The Devils of Cardona (42 page)

“Good-bye, scrivener,” she said. “And don't forget me.”

“Never,” he whispered hoarsely as she turned and walked away.

•   •   •

I
N
THE
MORNING
Segura and his children came out to watch them leave. Ventura brought Romero out into the main square on the baker's own horse, and Mendoza was surprised and clearly moved to find that a large crowd of Moriscos had gathered to say good-bye to them.

“We didn't need a send-off,” he said gruffly.

“I didn't ask them, Don Bernardo,” the mayor replied. “You will always have friends here.”

“Thank you,” said Mendoza. “And I wish the people of Belamar better times—and a better priest.”

“We all hope for that.” Segura smiled and held his hand in a tight grip. “And may God go with you, Licenciado Mendoza.”

He shook Ventura's and Gabriel's hands and muttered the same benediction. Beatriz choked back a sob as Ventura doffed his hat in an extravagant bow and mounted his horse. Juana met Gabriel's eyes only briefly and then hurried away from the square with her hand over her mouth as the crowd broke into a round of spontaneous applause, and the men rode down the street where they had fought for their lives only a few days before.

The Moriscos came out of their houses now or stood in their windows or on balconies to clap and cheer as they went past. Mendoza stared straight ahead, but Gabriel could tell that he was moved, and his own throat and chest were fit to burst with sadness and pride. The crowd followed them out of the main entrance and cheered as they descended the hill into the valley, where some of the peasants in the fields stopped to wave them on.

“What will happen to them now?” asked Gabriel when he was finally able to speak.

“The same thing that happens to all Moriscos,” Mendoza replied. “They will be forgotten for a while, but sooner or later the Inquisition will come here again.”

At the footbridge they paid the toll keeper for the last time and paused to look back on the valley once again, and then they turned the corner and descended toward the Jaca plain, as the sun rose higher into a sky that looked like polished blue stone. On arriving in Jaca, they took Romero to the cathedral jail. Mendoza told Ventura to wait for the countess's militia to bring the prisoners and went with Gabriel to take Calvo's deposition. They found Necker and one of Vargas's constables standing outside the closed door in almost the same positions they'd left them in.

“Everything in order, Necker?”

“Yes, sir. No one has been in or out, as you said, sir. Señora Calvo has asked to be let out. I said no.”

“And the corregidor?”

“Not a sign of him, sir. But I have heard them arguing.”

“I'm sure you have.” He knocked on the door, and a servant answered it almost immediately. “We're here to speak to your master.” Mendoza stepped inside without waiting for a reply while Gabriel followed close behind with his
escritorio
dangling from his shoulder. In the same moment, Señora Calvo appeared in the kitchen doorway on the other side of the courtyard, looking bored and petulant.

“How long must I stay here?” she asked.

“For as long as I say so, madam. Where is your husband?”

“In his room. He's been in there since yesterday morning. Feeling sorry for himself, no doubt. What I don't understand is why
I
have to stay here with him.”

Mendoza felt himself about to say something that he knew he would regret.

“Which door?” he said tersely.

“The second one on the left.”

He went upstairs, tapping his stick angrily on the marble floor, and knocked on Calvo's door. There was no answer.

“Calvo?”

He knocked more loudly, and there was still no response. He pushed on the handle, but the door was locked. “Calvo? Open the door, man!”

Downstairs in the courtyard, Señora Calvo and the servants were looking up at him, and Necker and the constable had also been attracted by the noise.

“It's bolted from the inside,” Señora Calvo said. “The fool has probably drunk himself into a stupor.”

Mendoza pushed against the door with his shoulder, but it remained solidly shut.

“I need someone to break it down!” he shouted.

Vargas's constable hurried away, and Necker came upstairs and tried without success to break open the door with his good shoulder. Ten minutes later the constable returned carrying a large blacksmith's hammer.

“And who's going to pay for the door if you smash it?” Cornelia Calvo complained.

Mendoza ignored her. After a few blows of the hammer, the wood around the lock began to splinter, and suddenly the door flew open. The constable stood back, and Mendoza stepped inside the darkened room. Even before he drew back the curtains, he could smell the familiar aroma that he had smelled so often in the last few weeks. Calvo was lying sprawled across the bed in his white shirt and hose, and the sheets around him were soaked with blood from his slashed wrists. The blood had also spread onto the floor, where it formed a pool around the knife that had fallen from his hand. The corregidor's grizzled face was as white as marble and in death he looked calm and serene, as if some burden he'd been carrying had now been lifted from him. On a table by the window, a sheaf of papers had been piled neatly next to an inkwell and quill.

