“Not exactly, Antonio,” my husband responded, pointedly emphasizing the name and thus the lack of honorific. Gabriel gestured to me with one hand, while the other, hanging by his side, curled and uncurled into a fist; his jealousy was palpable. “This is my wife.”
I lifted my veil.
Antonio flinched as if struck. His features slackened, causing his mouth to gape slightly for a heartbeat before he mastered himself and closed it. Even then, his eyes remained wide, and his lips worked a few times to form my name before he managed to expel the word:
“Marisol.” He cleared his throat and looked, stricken, at Gabriel, both of whose fists were now clenched, his downcast face violet. Antonio cleared his throat and repeated hoarsely, “Marisol…” He looked owlishly at my husband. “
She
is the student?”
Gabriel nodded, disabled by rage, unable to look up at either of us. “She wants to learn to play the lute,” he said between gritted teeth.
Antonio’s eyes narrowed beneath thick golden red brows. “And
you
brought her here?”
“With a chaperone,” Gabriel countered defensively. He thrust a chin in Máriam’s direction; her dark face remained impassive, her gaze artfully innocent, although a bit more of the whites of her eyes showed than usual. “You told me that no one comes back here except you. That
is
the truth, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” Antonio said. “Only rarely does someone else come back here; if Fray Morillo needs me, he rings for me.”
Still in shock, he nodded a greeting to Máriam, whom he’d known since childhood; the gesture conveyed wistful regret that he couldn’t welcome her more properly. Máriam’s rosy brown lips curved faintly upward in reply.
Then Antonio looked to me. I lowered my face, aware that, like Gabriel, I must have been flushing brightly.
“The driver will be back for her in an hour,” Gabriel continued stiffly, scowling down at the papers on Antonio’s podium. He looked over at me, his eyes imploring yet threatening. “See to it you remember what I told you,” he muttered at me, and ducked from the room, closing the door behind him.
For a long instant, I stood frozen, listening to Gabriel’s receding tread in the hall, followed by the sharp slam of the outbuilding’s rear door. Only the faintest murmur of voices emanated from the front of the building, where the rest of the occupants dwelled. Antonio’s office was so distant from the others that when Máriam wandered to the far corner of the room and turned her back discreetly to us, it was as if we two were alone.
Ten
I stood staring at Antonio as he came around the reading stand toward me, my expression cold.
“Perhaps you don’t want to see me,” I hissed, remembering the honest distress in his voice when he’d asked Gabriel, She
is the student?
“Perhaps I should follow don Gabriel and leave now.”
I wheeled about, thinking to do just that. But before I could lift my skirts to run out, Antonio stepped in front of me and put a polite if sympathetic hand on my elbow—the platonic touch of a stranger, not a friend.
“I was so sad to hear of doña Magdalena’s passing,” he said, lowering his already-soft voice. “I am so sorry, Marisol.”
I pulled my arm away, as if his touch stung. “And did your friend Gabriel tell you how she died?” My tone was scathing.
He recoiled; the look of pained sorrow on his features made me darkly jubilant. “Marisol,” he said sadly, simply. “Marisol, I
am
sorry.”
He moved toward me, arms open to comfort me, but I took a step back and held up my hands to fend him off.
“Why do you care?” I taunted him. “The Dominicans are happy she’s dead. You work for them now.”
Antonio closed his eyes to hide the painful emotion in them as he slowly lowered his arms.
For once I was glad to see him suffer, and I tried to land another verbal blow. “Aren’t you afraid the other Inquisitors will see you hugging a
conversa
?”
His eyes snapped open. “I’m not an Inquisitor; I’ve taken no vows of celibacy. I serve as secretary and scribe to Fray Morillo. I manage the case files of the accused.”
Fray Morillo, the tiny, powerful head of the Dominican Order in Spain, had read the papal bull and Edict of Grace in the town square. I turned my head in disgust at the sound of the name.
The sympathy in Antonio’s expression transformed to distrust; his voice became an accusatory whisper. “Why are you angry with me
?
