“Go and ask Eleonor.” Arnau remembered how he had seen his wife pointing at him through the flames licking around the body of an innocent man. “Hasdai is dead,” he said.
“Eleonor?” queried Joan.
“Does that surprise you?”
Joan lost his balance, and leaned on Arnau for support.
“What’s the matter, Joan?” his brother asked, trying to steady him.
“It’s this place... and seeing you like this... I feel faint.”
“Get out of here then,” Arnau encouraged him. “You’ll be more use to me on the outside than you will be trying to comfort me in here.”
Joan stood up. His legs were weak. “Yes, I think you’re right.”
Joan called the jailer and left the dungeon. He followed the fat man back up the passageway. He had a few coins on him.
“Take these,” he said. The jailer put them in his purse without a word. “Tomorrow there’ll be more if you treat my brother properly.” The only sound was from rats scurrying along the passage. “Did you hear me?” he insisted. This time the reply was a deep growl that at least silenced the rats.
JOAN NEEDED MONEY. As soon as he left the bishop’s palace, he headed for Arnau’s exchange table. When he arrived, he saw a crowd outside the small building on the corner of Canvis Vells and Canvis Nous from which Arnau had conducted his business affairs. Joan drew back.
“That’s his brother!” one of the crowd shouted.
Several of them rushed up to him. Joan was about to turn tail, but stopped when he saw that they had come to a halt a few steps from him. Of course they would not attack a Dominican. He stood as upright as possible and carried on walking.
“What’s happened to your brother, Friar?” one of the men asked as he passed by.
Joan confronted a man who was a good head taller than him.
“My name is Brother Joan. I’m an inquisitor with the Holy Office,” he said, raising his voice as he explained his position. “When you speak to me, call me ‘my lord inquisitor.’”
Joan looked up, staring the man straight in the eye. “What sins do you have to confess?” he inquired silently. The man took a couple of steps backward. Joan strode on toward the exchange, the crowd giving way before him.
“I am Brother Joan, an inquisitor from the Holy Office!” he shouted outside the closed doors of the building.
Three of Arnau’s assistants allowed him in. The room inside was in turmoil : account books were strewn all over the rumpled red cloth covering his brother’s money table. If Arnau could have seen it ...
“I need money,” he told them.
The three men looked at him in disbelief.
“So do we,” responded the eldest, a man by the name of Remigi who had taken over from Guillem.
“What’s that?”
“We have hardly any money left, Brother Joan.” Remigi opened several money boxes on the table. “Look, there’s nothing in them.”
“Doesn’t my brother have money?”
“Not in cash. Why do you think there are all those people outside? They want their money. They’ve been besieging us for days now. Arnau is still a very rich man,” he said, trying to reassure the friar, “but it’s all invested—in loans, commissions, in business deals...”
“Can’t you demand repayment of the loans?”
“The main debtor is the king, and you know that His Majesty’s coffers are...”
“Is there no one who owes Arnau money?”
“Yes, lots of people do, but either they are loans that have not come to term, or ones that have, but... You know Arnau lent money to many people who have nothing. They can’t pay him back. Even so, when they heard about his situation, many of them came and paid back part of what they owed him, what little they could afford. But that is no more than a gesture. We cannot hope to cover all the deposits that way.”
Joan turned back and pointed to the door. “So how is it that they can demand their money?”
“In fact, they don’t have the right to. They all deposited their funds for Arnau to use on their behalf, but money is slippery, and the Inquisition...”
Joan gestured for him to forget that he was also a member of the Holy Office. The jailer’s growl echoed in his ears.
“I need money,” he repeated out loud.
“I’ve already told you, there isn’t any,” Remigi protested.
“But I need some,” Joan insisted. “Arnau needs it.”
“Arnau needs it, and above all,” thought Joan, turning to look at the door again, “he needs breathing space. This scandal can only do him harm. People will think he is ruined, and then no one will want to know him ... We’ll need help.”
“Is there nothing we can do to calm those people down? Is there nothing we can sell?”
“We could pass on some commissions. We could put the creditors together in them, instead of Arnau,” said Remigi. “But to do that, we would need his authority.”
“Is mine enough?”
The official stared at him.
“It has to be done, Remigi.”
“I suppose you’re right,” the other man said after a few moments’ thought. “In fact, we would not be losing money. We would simply be switching things around. They could keep some investments. We would still have others. If Arnau were not involved, that would calm them down ... but you will have to give me your written authority.”
Remigi quickly prepared a document. Joan signed it. “Gather some money by first thing tomorrow,” he said as he signed. “It’s cash we need,” he insisted when the assistant looked at him hesitantly. “Sell something off cheaply if necessary, but we must have money.”
As soon as Joan had left the exchange house and calmed down the creditors outside once more, Remigi began to redistribute the investments. That same afternoon, the last ship leaving Barcelona carried with it instructions for Arnau’s agents all over the Mediterranean. Remigi acted swiftly; by the next day, the satisfied creditors were spreading the news that Arnau’s business affairs were sound.
48
FOR THE FIRST time in almost a week, Arnau drank fresh water and ate something other than a crust of bread. The jailer forced him to his feet by kicking him, and then sluiced a bucket of water on the floor. “Better water than excrement,” thought Arnau. For a few seconds, all that could be heard was the water splashing on the stones, and the obese jailer’s labored breathing. Even the old woman who had given herself up to death and kept her face buried in her filthy rags looked up at Arnau.
“Leave the bucket,” the bastaix ordered the jailer as he was about to leave.
Arnau had seen him mistreat prisoners just because they had dared to meet his gaze. Now the jailer lunged at him with outstretched arms, but when he saw Arnau defying him, he pulled away just before making contact. He spat, and threw the bucket on the ground. Before he shut the door behind him, he kicked at one of the shadows looking on.
After the ground had absorbed the water, Arnau sat down again. He could hear a church bell ringing. That and the feeble rays of sun that managed to penetrate the filthy window that was at street level outside were his only links to the world. Arnau raised his eyes to the tiny window and strained to hear more. Santa Maria was bathed in light, but did not yet have any bells, and yet the sound of chisels on stone, the hammering on timbers, and the workmen’s calls on the scaffolding could be heard some distance from the church. Whenever the distant echo of those sounds reached the dungeons, that and the sunlight transported Arnau’s spirit to accompany all those working so devotedly for the Virgin of the Sea. Arnau felt once more the weight of that first block of stone he had carried to Santa Maria. How long ago had that been? How things had changed! He had been little more than a boy, a boy who’d found in the Virgin the mother he had never known...