Wolves in Winter Read Free Page B

ears, which she would take out and let me play with as I waited for my father, dangling my feet in the blue-tiled fountain in her courtyard when it was hot or sitting snugly by
the fire in winter on a settle covered all over with flowers worked in silk. Adara lived in a fine house with several other ladies, and I thought that she must be very rich, even though she had no
husband.
    Her name in our tongue meant ‘virgin’. I asked my father once why she wore no habit, if she was a nun, and he smiled and said she belonged to a convent of a sort, but that he did no
business there. That wasn’t true, I said, because he took powders and salves to Adara that he made up in the back of our shop, and I had seen her handing him pesos to put in his purse.
    Tonight, though, Adara had not come for almond water or the bitter black paste my father forbad me touch. There was an urgency in her voice that roused me to listen more attentively.
    ‘It’s too late,’ I heard my father say.
    ‘If you come with me now?’
    ‘No, they have it. They have the
grimoire
. I was betrayed. But you will do as we agreed?’
    ‘Very well.’
    ‘I have packed them for her. It’s a poor enough dowry, God knows.’
    ‘I will care for her.’
    My father came up the stairs, treading slowly. He carried a candle and my dress lay over his arm.
    ‘It’s time to put this on, pretty one.’ He smiled, his teeth showing white in the grey of his beard. It makes me lose my breath now when I think what that smile must have cost
him.
    ‘Papa, what’s happening? Are we going somewhere special? With Adara? The crown isn’t dry.’
    ‘Come here, my little love. Something special, yes. Like a pageant. And you will be the most important player.’
    Then he told me what I had to do, and opened the shutters wide.
    *
    It seemed a long time that I waited, hunched on the windowsill. It was icy, and I tried not to shiver, feeling the blood drawing towards my heart and my hands grow numb where
they clutched the window frames. They came across the square, as Papa said they would, a line of torches, yellow light glancing on hooded faces and the fat crucifixes chained on their breasts. That
was the first moment that I was afraid. The men stopped before our door.
    ‘Samuel Benito. Samuel Benito! In the name of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, you are under arrest.’
    Aside from the river of flame beneath my window, the square was entirely dark. No one would stir, no one would come out to defend my father. Peeping over the sill, balancing the wax flowers my
father had wound in my hair with one cold-clumsy hand, I watched him step into the circle of light. He wore his best cloak, but his head was bare. The men fanned out, encircling him, and I saw that
those in the front ranks were not monks, as their hoods made them seem, but soldiers, the hilts of their short swords visible beneath the black robes like quartz in a pebble.
    ‘Does this belong to you?’ One of them was holding a fat square parcel, which I knew contained a book.
    ‘It did. I sold it some time ago. I am a bookseller, sir.’ My father’s voice was low and courteous.
    There was a muttering amongst the group. I caught the words ‘heretic’ and ‘
morisco
’, but my father’s stillness had unsettled them, somehow. They had expected
a fight. He spoke again.
    ‘I trust I am to come with you, sir?’
    I heard Adara move into the room behind me. I could smell the oil on the two rush torches she carried. She knelt before the stove.
    ‘Are you ready?’
    ‘Yes.’ I spoke from a dream, ensorcelled by the scene outside.
    ‘They will burn the house. We must be swift. No tears, do you understand me?’
    I nodded, my eyes fixed on my father as she dipped the torches to the flame in its iron cage.
    ‘Now.’
    As the light flared I scrambled up on the windowsill, flapping at the red fabric around my legs. My hair was crowned with a circlet of briar roses, retrieved by my father from