Behind him Mendoza heard Cornelia Calvo let out a strange sound that was somewhere between a howl of pain and an exclamation of disgust or frustration as he read the short note addressed to him on top of the pile:

My dear Bernardo,

Please forgive me if I call you by your first name out of respect for our friendship. You were right, of course. I should have died at Lepanto. Had I done so, I would have left this world as a hero and a martyr. Didn't the pope promise absolution for the sins of all those killed in the battle? Yet we survived, and in the years that followed, I discovered things about myself that I did not realize then I was capable of. You know I always admired you, Bernardo. You were the one with the high ideals, with all your beautiful schemes to help the poor and make the land fertile and your quaint belief in justice. But this country is not beautiful or just. And now I must leave this world covered in shame and dishonor, and I cannot stand to let you or anyone else judge me even in the short time I have to remain in it.

So I have decided to break my word and betray you once again and make my own escape. But before that happens, I have something to give you, as a token of our friendship. You will find here my full confession regarding everything I have done, with all the facts that I have already told you and the details you need to know about this dirty business. I also include Villareal's letters to me in the hope that they will be of interest to you.

And now my journey is about to end. I do not ask your forgiveness, but I ask you from time to time to remember me how I once was, rather than the man you knew more recently, though it may be you will prefer not to think of me at all.

Your friend,

Pelagio

Mendoza gazed out the window at the sunlit street and remembered the young man with a bright smile and thick dark hair, arm wrestling for money in a tavern and smiling grimly while Mendoza and the other students
cheered him on and chanted, “Cal-vo, Cal-vo!” He remembered shouted arguments about moral philosophy, student brawls when he and Calvo had staggered home to their lodgings arm in arm and battered and bloodied like soldiers, crawling through the rushes to watch the poor women bathing naked in the Tormes River. He remembered a distant Christmas when he and Calvo and their friends had drunkenly sung carols in the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca and how Calvo had performed a drunken galliard when the city watch ordered him to go home.

Most of all he remembered the brave young warrior who had fought the Saracens at Lepanto thirteen years earlier, a Spanish warrior whose strong arm had swept Mendoza off the deck and lowered him to safety and given him life. As long as he lived, he would never be able to connect those memories to the fat little man who'd been ready to see him crucified and who now lay on his own bed in his own blood. Only God could know the reasons for that transformation, but he promised himself that he would prove his old friend wrong and see that justice
was
done.

Behind him Necker, Gabriel and the constable were standing just inside the room, and as he gathered up the papers, he heard Cornelia Calvo's footsteps fading away in the corridor.

“Should we remove the body, sir?” asked the constable.

“No. Leave him here. And no one is to speak of this until I say so. Boy, give me your
escritorio
.”

Gabriel looked at him curiously as he went out into the corridor carrying the
escritorio
and intercepted Cornelia Calvo on the stairs.

“Where are you going, señora?” Mendoza asked.

“To grieve for my husband,” she said coldly.

“Perhaps if you had cared for him more when he was alive, he would not be dead. Come with me.”

She did not protest as he ushered her across the courtyard past the terrified-looking servants and into the kitchen, where he closed the door behind them.

“Sit down,” he ordered. “Can you write?”

“Of course I can write,” she said.

“When you arranged to see Rodrigo Vallcarca, did you write or use your servants to communicate with him?”

“How dare you? I never—” Her white cheeks were flushed now. “I have no idea what you are referring to.”

Mendoza leaned over the table so that his face was only a few feet away from hers. “Do not lie to me, señora. As far as I'm concerned, you are partly responsible for that corpse upstairs. I don't have Calvo, but I will charge you with complicity in his crimes unless you cooperate with me.”

“I knew nothing about his business!”

“Maybe, maybe not. But as the investigating judge, I assure you that I can see to it that you go to the galleys for at least five years. Do you think you could survive that, madam?”

Señora Calvo stared back at him and shook her head.

“Nor do I,” Mendoza said. “And if you want to avoid it, then you're going to have to help me.”

“How?”

Mendoza smiled humorlessly. “You are going to write a love letter.”

odrigo Vallcarca was not the type of man to think ahead, but even he knew better than to tell his father that Corregidor Calvo had been arrested and taken to Zaragoza. To do that would have required him to ride out to the hunting lodge, and it would also risk depriving himself of the night of pleasure that now lay ahead of him. Instead he waited until his family had retired to their rooms and then walked quickly through the rows of eucalyptus trees and out beyond the front gate to the little copse where his servant was waiting with his horse already saddled. He rode on alone, because servants were not required to be present for an occasion like this, and now the prospect of a night with Cornelia Calvo in her husband's own bed made his flesh ache and filled him with a craving that grew sharper as the trees and mountains flashed past him.

