The Inquisitor's Wife by Jeanne Kalogridis Page B

her profile to me; her lips were moving in the prayer I still remembered: Baruch atah Eloheinu …
    I stepped from the antechamber, one, two, my boot heels audible against the wood. My mother cast the briefest glance over her shoulder at me, then returned to her praying as if I’d been nothing more than a fly. Máriam too must have heard, but she ignored me altogether as she sat, legs tucked beneath her, on a green prayer rug of Moorish design. She held her dark hands up, slightly cupped, in front of her face and whispered the few words in Arabic I knew, as they had been inscribed everywhere on buildings and artwork in the city: Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim … In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful …
    For a long moment, I stood gaping as the women prayed. I told myself I had seen defiance in my mother’s gaze—and I knew without doubt that she had lied to me all these many years in order to keep me silent. That Máriam was a liar, too.
    Now that the Inquisition had come, she was silent no more.
    As I stared, I was torn between affection and rage: How dare these two lie to me for so long? Worse, how dare they expose me to their secret, forcing me to choose between my immortal soul (or worse, my dream of being accepted by the Old Christian world) and my love for them? Did they not realize how they were endangering my father?
    In the end, of course, there was really no choice. I’d known from the instant I’d looked on them what I had to do.
    *   *   *
     
    Confused, anxious, and angry, I retired early that night to my bedchamber. My mind was too agitated for sleep, so I sat at the little writing desk, lit the lamp, and tried to reread my father’s priceless copy of The Song of the Cid, skipping the battle scenes and focusing on the love of Rodrigo for his beautiful doña Jimena. The subject evoked a different sort of pain; I glanced up from my reading to stare at the winter shutters covering the window. Behind them, not far away, stood the tall stone wall that Antonio had dug through so that we could be together as children.
    I didn’t read long. A quarter hour later, the first drenching storm of winter arrived with a roar. The rain crashed down so hard that, curious, I opened the shutters and stared out at the sheets of water dropping from the sky. They swallowed the sight of the Vargases’ house, including the wall; I could see nothing but windswept, watery darkness, and pulled the shutters closed. The wind caused my reading lamp to sputter, and the growing chill near the window finally prompted me to abandon reading for bed. Even then, I couldn’t sleep, but lay thinking of Antonio, who should have returned this past June to ask for my hand. I’d waited so long for Antonio, despite his lack of letters, that at seventeen I was almost too old for a bride.
    I huddled beneath the covers and listened for an hour to the storm. When it let up quite abruptly, leaving in its wake a profound quiet, I was suddenly able to hear the soft knock at my chamber door. My mother stood on the threshold, still dressed in the blue-green velvet gown with its stiff verdugado ; her fringed white shawl was gone, and her expression was calm, her tone reasonable.
    “Marisol,” she said, “there’s something I must ask you, but you must swear to me that you’ll never tell your father.”
    “Mamá,” I countered evenly, “you know that I can’t agree to that.”
    “I’m not asking you to keep secret what you saw tonight,” she said.
    I let her in and silently closed the door. She looked up in frustration at a portrait above my mantel—one of me when I was only seven, an unsmiling, dark-haired, dainty child with too-large eyes, wearing a high collar and a long strand of pearls, like an infanta . “God has cursed me,” she said, only half teasing, “with a daughter as stubborn as her mother.”
    I didn’t smile.
    “It’s true that I’ve drawn the Inquisition’s attention,” Magdalena said, “because