| The church bells had started tollingintermittently, as if reluctant to spoil the cool, resplendent morning. The birds appeared to be competing with the lugubrious tones for the mood of the day. |
| Don Juan de Oate sat in the inner balcony of his palatial home and looked eastward at Bufa Peak, his feelings oscillating between enervating sadness and physical well-being as the cool air filled his lungs and the distant hubbub of daily life intruded into his consciousness. Drawn by the tolling bells, yet hardly conscious of what he was doing, he rose from his chairfor the time had come. The church, Nuestra Seora de la Asuncin, where his wife's body lay, was nearby, but to don Juan it suddenly seemed as far away as it had appeared to him when he was a child. Time had also taken a new dimension since his wife had fallen ill. Scenes of his courtship and marriage to Isabel flashed into his mind, but they seemed remote, as if from another era. |
| Their wedding had been a momentous event in Zacatecas and even throughout New Spain. Scion of a family that had amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the New World, son of Cristbal de Oate who had campaigned with the great Corts, and who had been a hero in the Mixtn War, one of the founders of Guadalajara, and discoverer of fabulously rich silver mines, Juan de Oate had taken for wife Isabel de Tolosa Corts y Moctezuma. She was equally rich and as aristocratic as one could be, for she was the great granddaughter of the magnificent, but ill-fated, emperor of the Aztecs, Moctezuma II, and the granddaughter of the great Corts, his conqueror. |
| After Moctezuma's death, his only legitimate daughter, Tecuichpotzin, who survived |
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