The Sisterhood (15 page)

There was just one final detail—the place where they were to meet at the church the next day in case they were separated in the crowd. Alejandro had told her to meet him in the far corner of the courtyard at midnight; he had prepared a small plan of the church marked with their meeting place in one of the chapels, he knew of a small service door behind a tapestry. That door led into an alley. Alejandro would be waiting when she came out.

Isabella worried about meeting him with so many priests and friars in the house, but Alejandro assured her that after several long nights’ vigils, all would be trying to snatch a few hours’ sleep before the next day’s funeral.

So while Isabella knelt by her mother’s bier and prayed for the souls of her mother and baby brother, she also made guilty supplications for the success of their plan.

When at last she fled the hall and its smells, Isabella sent her maid away and undid her too-tight bodice with relief. How swollen her breasts felt. She reminded herself that she only needed to be patient until tomorrow. She waited until it was time to meet Alejandro, then wrapped a woolen cloak over her nightdress, and managed to negotiate the servants’ steep narrow back staircase, clinging to the banister for support and hearing snores in the darkness coming from the great hall.

She waited, barefooted and chilled to the bone, fearing Alejandro had fallen asleep, too. At last she heard soft footsteps crossing the tiles. She hurried to meet him and threw herself into the arms of the hooded figure. “Oh Alejandro, warm me in your arms. It is so cold,” she whispered.

But instead of embracing her, the hooded figure stiffened and drew back with a sharp exclamation of surprise. Shoving her roughly away he lowered his hood and Isabella saw not Alejandro but—the priest! Then another figure came from the shadows whispering urgently, “Isabella, we must be quick! The priest is awake but I was afraid you would take cold waiting…”

The priest shouted, “You would seduce the count’s daughter? Villain, infidel, to insult the honor of this Christian house! Apostate! Devil! False Christian!”

Servants and friars appeared, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. “Seize him!” the priest roared.

Isabella fell at the priest’s feet to protest it was her fault, but it was too late. There was an uproar and Alejandro was dragged away struggling in the grips of four men, crying out the fault was his, not Isabella’s.

The count was informed immediately, and at first refused to believe that his daughter had been beguiled into a clandestine meeting with a lowly
converso
friar. Had he suspected how far the relationship had gone, he would have drawn his sword and killed Isabella and Alejandro on the spot. As it was, he had Isabella whipped unconscious, then locked in her chamber.

The next day he broke off all betrothal negotiations.

Her maid brought bread and water once a day and Isabella passed her time in pain and silence. A month went by and Easter approached. The welts on her back healed. She stopped feeling sick and her waist grew thicker. The sly maid whispered that since the winter had been mild, an epidemic of fever was spreading through
the poor quarters of the city. She told Isabella that a great bribe from Alejandro’s family had spared his life, but he had been sent to work in the infirmary for the poor, where the pestilence raged. With great relish the maid described the hell of filth, suffering, and death into which Alejandro had been cast, until Isabella covered her ears and gave the maid a brooch to go away.

The mirror told Isabella she had changed. Her soft cheeks had hollows; there were shadows under her eyes and her dark gold hair was dull and thin. She felt suffocated by a noxious pervasive smell as the weather grew warmer. The pestilence? Her maid hinted there were ways not to have a baby; there were potions and spells and old women who could “see to it.” Isabella turned a deaf ear. She wanted nothing to do with spells and witchcraft and poisons that would conjure the baby from her body. She remembered the look of joy on Alejandro’s face when she told him, and felt such an intense love for the baby it nearly choked her. The maid helped herself to Isabella’s things with impunity—trinkets and clothing, gloves, a shawl, ribbons. Isabella scarcely noticed. She could think of only one thing—how to save the baby.

Alejandro managed to send Isabella a letter calling her his dearest Beatrice, his light in hell. She must forget him and think only of herself and their child; if she could find her way to the Valley of the Swallows, she might throw herself on the mercy of his family. Isabella kissed the paper and felt a glimmer of hope. Alejandro was alive. Perhaps they might yet escape to Portugal…The baby kicked, to encourage her. Could the greedy maid be bribed to help them escape? Isabella discovered cunning. She reminded the maid that the Inquisition had never paid her for her betrayal of the cook, while she would be well rewarded for aiding her and Alejandro’s escape. The maid admitted this was true and agreed to carry letters between the lovers so they could work out what would be necessary—mules, food, and bribes for those who guarded Alejandro.

Then the maid returned with news that Alejandro was dead. He had succumbed to the pestilence, and his body had been thrown into a common grave in a lime pit behind the infirmary along with the corpses of the poor. Isabella betrayed no emotion, too bereft to weep. Had he died with her name on his lips? She longed for death, too, but she must live, at least until the baby was born. She knew she must find a way to escape the palace before she gave birth, and make her way to the Abenzucars. The sly and dishonest maid was her only hope. Then even that frail link was severed. A new serving girl who was deaf and dumb brought Isabella’s food and Isabella never saw her former maid again.

Hoping for a reward, the maid had reported to the count that Isabella and the
Morisco
still corresponded and planned to run away. The count did not believe her and had her locked in the cellars without food or drink to prevent such a vile story spreading. There, with rats scrabbling in the dark for company, the maid knew that her only revenge was that the count’s precious family line would be polluted with the blood of heretics! She perished miserably trying to suck moisture from the walls.

Isabella, equally trapped in the palace, only knew her situation grew more dangerous with each day that passed. Then, incredibly, it was the priest’s intervention that opened the door for her escape. Despite the count’s efforts to suppress it, rumors of Isabella’s attempted seduction by an infidel had spread among Old Christian families. The priest advised the count that the best that could be done in the circumstances was to place Isabella in a convent far from Madrid, preferably among an insignificant order of nuns. Let the girl and the scandal she had caused die in obscurity.

