Heresy Bound in Calfskin

Dawn in San Lázaro never brought light; it only moved the shadows across the granite. In the joints of the ashlar masonry, saltpeter sweated a grayish crust that took hours to dry.

On the pine table sat the pewter mug with the poorly soldered handle and the black chicory grounds. The surface had an iridescent, greasy film. Brais scraped a hardened drop of tallow from the wood with his thumbnail. The lack of sensitivity in his fingertip—that rubbery numbness that for months had kept him from telling the edge of a lancet from the spine of a spatula without looking at his hand—made him slip twice before lifting the flake.

He blew on his finger.

The first bell for matins rang from the chapter tower. A dull stroke, cracked since the frost of seventy-four.

A floorboard creaked at the foot of the stairs. They were footsteps that minded their direction rather than their weight. They stopped just on the other side of the threshold. Brais did not move; he watched the flame of the oil lamp tremble against the whitewash of the wall.

Then a dry scrape sounded from beneath the door. Something slid inward and dropped onto the floorboards with the dull thud of a bundle of leather.

"Don Brais?" whispered the voice from the other side, thick with sleep and camphor.

"I'm still up."

"The novitiate chimney flue is blocked again," said Sister Benigna from behind the wood, with the same indifference she used to note down flour rations. "The smoke is coming down into the old cells. If you have clean blankets, don't leave them out in the air."

"They're put away."

"Better that way. The wind is coming off the mud."

The scraping of her habit's rough wool faded away toward the minor transept.

Brais waited until he couldn't even hear the soles of her boots.

On the floor, next to the slate baseboard, lay an oblong volume bound in raw calfskin. The corners were worn down from too much handling. It didn't smell of incense or choir dust; it reeked of stale mutton tallow and the harsh vinegar apothecaries used to scrub cutting tables on sweltering days. Grease stains on the spine's leather had been blackened by brine until they looked like spots of dry gangrene.

When he picked it up, an acidic sting shot up the bridge of his nose, where the sore from the sulfur fumes hadn't quite healed. He wiped himself with his sleeve.

The hallway toward the refectory was a continuous draft. Don Julián Caunedo was standing by the lead washbasin, reviewing a sheet of paper with a frayed goose quill. He wore his cassock buttoned up to his throat, immaculate amid that reek of boiled cabbage and mud rising from the garden.

"The batch of alum from the bay turned out murky," Caunedo said without lifting his eyes from the paper. "The cellarer says the coopers used green oak. The salt is turning into gray clods."

"It will do for the first wash," Brais replied, pressing the bulk of the notebook against his ribs beneath the coarse wool.

"It won't do for anything the visitor needs to see without blushing," Caunedo drew a firm line. "Though I suspect your scruples, Master Mújica, have grown rather more elastic ever since your pulse started shaking during subclavian incisions."

"The cut was clean."

"Clean is what doesn't rot before the notary signs the record. But the cold is ending, Brais. As soon as the temperature rises three degrees, the depository will be a breeding ground and there won't be enough vinegar in the entire estuary to cover up what they leave half-dried."

Caunedo blew on the ink with a dry hiss. He put his quill back in its brass case, straightened his cuffs with two tugs, and fixed his eyes on Brais's left arm.

"Change the zinc buckets under the tables," he dropped the words over his shoulder. "Grease is dripping onto the flagstones and the novices are going to break their necks with the lime cauldrons."

Brais said nothing.

The auxiliary apothecary scarcely held a chestnut table and two wobbly stools. It had no ventilation other than a loophole facing the marsh. Brais lit a stub of tallow on a cracked plate. The flame bobbed a couple of times in that air heavy with dead lime and camphorated spirit dregs.

He set the book on his knees.

The parchment leaves crinkled like slices of dry horn. On the third folio, written in the cramped hand of a parish scribe, he read the warning: Whoever sets down their sins in calfskin has already accepted that the fire will devour their hands.

Brais passed his numb thumb over the line. The iron-gall ink had bled right through to the reverse side.

Further on, there were no sermons or apothecary formulas. They were clean drawings, made with ruler and compass: the ribcage blown wide open, stripped of the sternum, and marginal notes on the contractions of the ventricles when submerged in blue vitriol mixed with stable saltpeter.

The figures were relentless. Forty minutes after the final death rattle. Fifty if the body was lymphatic and flabby. Copper rods had to be applied to the heart's surface before the blood could clot.

And if Don Julián were to find out that a record existed in the chapter archives stating that—

Brais stopped.

He rubbed his eyelids with his knuckles. The wax fell onto his knee with a warm thud.

At the foot of the last plate, where wires emerged from a stack of zinc discs wedged between cloths of marine brine, there was no clandestine signature from any expelled schoolboy.

There was a seal.

Vermilion sealing wax with chipped edges, but unmistakable: three crossed nails and a truncated miter. The personal mark of the vicar general of the curia.

The same red-ink monogram that headed the edicts of relaxation to the secular arm to burn remains in the old square.

Outside, the dirty water of the estuary rose against the foundations of the lazaretto.