I wasn’t the one who married someone else. I saw you with him in the chapel, Marisol.”
“After you deserted me,” I responded coldly.
He gaped as his red-gold brows rushed together. “How did I desert you?” My retort so surprised him that he forgot himself and asked the question in full voice.
I whispered an angry reply. “Where
were
you for those eighteen months? Or should I ask
with whom
?”
He shook his head in disbelief at the question and lowered his volume. “How can you say such a thing to
me
? You know where I’ve been. It’s you who abandoned me.” His tone hardened. “To think that you would marry Gabriel—of all people.”
I bristled, remembering the young Antonio sitting beside me in the old olive tree, saying:
You’re New Christian, I’m Old—and together, we could make a bunch of little Christians.
“You have no right to criticize me,” I said.
Antonio’s mouth thinned to a slash, one corner slightly tugged down.
I glanced at the papers neatly arranged in the wooden cubbyholes on his desk, and knew that each of the dozens of sheaves represented a life, like my mother’s.
“I bear no grudge against Gabriel,” he said softly. “But I don’t understand why he brought you here, to me, and left us alone. Aren’t you curious as to why?”
I was but had no intention of discussing it with Antonio; I thought that perhaps Gabriel was punishing us both out of spite, although I couldn’t explain why he would leave me alone in the presence of a man who made him quake with jealousy. Instead, I walked over to the window and nodded at the lute carefully propped against the far corner of his desk. Sunlight glistened off its shiny lacquered soundboard, in whose center was carved a round rose, as delicately intricate as the finest Moorish stone fretwork on now-Christian cathedrals. I had seen this very lute in Antonio’s arms before, when he’d serenaded me at my mother’s window.
“I’m here to learn to play,” I said shortly. “I think we should focus on that.”
He lingered, watching me unhappily for a few seconds, and then drew a long breath.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll teach you. Here.”
He pulled a stool from behind the desk; Máriam reminded us of her presence by hurrying to bring a second chair from the back of the room. She set it down near the desk and ducked her head shyly, smiling as Antonio thanked her, then hurried back to her distant corner, once again turning her back discreetly to us. She’d always loved Antonio; her smile and courtesy to him irritated me, as I considered them disloyal.
Antonio kept the chairs at a discreet distance. I sat with my back to the window with the light from the window streaming over my shoulder. Antonio lifted the lute with practiced care and sat on the stool, settling the instrument into his embrace, and strummed the strings.
“All right,” he said. “First I’ll play a simple tune with only a few chord changes. This first time around, just watch the position of my fingers.”
He began to play a popular song, one I knew well, about a long-lost love returning. He’d plucked out the first phrase when I felt a flush of heat on my cheeks and neck; he stopped abruptly, realizing what he’d done, and launched into a different melody.
It was a bright, cheerful song with a driving rhythm, and I shifted my weight in the chair, relaxing a bit as Antonio sang softly in his whispery baritone.
The first line of the ditty always made me smile; it was supposedly the wife of an innkeeper singing, chiding her amorously neglectful husband and explaining why she strayed. I fought to ignore the lyrics and keep my gaze on Antonio’s fingers, but it was difficult.
I hang my sausages in the kitchen with care
And feed you and our guests the same
But you so rarely stroke my hair
Or call me loving names.
The song continued on, with references to handsome young travelers and, of course, the sausages in the kitchen, comparing the husband’s “wanting portion” to the more generous ones served to the male guests at the inn. As children, we’d sung the song to our elders and they had smiled patronizingly at us, thinking we missed the double entendres.
I fought to pay attention to his long fingers as they moved over the strings at the fret, but I soon found my attention wandering to his face. Antonio’s gaze was lowered, fixed on a spot on the aged stucco wall behind me. Whatever he saw in his mind’s eye was pleasant; the somberness lifted from his expression, revealing the old cheerful Antonio behind it. I felt my resistance melting despite myself.
Oh, how I could resist
His sausages, well stuffed?
