He said impulsively, ‘Agnes - never mind prophecies. I still don’t understand. What made you do this? Why run away - why throw away your life - why wall yourself up in a cell?’
‘For the love of God.’
There must be more. ‘And?’
She sighed. ‘And because I thought I would be safe,’ she said softly. ‘If I am in here, far from Oxford, encased in stone,
he
could not reach me again.’
He thought he understood at last. ‘Our father.’
‘Yes. It was not until Geoffrey came that I learned he was dead.’ She closed her eyes.
‘What did he do, Agnes?’
‘He was maddened. He was drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing. I forgive him; I have prayed for him. But I was ten years old. I feared that if I stayed, if I became a woman, and if his seed was planted in me - I left to save myself, and him, from that terrible sin.’
‘Oh, Agnes. I didn’t know. You say I protected you. But I failed, I failed—’
‘It wasn’t your fault, but his. Agnes is the name he gave me. But Agnes was a holy virgin. I am no Agnes.’
Impulsively he pushed his hand through the slit window. Tentatively his sister clasped his fingers, and then he felt the softness of her cheek on his hand.
Later he asked Geoffrey about the trench in the cell. It was Agnes’s own grave, Geoffrey said, a grave she scraped every day, for an anchoress was commanded to keep her death before her eyes at all times. Agnes would live and die in her stone box, and when her life was done she would lower herself into her self-dug tomb.
VI
Grace Bigod and Friar James had come to Seville to meet a man called Diego Ferron, a Dominican friar with contacts in the court of the Spanish monarchs. He was attached to a monastery outside the walls of the city, and had offices, it was said, in the palace complex of the Alcazar itself.
Ferron kept them waiting for days after their arrival. The date he suggested for their meeting, he told them in his note, was ‘suitable for our joint purpose’. James didn’t know what this meant.
On their tenth day in Seville, Grace and James were at last summoned to Ferron’s presence, at a private house in an old part of the city. When they arrived early at his house, they were led by a barefoot servant through a complicated archway into a garden, where water bubbled languidly from a fountain into a pool full of carp. The house was clearly Moorish, presumably abandoned by its owner on the fall of the city more than two hundred years ago. At least the Christian owners of this place had taken care to preserve what they had taken, though the furniture, lumpy wooden chairs, benches and low tables, would not have looked out of place in the home of a well-to-do Englishman, and walls which still bore Arabic inscriptions in praise of Allah were now studded with crucifixes and statues of the Virgin.
Friar Diego Ferron walked in briskly, introduced himself, ensured they had been served with tea and sweetmeats, and sat upright on a severe wooden chair. His habit was adorned with a magnificent black and white cowl made of some very fine wool. He was perhaps forty, his tonsured hair jet black and well groomed. He was a handsome man, his features sharp, his eyes brown, and his skin, shining with oils, was so dark that if not for his vestments James might have thought he was a Moor himself.
James was uneasy in his presence. When the brothers in Buxton had learned he was to meet Dominican friars in Spain, they had laughed. ‘They’re an odd lot, those Dominicans,’ one comfortable old friar had said. Saint Dominic, fired by his experience of the Albigensian heresy in France, had dedicated his order solely to the task of fighting heresy in all its forms. ‘And they’re worst of all in Spain. Mad as a bat.’
Ferron did not strike James as mad, but businesslike. Certainly he did not waste any time on pleasantries.
He focused his attentions on Grace. ‘First let me be sure you understand my role in the court of our glorious monarchs, Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile.’ He spoke fluent Latin. ‘You wrote to court to request an audience with Tomas de Torquemada. The friar is a Dominican colleague of mine, and was confessor of the Queen.’
‘Yes—’
‘Friar Torquemada is now working with the Inquisition. The Queen’s confessor is now Friar Hernando de Talavera, a Hieronymite. Pious, ascetic - a good man. The second of the Queen’s chief prelates is Cardinal de Mendoza, the archbishop of Seville. These persons will be involved in assessing your proposal for the court. I myself am on the staff of Friar Torquemada.’
‘You work for the Inquisition, then,’ Grace said.
