell of her bosom beneath the bright if much-mended bodice and shawl, the curve of her neck above its silver necklace, golden earrings dangling against the faint hollows of her brown cheeks, her dark, dark eyes and that lock of black hair with one silver strand that escaped the bounds of her colorful coif from time to time…had it been this woman alone, Don Felipe might have understood, even compassionated—though never condoned—his vicar’s weakness.

Catching this thought in his brain, the inquisitor whipped it away with images of Christ’s Passion and mementes mori. Yet it returned. Mementes mori would not long remain in the mind of a man still so newly released from the secret prison (whether it were living tomb or second womb), and thoughts of the Resurrection, dangerous to his present state because of the throbbing they did nothing to quiet, sprang more readily into the perpetual Easter of his soul than more wholesome meditations on the sufferings of our Lord.

At length he remembered the lady of his youthful devotion, his lost Morayma, and attempted to smother the new feelings beneath thoughts of her; but the old memories were too old, too long and successfully buried, too far on the other side of that great barrier between his youth and his maturity which more than a decade of total, solitary imprisonment had left scored across his life. The ancient devotion, the chivalric loyalty that had so long served him as armor against the fleshly weaknesses which beset priests, like other mortals, on all sides, and to which he had seen so many clerics so gleefully succumb, he finally felt trembling beneath the unconscious assault of a woman—no longer entirely young—but who had not yet been born at the time he was forced apart from his boyhood love.

Other women had tempted him throughout a life already long; he would not have been human had they not. Rarely had the temptation lasted beyond the time of actually being in the woman’s presence. Yet other women had danced through his thoughts, waking as well as sleeping, during his imprisonment. Frequently faceless, they had been no more to him than pimples popping up from the festering restlessness of the secret cell. But never, never since boyhood, could he recall that any other woman had haunted his thoughts so persistently and perpetually; and now, beside this woman of the Calé, even Morayma faded to the dim memory of a childish ideal.

Prudence dictated that he should avoid all further contact with Doña Pilar, but to shun the niece of his host would have betrayed the duties of a guest; and for this excuse to continue glimpsing her, exchanging scraps of polite conversation with her, accepting food and drink served by her hand, he felt profound gratitude.

And Doña Pilar trusted him. He had appealed to her to help him right the wrong, and she had complied by arming him with the first formal accusation against Don Fadrique Osorio. Fighting his own temptation in the only way remaining, by plunging himself into his holy work, he took his fiscal, scrivener, the two Juans and, for sniffing, Gubbio—and paid Don Fadrique’s house a visit on Thursday morning, while the priest was in his church saying Mass.

No servant opening to their knock, the familiars had to force open the door. The house was not deserted, however: scarcely had the party entered, when a woman’s screams assailed their ears.

The screams came from above. Fray Giuliano bounded up the stairs first, his young legs leading Don Felipe’s by no more than two or three steps, the familiars following. In the upper bedroom, they found the woman abed indeed—in the act of giving birth, with one midwife to attend her.

Don Felipe retained sufficient presence of mind to ask, “Beatrix de Córdoba?”

Both women stared at him. In the eyes of the one giving birth, he beheld such horror as he could not even remember feeling in that most awful moment on the way between Santiago de Compostela and Daroca when he had heard the dread words, “A matter of Faith,” directed against himself.

The midwife was a woman whose skin suggested some mixture of African and Moor, as her dark eyes suggested strong anger mixing with her natural fear. “Yes, Beatrix de Córdoba is her name!” cried this woman. “And mine is Teresa La Negra, and you are the Holy Inquisition, and—with your pardon—the business the good God has set on her cannot wait, even for you!”

“It is for you to pardon us, Teresa La Negra,” Don Felipe replied, courteous as knight addressing noble lady. “Neither you nor Beatrix de Córdoba is under any present suspicion of heresy. We will leave this part of the house alone for now.”

He herded his party back to the ground floor. At the foot of the stairs, the fiscal observed softly, “The explanation could still be innocent.”

“True,” the inquisitor agreed. “He could have been providing the unfortunate woman shelter for herself and her offspring by unknown fathers, and Pablo Savarres could have brought us mere slander.”

“But the sworn testimony of ten women and one boy would seem to render the most obvious explanation also the likeliest.”

“Even were it otherwise, is it not part of a pastor’s duty to avoid, so far as possible, any appearance of slander?”

Meanwhile, the little scrivener had found a doll and Juan de Torla a toy horse, seemingly left behind when the older children were hidden among those belonging to the castle. Even more damning, Gubbio looked twice around Osorio’s study, went straight to the oaken press, opened it, lifted out two books and three folded garments to uncover, at the bottom, cards, dice, and several bags of jingling money.