He saw her lying naked beneath him, and the thought
of her wrapping her thighs around him was enough to make him squeeze the horse more tightly with his own. Even now when he put his fingers to his nose, he could still smell the perfume from her letter, in which she had called him her darling, her lover, her young bull, and told him that her bed was empty and her lips were moist. She had never sounded so passionate and so eager, and as he urged his horse on through the moonlit night and felt the warm wind blowing in his face and hair, he promised himself that she would walk with difficulty the next morning.

On reaching the outskirts of the city, he slowed down and rode through the darkened streets to the stables near the pilgrims' inn, where he left his horse and continued on foot. Soon the corregidor's house appeared before him. He quickened his pace at the sight of the faint glimmer of light from the upstairs bedroom and imagined her white skin against the sheets in the canopy bed. On reaching the front door, he glanced around him and turned the handle. As she had promised, it was unlocked, and he slipped inside like a thief. No sooner had he shut the door behind him than he felt the barrel of a pistol against the back of his head and heard a voice saying, “Put your hands up and keep perfectly still.”

Vallcarca did as he was told while a hand slowly drew his sword from its sheath.

“Is this a robbery?” he asked. “If so—”

“Shut up until you're spoken to.”

Vallcarca heard movements from one of the other rooms now. For a moment he thought that Calvo had lured him into a trap as two men emerged from a doorway on the other side of the courtyard. One of them was carrying a torch, and as they came closer, he saw the judge who had humiliated him in front of his servants, accompanied by one of Calvo's
alguaciles
.

“Mendoza?” he exclaimed. “Why, that bitch from hell!”

“That's no way to talk about a lady,” Mendoza said. “Bring him in.”

Still holding the pistol pressed against Vallcarca's temple, Ventura prodded him forward in the back with his own sword and directed him toward
the open doorway. Inside, Mendoza sat down at a table, where a younger man was already waiting by an
escritorio
. Ventura gestured to him to sit down.

“Rodrigo Vallcarca, you are under arrest,” Mendoza said.

“What the hell for?”

“For the murders of the priest Father Panalles, Gonzalo del Río and his family and the
alguacil
Franquelo. I am also charging you with the murders of the Count of Cardona, Inquisitor Mercader and Commissioner Herrero and all the members of their party, in addition to rape, banditry and other offenses against His Majesty's peace.”

“What?” Vallcarca stared back at Mendoza with an expression of stupefied incomprehension. “But this is nonsense.”

“I have signed confessions from the bailiff Sánchez and the Morisco Vicente Péris and from three of the bandits who took part in the murders of the del Río family. I have enough proof to hang you ten times over.”

“You've got Sánchez?” Vallcarca's face fell. “When? How?”

“Never mind how. Their statements prove beyond any doubt that you are the man who organized and directed these crimes, and before you hang, you will confess to every one of them.”

Vallcarca bit his lip and looked around him with a bewildered and trapped expression. In the flickering light of the candle, the judge's face had a slightly hellish glow and his black eyes were devoid of pity or mercy.

“Damn it, Mendoza,” Vallcarca protested. “It wasn't me. Sánchez is just trying to save his own skin! I swear on my mother's milk I didn't order any of this! I just did what I was told!”

“That's what Sánchez said,” Mendoza replied. “Except that he said he took orders from you.”

“It's not true! Sánchez killed Cardona on my father's orders! It was my father who sent him to kill you in France! It was nothing to do with me.”

“Isn't it?” Mendoza nodded at Gabriel, who picked up his quill and dipped it in the inkwell. “In that case, if you want to save yourself, I advise you to start telling me why.”

•   •   •

B
ARON
V
ALLCARCA
AWOKE
in his hunting lodge to hear the startled flutter of birds just outside the window. Lying in the darkness with the woman sleeping beside him, he heard the unmistakable sound of horses' hooves from somewhere in the distance. The sound was so faint that he thought he might have imagined it, and he slipped out of bed and peered through a gap in the curtain. It was not yet daylight, and there was no sign of life from either inside or outside the house. Even the servants had not yet gotten up to start the fires and prepare the guns.

He was tempted to go back to sleep a little longer, but he felt the same tingling sensation at the back of his neck that had once saved him from Huguenot sentries or assassins during the wars in France, and he had learned never to ignore it. The woman stirred vaguely but did not wake up as he put on a shirt and unsheathed the sword that was hanging from the chair before walking barefoot into the dark hallway. As he descended the stairs, he thought once again that he heard movement from outside. He padded over to the window and looked down over the yard, but it seemed silent and empty. Finally he drew back the latch and opened the door. It was only then, as he stepped onto the wooden veranda, that he saw the man in the morion helmet standing directly in front of him with an escopeta pointed at his head.

“Drop your weapon,” the man commanded.

Vallcarca took an instinctive step backward as other shapes began to move toward him in the darkness, and he reached for the door handle.

