HOLDING A LIGHTED taper before him, Rafael led the way up a narrow stone staircase. His hand shook and the light flared up, spreading our shadows on the bare wall as we passed. It had taken quite a few of my gold coins and much pleading from Sister Beatriz for him to embark on this venture.
To begin with he’d refused utterly.
‘No, Señor Saulo, I won’t help you spy on a tribunal of the Inquisition.’ He’d shaken his head. ‘It can’t be done. There is no way to smuggle you into the hall. You can’t disguise yourself as a servant, for they allow no servants in. Besides which, if you were discovered you’d be questioned. Under torture you’d reveal my part in it and then I would have no mercy shown to me. As a servant I’d be executed. If I was lucky it would take place quickly. But they have a particularly cruel Inquisitor here at the moment, so it would most likely be a long and painful death.’
At this point the nun had reached out and touched Rafael on the shoulder. ‘I will pray for the success of our mission,’ she told him.
‘With respect, Sister, praying will do me no good when they apply red-hot pokers to my eyes.’
I piled some coins on the table in front of him. ‘All of this,’ I said. ‘All of it is yours.’
He hesitated, for it was a goodly sum, much more than he could expect to earn in the course of several years.
‘The nuns of the convent hospital of Las Conchas will pray for your soul in perpetuity,’ said Sister Beatriz.
Rafael had scooped up the money and disappeared out of the door.
Now, standing before me at the top of the stairs, he glanced behind nervously. ‘After this point,’ he whispered, ‘we must be very quiet.’
We nodded, and again our shadows, like dark spectres, followed our movements. The cowl covering the nun’s head and the cloak I’d wrapped around myself made grotesque shapes beside us.
It had taken Rafael two whole days to find a tradesman who’d worked in the Alhambra Palace and knew all the rooms and passageways and some of the secret entrances and exits. He’d discovered that the Inquisition tribunal of Zarita de Marzena would be held today in the Sultan’s Hall, and that there was a place where we might be able to secretly watch the proceedings. The corridor that opened out before us had no windows and no doors and ended with a blank wall at the far end.
I stopped. ‘There’s no outlet this way,’ I said.
‘The artisan told me to look here.’ Rafael walked on and touched a wooden panel set halfway along the wall. The design was arabesque, with stylized flowers interlaced with geometric shapes.
‘There is nothing,’ I said in impatience.
‘Don’t you wonder that this wood panelling is so carefully engraved in a corridor where no one has reason to come?’ Sister Beatriz asked. ‘Why spend so much on beautiful carvings if they are never to be seen? Sometimes,’ she added, ‘as in the dress or the jewellery of a woman, the reason for an adornment is not to display, but to conceal.’
Her sensitive fingers ran over the wood. She traced one of the interlinking patterns, following the twists and spirals to its central point. There was a soft click, and the panel slid to one side to reveal a tiny balcony enclosed by draped curtains.
Rafael left us. The nun and I slipped inside and closed over the secret door behind us.
Little light penetrated the gloom, and there was barely enough room for two of us. The balcony had been designed to keep hidden a single person who might wish to spy on any meeting taking place below. The curtains in front of us were part of a hanging decorating the upper part of the chamber wall. Sister Beatriz adjusted the folds so that we stood within the heavy drapes and could hear and see what passed below us.
‘Listen! They are beginning to assemble. Be warned, Saulo, however awful this becomes, we must make no sound, nor cry out to reveal our presence here.’ But she herself started back as the officers of the tribunal, a priest and two monks, assembled below us. ‘I recognize the Head Inquisitor,’ she whispered in agitation. ‘It is the priest, Father Besian. He bears ill-will towards me and mine. If his hand is behind this, then he would not have pursued Zarita without being confident of proving a gross misdeed.’
That explained the way this priest had stared at Zarita when leaving the royal reception rooms two days ago. It must be he who’d arranged her arrest and imprisonment.
They brought her in. Zarita stood almost directly beneath us in the hall. I could see the straight angle of her shoulders, the sweep of her neck, and a curl of her hair which had escaped the confines of the coif around her head.
And my heart and soul reached out to her.