The Inquisitor's Wife Read Online Free PDF

hers—I’d been terrified of losing her—that she smiled indulgently, set her sewing aside, and patted her lap.
    I laid my head upon it gingerly. It was firm, not soft, and her thighbones were prominent. I looked up to see my mother smiling down at me as she stroked my head, her damp hair falling forward like a veil, lying cool upon my bare arms.
    I spent a fleeting moment of joy in my mother’s lap, listening to the sounds of older neighborhood boys as they gathered for their customary Sunday game of kickball in the street below. Behind me, from my mother’s bedroom, the servant Máriam called out: “Doña Magdalena!”
    Máriam’s voice was low and resonant in the way that great orators’ and singers’ voices are. My mother sighed and turned to look over her shoulder, reluctant to leave me; I didn’t stir but held my breath, as if by doing so, I could somehow make her stay.
    Apparently the look on Máriam’s face was urgent enough that my mother patted my shoulder briskly, asking me to rise. As she left and stepped into the bedroom, I sat up straight on my little stool and frowned at the players down in the street. Fourteen youths, almost all from the Hojedas’ parish of San Pablo, were pulling their Sunday tunics over their heads to reveal white lawn undershirts, sheer enough to show the masculine sweep and sinew of their newly muscular backs and shoulders. They rolled back the long, full sleeves of the white undershirts to reveal gloriously strong young arms. The tunics were folded and set aside, and the players divided into two teams, seven apiece. They faced each other in the street between our house and the Hojedas’; a dozen or so younger boys, too small to play, had gathered along the edges to cheer on their older brothers and cousins.
    Seventeen-year-old Gabriel was captain of the Lions—symbol of the kings of Spain—and he stood in the center of his team lineup, his hair white in the sun, the brown ball placed carefully upon the cobblestone in front of his right foot. He was the tallest boy, already barrel-chested, with massive shoulders and long, thick limbs that had sprouted almost overnight, making his head look small by comparison. What he couldn’t achieve in speed and accuracy, he made up for with solid brute force. I stared lazily down as Gabriel’s booted toe met the ball with a solid, ringing thunk and watched it fly over the heads of the Imperial Eagles, the opposite team. Against the sudden cacophony of shouts and scuffling, I heard my mother’s voice rise, panicked, in the bedroom behind me.
    “He can’t stay,” she was telling the servant, Máriam. “Make him go away at once!”
    Máriam murmured an unintelligible reply.
    “Then tell him to leave it!” my mother commanded her. “Hurry…”
    There was more, but the players’ roars drowned it out. Although the alarm in my mother’s voice troubled me, I blotted it out, unwilling to interrupt my happiness. Instead, I focused my attention on the game. One of the Lions—a short, swift, wiry boy—had just succeeded in stealing the ball from the Eagles and was kicking it through enemy territory in the direction of the goal: a pile of crumbling stone at the end of the cul-de-sac, where the cobblestone disappeared and the old olive grove began. Most likely, the stone was the last remnants of a Roman column or caretaker’s dwelling, bleached bone from centuries of exposure to the Iberian sun. I leaned forward as the Eagle’s captain, tall and spindly, wormed his way past all defenders to retake the ball, to renewed cheering.
    Heated tempers and physical violence were the only rules in this particular game. I watched as Gabriel lumbered into the other captain’s path and delivered an elbow to his head, which disoriented him enough so that Gabriel could capture the ball with the side of his large foot.
    Despite the fresh noise and excitement this generated—and despite my growing curiosity and unease over the fact that my mother had