‘Yes. But I have good relations with both Friar de Talavera and the archbishop, as well as Friar Torquemada, and so he passed on your request to me as a suitable first point of contact.’
This politicking among holy men baffled James, and dismayed him obscurely.
Grace bowed. ‘I’m sure we will be able to do business together, brother.’
‘That’s what I’m here to find out,’ Ferron said slickly, quite coldly. ‘For it is business we are talking about, isn’t it? You are here to sell arms to the monarchs. These weapons, the Engines of God as you refer to them.’
‘There is more to it than that—’
‘We have arms. We have cannon, we have arquebuses.’
‘But nothing like the weapons I can offer you,’ Grace said urgently. ‘The engines are founded on the words of a prophecy, retrieved by my ancestor Joan of the Outremer from a cache beneath the mosque of this very city. The designs have been developed in secret for
two hundred years
by Franciscans, followers of the sage Roger Bacon - perhaps you have heard of him. Brother James here has studied the developments closely and can tell you all you wish to know.’
Ferron’s glance flickered over James. ‘I already know the most salient fact. That these weapons of yours are decidedly expensive.’
‘Decidedly better than anything you have. And decidedly what you need for the coming war. I do not mean the conflict with the Moors of Granada. I mean the war to end wars that will follow.’ She paused, her face intense, beautiful. ‘Brother, I know of this, deep in my bones. My family is of the Outremer, the Holy Land - we lived in Jerusalem itself. We were expelled by the Saracens in the same decade as Seville fell to the Christian armies. This was over two hundred years ago, and we still bear the scars in our souls. They are scars of the long war with the Muslims which has been waged since the death of Muhammad himself. And it is
a war Christendom is losing.
Ferron sat back, startled.
She had seized control of the exchange, James saw. They were the same age, roughly, Grace and Ferron. Both strong, both determined, both combative. They would be formidable enemies, still more formidable if they became allies.
James knew, though, that any cold-eyed observer of history would draw the same conclusion as Grace. Ever since the loss of Jerusalem in Joan’s day, Christendom had been on the retreat.
The problem was the rise of the Turks. A decade after Seville fell to the Christians, the Mamluk Turks defeated the Mongols - the first significant defeat suffered by the nomads across three continents. It was a turning point for the Islamic empires. The Mamluks, rampant, marched on; within decades they had obliterated the last trace of the old crusader states. Eventually the Mamluks fell to new waves of Mongol invaders. But out of their shattered polities rose a new nation of Turks called the Ottomans, who dismembered what was left of the old East Roman domains. The last Roman emperor died fighting for Constantinople, when the old city fell in 1453. A jubilant Sultan Mehmet crowed that Rome itself was next, that soon he would be feeding his horses on oats from the high altar of Saint Peter’s. And in the year 1480, just a year ago, as if making good that promise, Mehmet had assaulted Italy.
‘Thus from Jerusalem to Rome Christendom is in retreat,’ Grace said relentlessly. ‘Only here in Spain are Christian armies taking the fight to the Muslims. Only here, under Isabel and Fernando, are Christians winning. And that,’ she said, ‘is the key to the future.’
Ferron considered. ‘But the monarchs are barely at ease on their own thrones. Their marriage united the Christian kingdoms of Spain, but they must deal with over-mighty nobles, empty coffers, a mixed population of Christians, Jews and Muslims - and, of course, the great canker of Granada, whose emir has refused to pay his proper tribute for fifteen years. The final war against Islam?’ He smiled, languid. ‘Let’s be rid of the Moors in Granada first and then we’ll see.’
Grace said urgently, ‘Friar Ferron, I accept what you say. But time is short.’
‘Tell me what you mean.’
And she told him briefly of another prophecy: her family’s legend of the Testament of Eadgyth. Of the mysterious, crucial figure known by his three titles, the Dove, the spawn of the spider, and the Christ-bearer. Of warring destinies, which must be resolved ‘in the last days’ - which might come as soon as the year 1500.
‘We have two decades, then,’ Ferron said drily. ‘Not long to conclude a war that has lasted for eight hundred years! But why do
you
want this, lady?’
‘This is my destiny. My family’s destiny, as we have perceived it since the days of Joan of the Outremer.’
