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weighing up his choice. “Your wound at Lepanto—was it serious?”
    â€œIt was, Your Excellency, but it would have been worse were it not for Pelagio Calvo. We served together on the Genoese galley
Guzmana
, on Don Juan’s right. Calvo and I boarded a corsair ship from the rear in alongboat. I was shot in the hip while climbing onto the deck. An infidel was about to finish me when Calvo cut him down and lowered me back into the boat. He saved my life.”
    â€œBut you
were
wounded.”
    â€œA minor inconvenience that has never interfered with my ability to perform my duties.”
    â€œThen what the army lost the law has gained,” Villareal said graciously, handing him the white baton. “I look forward to your first report.”
    Mendoza got up and bowed, and Saravia accompanied him out into the hall.
    â€œThis is a very important assignment for you, Mendoza,” he said in a low voice. “The king will be following your investigation personally. Don’t fail him. Because if you fail, it means I fail, too.”
    â€œI will do my duty to the best of my ability as always, Your Worship.”
    â€œI don’t doubt it.” The president smiled unctuously. “Good luck, Licenciado.”
    Mendoza shook the other man’s soft white hand. He knew that some benefits from his expedition would have already accrued to Saravia, and as he walked away, he could not help feeling that Saravia would not be entirely disappointed if he never came back.

CHAPTER THREE

    t the age of thirty-four, Licenciado Bernardo Francisco Baldini de Mendoza could look back on a reasonably successful career within the Hapsburg bureaucracy for the son of an Italian mother and a Granadan silk merchant of converso descent. At the age of seven, he had seen his father accused of Judaizing and forced to spend a year in an Inquisition jail. Though the elder Mendoza was eventually acquitted, the stress provoked a heart attack that killed him, and the family business fell into difficulties. To reduce the economic burden on the family, Bernardo’s mother sent him to her brother-in-law’s care in Valladolid. His uncle had financed his education and paid for his studies at the University of Salamanca, where he studied for seven years, enough to add the title “Licenciado,” but not “Doctor,” to his name. Though he was considered by his tutors to be an excellent student, too many years of having Latinbeaten into him by his grammar-school teachers had left him with an aversion to academic study, and his early years at the university were tumultuous and disorderly.
    In 1569 he left the university as a result of the tavern fight and joined the army, with his uncle’s assistance, to escape criminal charges. In his five years in the king’s armies, he had fought the Moors in Granada and the Turks at Lepanto, where a musket ball had shattered his left thigh and ended his military career. Had it not been for Calvo, that shot would have ended his life as well. Instead he recovered from his wound and returned to Valladolid, where his uncle persuaded the university authorities in Salamanca that he was a changed man. This was true, because unlike Calvo he had lost his appetite for war and would not have returned to the army even if he’d been able to. He went on to complete four more years of study without incident, at which point his uncle was accused by the Inquisition of secret Jewish worship.
    The evidence against him was slim. A disgruntled servant claimed that he wore a white shirt on the Sabbath and refused to eat pork. His uncle denied these charges, but his brother’s previous record with the Inquisition worked against him, and he confessed in order to avoid a more severe punishment. His uncle always insisted that the charges were invented by a business rival. He was punished with a large fine that left him without funds to finance the education that might have transformed