Changeling

THE ABBEY OF LUCRETILI, OCTOBER 1453

A few months later, Luca was on the road from Rome, riding east, wearing a plain working robe and cape of ruddy brown, and newly equipped with a horse of his own.

He was accompanied by his servant Freize, a broad-shouldered, square-faced youth, just out of his teens, who had plucked up his courage when Luca left their monastery, and volunteered to work for the young man, and follow him wherever the quest might take him. The abbot had been doubtful, but Freize had convinced him that his skills as a kitchen lad were so poor, and his love of adventure so strong, that he would serve God better by following a remarkable master on a secret quest ordained by the Pope himself, than by burning the bacon for the long-suffering monks. The abbot, secretly glad to lose the challenging young novice priest, thought the loss of an accident-prone spit lad was a small price to pay.

Freize rode a strong cob and led a donkey laden with their belongings. At the rear of the little procession was a surprise addition to their partnership: a clerk, Brother Peter, who had been ordered to travel with them at the last moment, to keep a record of their work.

‘A spy,’ Freize muttered out of the side of his mouth to his new master. ‘A spy if ever I saw one. Pale-faced, soft hands, trusting brown eyes: the shaved head of a monk and yet the clothes of a gentleman. A spy without a doubt.

‘Is he spying on me? No, for I don’t do anything and know nothing. Who is he spying on, then? Must be the young master, my little sparrow. For there is no-one else but the horses and they’re not heretics, nor pagans. They are the only honest beasts here.’

‘He is here to serve as my clerk,’ Luca replied irritably. ‘And I have to have him whether I need a clerk or no. So hold your tongue.’

‘Do I need a clerk?’ Freize asked himself as he reined in his horse. ‘No. For I do nothing and know nothing and, if I did, I wouldn’t write it down – not trusting words on a page. Also, not being able to read or write would likely prevent me.’

‘Fool,’ the clerk Peter said as he rode by.

‘“Fool,” he says,’ Freize remarked to his horse’s ears and to the gently climbing road before them. ‘Easy to say: hard to prove. And anyway, I have been called worse.’

They had been riding all day on a track little more than a narrow path for goats, which wound upwards out of the fertile valley, alongside little terraced slopes growing olives and vines, and then higher into the woodland where the huge beech trees were turning gold and bronze. At sunset, when the arching skies above them went rosy pink, the clerk drew a paper from the inner pocket of his jacket. ‘I was ordered to give you this at sunset,’ he said. ‘Forgive me if it is bad news. I don’t know what it says.’

‘Who gave it you?’ Luca asked. The seal on the back of the folded letter was shiny and smooth, unmarked with any crest.

‘The lord who hired me, the same lord who commands you,’ Peter said. ‘This is how your orders will come. He tells me a day and a time, or sometimes a destination, and I give you your orders then and there.’

‘Got them tucked away in your pocket all the time?’ Freize inquired.

Grandly, the clerk nodded.

‘Could always turn him upside down and shake him,’ Freize remarked quietly to his master.

‘We’ll do this as we are ordered to do it,’ Luca replied, looping the reins of his horse casually around his shoulder to leave his hands free to break the seal to open the folded paper. ‘It’s an instruction to go to the abbey of Lucretili,’ he said. ‘The abbey is set between two houses, a nunnery and a monastery. I am to investigate the nunnery. They are expecting us.’ He folded the letter and gave it back to Peter.

‘Does it say how to find them?’ Freize asked gloomily. ‘For otherwise it’s bed under the trees and nothing but cold bread for supper. Beechnuts, I suppose. All you could eat of beechnuts. You could go mad with gluttony on them. I suppose I might get lucky and find us a mushroom.’

‘The road is just up ahead,’ Peter interrupted. ‘The abbey is near to the castle. I should think we can claim hospitality at either monastery or nunnery.’

‘We’ll go to the convent,’ Luca ruled. ‘It says that they are expecting us.’

It did not look as if the convent was expecting anyone. It was growing dark, but there were no warm welcoming lights showing and no open doors. The shutters were closed at all the windows in the outer wall, and only narrow beams of flickering candlelight shone through the slats. In the darkness they could not tell how big it was; they just had a sense of great walls marching off either side of the wide-arched entrance gateway. A dim horn lantern was hung by the small door set in the great wooden gate, throwing a thin yellow light downward, and when Freize dismounted and hammered on the wooden gate with the handle of his dagger they could hear someone inside protesting at the noise and then opening a little spy hole in the door, to peer out at them.

‘I am Luca Vero, with my two servants,’ Luca shouted. ‘I am expected. Let us in.’

The spy hole slammed shut, then they could hear the slow unbolting of the gate and the lifting of wooden bars and, finally, one side of the gate creaked reluctantly open. Freize led his horse and the donkey, Luca and Peter rode into the cobbled yard as a sturdy woman-servant pushed the gate shut behind them. The men dismounted and looked around as a wizened old lady in a habit of grey wool, with a tabard of grey tied at her waist by a plain rope, held up the torch she was carrying, to inspect the three of them.

‘Are you the man they sent to make inquiry? For if you are not, and it is hospitality that you want, you had better go on to the monastery, our brother house,’ she said to Peter, looking at him and his fine horse. ‘This house is in troubled times, we don’t want guests.’

‘No, I am to write the report. I am the clerk to the inquiry. This is Luca Vero, he is here to inquire.’

‘A boy!’ she exclaimed scornfully. ‘A beardless boy?’

Luca flushed in irritation, then swung his leg over the neck of his horse, and jumped down to the ground, throwing the reins to Freize. ‘It doesn’t matter how many years I have, or if I have a beard or not. I am appointed to make inquiry here, and I will do so tomorrow. In the meantime we are tired and hungry and you should show me to the refectory and to the guest rooms. Please inform the Lady Abbess that I am here and will see her after Prime tomorrow.’

‘Rich in nothing,’ the old woman remarked, holding up her torch to take another look at Luca’s handsome young face, flushed under his dark fringe, his hazel eyes bright with anger.

‘Rich in nothing, is it?’ Freize questioned the horse as he led him to the stables ahead. ‘A virgin so old that she is like a pickled walnut and she calls the little lord a beardless boy? And him a genius and perhaps a changeling?’

‘You, take the horses to the stables and the lay sister there will take you to the kitchen,’ she snapped with sudden energy at Freize. ‘You can eat and sleep in the barn. You—’ She took in the measure of Peter the clerk and judged him superior to Freize but still wanting. ‘You can dine in the kitchen gallery. You’ll find it through that doorway. They’ll show you where to sleep in the guesthouse. You—’ She turned to Luca. ‘You, the inquirer, I will show to the refectory and to your own bedroom. They said you were a priest?’

‘I have not yet said my vows,’ he said. ‘I am in the service of the Church, but I am not ordained.’

‘Too handsome by far for the priesthood, and with his tonsure grown out already,’ she said to herself. To Luca she said: ‘You can sleep in the rooms for the visiting priest, anyway. And in the morning I will tell my Lady Abbess that you are here.’

She was leading the way to the refectory when a lady came through the archway from the inner cloister. Her habit was made of the softest bleached wool, the wimple on her head pushed back to show a pale lovely face with smiling grey eyes. The girdle at her waist was of the finest leather and she had soft leather slippers, not the rough wooden pattens that working women wore to keep their shoes out of the mud.

‘I came to greet the inquirer,’ she said, holding up the set of wax candles in her hand.

Luca stepped forwards. ‘I am the inquirer,’ he said.

She smiled, taking in his height, his good looks and his youth in one swift gaze. ‘Let me take you to your dinner, you must be weary. Sister Anna here will see that your horses are stabled and your men comfortable.’

He bowed and she turned ahead of him, leaving him to follow her through the stone archway, along a flagged gallery that opened into the arching refectory room. At the far end, near the fire that was banked in for the night, a place had been laid for one person; there was wine in the glass, bread on the plate, a knife and spoon either side of a bowl. Luca sighed with pleasure and sat down in the chair as a maidservant came in with a ewer and bowl to wash his hands, good linen to dry them, and behind her came a kitchen maid with a bowl of stewed chicken and vegetables.

‘You have everything that you need?’ the lady asked.

‘Thank you,’ he said awkwardly. He was uncomfortable in her presence; he had not spoken to a woman other than his mother since he had been sworn into the monastery at the age of eleven. ‘And you are?’

She smiled at him and he realised in the glow of her smile that she was beautiful. ‘I am Sister Ursula, the Lady Almoner, responsible for the management of the abbey. I am glad you have come. I have been very anxious. I hope you can tell us what is happening and save us . . .’

