Hunger's Brides (94 page)

“The difficulty is that no one has seen these manuscripts for fifteen years. Were they destroyed? And if they still exist, where are they? Sigüenza is not stupid. It is doubtful that he would try to conceal them either at his house or the university—”

“Doctor Dorantes,” says the Viceroy's emissary, chin lifted, cheeks faintly colouring, “what strikes me as
doubtful
is a line of inquiry that by your own admission has turned up nothing in fifteen years. Until credible evidence is produced, the palace shall suppose that both don Carlos and the Reverend Father Núñez continue to give faithful service. The Viceroy's administration will not be undermined, as the Archbishop's clearly has, by baseless suspicions.”

“Of course, don Francisco, of course. We are aware Sigüenza is a friend of yours”—the Master Examiner raises a weary hand—
“and
that this can of course have no bearing on your deliberations. But your concerns are temporal. We take a longer view. Fifteen years is but a heartbeat.”

“Unfortunately,
messieurs
, like don Francisco here, I do not have an eternity either. And if you have been hearing the same reports I have about an unfortunate and ill-considered alliance between great Spain and a certain insignificant enemy of France, time is scarce indeed. I would really rather not have to make arrangements to smuggle a subject of the Spanish Crown out of Spanish territory in time of war. Unless you have further need of me this evening, I will leave you to get on with things. For my part, I leave reassured that you do not have enough to be arresting him any time soon.”

The Viceroy's representative rises to follow the Viscount out. “In the morning I make my report to the Viceroy. Keep us apprised.”

When the two have left, the Calificador runs his fingers through the red tangle at his throat. “Did he say keep us surprised?” he asks, of no one in particular.

“Coming late to this case,” Prosecutor Ulloa frowns over the open folder, “I do not yet see why the foreigner has been brought here tonight. How do we know this
Francés
,”Ulloa says with distaste,“will not run and tell Sigüenza everything he has just heard?”

“If only he would.”

The Prosecutor considers this.

“You see, Prosecutor Ulloa, the good don Francisco and the Viscount,” explains the Calificador, “are part of the pressure.”

Dorantes looks up from pondering the scratch on his desk. “Were the foreigner to do just as you suggest, Ulloa, although it is almost too much to hope for, Sigüenza might, in a panic to destroy the evidence, lead those watching him directly to the documents. What we can be sure of is that he will not leave New Spain until they are destroyed, since he cannot doubt that we may reach him even in France. So as long as he is here, there is still a chance. All the better if he has both reason and opportunity to leave. But where are those manuscripts? The most likely thing is that they are not in the city.”

“Still,” says the Calificador, glancing about him, “what if these papers
were
here? A question interesting to contemplate, no? One place would be a convent. Almost impossible to enter without giving warning. Too many corridors, too many escape routes, too much time. San Jerónimo, for example, is just such a warren. The difficulty with manuscripts, from our point of view, and His Excellency will appreciate the irony, is that they are so much more easily destroyed than books. We have only to
arrive at someone's door, and if a fire is burning in the hearth, loose leaves are up a chimney in seconds. With books, even after half an hour, one might retrieve enough evidence to condemn half a dozen men. Writer, printer, smuggler, buyer, seller, accomplices …”

“But has the publication of this letter,” Ulloa asks, “not put her on her guard?”

“It's hard to say with her. She has so very many interests—her poetry and her little fables, her locutory and her library. It is touching. And the few things that do not intimately concern her … hardly exist at all. His Excellency knows her better than I, but I would say she knows nothing of the world—has she ever lived in it, I wonder?”

The Bishop looks at him, his eyes glowing darkly.

“What the Calificador is taking so very long to say, Lord Bishop, is that she has no reason to connect the letter's publication to our interest in the missing manuscripts.”

“Forgive me, Master Examiner,” says Ulloa, “but we do have sources at San Jerónimo. Before taking the risk of alerting her, would it not have been wise to at least try to reassure ourselves she does not have the manuscripts right now? Could a way not have been found?”

“A way has been found,” says Dorantes.

“I have been wondering …” This time the red-bearded magistrate does not look at the Bishop, who has turned his attention back to the plaza, but addresses himself to Master Examiner Dorantes, “just how reliable we consider this ‘way' to be.”

With a scowl at his confrere Dorantes says soothingly to the Bishop, “With a little more experience, the new Calificador may come to understand that even when the end result is assured, there are no certainties in the moment. The nun or the Frenchman may lead us to the manuscripts. The manuscripts will give us Sigüenza or even give us Núñez. Núñez will give us what we need against her—he can hardly hide behind the sacramental Seal now. Or in the matter of this letter, the Archbishop—that is, should he be well enough to continue—moves against her on his own. Or, finally, we press this question of heretical quietism in her
finezas negativas
and clean up at least one mess the Jesuits have made.
³⁷
Dejada, alumbrada, gnóstica …
she has given us options.”

