The Devils of Cardona Read online

  Such murderers deserved to lose their lives. But this case was different. Even when pronouncing sentence, he remembered the fights from his own university days and thought how easily he could have been in the student’s place. It was luck, not judgment, that had saved him, because when men were drunk and brandished daggers at each other, the outcome was never predictable. The previous evening he had visited the student in his cell according to the usual custom, together with the priest, the prosecutor and the alguacil—the constable—who had made the arrest, and he brought the condemned man the customary biscuit, sweets and wine. A more unlikely murderer would be hard to find. The student had been studying philosophy and law, just as Mendoza once had done, and his parents had hoped for great things from him. The young man spoke in a soft, squeaky voice, and his eyes were red from sleeplessness and tears, as he expressed his regret at having broken his parents’ hearts and thrown away his friend’s life and his own through a combination of hot blood and too much wine. With more money and connections or a title, he might have been able to procure a lighter punishment by going above the heads of Mendoza and his colleagues, but the student’s family had not even been able to gain an appeal, and now the time for a reprieve had passed.

  At seven o’clock, Gabriel brought him a bowl of maize porridge, accompanied by raisins, dates and a glass of almond milk, and drew back the curtains. “A good day for a hanging, sir,” he observed, looking out at the cloudless sky.

  Mendoza clicked his tongue in disapproval. “An execution isn’t something to joke about, boy.”

  “Sorry, sir, I wasn’t thinking.” Gabriel laid the tray on the bed. “May I ask a question, sir?”

  Mendoza drained the almond milk in a single gulp. “Go ahead.”

  “Have you ever sentenced someone to death and found out afterward that he was innocent?”

  “I never sentenced anyone who hadn’t confessed first.”

  “But didn’t some of them confess under torture?”

  “Yes. But the confession isn’t valid unless they confirm it afterward. And I have never sentenced anyone who I didn’t believe was guilty.”

  “But isn’t it possible that a suspect could confess under torture and then ratify his confession afterward—not because he was guilty but because he didn’t want to be tortured again?”

  Mendoza agreed that this was a possibility.

  “And it’s also possible that the witnesses who testified against that person might be lying?”

  “Of course. The law is an imperfect instrument.”

  “But if that happened and the man you arrested was executed, would that also be God’s will?”

  “If God allowed it to happen, it must be,” Mendoza conceded warily.

  “Because otherwise it would mean that God had made a mistake, wouldn’t it?”

  “Be careful, boy.” Mendoza looked severely but affectionately at the tousled black hair and the dark, intelligent eyes. “Saying something like that in this house is one thing, but outside these walls it’s quite a different matter. Some thoughts are best left inside your head. Go and get dressed now—and dress well. A man will die today.”

  Gabriel bowed and left the room. Mendoza finished his breakfast and dressed with special care, entirely in black apart from the white ruff and cuffs protruding from the silk-lined doublet and slashed-velvet jerkin that he wore over it, its collar left open in the Flemish style, with his sword and felt cap and long judge’s robe reaching down to his buckled shoes. Outside in the hallway, Gabriel was already waiting, looking suitably somber in brown and dark green, as Magdalena emerged from the kitchen in her apron to inspect him.

  “Very distinguished,” she said approvingly. “Like a young judge. Señor, if I may.” She reached up and straightened Mendoza’s ruff. “You need a wife to do these things.”

  “And why would I need a wife when I already have you?”

  “Ay, Don Bernardo.” Magda sighed and shook her head. “A judge can’t marry his maid!”

  “And why not?” he teased her.

  “Por Dios, stop. I’m old enough to be your mother. Now, go.” She looked at Gabriel and shook her head. “Though why you want to see something like this . . .”

  “If Gabriel wants to work as a scrivener, he needs to know what the law requires,” Mendoza said firmly.

  “But he’s just a boy!”

  “He’s old enough.” Mendoza took his stick from its resting place near the door and went downstairs. Outside, the sereno had gone and the sunlight was spreading across the fine red roofs, illuminating the white window frames and black iron balconies on the upper floors as they walked along the cobbled street, past sprawled bodies that might have been drunken revelers or dead and sleeping beggars, past carriages that emanated a fleeting whiff of perfume that mingled with the smell of horse dung and excrement from the chamber pots emptied during the night, past pedestrians in their best clothes heading for the execution ground and members of the Penitential Confraternity of Valladolid in their long gray cassocks and black hoods, already collecting alms for the student’s soul.

  The execution was due to take place at ten o’clock, and by the time they reached the prison, a considerable crowd had already gathered that included judges, magistrates and constables, the bishop of Valladolid, members of the clergy, relatives of the accused and the deceased and the usual morbid onlookers who were always attracted to such spectacles for reasons Mendoza had never understood.