‘Save you?’

‘This is a long-established and beautiful nunnery,’ Sister Ursula said earnestly. ‘I joined it when I was just a little girl. I have served God and my sisters here for all my life, I have been here for more than twenty years. I cannot bear the thought that Satan has entered in.’

Luca dipped his bread in the rich thick gravy, and concentrated on the food to hide his consternation. ‘Satan?’

She crossed herself, a quick unthinking gesture of devotion. ‘Some days I think it really is that bad, other days I think I am like a foolish girl, frightening myself with shadows.’ She gave him a shy, apologetic smile. ‘You will be able to judge. You will discover the truth of it all. But if we cannot rid ourselves of the gossip we will be ruined: no family will send their daughters to us, and now the farmers are starting to refuse to trade with us. It is my duty to make sure that the abbey earns its own living, that we sell our goods and farm produce in order to buy what we need. I can’t do that if the farmers’ wives refuse to speak with us when I send my lay sisters with our goods to market. We can’t trade if the people will neither sell to us nor buy from us.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, I will leave you to eat. The kitchen maid will show you to your bedroom in the guesthouse when you have finished eating. Bless you, my brother.’

Luca suddenly realised he had quite forgotten to say grace: she would think he was an ignorant mannerless hedge friar. He had stared at her like a fool and stammered when he spoke to her. He had behaved like a young man who had never seen a beautiful woman before and not at all like a man of some importance, come to head a papal inquiry. What must she think of him? ‘Bless you, Lady Almoner,’ he said awkwardly.

She bowed, hiding a little smile at his confusion, and walked slowly from the room, and he watched the sway of the hem of her gown as she left.

On the east side of the enclosed abbey, the shutter of the ground-floor window was slightly open so that two pairs of eyes could watch the Lady Almoner’s candle illuminate her pale silhouette as she walked gracefully across the yard and then vanished into her house.

‘She’s greeted him, but she won’t have told him anything,’ Isolde whispered.

‘He will find nothing unless someone helps him,’ Ishraq agreed.

The two drew back from the window and noiselessly closed the shutter. ‘I wish I could see my way clear,’ Isolde said. ‘I wish I knew what to do. I wish I had someone who could advise me.’

‘What would your father have done?’

Isolde laughed shortly. ‘My father would never have let himself be forced in here. He would have laid down his life before he allowed someone to imprison him. Or, if captured, he would have died attempting to escape. He wouldn’t just have sat here, like a doll, like a cowardly girl, crying, missing him, and not knowing what to do.’

She turned away and roughly rubbed her eyes. Ishraq put a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ she said. ‘There was nothing we could do when we first came here. And now that the whole abbey is falling apart around us, we can still do nothing until we understand what is going on. But everything is changing even while we wait, powerless. Even if we do nothing; something is going to happen. This is our chance. Perhaps this is the moment when the door swings open. We’re going to be ready for our chance.’

Isolde took the hand from her shoulder and held it against her cheek. ‘At least I have you.’

‘Always.’

Luca slept heavily; not even the church bell tolling the hour in the tower above his head could wake him. But, just when the night was darkest, before three in the morning, a sharp scream cut through his sleep and then he heard the sound of running feet.

Luca was up and out of his bed in a moment, his hand snatching for the dagger under his pillow, peering out of his window at the dark yard. A glint of moonlight shining on the cobblestones showed him a woman in white racing across the yard to scrabble at the beams barring the heavy wooden gate. Three women pursued her, and the old porteress came running out of the gatehouse and grabbed the woman’s hands as she clawed like a cat at the timbers.

The other women were quick to catch the girl from behind and Luca heard her sharp wail of despair as they grabbed hold of her, and saw her knees buckle as she went down under their weight. He pulled on his breeches and boots, threw a cape over his naked shoulders, then sprinted from his room, out into the yard, tucking the dagger out of sight in the scabbard in his boot. He stepped back into the shadow of the building, certain they had not noticed him, determined to see their faces in the shadowy light of the moon, so that he would know them, when he saw them again.

The porteress held up her torch as they lifted the girl, two women holding her shoulders, the third supporting her legs. As they carried her past him, Luca shrank back into the concealing darkness of the doorway. They were so close that he could hear their panting breaths, one of them was sobbing quietly.

It was the strangest sight. The girl’s hand had swung down as they lifted her; now she was quite unconscious. It seemed that she had fainted when they had pulled her from the barred gate. Her head was rolled back, the little laces from her nightcap brushing the ground as they carried her, her long nightgown trailing in the dust. But it was no normal fainting fit. She was as limp as a corpse, her eyes closed, her young face serene. Then Luca gave a little hiss of horror. The girl’s swinging hand was pierced in the palm, the wound oozing blood. They had folded her other hand across her slight body and Luca could see a smudge of blood on her nightgown. She had the hands of a girl crucified. Luca froze where he stood, forcing himself to stay hidden in the shadows, unable to look away from the strange terrible wounds. And then he saw something that seemed even worse.

All three women carrying the sleeping girl wore her expression of rapt serenity. As they shuffled along, carrying their limp bleeding burden, all three were slightly smiling, all three were radiant as if with an inner secret joy.

And their eyes were closed like hers.

Luca waited till they had sleepwalked past him, steady as pall-bearers, then he went back into the guesthouse room and knelt at the side of his bed, praying fervently for guidance to somehow find the wisdom, despite his self-doubt, to discover what was so very wrong in this holy place, and put it right.

He was still on his knees in prayer when Freize banged open the door with a jug of hot water for washing, just before dawn. ‘Thought you’d want to go to Prime.’

‘Yes.’ Luca rose stiffly, crossed himself, and kissed the cross that always hung around his neck, a gift from his mother on his fourteenth birthday, the last time he had seen her.

‘Bad things are happening here,’ Freize said portentously, splashing the water into a bowl and putting a clean strip of linen beside it.

Luca sluiced his face and hands with water. ‘I know it. God knows, I have seen some of it. What do you hear?’

‘Sleepwalking, visions, the nuns fasting on feast days, starving themselves and fainting in the chapel. Some of them are seeing lights in the sky, like the star before the Magi, and then some wanted to set off for Bethlehem and had to be restrained. The people of the village and the servants from the castle say they’re all going mad. They say the whole abbey is touched with madness and the women are losing their wits.’

Luca shook his head. ‘The saints alone know what is going on here. Did you hear the screams in the night?’

‘Lord save us, no. I slept in the kitchen and all I could hear was snoring. But all the cooks say that the Pope should send a bishop to inquire. They say that Satan is walking here. The Pope should set up an inquiry.’

‘He has done! That’s me,’ Luca snapped. ‘I shall hold an inquiry. I shall be the judge.’

‘Course you will,’ Freize encouraged him. ‘Doesn’t matter how old you are.’

‘Actually, it doesn’t matter how old I am. What matters is that I am appointed to inquire.’

‘You’d better start with the new Lady Abbess, then.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it all started as soon as she got here.’

‘I won’t listen to kitchen gossip,’ Luca declared haughtily, rubbing his face. He tossed the cloth to Freize. ‘I shall have a proper inquiry with witnesses and people giving evidence under oath. For I am the inquirer, appointed by the Pope, and it would be better if everyone remembered it. Especially those people who are supposed to be in service to me, who should be supporting my reputation.’

‘Course I do! Course you are! Course you will! You’re the lord and I never forget it, though still only a little one.’ Freize shook out Luca’s linen shirt and then handed him his novice’s robe, which he wore belted high, out of the way of his long stride. Luca strapped his short sword on his belt and notched it round his waist, dropping the robe over the sword to hide it.

‘You speak to me like I was a child,’ Luca said irritably. ‘And you’re no great age yourself.’

‘It’s affection,’ Freize said firmly. ‘It’s how I show affection. And respect. To me, you’ll always be “Sparrow”, the skinny novice.’

‘“Goose”, the kitchen boy,’ Luca replied with a grin.

‘Got your dagger?’ Freize checked.

Luca tapped the cuff of his boot where the dagger was safe in the scabbard.

‘They all say that the new Lady Abbess had no vocation, and was not raised to the life,’ Freize volunteered, ignoring Luca’s ban on gossip. ‘Her father’s will sent her in here and she took her vows and she’ll never get out again. It’s the only inheritance her father left her, everything else went to the brother. Bad as being walled up. And, ever since she came, the nuns have started to see things and cry out. Half the village says that Satan came in with the new abbess. Cause she was unwilling.’

