squalid rooms two houses down from his own lodgings. He wasn’t surprised to see her here. If there was any trouble or misfortune anywhere in the neighbourhood she was always the first on the scene. He sidled closer to her.
‘What’s everyone looking so thunderstruck for?’ he whispered, then, just to bait her, he added with a grin, ‘You’d think the Virgin Mary had farted in the middle of Mass.’
The old crone turned and glared furiously at him, crossing herself rapidly.
‘How dare you speak so of the Blessed Virgin? If your poor mother was alive today it would kill her to hear such wicked words on your lips.’
She hobbled around to the other side of the crowd, darting poisonous glances at him. Manuel grinned broadly at the outraged expression on her face. That would give the old witch something to complain about.
A man standing on the other side of Manuel pointed through the heads of the crowd to a notice pinned to the door of the church.
‘What’s it say?’ he demanded.
Manuel shrugged. He’d never learned to read much more than his own name, but even if he had been a scholar, at that distance it would have been impossible to make out the words.
The question was taken up by others who were unable to get close to the door. They began insisting that those at the front should either move aside or tell them what had been nailed up there. So, in scandalized tones, the ripple of the words spread back through the crowd, passing from mouth to mouth until it reached Manuel’s ears.
The Messiah has not yet come. Jesus is not the Messiah.
Manuel was as shocked as any in that crowd. It was one thing to make jokes, but what was nailed on that door was nothing short of blasphemy. Even as the words spread through the crowd, an angry buzzing began. Strangers and neighbours alike were demanding to know who could have committed such an outrage.
Manuel felt a cold shiver of unease. It never took much to inflame a crowd in Lisbon. If a few hotheads started whipping up the anger of the mob, they would turn violent in minutes. And he knew only too well whom the crowd would turn on first. Somehow, the Old Christians of Lisbon could always tell if you were a Jewish convert. They could scent the presence of a New Christian and would attack with the savagery of a pack of wild dogs.
He broke away and hurried off in the direction of the glassblowers’ works. As he scuttled through the streets he passed two more churches and saw to his disquiet the same heresy nailed to their doors and other angry mobs beginning to gather around them.
By noon everyone in the city knew that the blasphemous proclamation had been pinned not only to every church door in Lisbon, but also on the very door of the great Cathedral itself, and King João had offered a reward of 10,000 silver crusados to anyone who could discover the author of this evil.
That night when Manuel returned to his lodgings, he found the house packed to the rafters with frightened men and women. Men and women like himself who were Cristianos Nuevos , New Christians, or, as the Old Christians mockingly called them, Marranos , meaning pigs. They were Jews fled from Spain, or their descendants, who had been forced to convert to Christianity, and now practised the Catholic faith. But to the Old Christians they were filthy foreigners come here to take their jobs, their homes and their women, and no matter how much the New Christians swore they were now good Catholics, they still remained what they had always been in the eyes of the Old Christians – Christ killers.
Manuel squashed himself into the darkened doorway of one of the rooms. Jorge, the physician, was holding forth amid a crowd of men all murmuring nearly as loudly as the crowd outside the churches.
Jorge held up his hands for silence, raising his voice to make himself heard.
‘There is no cause for fear. The Pope issued a bull declaring all New Christians free and cancelling all the charges brought against us.