  At nine o’clock they brought out the prisoner, dressed in a white open-necked smock and black hose and the blue cap that would secure him indulgences in his passage through eternity. At ten minutes past, he was mounted on the waiting donkey and the halter was placed around his neck, while the crucifix was bound to his hands. Two members of the fraternity began to beat on their tambours, and the somber procession set off in a slow, stately rhythm toward the Campo Grande, fronted by a hooded brother hoisting a large crucifix. Mendoza’s face was impassive, his stick tapping the ground as he limped along beside Gabriel and Constable Johannes Necker, the arresting officer, while the two monks accompanying the donkey urged the condemned man to accept his death with Christian courage and due penitence.

  The student was clearly struggling to do this, and he began half moaning, half praying when some passersby made the sign of the cross at his approach. More spectators joined the procession as they drew closer to the park, where a large crowd was already waiting. At the sight of the scaffold and the executioner, the student’s legs buckled, and he had to be dragged up onto the platform, crying and protesting, still holding the crucifix bound to his hands. At ten o’clock precisely, the executioner released the trap upon the sound of the first church bell. Mendoza saw Gabriel flinch as the student plummeted downward, twitching and jerking before hanging limply from the rope, where he would remain until the Penitential Brothers were allowed to take the body down and prepare it for burial the following day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  he king’s justice had been done, and the body dangling from the rope beneath the blue Castilian sky was there to proclaim the fact to the relatives of his victim and former friend and to anyone else who thought to defy the laws of God and man. Gabriel was staring at the gallows with a horrified expression when Mendoza turned and looked at him intently.

  “Don’t ever throw away your life like that, boy!” he said. “That student gave death a free gift because he didn’t think about the consequences of his actions beforehand.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gabriel looked puzzled by his urgency, but Mendoza was not willing to explain to his page that he himself had once stabbed a fellow student in a tavern brawl and nearly killed him.

  “Go home,” Mendoza said. “Don’t bother with Mass today. We’ll talk later.”

  Gabriel nodded and walked slowly away through the crowd, looking deep in thought. Some of the bystanders were talking animatedly about the hanging and
the crime that had caused it, and Mendoza heard one man criticize the student’s abject collapse on the scaffold, as though discussing an actor’s performance in a comedia. Mendoza would have liked to have gone home with Gabriel, but Mass was also part of his obligations, and he knew that his absence would be noticed.

  The Church of San Pablo was packed, and all the dignitaries and officials who had attended the execution were present to hear a Mass that was even more solemn than usual. Bishop Haro had clearly written his sermon with a view to the execution. He quoted from Exodus 21:12, that whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death, and he insisted that this obligation applied to young and old, to those who killed with prior intention and those who did so in the heat of passion. Because God’s laws were immutable and weakness and youth were not sufficient justification for any exception. Mendoza was not convinced by this argument, but Haro soon worked himself into a veritable lather of emotion, his arms waving and his voice rising and falling in the familiar dramatic cadences as he told the congregation that evil was in the act and its consequences rather than in the intention, that the laws of the Crown were also God’s laws and that obedience to both was the only sure path to virtue and salvation.

  The sermon provoked even more histrionic sighs than usual from the female congregants, many of whom, Mendoza knew, had already strayed from the path of virtue and sighed loudest in an attempt to disguise the fact. This response seemed only to galvanize Haro to new flights of emotion. Mendoza was unimpressed. He generally preferred sermons with calmer and more reasoned arguments or theological questions to chew on to Haro’s melodramatic oratory, and he was uncomfortably conscious of the presence of Elena and her husband a few rows in front of him.

  He was pleased to observe that she was not sighing, because there was only one place where he liked to hear her do that, and it was not in church. He continued to glance furtively at the black mantilla as the bishop’s voice droned on. Her piety was oddly exciting, and he felt a guilty but not unpleasant stirring of desire at the thought of the thick red hair and caramel skin that her prim church clothes concealed. He would have preferred not to linger when the service was over, but propriety and the dignity of his office obliged him to make his exit slowly as the congregation filed out of the church.

  He and Elena had often arranged their liaisons after Mass, whether verbally or by passing notes, and to some extent it was better to speak to her when her husband was present, in order to avoid generating malicious rumors among those who fed on such things, even if these meetings demanded a talent for deception that he was not always confident he possessed. Elena, on the other hand, was not at all discomfited by such occasions, and he sensed that she rather enjoyed the element of theater and subterfuge that they required. He stood talking to two of his colleagues and watched out of the corner of his eye as she maneuvered herself and her husband inexorably through the congregants toward them, pausing briefly to pay her respects to the bishop and the grandees until she finally came alongside him.

  “Good morning, Licenciado Mendoza,” she said. “A stirring sermon today, I thought. Bishop Haro had fire on his tongue.”

  Mendoza bowed and doffed his cap graciously. “He did indeed, Doña Elena. Good day, Don César.”

  The procurador Izarra smiled his usual supercilious and condescending smile, as though he were looking down on the whole world from a great height, and Mendoza immediately felt a little less guilty. Izarra was one of the most successful attorneys in Valladolid, and there were those who predicted that he would one day become president of the Chancery and buy his way into the nobility whose interests he had served so diligently. If so, it would not be a reward for ability or integrity, and Izarra had an irritating tendency to behave as if he had already achieved his promotion.