Ferron pursed his lips. ‘And you are unmarried. No husband - no children.’
‘My life has a single purpose, friar. As I said, that has been the case since I was twenty. What need have I of children when I have the Engines of God?’
James shared a glance with Ferron, one of the few times the two of them communicated. Even Ferron looked disturbed by her intensity.
But he steepled his fingers and pressed the tips against his lips. ‘What first? We must discuss the provenance of your various prophecies. But it occurs to me that the time is so short that this Dove of yours, if he exists,
must already have been born.
The Holy Brotherhood is rather good at finding people. I’ll pass this on; we will find your Dove, if he lives.’
A young monk came into the room and apologetically whispered in Ferron’s ear.
Ferron stood. ‘We will continue our business later. For now, please, join me. I asked you to delay our meeting until today because I thought that you, as guests in our city, would like to witness the first triumph of the Inquisition.’
Grace stood with polite eagerness. ‘And what triumph is that?’
Ferron smiled. ‘We call it the Act of Faith.’
Auto-da-fé.
VII
That February day, the procession formed up before Seville’s unfinished cathedral. At its head was a company of Dominicans, barefoot, with their heads covered by black and white cowls like Ferron’s. They bore the banner of the Inquisition, a knotted cross flanked by the olive branch of peace and the sword of retribution. Behind the monks walked magistrates, then soldiers carrying wood for the fires.
And then came the condemned - seven of them, six men and a woman, flanked by soldiers bearing lances to ensure they could not escape. More hooded monks followed, chanting for repentance, and finally drummers who hammered out a heavy, doleful rhythm.
Ferron led Grace and James to join a gaggle of other notable citizens who trailed the drummers. They passed along narrow streets crowded with people who came to stare at the condemned. Some of them were foreigners, James thought, Portuguese explorers or Italian merchants, ambassadors from an entirely different world, who watched this gruesome parade with sneers of disgust - and yet they watched.
James himself was horribly fascinated by the faces of the condemned. They wore yellow gowns, carried candles, and had nooses around their necks. They were influential conversos - Jews converted to Christianity, or even the descendants of converts - whose treacherous reversion to Judaism had been rooted out, tried and sentenced. One young man looked frightened, and he continually crossed himself and mumbled prayers; if he was secretly Jewish he didn’t look it now. The others merely looked stunned, or disbelieving.
The procession snaked out of the city walls to an open field. Here bare wooden stakes had been set up in a row, their purpose blunt and obvious. The condemned were tied to these stakes. One man struggled, another wept, and that younger man crossed himself until his arms were pinned. The rest bore the procedure in stoical silence.
Ferron pointed out one Dominican, a tall, pale figure with a flattened nose, like a boxer’s. ‘Torquemada,’ he murmured. ‘Your first contact, madam. Not yet an Inquisitor, actually, but his soul yearns for the good work. Ferociously pious and yet a master of organisation. Perhaps every cleansing needs a cool mind like his!’
The leader of the Dominicans stepped forward, and began to deliver a sermon in windy Spanish, laden with quotations from Revelation.
Ferron whispered to Grace, ‘He is Friar Vincent Ojeda, of the Monastery of San Pablo. He led the commission which established the Inquisition in the first place, to root out weakness and treachery in our new state. For connoisseurs of apocalyptic preaching, his sermons are collectors’ items,’ he said. ‘But this is a moment for which he has campaigned all his adult life.’
A portly, intense man, Ojeda was alight with joy in this killing place, James thought. And if James was watching Ojeda, so, he found, Ferron was watching him.
‘I wonder what you are thinking, young brother. Your expression is complicated. Are you concerned that the innocent may be wrongly condemned? It is possible; we are human. But remember the words of the Pope’s legate at the time of the Albigensian heresy: “Slay all. God will know His own.”’
‘That would be small comfort were I at the stake today.’
‘True, but you aren’t at the stake, are you? I’ve known your type before. You are too intelligent to be truly pious. What do you think of us? What do you think of me?’
James decided to answer honestly. ‘I think you are a man of affairs,’ he said. ‘Of business. Of this world, more than the next. You see this Inquisition as a way for you to achieve your goals, and for your monarchs to build a strong and unified state.’