“One more move and your brains will be all over that door,” said the man with the escopeta. “Dead or alive, it makes no difference.”

Vallcarca dropped the sword. All around the yard, men were advancing cautiously toward the house now in a semicircle, bearing pistols, swords and escopetas, and one of them was walking more slowly, tapping a stick on the ground.

“I wouldn't try it, Baron. The house is surrounded. And it would not bother me at all if my men were to shoot you like a dog.”

“Mendoza,” Vallcarca said disgustedly as one of the men stepped onto the veranda and held a sword against his throat. “What brings you here so early?”

“I'm arresting you in the name of the king for murder, blackmail and other crimes against the public peace.”

“Well, can I at least get dressed first?”

Mendoza shook his head. “Your servants can bring what you need to Zaragoza.”

“Zaragoza! Damn it, Mendoza! I'm Vallcarca, not some peasant! At least let me get my boots on!”

“Take him.”

Vallcarca clenched his fists and looked momentarily inclined to resist until the point of Ventura's sword dissuaded him. One of the constables tied his hands, and Ventura prodded him forward with the sword. Some of the servants had come out onto the veranda now and watched as their master was led barefoot and tied up through the yard. Mendoza ordered them to go back inside, and he followed Vallcarca out along the road to where the horses and carriage were waiting. Ventura pushed the baron into the carriage, and Mendoza and his cousin sat down opposite their prisoner as they rode back toward the Huesca road.

“I don't know where you got these allegations from, Mendoza,” Vallcarca said furiously. “But neither you nor the corregidor will ever see me hang.”

“Corregidor Calvo is dead,” Mendoza replied calmly. “But your son has been very cooperative.”

“What are you talking about?” Vallcarca looked suddenly less certain. “My son's at my father-in-law's house.”

“Not anymore,” Mendoza said.

They stopped at the turnoff to Huesca and waited until the countess's
militia escort appeared, together with the carts carrying the prisoners they had taken from the Catalan's band. As the cortege came closer, Vallcarca saw his son sitting in one of the carts with his legs and feet bound together. He glared at him incredulously, but Rodrigo looked away as if he had not seen him. Mendoza gave the order to move out, and they began to wind their way back down to the scorched white plain as the sun came up and flooded the arid hills with dazzling, luminous light. They were not long past Huesca when they came across a group of travelers who were coming in the opposite direction in a procession of horses, mules and carts. One of them was a sweating priest in a black soutane, perched uncomfortably on a mule and leading a donkey carrying a large bundle.

“God be with you, brothers,” he said, glancing nervously at the prisoners and their armed escorts. “How is the road ahead?”

“Very quiet,” Necker replied.

The priest and the other travelers looked relieved.

“May I inquire where you are going?” Mendoza asked.

“To Belamar de la Sierra,” the priest replied gloomily. “It's a Morisco village. Do you know it?”

“I do, Father,” Mendoza said. “As a matter of fact, we have just come from there.”

“I understand there have been some problems in the village,” the priest said.

“There were, Father.” Mendoza smiled as the carriage moved away. “But I think you'll find that things are much calmer now.”

•   •   •

T
HE
ARRIVAL
OF
such a large contingent of prisoners caused great excitement in Zaragoza, where rumors of what had taken place in Cardona had already begun to circulate through the city. As they rode along the crowded Corso, pedestrians, shopkeepers and artisans stared curiously at the wild beasts from the mountains who had murdered two inquisitors. The
more daring bystanders ran up to the carts and attempted to hit the prisoners before Ventura beat them off. By the time they reached the city jail, a large crowd was following them, and some of Mendoza's men were obliged to push them back as the prisoners were led inside.

The prisoners were still being processed when the viceroy arrived, accompanied by his servants. Mendoza had already written to Sástago to inform him of his imminent arrival, and the viceroy congratulated Mendoza on a successful conclusion to his investigation. When Mendoza replied that the investigation would not be concluded until his prisoners had been tried and convicted, the viceroy looked suddenly anxious. He nevertheless invited Mendoza, Ventura, Gabriel and Necker to stay at his house once again, while Vargas's men and the Moriscos made their way back up to the mountains.

After a fine lunch of roasted peacock and almond sauce, the reasons for the viceroy's anxiety became clear when Mendoza gave him a detailed account of the investigation and everything that had taken place since they'd last met.

“My God, Mendoza,” Sástago said. “I told you your investigation would be difficult, but I didn't expect anything like this. This is real villainy. The king was preparing to send troops to put down the rebellion. There was even talk that the wedding might have to be called off.”

“There is no need for that, Your Grace. This is a conspiracy, not a rebellion. I know the names of the men responsible. And I intend to make sure that they pay the price for their crimes—from the highest to the lowest.”