he turned and hurled the torch as far away from the pyre as his strength would allow. It crashed on to the flagstones and continued to burn there, as Sebastian stalked back to the dais.
The crowd gasped. For a moment no one moved. Finally the officer retrieved the torch and looked helplessly at the Inquisitor-General, plainly uncertain what to do next. The Inquisitor’s face was a portrait of undisguised rage. For a moment he looked as if he was going to wrench the torch out of the officer’s hands and light the pyre himself. You could see he was itching to burn these heretics, but that was the one thing he did not have the power to do.
The crowd started up a rhythmic mocking chant – Burn them! Burn them! – stamping their feet and clapping their hands. The king’s great-uncle rose from his throne and almost leapt from the royal dais. His red robes flying out behind him, he strode rapidly across the square. He seized the torch with one hand, whilst with the other he struck such a blow with his leather-gloved fist that he lifted the officer off his feet and sent him sprawling on the ground a yard or more away. The Regent lifted the torch high above his head, then thrust it into the tarred sticks, as viciously as if he was thrusting a dagger into a man’s body. The wood caught at once, and flames clawed up into the black sky. The crowd roared and cheered.
The fire surrounded the box of bones that the young girl had placed on the pyre. For several minutes the box sat in the centre of the blaze, unscathed, like a phoenix in its nest, then it burst into flames and was consumed.
It seemed a lifetime before the flames reached the back of the pyre, where the living prisoners were tied. They writhed in the scorching heat, watching the flames creep closer to them, waiting for the orange tongues to dart out towards the hems of their robes and lick up around their bodies.
I had never in my life prayed for someone’s death, but I did so now. I prayed that Jorge and the woman and the young man would be suffocated by the smoke before the flames touched them. Was it blasphemy to pray that heretics should be spared pain? I never knew if my prayers were answered, for by then the flames at the front were too high, the smoke too dense for me to see when they died. If they could have screamed through the leather gags, no one would have heard them for the cheering and insane bellows of laughter from the crowd.
I pretended it was smoke that made the tears run down my face, but I don’t think Dona Ofelia believed me.
Belém, Portugal Ricardo
Lure – a piece of padded wood, to which meat and feathers have been bound, which is swung on a line to attract the hawk to the falconer.
‘Senhor Ricardo da Moniz, at your service,’ I announced.
I swept off my green feathered cap and bowed low, kissing Dona Lúcia’s plump jewelled hand. Pio, my diminutive pet monkey, standing on my shoulder, doffed his miniature cap and bowed in imitation of me. Dona Lúcia simpered at us both.
Sweet Jesu, that ruby in her ring was the size of a pigeon’s egg! I could hardly bear to tear my lips away from it. All right, so maybe it was not quite that large, but where’s the harm in embellishing a little? The point is that it was as plain as a nipple on a whore that Dona Lúcia was elderly, wealthy and best of all a widow, with no one to lavish her money on except herself and her overstuffed lapdog.
‘Won’t you sit with me, Senhor Ricardo?’ she cooed, patting the silk cushion next to her on her seat under the arbour.
Ricardo – it has a debonair ring to it, don’t you think? I’m quite proud of that one. The name came to me on the spur of the moment in the fish market when I first encountered Dona Lúcia’s adorable little maid, with breasts like a couple of soft ripe peaches and such a fetching little dimple in her right cheek. Senhor Ricardo, she repeated when I told her, and the syllables purred delightfully in her slim white throat.
Anyway, it’s a damn sight better than Cruz, which my benighted parents thrust upon me. What on earth possessed them to name their youngest son