“Excuse me,” the Calificador offers, “but have we not missed a step? How are these manuscripts to give us Núñez? Is he not more likely to be taken in the event that he has failed to burn her journals?”

“There are other proceedings, Calificador. Many others, which you have no present need to know about.” Dorantes runs the heel of a small pale hand wearily across one brow. He leans forward, weight on his elbows, and places his interlaced palms on the desk. “You may go now, Calificador.”

When he has left, Ulloa asks, “As to the sequence, does the Lord Bishop have a preference?”

“Who falls first?” The Bishop turns from the plaza. “No. I do not much care.”

“We take our exemplum in patience, then, from His Excellency. Anything before we adjourn?”

“Master Examiner, Lord Bishop …”

“Yes, Ulloa.”

“While I, for one, am satisfied that the case holds promise, one final worry occurs to me. Bringing don Francisco here was prudent—he now knows himself to be the prime suspect if don Carlos is warned. But are we prepared to have the foreigner go to her with what he has heard?”

“It is as you yourself have said, Ulloa. Pressure at as many points as possible. He would be doing us a favour. But he has not the slightest chance of getting her out if we do not wish it.”

“And we do not wish it?”

“We do not wish it.”

The Bishop seems about to rise. The others tense to rise with him. For the past half hour he has seemed unaware of the tray of sweetmeats on the table beside him. His hand sways idly now over them, stops, settles on a choice. A slice of candied squash. Raising it to his lips, he stops. The heavy rings glow in the lantern light. It is full dark outside.

“Not knowing quite what he expects to get,” the Bishop says softly,“the Viscount may indeed go to her, as he has once already. At first he will find himself enjoying again this power he has over her, which lies precisely in her not knowing that he has it, and this knowledge that she does not really see him. But since he cannot get in, and since he cannot get her out, he will see that this is all there is for him.

“I do not think he will go again.”

[27th day of November, 1690]

la excma. María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga
Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna
,
Madrid, España

Queridísima María Luisa
,

F
or weeks I have no news of you. And now your letter opens saying you will not be able to write for some time. Were this not agony enough—there is the why. I beg you, write even two lines the first instant you can, just to say your Tomás is recovering. How galling for you to hear his physicians changing their diagnosis like so many weathercocks. And how very selfish I have been to burden you—can I have forgotten you might have cares of your own?

I continue to believe Tomás's recent difficulties with our new Queen are temporary. If she so far continues to overlook his qualities, we may be certain it is the work of that same claque that has orchestrated his brother's removal as the King's Prime Minister. It saddens me to be so far away and so ignorant of matters there that I can now offer such thin comfort and no advice at all except, believe all will be well even as you act all the more resolutely to make it so.

Let me at least try to allay fears I myself have raised so unkindly, with regard to the recent activities of the Inquisition here. The time for reading obliquely, as one reads Aeschylus, has passed. As soon as Carlos duly supplied them with a book inventory, the whole business faded away. The Inquisitor Dorantes was only sending a message to our distinguished Chair of Mathematics and Astrology. No, not just a message, a reminder. For it is ten years ago now that Dorantes censored a set of observations Carlos had published on the phases of the moon. (Twenty years ago Dorantes even censored Núñez—for ‘an excess of enthusiasm over the immaculacy of the Virgin Mother's conception.' Truly, one hesitates to imagine what this could have meant …)

I am sorry to have alarmed you unnecessarily. You once said you thought my fear of the Inquisition exaggerated. These days, anyone in
the capital will tell you that the Holy Office's power is on the decline. That if you are circumspect and curry favour with the authorities, do not rise too fast among your neighbours or speak out too frankly among strangers, do not think the wrong thoughts or read the wrong books, that if you miss no opportunity to express your enthusiasm for the Faith, you have nothing to fear from the Inquisition.

At any rate, if the Holy Office had launched a proceeding against Carlos I would have heard—first the whispers of the well-informed, then a great murmuring among the ignorant. And soon after that he would be a guest of the Tribunal.

There has been nothing of this. So I hope to have laid your doubts (and most of all your loving fears) to rest, if by this somewhat gloomy avenue.

Things have been otherwise calm. Right now, all the talk at the cathedral is of the Archbishop's sermon for the Vigil of our Lord's Nativity, or perhaps it was for Gaudete Sunday, I'm not sure which. The point being that he seems to have decided not to give it. I will send Antonia out this morning to find out what she can. The affair has occasioned as much mirth as curiosity among the clerics here, since it has become an open secret that the Archbishop, who never misses an opportunity to trade on his intellectual connections in Europe, has become all but incapable of delivering much less writing a sermon, such is his near-constant state of upset.

As I wrote you recently, the Bishop of Puebla has followed through on his promise to secure for me the one commission from the Church that I have truly coveted in recent years. A suite of carols on Saint Catherine of Alexandria, to be sung in the cathedral in Puebla. In a few more weeks I hope to have finished, but I may say with a small shudder of poet's superstition that they are on their way to being my best work since
First Dream
.