“All this,” Fray Giuliano exclaimed sadly, “and he has made his house into a gambling den as well!”

“And with small children beneath his roof,” Don Felipe added.

“I marvel,” Gubbio put in, “that he could find players willing to come to him, trying as he seems to have been to cuckold every man in his flock.”

Of course the Italian spoke in jest. Gamblers always came forth, ready to play at every opportunity. Don Fadrique Osorio was far from the first parish priest they had found also serving as master of a gaming house—deplorable, but hardly heretical.

But they had all they needed without the cards and dice. Bidding Gubbio bury them again in the chest, Don Felipe settled down with his men to wait.

In a few moments, Don Fadrique returned from saying Mass. He stepped into his house, saw the Inquisition, and crumpled even before Don Felipe rose to utter the words of arrest.

Upstairs, the newborn infant began to cry. Its wails did not appear to hearten Don Fadrique in any way.

* * * *

As it turned out, Don Fadrique Osorio was the only prisoner the Holy Office claimed in Agapida. Don Felipe recognized his priesthood, however dishonored, by appointing the hidalgo Don Carlos Cascajo as one of the two guards to escort him back to Ainsa. As Don Fadrique’s other guard the inquisitor named Micer Garcias; these two familiars got on well together.

He could easily have had one or two more nobly-born familiars from the castle. Don Gaspar showed himself ready to turn the rack with his own hands on some unfortunate if by so doing he could win appointment as familiar to the Holy Office—but then, Don Felipe suspected that Don Gaspar was eager to set his hand to any such work even without additional incentive. The inquisitor ignored the castle, however, and selected replacements for Cascajo and Garcias from among the villagers, naming Pablo Savarres and a strong young man called Ernán del Río. He would have liked to make familiars of some Calé men, but Don Sagesse smilingly declined the offer on behalf of himself and all his people. “I fear,” he explained to his guest in private, “that already we have made no friends with his young lordship, by housing you here when you could have gone into his castle.”

“Friend, that choice was my own.”

“And deeply have you honored us, my lord.”

“Consider this: being named familiars would benefit you. The Holy Inquisition protects its own.”

Still Don Sagesse shook his silvering head. “If you will name Don Gaspar your familiar, then we also will take pride in accepting this great gift. But, I beg you, do not give him further cause to envy us.”

“It is your choice, my friend. In any case, you will have time to reconsider. I will be back.”

Filling Don Fadrique’s place cost the inquisitor more pains than replacing the familiars. Again, the castle had two chaplains available, but the old lord’s confessor seemed as feeble as Don Alfons himself, and Don Felipe would as willingly have left his former vicar alone as trusted the young lord’s confessor in his place.

At last he turned to his trusted fiscal. “Will you suspend your career in the Holy Office, at least for now, to serve God, myself as your immediate superior, and this unfortunate flock by acting as their new shepherd?”

Fray Giuliano bowed his head. “Obedience before all. But which does your Excellence need more, a good vicar or a good fiscal?”

“Sorely as I shall miss your services as fiscal, at the moment I and my benefice have greater need of a vicar whom I can trust. A new fiscal I can find at the nearest monastery.”

“That would be Nuestra Señora de las Nieves,” Fray Giuliano pointed out, “and they are Dominicans.”

“Curb thy Franciscan jealousies, brother. The Dominicans, too, have proved themselves capable of serving the Holy Office with some small competence. Remember: my fiscal I will have constantly under my eye, but my vicar I must be able to trust at a distance.”

Fray Giuliano’s eyes suggested that his superior, being a secular priest, could never understand the vital importance of distinguishing among the various Orders. But he quickly blinked and nodded. “Write the appointment, Excellence, for I may need it to prove my authority in Don Gaspar’s face, and I shall place it upon my head and wear it in my heart for however long you see fit.”

“Take heart, good brother! I intend to pay Agapida another visit within the year—if not as inquisitor, then as holder of the benefice.”

And as ardent admirer, his heart added, of one dark-eyed lady of the Calé. The moment his head recognized this thought, it tried to smother it, but neither very successfully nor very enthusiastically.

“Remember, also,” he added, half sportively, half to cover the silent clamor of his own heart, “that to eat meat on a day of abstinence is no evidence of judaizing if the meat is pork.”

“Have no fear, your Excellence. I shall not attempt to serve two masters at the same time. I shall not be pastor and inquisitor both!”