‘And what do they say the brother is like?’ Luca asked, tempted to gossip despite his resolution.

‘Nothing but good of him. Good landlord, generous with the abbey. His grandfather built the abbey with a nunnery on one side and a brother house for the monks nearby. The nuns and the monks share the services in the abbey. His father endowed both houses and handed the woods and the high pasture over to the nuns, and gave some farms and fields to the monastery. They run themselves as independent houses, working together for the glory of God, and helping the poor. Now the new lord in his turn supports it. His father was a crusader, famously brave, very hot on religion. The new lord sounds quieter, stays at home, wants a bit of peace. Very keen that this is kept quiet, that you make your inquiry, take your decision, report the guilty, exorcise whatever is going on, and everything gets back to normal.’

Above their heads the bell tolled for Prime, the dawn prayer.

‘Come on,’ Luca said, and led the way from the visiting priest’s rooms towards the cloisters and the beautiful church.

They could hear the music as they crossed the yard, their way lit by a procession of white-gowned nuns, carrying torches and singing as they went like a choir of angels gliding through the pearly light of the morning. Luca stepped back, and even Freize fell silent at the beauty of the voices rising faultlessly into the dawn sky. Then the two men, joined by Brother Peter, followed the choir into the church and took their seats in an alcove at the back. Two hundred nuns, veiled with white wimples, filled the stalls of the choir either side of the screened altar, and stood in rows facing it.

The service was a sung Mass; the voice of the serving priest at the altar rang out the sacred Latin words in a steady baritone, and the sweet high voices of the women answered. Luca gazed at the vaulting ceiling, the beautiful columns carved with stone fruit and flowers, and above them, stars and moons of silver-painted stone, all the while listening to the purity of the responses and wondering what could be tormenting such holy women every night, and how they could wake every dawn and sing like this to God.

At the end of the service, the three visiting men remained seated on the stone bench at the back of the chapel as the nuns filed out past them, their eyes modestly down. Luca scanned their faces, looking for the young woman he had seen in such a frenzy last night, but one pale young face veiled in white was identical to another. He tried to see their palms, for the telltale sign of scabs, but all the women kept their hands clasped together, hidden in their long sleeves. As they filed out, their sandals pattering quietly on the stone floor, the priest followed them, and stopped before the young men to say pleasantly, ‘I’ll break my fast with you and then I have to go back to my side of the abbey.’

‘Are you not a resident priest?’ Luca asked, first shaking the man’s hand and then kneeling for his blessing.

‘We have a monastery just the other side of the great house,’ the priest explained. ‘The first Lord of Lucretili chose to found two religious houses: one for men and one for women. We priests come over daily to take the services. Alas, this house is of the order of Augustine nuns. We men are of the Dominican order.’ He leaned towards Luca. ‘As you’d understand, I think it would be better for everyone if the nunnery were put under the discipline of the Dominican order. They could be supervised from our monastery and enjoy the discipline of our order. Under the Augustinian order these women have been allowed to simply do as they please. And now you see what happens.’

‘They observe the services,’ Luca protested. ‘They’re not running wild.’

‘Only because they choose to do so. If they wanted to stop or to change, then they could. They have no rule, unlike us Dominicans, for whom everything is set down. Under the Augustinian order every house can live as they please. They serve God as they think best and as a result—’

He broke off as the Lady Almoner came up, treading quietly on the beautiful marble floor of the church. ‘Well, here is my Lady Almoner come to bid us to breakfast, I am sure.’

‘You can take breakfast in my parlour,’ she said. ‘There is a fire lit there. Please, Father, show our guests the way.’

‘I will, I will,’ he said pleasantly and, as she left them, he turned to Luca. ‘She holds this place together,’ he said. ‘A remarkable woman. Manages the farmlands, maintains the buildings, buys the goods, sells the produce. She could have been the lady of any castle in Italy, a natural Magistra: a teacher, a leader, a natural lady of any great house.’ He beamed. ‘And, I have to say, her parlour is the most comfortable room in this place and her cook second to none.’

He led the way out of the church across the cloister through the entrance yard to the house that formed the eastern side of the courtyard. The wooden front door stood open, and they went into the parlour, where a table was already laid for the three of them. Luca and Peter took their seats. Freize stood at the doorway to serve the men as one of the lay-woman cooks passed him dishes to set on the table. They had three sorts of roasted meats: ham, lamb and beef; and two types of bread: white manchet and dark rye. There were local cheeses, and jams, a basket of hard-boiled eggs, and a bowl of plums with a taste so strong that Luca sliced them on a slice of wheat bread to eat like sweet jam.

‘Does the Lady Almoner always eat privately and not dine with her sisters in the refectory?’ Luca asked curiously.

‘Wouldn’t you, if you had a cook like this?’ the priest asked. ‘High days and holy days, I don’t doubt that she sits with her sisters. But she likes things done just so; and one of the privileges of her office is that she has things as she likes them, in her own house. She doesn’t sleep in a dormitory nor eat in the refectory. The Lady Abbess is the same in her own house next door.

‘Now,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘I have a drop of brandy in my saddlebag. I’ll pour us a measure. It settles the belly after a good breakfast.’ He went out of the room and Peter got to his feet and looked out of the window at the entry courtyard where the priest’s mule was waiting.

Idly, Luca glanced round the room as Freize cleared their plates. The chimney breast was a beautifully carved wall of polished wood. When Luca had been a little boy his grandfather, a carpenter, had made just such a carved chimney breast for the hall of their farmhouse. Then, it had been an innovation and the envy of the village. Behind one of the carvings had been a secret cupboard where his father had kept sugared plums, which he gave to Luca on a Sunday, if he had been good all the week. On a whim, Luca turned the five bosses along the front of the carved chimney breast one after the other. One yielded under his hand and, to his surprise, a hidden door swung open, just like the one he’d known as a child. Behind it was a glass jar holding not sugared plums but some sort of spice: dried black seeds. Beside it was a cobbler’s awl – a little tool for piercing lace holes in leather.

Luca shut the cupboard door. ‘My father always used to hide sugared plums in the chimney cupboard,’ he remarked.

‘We didn’t have anything like this,’ Peter the clerk replied. ‘We all lived in the kitchen, and my mother turned her roast meats on the spit in the fireplace and smoked all her hams in the chimney. When it was morning and the fire was out and we children were really hungry, we’d put our heads up into the soot and nibble at the fatty edges of the hams. She used to tell my father it was mice, God bless her.’

‘How did you get your learning in such a poor house?’ Luca asked.

Peter shrugged. ‘The priest saw that I was a bright boy, so my parents sent me to the monastery.’

‘And then?’

‘Milord asked me if I would serve him, serve the order. Of course I said yes.’

The door opened and the priest returned, a small bottle discreetly tucked into the sleeve of his robe. ‘Just a drop helps me on my way,’ he said. Luca took a splash of the strong liquor in his earthenware cup, Peter refused, and the priest took a hearty swig from the mouth of the bottle. Freize looked longingly from the doorway, but decided against saying anything.

‘Now I’ll take you to the Lady Abbess,’ the priest said, carefully stoppering the cork. ‘And you’ll bear in mind, if she asks you for advice, that she could put this nunnery under the care of her brother monastery, we would run it for her, and all her troubles would be over.’

‘I’ll remember,’ Luca said, without committing himself to one view or the other.

The abbess’s house was next door, built on the outer wall of the nunnery, facing inwards onto the cloister and outwards to the forest and the high mountains beyond. The windows that looked to the outer world were heavily leaded, and shielded with thick metal grilles.

‘This place is built like a square within a square,’ the priest told them. ‘The inner square is made up of the church, with the cloister and the nuns’ cells around it. This house extends from the cloister to the outer courtyard. The Lady Almoner’s half of the house faces the courtyard and the main gate, so she can see all the comings and goings, and the south wall is the hospital for the poor.’

The priest gestured towards the door. ‘The Lady Abbess said for you to go in.’ He stood back, and Luca and Peter went in, Freize behind them. They found themselves in a small room furnished with two wooden benches and two very plain chairs. A strong wrought-iron grille in the wall on the far side blocked the opening into the next room, veiled by a curtain of white wool. As they stood waiting, the curtain was silently drawn back and on the other side they could just make out a white robe, a wimple headdress, and a pale face through the obscuring mesh of the metal.

‘God bless you and keep you,’ a clear voice said. ‘I welcome you to this abbey. I am the Lady Abbess here.’