As Antonio sang the line, the corners of his eyes crinkled, and a spark of joy lit up his face; his lips stretched into a faint crescent. I didn’t intend to smile myself; the expression formed against my will, just as my right foot began involuntarily to keep time. I sang the next two lines with him:
Oh, how could he insist
Our tryst should be so rushed?
Antonio looked shyly up at me, his smile deepening; he nodded in gentle approval and looked away again, losing himself in song. And for a moment, just a moment, I allowed myself to forget everything—my mother’s death, my father’s rejection of me, my marriage to Gabriel—and let my voice soar, as strong and as clear as my mother’s once was. I dissolved into the present, remembering only that I was singing again with Antonio, that he was alive and well and we were together, and that the rollicking music was balm for my wounded heart.
As we launched into the third verse, the door was flung open, startling all three of us. Two Dominican nuns in white habits topped by black cloaks and veils appeared in the doorway. One was quite old, with a deeply wrinkled face and thick spectacles that magnified her eyes. A young sister held her elbow supportively and led her into the back of the room without a word to Antonio or to me. Immediately, they knelt in deep curtsies—the older woman doing so with some difficulty, leaning heavily on the younger. They were bowing not to us, but to someone in the doorway.
I turned in my chair. A third woman stood on the threshold, surrounded by a group of Dominican monks in white and black. She was taller than most of the men next to her, large boned and stately in a modest black silk gown, the casing for the
verdugado
’s hoops in velvet, her bodice trimmed with the finest black lace I’d ever seen. Her matching lace veil covered straight, thick auburn hair, parted in the middle and pulled back into a thick, silk-wrapped braid, and a small gold crucifix rested on the shelf of her prominent bosom; she wore no other jewelry save a thin gold wedding band. She was plain, with a long, horselike face and a nose too long and too thin, with pinched nostrils; her lower lip was very full, her upper bowed and thin. Although she was far from old, perhaps thirty, there was already a fold of flesh beneath her weak chin; her dark blue-green eyes, shallow and heavy lidded beneath slight overplucked brows, exuded a jaded air.
Yet she was smiling, baring the considerable gap between her two large yellow front teeth and clapping in time to the music.
Antonio looked on her and rose so quickly that the lute slipped from his grasp and struck his stool, causing the instrument’s wooden belly and strings to protest. He set the lute on the floor so carelessly it rattled, and he offered a sweeping bow, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
I jerked to my feet, unclear as to exactly who the woman was, but I too curtsied and dropped my gaze.
“Oh, don’t stop!” the woman encouraged us. “Rise, rise! Keep singing!”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Antonio replied, and promptly picked up the lute.
Standing, he gracefully tucked its wooden belly in the corner of his right arm and caught the neck with his left hand. And I, fool that I was, straightened and began to tremble from pure nerves as I realized that I looked on Her Majesty doña Isabel, Queen of Castile and León, the most powerful woman Spain had ever known. It seemed impossible that she should be here, in Seville; she rarely traveled this far south, but preferred to stay near her palaces in the Old Christian strongholds of Toledo, Segovia, and Madrid.
“Your Majesty,” I gasped, so overwhelmed that I could scarcely utter the almost-inaudible words. I found myself staring at her and immediately looked away at Antonio. He caught my eye as he began to play the opening notes of a more sedate, formal tune.
“No, no,” doña Isabel called, still grinning toothily. “Play what you were playing before!”
Antonio’s eyebrows lifted, and a spark of merriment shone in his eyes as he began to pick out the melody, adding embellishment this time. At the same time, he shot a polite, sidewise glance at the queen; she noted the whimsy in his gaze and responded by widening her gap-toothed grin and nodding.
In an instant, she was clapping again to the rhythm with a childlike lack of restraint, ignoring the perplexed expressions on the faces of the nuns and monks, most of whom lifted their arms but could not bring themselves to clap in time along with her.
But I clapped and somehow managed a smile, and when Antonio launched into the music again, singing harmony to my lead, I gave my voice free rein and let it soar as high and loud as it wished.