Read Online The Inquisitor's Wife by Jeanne Kalogridis - Free Book Online Page B

and wife, I forced myself to lift my black veil. The world was suddenly too close, too bright; I yearned to cover myself again, but instead I turned toward my husband.
    My eyes came to rest at the level of his heart, hidden beneath the matte black of his wool tunic. I tilted back my head to look up at his large, pallid face and his green eyes, as clear as colored glass and full of abject panic. I instinctively recoiled, but he lowered himself from the waist—keeping a respectable distance between us—and abruptly pressed his mouth against mine.
    His lips were soft, but their touch reignited my rage and sorrow. I squeezed my eyes shut and fought the violent urge to pull away, to run from all memory of the last week. Yet I remained motionless as Gabriel’s chaste, timid kiss lingered. He took a half step closer until I could feel the sudden heat of him on my cheeks; his lips pushed more insistently against mine, and I felt him tremble faintly.
    I opened my eyes and pulled away, thinking of the sweating young bully in the street, his expression one of entrancement, his soaked linen undershirt clinging to the muscles of his broad back and the arm wrapped around my beloved Antonio’s neck. Blotchy scarlet blooms on his cheeks, my husband straightened with a gasp, then glanced surreptitiously at my father, as if worried his lapse of dignity had been noted.
    I couldn’t look directly at my father, but from the corner of my eye, I saw candlelight glint off his tears. I hated him so much at that moment that I successfully repressed my own—some of which sprang not from grief over my mother or from leaving my father’s house, but from the memory of my friend Antonio, fourteen years old, hanging upside down by his knees from the branch of a great olive tree in my father’s sprawling orchard. It was the week after his fight with Gabriel, and his bottom lip was still faintly swollen and bruised.
    “Will you stay with me forever, Marisol?” he had asked, grinning, his golden red hair hanging in a thick straight shock below his bright flushing face. “Will you marry me?”
    At eleven, I was an agile climber. I’d sat straddling the branch beside him, my short skirts tucked about me, my bare legs dangling down.
    “You don’t want to marry me,” I’d answered, rather crossly. “I’m a conversa. All our children would be considered conversos. ”
    “Nonsense!” he exclaimed, with genuine scorn. “You’re New Christian, I’m Old—and together…” Grinning, he pulled himself up and gave my arm a quick, playful pinch. Antonio always smiled so easily. “We could make a bunch of little Christians!”
    I shrieked in mock torment and swiped at him. I was laughing when I spoke, even though the words caused real pain. “Some say my blood is tainted.”
    “No more than mine,” he said, growing serious. “After all, wasn’t Adam Jewish?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
    “Yes, he was. He was in the Old Testament. And we’re all descended from Adam. Jesus himself was a Jew. So how can anyone’s blood be tainted?”
    I loved Antonio so.
    *   *   *
     
    Now, in the chapel, the priest made a shooing gesture at Gabriel, who gathered some confidence and took my arm firmly, formally. I felt childish panic at the realization that I had to take his arm because I was now his wife and required to obey him.
    As Gabriel and I stepped down from the altar to rejoin my father, I told myself that I should have run away, just as Magdalena had urged me on that last terrible night.
    I pointedly avoided my father’s embrace and tried to compose my expression pleasantly as the priest accepted a purse from my father and set to work snuffing out the candles.
    “Please take good care of her,” my father said softly to Gabriel, who nodded.
    As the candles were extinguished one by one, the gloom deepened. I turned my back to the Madonna and her wooden tear and rested my hand lightly in the crook of Gabriel’s arm as we set