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a different world—of a village smaller than Seville but crowded with students from all over Europe, eager to study at the three-hundred-year-old university. The winters were colder, sometimes killing the flowers; the summers were milder, but—and this he only hinted at—the atmosphere was far less temperate as far as conversos were concerned. Salamanca lay in the northerly province of León, where few Jews had settled, and the population was resoundingly Old Christian.
    I paid it little attention; so long as I had Antonio’s letters, I was happy enough to believe his heart and mind would never change toward me. And indeed, when he returned to Seville after two years, for his father’s funeral, he was just the same and kissed me with just as much passion.
    But sometime after he returned to Salamanca, his letters abruptly stopped coming. I wrote him again and again but received no reply. Months passed, and then a year; I finally penned a letter stating that if I did not hear from him within eight weeks, I would consider our engagement broken off.
    No reply ever came, although others in Seville had heard from him and knew that he was well and still at the university. Bitterly, I took the sapphire ring from my finger, hid it away, and forbade my parents to speak of Antonio.
    *   *   *
     
    In the Chapel of the Fifth Anguish, I had finished my vows and stood with my hands steepled—the gold wedding band alien and cold upon my finger—and my head bowed, while the priest asked God to make me fertile in order to give Gabriel many sons. I silently informed God that I wanted no part of it. When the priest began to recite the Lord’s Prayer— “Pater noster, qui es in caelis”— I repeated it calmly along with the others, but I began to panic at the realization that the service was coming to an end. I was almost Gabriel’s wife, and while I’d submitted to the marriage out of pure spite toward my father and myself, my fury had ebbed to the point that I understood I was letting my fate take a stupid, wretched turn, one that couldn’t easily be undone. My voice began to shake, and I lowered it to a whisper.
    What would my mother have thought, if she’d lived to see me marry Gabriel Hojeda? Had she known that her death would bring about such an unhappy union, surely she would have spared herself. Like me, she despised the Hojedas, especially Gabriel’s older brother Alonso, who became head of the Dominican monastery and was renowned across Spain for his preaching against “the filth of Judaism, whose taint is so strong in the blood that no convert, however sincere, can overcome it.” We were agents of the Devil, Fray Hojeda said, and used lizards and serpents and the blood of Old Christian babies in magical rituals in order to cover up the stench that normally exuded from Jewish flesh.
    When the Queen of Castile, Isabel, came to visit Seville a few years earlier with her husband, Fernando the King of Aragón, Fray Hojeda told Her Majesty that the conversos of Seville were all off practicing obscene rituals in their homes. Together with the Jews, the friar said, conversos were plotting to destroy Christianity. Hojeda would have far preferred another violent pogrom, but as Isabel’s hold on Castile was still tenuous and she wanted no more civil unrest, he suggested an Inquisition, beginning in Seville.
    A few months ago, in September, rumors began that the Inquisitors were already in the city among us, spying on conversos and soliciting denunciations. Much to Fray Hojeda’s disappointment, he was not chosen to participate in the very process he had instigated, although he had hoped to be appointed its head.
    And here I, the dark-haired, dark-eyed child of a converso mother, was marrying his youngest brother.
    “… sed libera nos a malo. Amen.”
    The last line of the prayer died on my tongue; I couldn’t say Amen. Instead, I raised my head for the priest’s blessing, and when he pronounced Gabriel and me man