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me?”
    â€œHe asked you a simple question, Alvero. I’ve never seen you this way before. I’ve never seen you so shaken. I don’t know what you’re afraid of.”
    â€œOf course you don’t. I wonder whether you know what the Inquisition is. We go on with our lives, laughing, singing, pretending that the world is the way it always was, but underneath we know, underneath we know that there is a thing in Spain now, called the Inquisition, and day and night we are afraid, and this whole land stinks with fear.”
    â€œWhat a thing to say, my husband. Really, what a thing to say. How can you? I don’t know how you can talk that way about Thomas. This is a man of God, who baptized our only child—”
    Alvero came close to her now and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Just one thing, my wife. Do you know why he was summoned to Seville?”
    â€œYou told me,” Maria answered primly. “King Ferdinand made him the Grand Inquisitor, the head of the Holy Inquisition. The more honour to all of us.”
    â€œMy God – do you know what you are talking about?” Alvero asked her.
    â€œThere is no need to talk like that to me. I am no fool. Of course I know what I am talking about.”
    â€œDo you know what the Inquisition is? Or is it because you know what it is that you can sit there, like a fool, and say the things you do?”
    â€œHow dare you call me a fool!”
    â€œGod help us!” Alvero exclaimed and then turned and strode out of the room.
    Meanwhile, they were all of them in Torquemada’s thoughts. Torquemada felt exalted, without fatigue and without fear. He had no desire to sleep, nor did he have any desire for company, and that night, as he often did, he walked in the pillared passageway of the cloister. The passageway was lit by intense silvery moonlight and in this moonlight, Torquemada paced the circuit of the cloister. Again and again he paced it, back and forth, filled with a strange kind of happiness at his own exaltation. It was not often that he felt exaltation. His was a sombre and oppressed personality, but now he felt alive and excited – close to God – closer to God than he had ever been before.

4
    BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING ALVERO ’ S MOOD HAD changed. Not only did a night’s sleep and the bright sunlight of a new day make a difference, but this was the morning of a business meeting that Alvero had scheduled a month before. It had long been in Alvero’s mind to make a compact between a group of merchants in Spain and groups in Italy and in the Netherlands. All three areas had completed a decade of enormous prosperity and Alvero believed that if the vast shipping capacity of the Netherlands and Milan were joined together with the military strength that the merchants of Spain could muster, a commercial triumvirate could come into being that would, in time, become a veritable empire.
    He had fallen asleep to his thoughts and fancies of what it might mean if the Italian Columbus was right, and the westward route to the Indies could be opened; and now, this morning, as he greeted his associates, Hans Van Sitten and Salo Cordoza from the city of Amsterdam, Peri Gomez and Louis Lopez, both of them from Barcelona, and, finally, Dino Aleppo from Milan, he wondered what their reaction would be – and, in a light and amusing manner, he told them what Columbus proposed. Their interest belied his manner of telling. Alvero, sitting at the end of the long refectory table, dressed in sober black velvet and white shirt, olive-skinned, darkly handsome, combining the grace of a Spanish knight and the perspicacity of a merchant, was not to be taken lightly or dismissed; and immediately he had finished, Van Sitten, the Dutchman, asked him how much the Queen needed. Alvero replied that no figure had been established but that it was proposed to equip a small fleet of anywhere from four to ten ships, well armed, well