‘I am Luca Vero.’ Luca stepped up to the grille, but he could see only the silhouette of a woman through the richly wrought ironwork of grapes, fruit, leaves and flowers. There was a faint light perfume, like rosewater. Behind the lady, he could just make out the shadowy outline of another woman in a dark robe.

‘This is my clerk Brother Peter, and my servant Freize. And I have been sent here to make an inquiry into your abbey.’

‘I know,’ she said quietly.

‘I did not know that you were enclosed,’ Luca said, careful not to offend.

‘It is the tradition that visitors speak to the ladies of our order through a grille.’

‘But I shall need to speak with them for my inquiry. I shall need them to come to report to me.’

He could sense her reluctance through the bars.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Since we have agreed to your inquiry.’

Luca knew perfectly well, that this cool Lady Abbess had not agreed to the inquiry: she had been offered no choice in the matter. His inquiry had been sent to her house by the lord of the Order, and he would interrogate her sisters with or without her consent.

‘I shall need a room for my private use, and the nuns will have to come and report to me, under oath, what has been happening here,’ Luca said more confidently. At his side the priest nodded his approval.

‘I have ordered them to prepare a room for you next door to this one,’ she said. ‘I think it better that you should hear evidence in my house, in the house of the Lady Abbess. They will know then that I am co-operating with your inquiry, that they come here to speak to you under my blessing.’

‘It would be better somewhere else altogether,’ the priest said quietly to Luca. ‘You should come to the monastery and order them to attend in our house, under our supervision. The rule of men, you know . . . the logic of men . . . always a powerful thing to invoke. This needs a man’s mind on it, not a woman’s fleeting whimsy.’

‘Thank you, but I will meet them here,’ Luca said to the priest. To the Lady Abbess he said, ‘I thank you for your assistance. I am happy to meet with the nuns in your house.’

‘But I do wonder why,’ Freize prompted under his breath to a fat bee bumbling against the small leaded window pane.

‘But I do wonder why,’ Luca repeated out loud.

Freize opened the little window and released the bee out into the sunshine.

‘There has been much scandal talked, and some of it directed against me,’ the Lady Abbess said frankly. ‘I have been accused personally. It is better that the house sees that the inquiry is under my control, is under my blessing. I hope that you will clear my name, as well as discovering any wrong-doing and rooting it out.’

‘We will have to interview you, as well as all the members of the order,’ Luca pointed out.

He could see through the grille that the white figure had moved, and realised she had bowed her head as if he had shamed her.

‘I am ordered from Rome to help you to discover the truth,’ he insisted.

She did not reply but merely turned her head and spoke to someone out of his sight and then the door to the room opened and the elderly nun, the porteress Sister Anna who had greeted them on their first night, said abruptly, ‘The Lady Abbess says I am to show you the room for your inquiry.’

It appeared that their interview with the Lady Abbess was over, and they had not even seen her face.

It was a plain room, looking out over the woods behind the abbey, in the back of the house so that they could not see the cloister, the nuns’ cells, or the comings and goings of the courtyard before the church. But, equally, the community could not see who came to give evidence.

‘Discreet,’ Peter the clerk remarked.

‘Secretive,’ Freize said cheerfully. ‘Am I to stand outside and make sure no-one interrupts or eavesdrops?’

‘Yes.’ Luca pulled up a chair to the empty table and waited while Brother Peter produced papers, a black quill pen and a pot of ink, then seated himself at the end of the table, and looked at Luca expectantly. The three young men paused. Luca, overwhelmed with the task that lay before him, looked blankly back at the other two. Freize grinned at him, and made an encouraging gesture like someone waving a flag. ‘Onward!’ he said. ‘Things are so bad here, that we can’t make them worse.’

Luca choked on a boyish laugh. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, taking his seat, and turned to Brother Peter. ‘We’ll start with the Lady Almoner,’ he said, trying to speak decisively. ‘At least we know her name.’

Freize nodded and went to the door. ‘Fetch the Lady Almoner,’ he said to Sister Anna.

She came straight away, and took a seat opposite Luca. He tried not to look at the serene beauty of her face, her grey knowing eyes that seemed to smile at him with some private knowledge.

Formally, he took her name, her age – twenty-four – the name of her parents, and the duration of her stay in the abbey. She had been behind the abbey walls for twenty years, since her earliest childhood.

‘What do you think is happening here?’ Luca asked her, emboldened by his position as the inquirer, by his sense of his own self-importance, and by the trappings of his work: Freize at the door, and Brother Peter with his black quill pen.

She looked down at the plain wooden table. ‘I don’t know. There are strange occurrences, and my sisters are very troubled.’

‘What sort of occurrences?’

‘Some of my sisters have started to have visions, and two of them have been rising up in their sleep – getting out of their beds and walking though their eyes are still closed. One cannot eat the food that is served in the refectory, she is starving herself and cannot be persuaded to eat. And there are other things. Other manifestations.’

‘When did it start?’ Luca asked her.

She nodded wearily, as if she expected such a question. ‘It was about three months ago.’

‘Was that when the new Lady Abbess came?’

A breath of a sigh. ‘Yes. But I am convinced that she has nothing to do with it. I would not want to give evidence to an inquiry that was used against her. Our troubles started then – but you must remember she has no authority with the nuns, being so new, so inexperienced, having declared herself unwilling. A nunnery needs strong leadership, supervision, a woman who loves the life here. The new Lady Abbess lived a very sheltered life before she came to us, she was the favoured child of a great lord, the indulged daughter of a great house; she is not accustomed to command a religious house. She was not raised here. It is not surprising that she does not know how to command.’

‘Could the nuns be commanded to stop seeing visions? Is it within their choice? Has she failed them through her inability to command?’

Peter the clerk made a note of the question.

The Lady Almoner smiled. ‘Not if they are true visions from God,’ she said easily. ‘If they are true visions, then nothing would stop them. But if they are errors and folly, if they are women frightening themselves and allowing their fears to rule them . . . If they are women dreaming and making up stories . . . Forgive me for being so blunt, Brother Luca, but I have lived in this community for twenty years and I know that two hundred women living together can whip up a storm over nothing if they are allowed to do so.’

Luca raised his eyebrows. ‘They can invoke sleepwalking? They can invoke running out at night and trying to get out of the gates?’

She sighed. ‘You saw?’

‘Last night,’ he confirmed.

‘I am sure that there are one or two who are truly sleepwalkers. I am sure that one, perhaps two, have truly seen visions. But now I have dozens of young women who are hearing angels, and seeing the movement of stars, who are waking in the night and are shrieking out in pain. You must understand, Brother, not all of our novices are here because they have a calling. Very many are sent here by families who have too many children at home, or because the girl is too scholarly, or because she has lost her betrothed or cannot be married for some other reason. Sometimes they send us girls who are disobedient. Of course, they bring their troubles here, at first. Not everyone has a vocation, not everyone wants to be here. And once one young woman leaves her cell at night, against the rules, and runs around the cloisters, there is always someone who is going to join her.’ She paused. ‘And then another, and another.’

‘And the stigmata? The sign of the cross on her palms?’

He could see the shock in her face. ‘Who told you about that?’

‘I saw the girl myself, last night, and the other women who ran after her.’

She bowed her head and clasped her hands together; he thought for a moment that she was praying for guidance as to what she should say next. ‘Perhaps it is a miracle,’ she said quietly. ‘The stigmata. We cannot know for sure. Perhaps not. Perhaps – Our Lady defend us from evil – it is something worse.’

Luca leaned across the table to hear her. ‘Worse? What d’you mean?’

‘Sometimes a devout young woman will mark herself with the five wounds of Christ. Mark herself as an act of devotion. Sometimes young women will go too far.’ She took a nervous shuddering breath. ‘That is why we need strong discipline in the house. The nuns need to feel that they can be cared for, as a daughter is cared for by her father. They need to know that there are strict limits to their behaviour. They need to be carefully ruled.’

‘You fear that the women are harming themselves?’ Luca asked, shocked.

‘They are young women,’ the Lady Almoner repeated. ‘And they have no leadership. They become passionate, stirred up. It is not unknown for them to cut themselves, or each other.’

Brother Peter and Luca exchanged a horrified glance, Brother Peter ducked down his head and made a note.

‘The abbey is wealthy,’ Luca observed, speaking at random, to divert himself from his shock.

She shook her head. ‘No, we have a vow of poverty, each and every one of us. Poverty, obedience and chastity. We can own nothing, we cannot follow our own will, and we cannot love a man. We have all taken these vows; there is no escaping them. We have all taken them. We have all willingly consented.’

