The enslaved’s place in this religious community is of equal interest. As the historian William Henry Scott tells us, it was not unknown for the archipelago’s seventeenth century missionaries to have slaves. The Augustinian order’s rules allowed each friar the ownership of one.²⁰Other slaves, it seems, were the convent’s property. What is particularly noteworthy in this case is the insight it provides into how the enslaved were integrated into the daily life of the broader colonial society. On the one hand, Jacinto’s enslavement had clearly followed his master Montemayor to the latter’s new assignment in Cebu. On the other hand, beyond this master-enslaved relationship, we see that Tomás shared his sleeping quarters with servants who appeared to be free. He had repeated contact with Isabel, a free India, and Ruiz found it plausible that he had had contact with a Sangley (Chinese). Manuel, also enslaved at the convent, likewise had contact with Isabel. Jacinto for his part must have had regular enough contact with Isabel prior to co-habiting with her “en offensa de dios.”²¹The missionaries’ intramural discourse of responsibility and negligence led them to focus time and again on their own actions and the actions of Tomás. It seems, however, that the true central node between all of the actors in this case was the couple Isabel and Jacinto. The India Isabel exercised an agency over these events that was as powerful as it was unseen. Although, the matter is less than clear, she seems to have gone out of her way to acquire this golden cross and its chain. Presupposing that she had not actually asked Tomás or Jacinto to steal it for her (perhaps an inductively baseless possibility, but one that we cannot exclude), she must have expressed enough of a desire for this cross to Tomás that even when Tomás took it from her, he found himself, three weeks later, bringing it back. He knew that she would be willing to lend him money in its stead. In this exchange the cross and chain seemed to have had a value to both individuals other than their weight in gold.²²Tomás chose to pawn the cross rather than to alienate the cross through sale. Isabel, it seemed, made it no secret that she had the cross. Ribero’s informants, Juana and Manuel, both attested to have “seen”²³ her with it. Ironically, Isabel’s agency comes out clearest in a way very differently from the missionaries. The missionaries’ exercised their power through the production of their manuscripts in which their words negotiated their personal framings of the events from 1620 to 1625. Through these manuscripts we get an excess of data not just into the process of interrogation, but also into the process of inventory construction. Every object and person in this case was framed in relation to the missionaries: whether it be the gold framed in the form of crosses and chains or people framed in the form of indios and esclavos. Isabel, in contrast, exercised her agency by her refusal to participate in this discussion. Without her words, the missionaries could not employ reductive strategies to frame those words in their colonial context. And then there was Jacinto. His curious absence throughout the interrogation went unexplained, except, perhaps, in Montemayor’s wail that now “the slaves have run away and revolted.”²⁴ To the missionaries, Jacinto was simply the “slave of the father prior,”²⁵ but clearly Jacinto saw himself in very different terms. Moreover, his relationship with Isabel suggests that the missionaries’ attempt to frame Jacinto’s relationships with people as either legitimate or illegitimate on their terms, meant little to Jacinto himself. The missionaries’ world views were coherent, even as they tried to pin blame on one another. And we as readers are drawn into that coherence. Isabel and Jacinto, in contrast, kept their views unfettered by refusing to participate in this investigation.