  “Justice was well served this morning, Mendoza,” he said in his faintly nasal whine. “And well attended, too. You must be pleased.”

  Such crass observations were typical of Izarra, who often seemed to be mocking everything, including his own wife. Though he dealt with litigation and civil law suits, he was known for his fondness for the death penalty, and Mendoza had no doubt that he would have strung up as many people as necessary to assist his upward progress if he had chosen criminal law instead.

  “It wasn’t a particularly difficult or significant case,” Mendoza said, knowing that Izarra knew this already.

  “Well, they all count for something.”

  Mendoza nodded politely and wondered once again what Elena was doing with such a husband, who regarded the death of a man as nothing more than another career milestone and an opportunity to be noticed.

  “The Fanini troupe will be giving a private performance at our house this Thursday, Licenciado, on their way back to Florence,” Elena said matter-of-factly. “There will be music. Will you be able to attend and play for us?”

  Her tone suggested that it was an issue of complete indifference either way, and the first-person plural was superfluous, since her husband did not share Elena’s fondness for the arts. She was good at this, Mendoza thought, perhaps too good, because a woman who could deceive her own husband so effortlessly was capable of doing the same to any man.

  “It would be my pleasure, Doña Elena,” he replied. “Duty permitting.”

  “Of course.” Elena gave the faintest of smiles behind her mantilla and continued her onward progress through the crowd toward her waiting carriage. Mendoza hurried quickly back to the Plaza Mayor with a feeling of relief and also anticipation at the prospect of an evening of theater, music and lovemaking—the perfect antidote to the squalid spectacle that had taken place in the Campo Grande earlier. The square had long since recovered from the great fire of 1561. That same year the king announced his decision to move the court from Valladolid to Toledo and then to Madrid, and there were those who thought that the city would die as a consequence. But the rebuilt plaza was once again pullulating with people enjoying the spring sunshine, from priests and friars, nuns, groups of students horsing around, to couples and families strolling with their children, to noble hidalgos and the occasional grandee showing off his wealth and status.

  Even though he was not yet on duty, Mendoza instinctively scanned the crowd for signs of illegal activity, from purse snatchers and pickpockets to shell gamers and card tricksters, vagabonds from other towns and child beggars over the age of five to whores wearing gold or silver. He already knew many potential offenders by sight, and there was no sign of any of them this morning. On the far side of the square in the direction of the Plaza Zorrilla, he saw two women in black mantillas who were obviously soliciting, even though it was Sunday and public women were not allowed to ply their trade in the main square.

  Vice and crime were everywhere, seeping through every pore of the city, despite the veneer of virtue and respectability with which polite society surrounded itself, from the grubbiest slum to the richest palace, and it was his job as one of the four alcaldes de crimen—criminal judges—in the Royal Audience and Chancery of Valladolid to prevent it. But first he had arranged to meet Constable Velasco at the lockup.

  He found Velasco dictating the results of the night’s patrol to the scrivener, interrupting himself to give Mendoza a quick summary: two murders and five stabbings, a violation of house arrest by the son of a hidalgo who had previously breached his terms, a sword fight in which two men had been seriously wounded, a brandy-house brawl in which one man had had a broken bottle rammed into his face and lost an eye, and a burglary. Only one of the murders had a culprit. The other had taken place in the street, during either a robbery or possibly a contract killing. In the course of the night, they had made six arrests. Most of this activity had taken place in the poorer districts away from the city center, but one woman had been tied up and her house robbed only a few streets away.

  “Only robbed, I hope?”

  “It seems so, Your Honor,” Velasco replied. “The lady in questio
n says they were very well mannered—even when they entered her bedroom.”

  “So chivalry is not dead. Well, I suppose we should go and speak to her and get some more details. Have the preliminary reports delivered to my office first thing tomorrow.”

  “Can’t we let some of the prisoners go, sir? The cells will be full if we make any more arrests today.”

  “Then you’ll have to make room.”

  Just then the door opened and one of Judge Saravia’s messengers appeared and announced that he wished to see Mendoza at his house immediately. Mendoza did not usually receive such requests, let alone on Sundays. The president of the Chancery was one of those judges for whom the law was useful only insofar as it made him rich, whether through the offices and favors he received from the king and his ministers or the payments and bribes that he was rumored to have extracted from his clients. The fact that there were many others like him did not make such behavior any more acceptable to Mendoza, and he knew that the antipathy was mutual.

  • • •

  MENDOZA’S CURIOSITY was aroused still further when he saw outside his house the splendid walnut carriage, whose corners were embossed with silver filigree. The carriage was accompanied by an escort of ten soldiers and servants, who were grandly turned out in gleaming morions, chest armor and identical pale blue smocks that attracted numerous stares from curious passersby.