‘Except the Lady Abbess,’ Luca suggested. ‘I understand that she protested. She did not want to come. She was ordered to enter the abbey. She did not choose to be obedient, poor, and without the love of a man.’

‘You would have to ask her,’ the Lady Almoner said with quiet dignity. ‘She went through the service. She gave up her rich gowns from the great chests of clothes that she brought in with her. Out of respect for her position in the world she was allowed to change her gown in private. Her own servant shaved her head and helped her dress in coarse linen, and a wool robe of our order, with a wimple around her head and a veil on top of that. When she was ready she came into the chapel and lay alone on the stone floor before the altar, her arms spread out, her face to the cold floor, and she gave herself to God. Only she can know if she took the vows in her heart. Her mind is hidden from us, her sisters.’

She hesitated. ‘But her servant, of course, did not take the vows. She lives among us as an outsider. Her servant, as far as I know, follows no rules at all. I don’t know if she even obeys the Lady Abbess, or if their relationship is more . . .’

‘More what?’ Luca asked, horrified.

‘More unusual,’ she said.

‘Her servant? Is she a lay sister?’

‘I don’t know quite what you would call her. She was the Lady Abbess’s personal servant from childhood, and when the Lady Abbess joined us, the slave came too; she just accompanied her when she came, like a dog follows his master. She lives in the house of the Lady Abbess. She used to sleep in the storeroom next door to the Lady Abbess’s room, she wouldn’t sleep in the nun’s cells, then she started to sleep on the threshold of her room, like a slave. Recently she has taken to sleeping in the bed with her.’ She paused. ‘Like a bedmate.’ She hesitated. ‘I am not suggesting anything else,’ she said.

Brother Peter’s pen was suspended, his mouth open; but he said nothing.

‘She attends the church, following the Lady Abbess like her shadow; but she doesn’t say the prayers, nor confess, nor take Mass. I assume she is an infidel. I really don’t know. She is an exception to our rule. We don’t call her Sister, we call her Ishraq.’

‘Ishraq?’ Luca repeated the strange name.

‘She was born an Ottoman,’ the Lady Almoner said, her voice carefully controlled. ‘You will notice her around the abbey. She wears a dark robe like a Moorish woman, sometimes she holds a veil across her face. Her skin is the colour of caramel sugar, it is the same colour: all over. Naked, she is golden, like a woman made of toffee. The last lord brought her back with him as a baby from Jerusalem when he returned from the crusades. Perhaps he owned her as a trophy, perhaps as a pet. He did not change her name nor did he have her baptised; but had her brought up with his daughter as her personal slave.’

‘Do you think she could have had anything to do with the disturbances? Since they started when she came into the abbey? Since she came in with the Lady Abbess, at the same time?’

She shrugged. ‘Some of the nuns were afraid of her when they first saw her. She is a heretic, of course, and fierce-looking. She is always in the shadow of the Lady Abbess. They found her . . .’ She paused. ‘Disturbing,’ she said, then nodded at the word she had chosen. ‘She is disturbing. We would all say that: disturbing.’

‘What does she do?’

‘She does nothing for God,’ the Lady Almoner said with sudden passion. ‘For sure, she does nothing for the abbey. Wherever the Lady Abbess goes, she goes too. She never leaves her side.’

‘Surely she goes out? She is not enclosed?’

‘She never leaves the Lady Abbess’s side,’ she contradicted him. ‘And the Lady Abbess never goes out. The slave haunts the place. She walks in shadows, she stands in dark corners, she watches everything, and she speaks to none of us. It is as if we have trapped a strange animal. I feel as if I am keeping a tawny lioness, encaged.’

‘Are you afraid of her, yourself?’ Luca asked bluntly.

She raised her head and looked at him with her clear grey gaze. ‘I trust that God will protect me from all evil,’ she said. ‘But if I were not certain sure that I am under the hand of God she would be an utter terror to me.’

There was silence in the little room, as if a whisper of evil had passed among them. Luca felt the hairs on his neck prickle, while beneath the table Brother Peter felt for the crucifix that he wore at his belt.

‘Which of the nuns should I speak to first?’ Luca asked, breaking the silence. ‘Write down for me the names of those who have been walking in their sleep, showing stigmata, seeing visions, fasting.’

He pushed the paper and the quill before her and, without haste or hesitation, she wrote six names clearly, and returned the paper to him.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen visions, or walked in your sleep?’

Her smile at the younger man was almost alluring. ‘I wake in the night for the church services, and I go to my prayers,’ she said. ‘You won’t find me anywhere but warm in my bed.’

As Luca blinked that vision from his mind, she rose from the table and left the room.

‘Impressive woman,’ Peter said quietly, as the door shut behind her. ‘Think of her being in a nunnery from the age of four! If she’d been in the outside world, what might she have done?’

‘Silk petticoats,’ Freize remarked, inserting his broad head around the door from the hall outside. ‘Unusual.’

‘What? What?’ Luca demanded, furious for no reason, feeling his heart pound at the thought of the Lady Almoner sleeping in her chaste bed.

‘Unusual to find a nun in silk petticoats. Hair shirt, yes – that’s extreme perhaps, but traditional. Silk petticoats, no.’

‘How the Devil do you know that she wears silk petticoats?’ Peter demanded irritably. ‘And how dare you speak so, and of such a lady?’

‘Saw them drying in the laundry, wondered who they belonged to. Seemed an odd sort of garment for a nunnery vowed to poverty. Started to listen. I may be a fool but I can listen. Heard them whisper as she walked by me. She didn’t know I was listening, she walked by me as if I was a stone, a tree. Silk gives a little hss hss hss sound.’ He nodded smugly at Peter. ‘More than one way to make inquiry. Don’t have to be able to write to be able to think. Sometimes it helps to just listen.’

Brother Peter ignored him completely. ‘Who next?’ he asked Luca.

‘The Lady Abbess,’ Luca ruled. ‘Then her servant, Ishraq.’

‘Why not see Ishraq first, and then we can hold her next door while the Lady Abbess speaks,’ Peter suggested. ‘That way we can make sure they don’t collude.’

‘Collude in what?’ Luca demanded, impatiently.

‘That’s the whole thing,’ Peter said. ‘We don’t know what they’re doing.’

‘Collude.’ Freize carefully repeated the strange word. ‘Col-lude. Funny how some words just sound guilty.’

‘Just fetch the slave,’ Luca commanded. ‘You’re not the inquirer, you are supposed to be serving me as your lord. And make sure she doesn’t talk to anyone as she comes to us.’

Freize walked round to the Lady Abbess’s kitchen door and asked for the servant, Ishraq. She came veiled like a desert-dweller, dressed in a tunic and pantaloons of black, a shawl over her head pinned across her face, hiding her mouth. All he could see of her were her bare brown feet – a silver ring on one toe – and her dark inscrutable eyes above her veil. Freize smiled reassuringly at her; but she responded not at all, and they walked in silence to the room. She seated herself before Luca and Brother Peter without uttering one word.

‘Your name is Ishraq?’ Luca asked her.

‘I don’t speak Italian,’ she said in perfect Italian.

‘You are speaking it now.’

She shook her head and said again: ‘I don’t speak Italian.’

‘Your name is Ishraq.’ He tried again in French.

‘I don’t speak French,’ she replied in perfectly accented French.

‘Your name is Ishraq,’ he said in Latin.

‘It is,’ she conceded in Latin. ‘But I don’t speak Latin.’

‘What language do you speak?’

‘I don’t speak.’

Luca recognised a stalemate and leaned forwards, drawing on as much authority as he could. ‘Listen, woman: I am commanded by the Holy Father himself to make inquiry into the events in this nunnery and to send him my report. You had better answer me, or face not just my displeasure, but his.’

She shrugged. ‘I am dumb,’ she said simply, in Latin. ‘And of course, he may be your Holy Father, but he is not mine.’

‘Clearly you can speak,’ Brother Peter intervened. ‘Clearly you can speak several languages.’

She turned her insolent eyes to him, and shook her head.

‘You speak to the Lady Abbess.’

Silence.

‘We have powers to make you speak,’ Brother Peter warned her.

At once she looked down, her dark eyelashes veiling her gaze. When she looked up Luca saw that her dark brown eyes were crinkled at the edges, and she was fighting her desire to laugh out loud at Brother Peter. ‘I don’t speak,’ was all she said. ‘And I don’t think you have any powers over me.’

