“It looks like the one Eliza sent me in New Spain…” Jack blinked and shook his head. “The one we opened and read on the ship…which was obviously a fake...but that one hasn’t even been opened.”
“Poor Jack. This is the true letter that was delivered to you in New Spain, and that you sealed up inside van Hoek’s book-chest. But it was not sent by Eliza. It was sent by Elizabeth de Obregon. That fickle bitch smuggled it out of the convent where she was being held in Mexico City. Then later, when we were in Vera Cruz—”
“You took it out of the crate where I’d stored it, and substituted a fake one you’d written. Van Hoek complained that the caulking was badly done…. I should’ve suspected tampering.”
“I am a better forger than a caulker, it would seem,” de Gex said.
“The forgery worked,” Jack allowed.
“Monsieur Esphahnian listened to your talk of Eliza for years, and knew every detail of the story by heart…without his information, I could never have composed that letter.”
De Gex broke the seal on the letter of Elizabeth de Obregon. “It would weigh on my conscience, Jack, if I did not read you your mail. This is written in florid Spanish…. I will translate it into English. She begins with the usual complicated salutation and apology…then complains of persistent nightmares that have plagued her ever since she arrived in New Spain, and prevented her from getting a single good night’s sleep. In these nightmares, she is on the Manila Galleon, in the middle of the Pacific, when it falls into the hands of the Inquisition. There is no mutiny and no violence…one day the Captain is simply gone, as if he had fallen overboard when no one was looking, and the officers are in irons, confined to their cabins, but none of them knows it yet because they are all in a drugged sleep. A man in a black robe has seized control of the ship…like any other Inquisitor, he has a staff of familiars, who until now have been disguised as merchants’ servants. They have been gathering information about their employers’ blasphemies and heresies. And, too, he has bailiffs, alguaciles, who’ve been disguised as ordinary seamen but who are now armed with pistols, whips, and blunderbusses, and are not slow to use them against anyone who challenges the authority of the man in the black robe…. She goes on, Jack, to narrate this nightmare (she calls it a nightmare) in considerable detail, but much of it is well-known to you, who have such an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Inquisition. Suffice it to say that the Holy Office carried out its duties exactingly on that ship, and many of the merchants aboard were discovered to be Jews. Really, the entire Galleon was a nest of vipers, a ship of infamous degradation…”
“Is that what she wrote, or are you ‘translating’ a bit freely?”
“But even as he was decorating the yard-arms with dangling merchants, giving them the strappado so that they would unburden themselves of their sins, this black-robe was keeping lookouts posted for any sign of Minerva.”
“Does she explain the firing of the signal-cannon?”
“The hereticks mutinied. They fired the cannon in an attempt to summon help. There was general warfare—the black-robe was driven belowdecks…”
“Where he kindled a fire, to make an auto da fé of the entire ship.”
“When Elizabeth de Obregon woke aboard Minerva, the first thing she saw was that same black-robe staring her in the face. With opium and with clever arguments he induced her to believe that the burning of the Galleon had been an accident, and that now, on Minerva, they were prisoners of the hereticks, who would kill the black-robe if they knew him to be a Jesuit. After that they would make her their whore. So she played the role that the black-robe devised for her…but after recuperating in Mexico City, and suffering diverse tortures from want of opium, and coming out from the influence of the black-robe, these nightmares had begun. She decided that they were not nightmares but true memories, and that all the black-robe’s doings must have been part of a plan having something to do with Minerva, and something to do with the gold of Solomon, which Minerva‘s owners had stolen from the ex-Viceroy.”
“And she wrote to warn us of this? That was a noble act on the lady’s part,” Jack mused, “but I cannot imagine why she cared whether we lived or died.”
“She was of a converso family,” de Gex said. “She was a Jewess.”
“I cannot help but notice you are using the past tense.”
“She lies in a pauper’s grave outside Mexico City. The Inquisition there, so corrupt and pusillanimous, gave her nothing more than routine treatment. She died of some pestilence that was sweeping through the prison. But one day I will see her burned in effigy in a great auto da fé in St. James’s Park, Jack. You’ll be there, too—you’ll put the torch to her pyre and pray the rosary while her effigy burns.”
“If you can arrange an auto da fé in Westminster, I’ll do that,” Jack promised.