I DIDN’T KNOW if Saulo was still there.
I prayed that he’d taken the chance to get clear, yet I also hoped that he’d remained long enough to hear my declaration. Whether he had heard or not, it was said. And as I was taken away I was glad I’d said it.
Some courtiers gathered to point and stare as they marched me down the corridors, but most dropped their gaze or stood back and turned their faces to the wall.
Such was the terror of the Inquisition.
I was taken to an underground basement near the soldiers’ barracks. I was surprised, but in no way comforted, to find that many of the rooms there were already full of prisoners.
A black-robed monk sat behind a long table. I stood before him, shivering, my feet bare on the stone floor, as he wrote down the details of my name and age and place of birth and family information. When he’d finished he raised his head. ‘Do you wish to confess?’
‘My arrest is a mistake,’ I replied, for at that point I really thought an error had been made. ‘I have nothing to confess.’
‘Everyone has something to confess. It is better that you make your confession now, voluntarily, than . . . later.’
I shook my head. ‘I have done nothing wrong.’
‘Then you have nothing to fear.’
This interview lasted only ten or fifteen minutes before I was taken to a windowless room with a cot bed. As I lay down on it, my first feelings were of relief. The priest was right. I had nothing to fear. I was not like Bartolomé, who had appeared to ridicule the clergy, or the women who had sinned with their bodies. For almost five months of the previous year I’d lived the life of an enclosed nun, so there could be no offence on my part against Church or State.
Also, it was known that there was a limit to the number of times a suspect could be questioned by the Inquisition. Therefore I should only have one or two more sessions like that and I would be free to go.
I lay on the cot that night, not sleeping, and tried to convince myself that this was how it would be.