The Confusion

Leibniz excused himself so that Sophie Charlotte could scold her son. As he passed beneath the globe he saw Princess Caroline’s shoes flashing out first to one side, then the other, as she reciprocated to and fro, first towards George August, then towards Frederick William. She was singing a little nursery rhyme she had picked up from her English tutor: “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe…catch a suitor by the toe…to England or Prussia shall I go…to be made high or be laid low…eeny, meeny, miney, moe.”

Book 4 Bonanza Mexico City, New Spain SUKKOTH 1701

That Golden Sceptre which thou didst reject

Is now an Iron Rod to bruise and breake

Thy disobedience.

–MILTON, Paradise Lost

“C ARAMBA!” EXCLAIMED DIEGO DE FONSECA, “a cucaracha has fallen onto the tortillas of my wife!”

Moseh had seen it before de Fonseca had, and had jumped to his feet even before the initial Caramba! had echoed off the far wall of the prison’s courtyard. As he reached over the table, the beads of his colossal rosary-walnut-shells strung on a cowhide thong-whacked the rim of a honey-filled serving-crock. His arm shot free of its sleeve, revealing a ladder of welts and scars, some fresher than others. His shoulder-joint rumbled and popped like a barrel rolling over cobblestones. Most of the men at the table felt twinges of sympathetic pain in their own shoulders, and inhaled sharply. Moseh’s ingratiating smile hardened into a scary grimace, but he got a grip on Senora de Fonseca’s tortilla-plate and pulled it clear. “Allow me to fetch some fresh ones…”

Diego de Fonseca glanced sidelong at his wife, who had tilted her head back, reducing her chin count to a mere three, and was glaring at the net-work of vines above the table, which was vibrant with six-legged life. The Director, who was not a thin specimen either, leaned slightly towards Moseh and said, “That is most Christian of you…but we prefer our tortillas made with rich lard, and in fact have never seen them made with olive oil before-”

“I could send out an Indian, Senor Director-”

“Don’t bother, we are satiated. Besides-”

“I was just about to say it!” Jack put in. “Besides, you and the Senora get to go home tonight!”

Diego de Fonseca adjusted the set of his jaw slightly, and favored Jack with the same look his wife had aimed at the cockroach moments earlier. Fortunately, Senora de Fonseca’s attention had been drifting: “Over there, you pay such attention to cleanliness,” she observed, casting a look down an adjacent gallery, where several prisoners were sweeping the paving-stones with bundles of willow-branches. “Yet you lay out your feast with nothing to protect you from the sky, save this miserable thatching of infested vines.”

“I gather from your tone that you are bemused by our ineptitude where a senora less imbued with Christian charity would be angry at our rudeness,” Moseh said.

“Quite! Why, those fellows with the willow-branches are not so much sweeping the pavement as spanking it!”

“Those are from that batch of Jewish monks we arrested at the Dominican monastery three years ago,” said Diego.

From any other Inquisition prison warden, this might have sounded judgmental-even condemnatory. But Diego de Fonseca presided over what was widely held to be the mellowest and most easy-going Inquisition prison in the whole Spanish Empire, and he said it in mild conversational tones. Then he popped a honey-dipped pastry into his mouth.

“That explains it!” said Moseh. “Those Dominicans are so rich, each monk hires half a dozen Indians as housekeepers, and consequently they know nothing of the domestick arts.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Say, Brother Christopher! Brother Peter! Brother Diaz! There are ladies present! Try to move some dirt as long as you are sweeping the courtyard, will you?”

The three monks straightened up and glared at Moseh, then bent their backs again and began scraping dust across the stones. Clouds of volcanic ash built up and rose around their knees.

“As for this wretched covering, I can only beg you pardon, senora,” continued Moseh. “We like to lie out in this place and recuperate after a question-and-answer session with the Inquisitor, and so we have been training the vines to grow thus, to shade us from the mid-afternoon sun.”

“Then you need to give them manure, for I can clearly see stars coming out through the gaps.”

To which the obvious response was Manure!? We get no shortage of that from the priests, and give all of it back to the Inquisitor, but before Jack could say it, Moseh silenced him with a look, and said: “Insofar as the vines cover us, we thank Lord Jesus, and insofar as they don’t, we are reminded that in the end we are all dependent on the protection of God in Heaven.”