LITMIR.BIZ

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to overhear by accident—in my religious duties, I had not yet heard of his little friend’s disappearance… My lord, young Pedro confessed, weeping, that he had helped his friends Juan and Luis del Quivir to murder their brother Estevan!”

      “Wait.” It is not easy to shock a father confessor—but this… “Why? How could Satan move them to such a deed?”

      “It began innocently enough, by Pedro’s account. They thought only, in youthful piety, to re-enact our Lord’s Crucifixion, and make a shroud, such as they had heard of from pilgrims. They nerved themselves to inflict that grievous pain by meditating on the piety of their intentions. They did not expect Estevan to die. Even when they uncovered him, the first time, and found him cold beneath the cloth, his brothers could not believe it. He would rise, they still insisted, between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, as our Lord rose, and this time he also would imprint his little shroud.”

      “My God!”

      “Pedro himself seemed half convinced, even making his Confession, that the miracle would yet come to pass. He saw their sin, but still expected the miracle.”

      “I…see… What penance did you give him?”

      “I told him there could be no spiritual absolution in such case until he had confessed to the secular arm as well. As far as I have heard, he has not done so. He protested at once to me that it was not his sin alone, that he could not put his friends in danger of law along with himself. I insisted that his absolution was dependent upon his confession of the crime to the alcalde, although he might choose to accuse only himself, as if he had acted alone. Still, he seems to prefer keeping the whole, unpardoned burden of his guilt, rather than bare it to the secular arm.”

      “But…when did they do it?” Don Felipe asked, remembering in bafflement that the family had gone directly from church to bed on Good Friday, and missed their youngest son already upon rising before dawn on Holy Saturday.

      “They did it on Good Friday afternoon, thinking it as holy a ritual as that enacted in every church. My lord, does this not add heresy to murder?”

      “It does,” Don Felipe replied abstractedly. “But…but all these witnesses who have come forward with their tales of seeing Estevan and his brothers in church on Good Friday afternoon?”

      “The children themselves—Luis, Juan, and Pedro—began that tale, saying they had been there together, although apart from their families, and Estevan with them. They meant to avert any doubt or suspicion that must have risen out of their absence, but Pedro himself seemed filled with wonder that others should have seen them, too. I think he believed it to be a sign that in some spiritual sense they were indeed all present in church, and that the miracle would indeed come to pass. Even now that Estevan has been found still dead, his killers may think it a sign that his sainthood lessens their guilt.”

      “It remains mysterious,” said Don Felipe. Somewhere, deep within his head, a strange, brusque voice—a woman’s?—seemed to say: Never trust your eyewitnesses. Tell people what you think they should have seen, and their memories change to order.

      Neither recognizing this voice nor understanding its message, he ignored it and more or less accepted the apparitions as some miracle resembling that of bilocation. Was not the child still a holy saint, even though martyred by fellow Catholic Christians? The Ordinary went on, searching every aspect, “They thought to make a shroud, you say? A holy relic, like that of our Lord?”

      “Their cloth was at first too large for the child. Half of it served to cover him. When they found him dead beneath it half an hour after they had laid him out, they tore away the part that was all bloody from his wounds, and left the clean second half over him, thinking to have their shroud more clearly imprinted when the miracle should come to pass on Holy Saturday night.”

      For some moments the two men sat silent, Don Felipe’s mind groping through a maze of terrible images in search of further questions. At last he told his penitent, “I can find nothing in your actions to condemn, my son.”

      “Should I not have given the boy our Lord’s forgiveness without condition?”

      “No. In such a matter, the condition you attached was right and commendable.”

      Several more reassurances, a few peccadillos of the Franciscan’s own to justify penance and absolution, and Fray Bartomeu finally took his departure, leaving his young father confessor to grapple alone with the revelation.

      If only it had come to him in any other way! The initial horror of this thing—four Christian boys playing piously at crucifixion until the chosen one died—had at first banished thoughts of Gamito and Daroca’s other Jews, their danger and what this truth would do in their behalf…if only it could be made public!

      And that it could not. Told in sacramental Confession, it was knowledge imparted by the conscience-ridden soul directly to the Lord Ihesu. Only within another Confession could it be shared, as the Franciscan had shared it. Outside this sacramental conference, both Fray Bartomeu and Don Felipe were strictly forbidden any claim to possess this knowledge in their own persons. The secret belonged to God and Pedro Choved. Young Pedro alone, as the original penitent, had the right to reveal it…the duty to reveal it, if he obeyed God’s voice as transmitted through Fray Bartomeu. And if the boy had gone to another confessor, gained absolution without Fray Bartomeu’s condition? Or if fear for his body outweighed fear for his soul? In any case, if he had not come forward yet, it seemed unlikely that he ever would. That left it to God, Who might reveal it through miracle… And why would God so bestir Himself now, when He had not done so to save or revive little Estevan?

      Lives hung upon this secret. Innocent lives, lives unjustly maligned. Among them, the life of one of Felipe’s earliest friends, his last remaining link with boyhood, one who had survived the horrors of Alhama’s capture and hardships of the journey north from Karnattah, one whose family and whose people looked to him for support and comfort. And Felipe de Alhama de Karnattah must forget as man what he had learned as priest: the knowledge that could save Gamito, might yet prove essential to save all the Jews of Daroca.

      Ah! sweet Mother of God! if only I had stayed in Italy!

      After a long time he rose. Like one stunned, he understood that High Mass would be almost over. He had missed it. No matter. Possibly men and women had seen him there, as they had seen the Holy Child and his companions on Good Friday. As though half drowning in dense fog, he made his way alone to the tribunal and sat waiting for Fra Guillaume’s return from church.

      The Dominican reached his small lodging aglow with a tranquility that would have been natural after High Mass during this holiest triduum of any other year, but today seemed out of keeping with the city’s mood. “Felipe, my friend!” he greeted the Ordinary in mild surprise. “Do you not dine with his Reverence the bishop?”

      “I have had information, brother,” Don Felipe replied, now on his feet. Somehow, in the fog that had choked him, mind and soul, since Fray Bartomeu’s Confession, he found that his decision had been formed. “Secret information, from an anonymous source, concerning a case of suspected heresy.”

      The old inquisitor heaved a sigh. “On this, of all days! Well, dine with me, and we will speak of it after our midday sleep.”

      “It is a matter of some urgency. I believe that it concerns this matter which has inflamed the city against our Jewish brethren.”

      Fra Guillaume seemed to ponder for the space of a Gloria, then smiled and shook his head. “My friend, my young friend. You have yet to learn that there is no matter so urgent that it cannot wait until after dinner and digestion. Does not the Apostle himself instruct us to take a little wine, for our stomachs’ sake? We will, however, cut our rest a little short, so as to look into this, whatever it is, without too much delay. Until then, as you value your health and mine, not another word.”

      There was no help for it. Not for our Lord Himself in Person, Don Felipe thought, would Fra Guillaume have broken his iron rule of allowing no serious talk over meals, nor would he have omitted his nap afterwards. As for the younger man, he ate and drank only as much as necessary

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