Luca flushed scarlet with the quick temper of a young man who has been mocked by a woman. ‘Just go,’ Luca said shortly.

To Freize, who put his long face around the door, he snapped: ‘Send for the Lady Abbess. And hold this dumb woman next door, alone.’

Isolde stood in the inner doorway, her hood pulled so far forwards that it cast a deep shadow over her face, her hands hidden in her deep sleeves, only her lithe white feet showing below her robe, in their plain sandals. Irrelevantly Luca noticed that her toes were rosy with cold and her insteps arched high. ‘Come in,’ Luca said, trying to recover his temper. ‘Please take a seat.’

She sat; but she did not put back her hood, so Luca found he was forced to bend his head to peer under it to try to see her. In the shadow of the hood he could make out only a heart-shaped jaw line with a determined mouth. The rest of her remained a mystery.

‘Will you put back your hood, Lady Abbess?’

‘I would rather not.’

‘The Lady Almoner faced us without a hood.’

‘I was made to swear to avoid the company of men,’ she said coldly. ‘I was commanded to swear to remain inside this order and not meet or speak with men except for the fewest words and the briefest meeting. I am obeying the vows I was forced to take. It was not my choice, it was laid upon me by the Church. You, from the Church, should be pleased at my obedience.’

Brother Peter tucked his papers together and waited, pen poised.

‘Would you tell us of the circumstances of your coming to the nunnery?’ Luca asked.

‘They are well-enough known,’ she said. ‘My father died three and a half months ago and left his castle and his lands entirely to my brother, the new lord, as is right and proper. My mother was dead, and to me he left nothing but the choice of a suitor in marriage or a place in the abbey. My brother, the new Lord Lucretili, accepted my decision not to marry and did me the great favour of putting me in charge of this nunnery, and I came in, took my vows, and started my service as their Lady Abbess.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I am seventeen,’ she told him.

‘Isn’t that very young to be a Lady Abbess?’

The half-hidden mouth showed a wry smile. ‘Not if your grandfather founded the abbey and your brother is its only patron, of course. The Lord of Lucretili can appoint who he chooses.’

‘You had a vocation?’

‘Alas, I did not. I came here in obedience to my brother’s wish and my father’s will. Not because I feel I have a calling.’

‘Did you not want to rebel against your brother’s wish and your father’s will?’

There was a moment of silence. She raised her head and from the depth of her hood he saw her regard him thoughtfully, as if she were considering him as a man who might understand her.

‘Of course, I was tempted by the sin of disobedience,’ she said levelly. ‘I did not understand why my father would treat me so. He had never spoken to me of the abbey nor suggested that he wanted a life of holiness for me. On the contrary, he spoke to me of the outside world, of being a woman of honour and power in the world, of managing my lands and supporting the Church as it comes under attack both here and in the Holy Land. But my brother was with my father on his deathbed, heard his last words, and afterwards he showed me his will. It was clearly my father’s last wish that I come here. I loved my father, I love him still. I obey him in death as I obeyed him in life.’ Her voice shook slightly as she spoke of her father. ‘I am a good daughter to him; now as then.’

‘They say that you brought your slave with you, a Moorish girl named Ishraq, and that she is neither a lay sister nor has she taken her vows.’

‘She is not my slave; she is a free woman. She may do as she pleases.’

‘So what is she doing here?’

‘Whatever she wishes.’

Luca was sure that he saw in her shadowed eyes the same gleam of defiance that the slave had shown. ‘Lady Abbess,’ he said sternly. ‘You should have no companions but the sisters of your order.’

She looked at him with an untameable confidence. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you have the authority to tell me so. And I don’t think that I would listen to you, even if you said that you had the authority. As far as I know there is no law that says a woman, an infidel, may not enter a nunnery and serve alongside the nuns. There is no tradition that excludes her. We are of the Augustine order, and as Lady Abbess I can manage this house as I see fit. Nobody can tell me how to do it. If you make me Lady Abbess then you give me the right to decide how this house shall be run. Having forced me to take the power, you can be sure that I shall rule.’ The words were defiant, but her voice was very calm.

‘They say she has not left your side since you came to the abbey?’

‘This is true.’

‘She has never gone out of the gates?’

‘Neither have I.’

‘She is with you night and day?’

‘Yes.’

‘They say that she sleeps in your bed?’ Luca said boldly.

‘Who says?’ the Lady Abbess asked him evenly.

Luca looked down at his notes, and Brother Peter shuffled the papers.

She shrugged, as if she were filled with disdain for them and for their gossipy inquiry. ‘I suppose you have to ask everybody, everything that they imagine,’ she said dismissively. ‘You will have to chatter like a clattering of choughs. You will hear the wildest of talk from the most fearful and imaginative people. You will ask silly girls to tell you tales.’

‘Where does she sleep?’ Luca persisted, feeling a fool.

‘Since the abbey became so disturbed she has chosen to sleep in my bed, as she did when we were children. This way she can protect me.’

‘Against what?’

She sighed as if she were weary of his curiosity. ‘Of course, I don’t know. I don’t know what she fears for me. I don’t know what I fear for myself. In truth, I think no-one knows what is happening here. Isn’t this what you are here to find out?’

‘Things seem to have gone very badly wrong since you came here.’

She bowed her head in silence for a moment. ‘Now that is true,’ she conceded. ‘But it is nothing that I have deliberately done. I don’t know what is happening here. I regret it very much. It causes me, me personally, great pain. I am puzzled. I am . . . lost.’

‘Lost?’ Luca repeated the word that seemed freighted with loneliness.

‘Lost,’ she confirmed.

‘You don’t know how to rule the abbey?’

Her head bowed down as if she were praying again. Then a small silent nod of her head admitted the truth of it: that she did not know how to command the abbey. ‘Not like this,’ she whispered. ‘Not when they say they are possessed, not when they behave like madwomen.’

‘You have no vocation,’ Luca said very quietly to her. ‘Do you wish yourself on the outside of these walls, even now?’

She breathed out a tiny sigh of longing. Luca could almost feel her desire to be free, her sense that she should be free. Absurdly, he thought of the bee that Freize had released to fly out into the sunshine, he thought that every form of life, even the smallest bee, longs to be free.

‘How can this abbey hope to thrive with a Lady Abbess who wishes herself free?’ he asked her sternly. ‘You know that we have to serve where we have sworn to be.’

‘You don’t.’ She rounded on him almost as if she were angry. ‘For you were sworn to be a priest in a small country monastery; but here you are – free as a bird. Riding around the country on the best horses that the Church can give you, followed by a squire and a clerk. Going where you want and questioning anyone. Free to question me – even authorised to question me, who lives here and serves here and prays here, and does nothing but sometimes secretly wish . . .’

‘It is not for you to pass comment on us,’ Brother Peter intervened. ‘The Pope himself has authorised us. It is not for you to ask questions.’

Luca let it go, secretly relieved that he did not have to admit to the Lady Abbess his joy at being released from his monastery, his delight in his horse, his unending insatiable curiosity.

She tossed her head at Brother Peter’s ruling. ‘I would expect you to defend him,’ she remarked dismissively. ‘I would expect you to stick together, as men do, as men always do.’

She turned to Luca. ‘Of course, I have thought that I am utterly unsuited to be a Lady Abbess. But what am I to do? My father’s wishes were clear, my brother orders everything now. My father wished me to be Lady Abbess and my brother has ordered that I am. So here I am. It may be against my wishes, it may be against the wishes of the community. But it is the command of my brother and my father. I will do what I can. I have taken my vows. I am bound here till death.’

‘You swore fully?’

‘I did.’

‘You shaved your head and renounced your wealth?’

A tiny gesture of the veiled head warned him that he had caught her in some small deception. ‘I cut my hair, and I put away my mother’s jewels,’ she said cautiously. ‘I will never be bare-headed again, I will never wear her sapphires.’

‘Do you think that these manifestations of distress and trouble are caused by you?’ he asked bluntly.

Her little gasp revealed her distress at the charge. Almost, she recoiled from what he was saying, then gathered her courage and leaned towards him. He caught a glimpse of intense dark blue eyes. ‘Perhaps. It is possible. You would be the one to discover such a thing. You have been appointed to discover such things, after all. Certainly I don’t wish things as they are. I don’t understand them, and they hurt me too. It is not just the sisters, I too am—’

‘You are?’

‘Touched,’ she said quietly.

Luca, his head spinning, looked to Brother Peter, whose pen was suspended in midair over the page, his mouth agape.

