The Devils of Cardona Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œDon’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.”
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œGo 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
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. 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