Free The Inquisitor's Wife by Jeanne Kalogridis

off down the long dark aisle. My father followed us in silence. I struggled against the painful tightening that seized my throat down to my heart, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from filling. I fastened my gaze on the faintly glowing archway leading out to the vestibule, where Gabriel and my father had left the lanterns; just to the right of the arched doorway stood the white stone font of Holy Water, gray and indistinct in the dimness.
    Beside it, something stirred. I blinked, letting the tear spill to clear my vision, and looked again.
    A figure bolted from the back of the chapel to the doorway and passed swiftly beneath the pointed arch. His black cloak caused the edges of his body to melt into the darkness, but his head was uncovered. Not even the weakest light could fall upon such hair and fail to gleam bright, golden red.

 
     
    Four
     
     
    At the sight of the man with the red-gold hair disappearing through the archway, I gasped and began to pull away from Gabriel; in the next instant, Antonio—or his twin—had vanished.
    “Don’t be frightened, doña Marisol,” Gabriel said softly, his baritone half whisper echoing off the cavernous ceiling. His use of the word doña startled me; I’d never been addressed as a married woman before, and the combination of my name with that word unsettled me and made me think again of my mother. He caught my hand to put it firmly back upon his forearm, just below the crook, and pressed his own atop it, to make sure I didn’t break free again. “It was just someone praying.”
    I glanced up at him, studying his anxiety-bright eyes for any sign that he too had seen Antonio’s specter fleeing the chapel, and found none. I looked over my shoulder at my father, whose defeated gaze was downcast.
    It took all my patience not to shake free from Gabriel and run through the archway to see where the copper-haired man had gone, but I calmed myself with the thought that the red hair had been a coincidence, a trick of the light, or the result of my imagination. Our pace seemed agonizingly slow, but we soon made it out into the vestibule, whose hanging lamps made it much brighter than the chapel. It was as empty and silent as when we’d come. I squinted at the air, as if to read whether its wake had been disturbed; I stared at the massive wooden portal leading outside, to see whether it was still swinging shut, but it was motionless. If anyone had passed through it, he’d done so with great speed, as if he’d wanted to escape detection.
    Gabriel opened the door and held it for us, letting in a gust of cold air. The three of us stepped outside. The heavy rains had stopped, leaving behind the elemental smell of wet earth, but clouds still lingered, half obscuring a radiant moon.
    Out on the brick street, a two-horse carriage with lit lanterns waited; the driver was huddled inside for warmth, but at the sight of us, he scrambled out with as much dignity as he could muster. The streets were quiet on this third night after Christmas, some three hours before midnight, and not an hour ago, it had been raining solidly; droplets clung glittering to the lanterns’ glass casings. I lifted my face to the sky for an instant, listening. In the near distance, galloping horse hooves clattered against brick; in the far, the wooden wheels of the plague cart rumbled, harmonizing with the undertaker’s singsong summons for the bodies of the dead. The latter sound no longer frightened me, though it added to my melancholy. The plague came and went with great regularity in Seville and worsened when the weather warmed, but it usually confined itself to the poorest quarters near the riverbanks.
    The driver held the door open while Gabriel helped me and then my father up into the coach. The ride home was mercifully short, the silence punctuated by Gabriel’s few tentative efforts at conversation and my father’s and my monosyllabic replies.
    When we pulled up to my father’s house—mine no longer, now—the