Read Online The Portuguese Affair by Ann Swinfen - Free Book Online Page B

mother. ‘Have you brought Jaime? He has been gone so long, so long.’
    Then she started muttering to herself and rocking there on the floor, clutching a bundle of clothes to her. We stepped back to the door.
    ‘Poor creature,’ said my mother. ‘Her wits are wandering. I think they must have taken Jaime away for ever. Come over here, Caterina, away from the draught. We’ll gather some of this straw together and sit on it.’
    ‘It’s horrible,’ I said, ‘filthy. We can’t sit on that.’
    ‘It is better than cold stone,’ she said brusquely. ‘If you have nothing worse to suffer than dirty straw, God will truly have spared you.’
    Reluctantly I did as I was bid. The straw was infested with lice and fleas which were soon crawling over my shuddering flesh, but my earlier tiredness suddenly rolled over me again as I sat there amongst the stinking straw. I found myself lying with my head in my mother’s lap, and slept.
    I suppose it was morning, or some time the next day, when they brought us a bowl of slops, some stale bread, and a jug of muddy water. The old woman seemed not to want anything, but my mother persuaded her to take a little. Her name, she said, was Francesca, and she did not know how long she had been in the prison. It was certainly months, perhaps even years. Her talk rambled still, but she did not seem as crazed as she had in the night. She had been brought here with her son, who was thirteen, accused of Judaizing, and put to the question. They had taken Jaime away and she was still waiting for him to return. They had stripped him first, and it was his clothes she kept always beside her. I saw my mother take note of this, and I realised what she was thinking, for I was shivering in my thin shift. I did not want to wear a dead boy’s clothes, which had mouldered here perhaps for years, but I was very cold.
    They left us alone for several days. I could not be sure, but it must have been nearly a week. By then my mother had broached the subject of the clothes to Francesca, who became frantic and refused.
    ‘But Jaime can have them again when he returns,’ my mother pleaded. ‘You see how cold my son is. Look, I will give you this gold earring for the use of them until then.’ She held up one of my gold tear-drops.
    Francesca laughed wildly. ‘What use is gold to me? Keep your gold.’
    She would not part with the clothes, for which I was partly grateful and partly regretful.
    When next a guard brought our food, I heard my mother whispering to him, and the following day he brought cheese and figs and new bread and wind-dried ham and a small flask of wine. I saw my mother hand him one of my earrings, and I started forward, my stomach groaning in expectation of the food, but my mother batted my hand away.
    ‘Now, Francesca,’ she said winningly. ‘You see all this good food? It shall all be yours, in exchange for the loan of Jaime’s clothes to my son here.’
    Francesca fought with herself and her hunger for an hour at least before at last she agreed, handing over the rancid, sweat-stained garments, and huddled in the corner, muttering over the food. Curling my lip with distaste, I pulled on a pair of breeches the colour of horse dung and a grey tunic whose frayed sleeves hung down past my hands. At least my own shift protected me from contact with them about my body. Our long confinement in the dark cell had caused my eyes to adjust to the scant light, and I could see that I might be able to pass for a boy.
    ‘We must choose a name for you,’ said my mother, ‘and use it even when we are alone. Something pious and Christian.’
    ‘Christoval,’ I said. It was the first boy’s name that came into my head.
    ‘Christoval Alvarez.’ She tried it on her tongue. ‘Yes, that will do very well.’
    I looked enviously to the dark corner where Francesca was mumbling over the food. She did not appear to be eating it. Instead she had made it into a pile and was crooning to herself.
    It became