‘Touched?’ Luca repeated wondering wildly if she meant that she was going insane.

‘Wounded,’ she amended.

‘In what way?’

She shook her head as if she would not fully reply. ‘Deeply,’ was all she said.

There was a long silence in the sunlit room. Freize outside, hearing the voices cease their conversation, opened the door, looked in, and received such a black scowl from Luca that he quickly withdrew. ‘Sorry,’ he said as the door shut.

‘Should not the nunnery be put into the charge of your brother house, the Dominicans?’ Peter asked bluntly. ‘You could be released from your vows and the head of the monastery could rule both communities. The nuns could come under the discipline of the Lord Abbot, the business affairs of the nunnery could be passed to the castle. You would be free to leave.’

‘Put men to rule women?’ She looked up as if she would laugh at him. ‘Is that all you can suggest – the three of you? Going to the trouble to come all the way from Rome on your fine horses, a clerk, an inquirer and a servant, and the best idea you have is that a nunnery shall give up its independence and be ruled by men? You would break up our old and traditional order, you would destroy us who are made in the image of Our Lady Mary, and put us under the rule of men?’

‘God gave men the rule over everything,’ Luca pointed out. ‘At the creation of the world.’

Her flash of laughing defiance deserted her as soon as it had come. ‘Oh, perhaps,’ she said, suddenly weary. ‘If you say so. I don’t know. I wasn’t raised to think so. But I know that is what some of the sisters want, I know it is what the brothers say should happen. I don’t know if it is the will of God. I don’t know that God particularly wants men to rule over women. My father never suggested such a thing to me and he was a crusader who had gone to the Holy Land himself and prayed at the very birthplace of Jesus. He raised me to think of myself as a child of God and a woman of the world. He never told me that God had set men over women. He said God had created them together, to be helpers and lovers to each other. But I don’t know. Certainly God – if He ever stoops to speak to a woman – does not speak to me.’

‘And what is your own will?’ Luca asked her. ‘You, who are here, though you say you don’t want to be here? With a servant who speaks three languages but claims to be dumb? Praying to a God who does not speak to you? You, who say you are hurt? You, who say you are touched? What is your will?’

‘I have no will,’ she said simply. ‘It’s too soon for me. My father died only fourteen weeks ago. Can you imagine what that is like for his daughter? I loved him deeply, he was my only parent, the hero of my childhood. He commanded everything, he was the very sun of my world. I wake every morning and have to remind myself that he is dead. I came into the nunnery only days after his death, in the first week of mourning. Can you imagine that? The troubles started to happen almost at once. My father is dead and everyone around me is either feigning madness, or they are going mad.

‘So if you ask me what I want, I will tell you. All I want to do is to cry and sleep. All I want to do is to wish that none of this had ever happened. In my worse moments, I want to tie the rope of the bell in the bell tower around my throat and let it sweep me off my feet and break my neck as it tolls.’

The violence of her words clanged like a tolling bell itself into the quiet room. ‘Self-harm is blasphemy,’ Luca said quickly. ‘Even thinking of it is a sin. You will have to confess such a wish to a priest, accept the penance he sets you, and never think of it again.’

‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I know. And that is why I only wish it, and don’t do it.’

‘You are a troubled woman.’ He had no idea what he should say to comfort her. ‘A troubled girl.’

She raised her head and, from the darkness of her hood, he thought he saw the ghost of a smile. ‘I don’t need an inquirer to come all the way from Rome to tell me that. But would you help me?’

‘If I could,’ he said. ‘If I can, I will.’

They were silent. Luca felt that he had somehow pledged himself to her. Slowly, she pushed back her hood, just a little, so that he could see the blaze of her honest blue eyes. Then Brother Peter noisily dipped his pen in the bottle of ink, and Luca recollected himself.

‘I saw a nun last night run across the courtyard, chased by three others,’ he said. ‘This woman got to the outer gate and hammered on it with her fists, screaming like a vixen, a terrible sound, the cry of the damned. They caught her and carried her back to the cloister. I assume they put her back in her cell?’

‘They did,’ she said coldly.

‘I saw her hands,’ he told her; and now he felt as if he were not making an inquiry, but an accusation. He felt as if he were accusing her. ‘She was marked on the palms of her hand, with the sign of the crucifixion, as if she was showing, or faking, the stigmata.’

‘She is no fake,’ the Lady Abbess told him with quiet dignity. ‘This is a pain to her, not a source of pride.’

‘You know this?’

‘I know it for certain.’

‘Then I will see her this afternoon. You will send her to me.’

‘I will not.’

Her calm refusal threw Luca. ‘You have to!’

‘I will not send her this afternoon. The whole community is watching the door to my house. You have arrived with enough fanfare, the whole abbey, brothers and sisters, know that you are here and that you are taking evidence. I will not have her further shamed. It is bad enough for her with everyone knowing that she is showing these signs and dreaming these dreams. You can meet her; but at a time of my choosing, when no-one is watching.’

‘I have an order from the Pope himself to interview the wrong-doers.’

‘Is that what you think of me? That I am a wrong-doer?’ she suddenly asked.

‘No. I should have said I have an order from the Pope to hold an inquiry.’

‘Then do so,’ she said impertinently. ‘But you will not see that young woman until it is safe for her to come to you.’

‘When will that be?’

‘Soon. When I judge it is right.’

Luca realised he would get no further with the Lady Abbess. To his surprise, he was not angry. He found that he admired her; he liked her bright sense of honour, and he shared her own bewilderment at what was happening in the nunnery. But more than anything else, he pitied her loss. Luca knew what it was to miss a parent, to be without someone who would care for you, love you and protect you. He knew what it was to face the world alone and feel yourself to be an orphan.

He found he was smiling at her, though he could not see if she was smiling back. ‘Lady Abbess, you are not an easy woman to interrogate.’

‘Brother Luca, you are not an easy man to refuse,’ she replied, and she rose from the table without permission, and left the room.

For the rest of the day Luca and Brother Peter interviewed one nun after another, taking each one’s history, and her hopes, and fears. They ate alone in the Lady Almoner’s parlour, served by Freize. In the afternoon, Luca remarked that he could not stand another white-faced girl telling him that she had bad dreams and that she was troubled by her conscience, and swore that he had to take a break from the worries and fears of women.

They saddled their horses and the three men rode out into the great beech forest where the massive trees arched high above them, shedding copper-coloured leaves and beech mast in a constant whisper. The horses were almost silent as their hooves were muffled by the thickness of the forest floor and Luca rode ahead, on his own, weary of the many plaintive voices of the day, wondering if he would be able to make any sense of all he had heard, fearful that all he was doing was listening to meaningless dreams and being frightened by fantasies.

The track led them higher and higher until they emerged above the woodland, looking down the way they had come. Above them, the track went on, narrower and more stony, up to the high mountains that stood, bleak and lovely, all around them.

‘This is better.’ Freize patted his horse’s neck as they paused for a moment. Down below them they could see the little village of Lucretili, the grey slate roof of the abbey, the two religious houses placed on either side of it, and the dominating castle where the new lord’s standard fluttered in the wind over the round gatehouse tower.

The air was cold. Above them a solitary eagle wheeled away. Brother Peter tightened his cloak around his shoulders and looked at Luca, to remind him that they must not stay out too long.

Together they turned the horses and rode along the crest of the hill, keeping the woodland to their right, and then, at the first woodcutter’s trail, dropped down towards the valley again, falling silent as the trees closed around them.

The trail wound through the forest. Once they heard the trickle of water, and then the drilling noise of a woodpecker. Just when they thought they had overshot the village they came out into a clearing and saw a wide track heading to the castle of Lucretili which stood, like a grey stone guard post, dominating the road.

‘He does all right for himself,’ Freize observed, looking at the high castle walls, the drawbridge and the rippling standards. From the lord’s stables they could hear the howling of his pack of deerhounds. ‘Not a bad life. The wealth to enjoy it all, hunting your own deer, living off your own game, enough money to take a ride into Rome to see the sights when you feel like it, and a cellar full of your own wine.’

‘Saints save her, how she must miss her home,’ Luca remarked, looking at the tall towers of the beautiful castle, the rides which led deep into the forest and beyond to lakes, hills, and streams. ‘From all this wealth and freedom to four square walls and a life enclosed till death! How could a father who loved his daughter bring her up to be free here, and then have her locked up on his death?’