When the count informed his disgraced daughter of her fate, Isabella heard him with downcast eyes and a submissive expression, masking the spark of hope his words raised in her heart. On her knees, she begged her father as penance that he allow her three
days in his library, to choose a convent such as he intended. Her father, having no better plan, agreed and dismissed her curtly, taking little notice of the fact that her wide hooped skirts sat higher than before. Isabella’s disability had always given her an awkward shape.

In the count’s library Isabella hunted desperately for the book that mentioned the convent of the swallows above the valley where the Abenzucars lived. She finally found what she was looking for, a disintegrating volume with mildewed pages that made her sneeze. It had been written by a Christian hermit’s acolyte during the time of the Moors. The young acolyte had joined the hermit in his cave in the Andalusian mountains, intending to share his master’s privations and preserve his teachings for posterity. But the hermit kept such long spells of fasting and silence that the acolyte went in search of food and conversation with the mountain folk. Among them was a community of religious women living in what the Moors called the House of the Swallows, and Christians called Las Golondrinas Convent.

Isabella had never heard of the order, Sors Santas de Jesus—Holy Sisters of Jesus. According to the acolyte, local people believed the order had occupied the site before the Moors and even the Visigoths before them, possibly since the Roman occupation of Hispania. The order was skilled with medicines, and the convent was known for charity to the poor of the mountain villages, regardless of their religion. Mountain people believed the nuns had special powers given by God. They said the swallows that returned to the convent each year from their migration and gave the place its name were the souls of dead nuns, and the convent was haunted by a tall woman in a billowing cloak. The main thing was that it would satisfy her father’s wish to hide her away.

Isabella cared only for the convent’s proximity to the Abenzucars in the valley below. For the moment she had no plan
beyond reaching that valley. What to say to Alejandro’s family, whether they would take her in—she would worry about that on the journey. Could she manage so long a journey, concealing her condition? She must. Fortunately she was slender, and the swell of her stomach could be disguised by exaggerating her limp to make her skirts sway, or bending to lean on her walking stick.

The count had never heard of the order, but made his own inquiries. What he learned gave him a grim satisfaction. The convent had Old Christian associations, and was far from Madrid in the mountains, at the end of an old Roman route from the coast. He sent for his notaries to prepare the nun’s dowry Isabella was to have. As soon as that matter was settled they left Madrid, Isabella concealed behind the leather curtains of the carriage. But her plan to go to the Abenzucars was now impossible. Her father was accompanying her on horseback.

Day after day, they traveled with agonizing slowness, Isabella willing the carriage to hurry, bracing herself against the cushions, counting over and over on her fingers the number of months. She thought they would reach the convent in time, unless the baby came too quickly. Her mother’s troubled experiences of childbirth had been the subject of whispered discussions among the maids and nurses of the household, and Isabella had acquired more knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth than most unmarried girls. She knew there was not much time left. A mule grew lame. A wheel did not turn properly. They halted for salve and then repairs. Isabella questioned the coachman impatiently. How much farther? The coachman did not know.

The road into the mountains grew steeper. Fresh mules were hitched to the carriage and new drivers took over, local men. When she asked, they pointed to the mountain ahead of them and finally gave her the welcome news they would reach Las Golondrinas Convent the next day. Inside the carriage Isabella stroked her belly
to calm the baby as it kicked. By the time the carriage stopped for the night at a mountain
refugio
, a dull pain had begun tightening across her abdomen and back. Throughout a long night it came and went, came and went. Isabella lay sleepless on her straw pallet, perspiring with fear.

Las Golondrinas Convent, Summer 1505

The next day the mules panted and strained to haul the carriage up the last steep gradient before finally pulling to a stop. Nauseous from the twisting road, Isabella leaned out the window and took great desperate gulps of air that was clean and cool after the scorching heat of the plains. Gold and ruby earrings flashed in the sun as she turned her head for the view of Alejandro’s childhood home. Below her spread well-tended terraces of olive trees and vegetable gardens and she could hear goats’ bells and the distant calls of shepherd boys. In the distance, small white villages clung to the mountains.

Relief at reaching her destination and the scent of sun-warmed herbs and pine soothed her nerves and stomach. She craned her neck to look up at the convent gates and walls with their barred windows and flocks of swallows whirling and dipping around the bell tower. She squinted against the bright sunlight. Save for the cross on top of the bell tower it could have been another empty Moorish fortress standing with its back to the rock face of the mountain. They had passed many such fortresses and castles the Moors had built, then abandoned in the
Reconquista
. Yes, there, just as the book had described, the statue with her hand out to the stone swallows carved around her feet, carved so realistically
they looked about to take flight. Isabella closed her eyes, and for a moment it was not the mountain breeze but Alejandro’s breath on her cheek, and she was comforted.

Only for a moment. There were new trials ahead. The pain gripped again, harder and more insistently. She clutched her handkerchief tighter and her breath came shallowly. Small beads of sweat appeared on her upper lip. She glanced at her father who was discussing something with the groom who waited to take his reins. She bit down on her handkerchief. Trying to think of anything but the pain, she distracted herself recalling what the acolyte had said of this place.

Before the convent, heathen goddesses had been worshipped by women who had somehow found their way to this remote spot. The Phoenicians had left shards of votive pottery and amulets and a small stone with Punic writing claiming it as the shrine of the goddess Astarte. According to Pliny, Carthaginian women were abandoned here when Hannibal led their men over the mountains on elephants to attack Rome, and rededicated Astarte’s altar to their goddess Tanit. In Hadrian’s time adventurous young soldiers would undertake expeditions to search for a legendary colony of beautiful Carthaginian girls in the mountains. But the Christian God and the intercession of the Virgin had vanquished pagan associations…