‘Better that than a bad husband who would beat her as soon as her brother’s back was turned, better that than die in childbirth,’ Brother Peter pointed out. ‘Better that than being swept off her feet by some fortune-hunter, and all the family wealth and good name destroyed in a year.’

‘Depends on the fortune-hunter,’ Freize volunteered. ‘A lusty man with a bit of charm about him might have brought a flush to her cheek, given her something pleasant to dream about.’

‘Enough,’ Luca ruled. ‘You may not talk about her like that.’

‘Seems we mustn’t think of her like a pretty lass,’ Freize remarked to his horse.

‘Enough,’ Luca repeated. ‘And you don’t know what she looks like, any more than I do.’

‘Ha, but I can tell by her walk,’ Freize said quietly to his horse. ‘You can always tell a pretty girl by the way she walks. A pretty girl walks like she owns the world.’

Isolde and Ishraq were at the window as the young men came back through the gate. ‘Can’t you just smell the open air on their clothes?’ the first one whispered. ‘When he leaned forwards I could just smell the forest, and the fresh air, and the wind that comes off the mountain.’

‘We could go out, Isolde.’

‘You know I cannot.’

‘We could go out in secret,’ the other replied. ‘At night, through the little postern gate. We could just walk in the woods in the starlight. If you long for the outside, we don’t have to be prisoners here.’

‘You know that I took vows that I would never leave here . . .’

‘When so many vows are being broken?’ the other urged. ‘When we have turned the abbey upside down and brought hell in here with us? What would one more sin matter? How does it matter what we do now?’

The gaze that Isolde turned on her friend was dark with guilt. ‘I can’t give up,’ she whispered. ‘Whatever people think I have done or say I have done, whatever I have done – I won’t give up on myself. I’ll keep my word.’

The three men attended Compline, the last service before the nuns went to bed for the night. Freize looked longingly at the Lady Almoner’s stores as the three men walked out of the cloister and separated to go to their rooms. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a glass of sweet wine as a nightcap,’ he said. ‘Or two. Or three.’

‘You really are a hopeless servant for a religious man,’ Peter remarked. ‘Wouldn’t you have done better in an ale house?’

‘And how would the little lord manage without me?’ Freize demanded indignantly. ‘Who watched over him in the monastery and kept him safe? Who fed him when he was nothing more than a long-legged sparrow? Who follows him now wherever he goes? Who keeps the door for him?’

‘Did he watch over you in the monastery?’ Peter asked, turning in surprise to Luca.

Luca laughed. ‘He watched over my dinner and ate everything I left,’ he said. ‘He drank my wine allowance. In that sense he watched me very closely.’

At Freize’s protest, Luca thumped him on the shoulder. ‘Ah, all right! All right!’ To Peter he said: ‘When I first entered the monastery he watched out for me so that I wasn’t beaten by the older boys. When I was charged with heresy he gave witness for me, though he couldn’t make head nor tail of what they said I had done. He has been loyal to me, always, from the moment of our first meeting when I was a scared novice and he was a lazy kitchen boy. And when I was given this mission he asked to be released to go with me.’

‘There you are!’ Freize said triumphantly.

‘But why does he call you “little lord”?’ Peter pursued.

Luca shook his head. ‘Who knows? I don’t.’

‘Because he was no ordinary boy,’ Freize explained eagerly. ‘So clever and, when he was a child, quite beautiful like an angel. And then everyone said he was not of earthly making . . .’

‘Enough of that!’ Luca said shortly. ‘He calls me “little lord” to serve his own vanity. He would pretend he was in service to a prince if he thought he could get away with it.’

‘You’ll see,’ Freize said, nodding solemnly to Brother Peter. ‘He’s not an ordinary young man.’

‘I look forward to witnessing exceptional abilities,’ Brother Peter said drily. ‘Sooner rather than later, if possible. Now, I’m for my bed.’

Luca raised his hand in goodnight to the two of them and turned into the priest house. He closed the door behind him and pulled off his boots, putting his concealed dagger carefully under the pillow. He laid out the paper about the number zero on one side of the table, and the statements that Peter had written down on the other. He planned to study the statements and then reward himself with looking at the manuscript about zero, working through the night. Then he would attend the service of Lauds.

At about two in the morning, a tiny knock at the door made him move swiftly from the table to take up the dagger from under his pillow. ‘Who’s there?’

‘A sister.’

Luca tucked the knife into his belt, at his back, and opened the door a crack. A woman, a veil of thick lace completely obscuring her face, stood silently in his doorway. He glanced quickly up and down the deserted gallery and stepped back to indicate that she could come inside. In the back of his mind he thought he was taking a risk letting her come to him without witnesses, without Brother Peter to take a note of all that was said. But she too was taking a risk, and breaking her vows, to be alone with a man. She must be driven by something very powerful to step into a man’s bedroom, alone.

He saw that she held her hands cupped, as if she were hiding something small in her palms.

‘You wanted to see me,’ she said quietly. Her voice was low and sweet. ‘You wanted to see this.’

She held out her hands to him. Luca flinched in horror as he saw that in the centre of both was a neat shallow hole, and each palm was filled with blood. ‘Jesu save us!’

‘Amen,’ she said instantly.

Luca reached for the linen washcloth and tore a strip roughly off the side. He splashed water onto it from the ewer, and gently patted each wound. She flinched a little as he touched her. ‘I am sorry, I am sorry.’

‘They don’t hurt much, they’re not deep.’

Luca dabbed away the blood and saw that both wounds had stopped bleeding and were beginning to form small scabs. ‘When did this happen?’

‘I woke just now, and they were like this.’

‘Has it happened before?’

‘Last night. I had a terrible dream, and when I woke I was in my cell, in my bed, but my feet were muddy and my hands were filled with blood.’

‘I think that it was you that I saw,’ he said. ‘In the entrance yard? Do you remember nothing?’

She shook her head and the lace veil moved but did not reveal her face. ‘I just woke and my hands were like this, newly marked. It has happened before. Sometimes I have woken in the morning and found them wounded but they have already stopped bleeding, as if they came earlier in the night, without even waking me. They are not deep, you see, they heal within days.’

‘Do you have a vision?’

‘A vision of horror!’ she suddenly broke out. ‘I cannot believe it is the work of God to wake me with bleeding hands. I have no sense of holiness, I feel nothing but terror. This cannot be God stabbing me. These must be blasphemous wounds.’

‘God might be working through you, mysteriously . . .’ Luca tried.

She shook her head. ‘It feels more like punishment. For being here, for following the services, and yet being cursed with a rebellious heart.’

‘How many of you are here unwillingly?’

‘Who knows? Who knows what people think when they go through each day in silence, praying as they are commanded to do, singing as they are ordered? We are not allowed to speak to one another during the day except to repeat our orders or say our prayers. Who knows what anyone is thinking? Who knows what we are all privately thinking?’

She spoke so powerfully to Luca’s own sense that the nunnery was full of secrets that he could not bring himself to ask her anything more, but chose to act instead. He took a sheet of clean paper. ‘Put your palms down on this,’ he commanded. ‘First the right and then the left.’

She looked as if she would like to refuse but did as he ordered, and they both looked, in horror, at the two neat triangular prints that her blood left on the whiteness of the manuscript and the haze of her bloody palm print around them.

‘Brother Peter has to see your hands,’ Luca decided. ‘You will have to make a statement.’

He expected her to protest; but she did not. She bowed her head in obedience to him.

‘Come to my inquiry room tomorrow, first thing,’ he said. ‘Straight after Prime.’

‘Very well,’ she said easily. She opened the door and slipped through.

‘And what is your name, Sister?’ Luca asked, but she was already gone. It was only then that he realised that she would not come to the inquiry room and testify, and that he did not know her name.

Luca waited impatiently after Prime, but the nun did not come. He was too irritated with himself to explain to Freize and Brother Peter why he would see no-one else, but sat in the room, the door open, the papers on the table before them.

In the end, he declared that he had to ride out to clear his head, and went to the stables. One of the lay sisters was hauling muck out of the stable yard, and she brought his horse and saddled it for him. It was odd to Luca, who had lived for so long in a world without women, to see all the hard labouring work done by women, all the religious services observed by women, living completely self-sufficiently, in a world without men except for the visiting priest. It added to his sense of unease and displacement. These women lived in a community as if men did not exist, as if God had not created men to be their masters. They were complete to themselves and ruled by a girl. It was against everything he had observed and everything he had been taught and it seemed to him no wonder at all that everything had gone wrong.

As Luca was waiting for his horse to be led out, he saw Freize appear in the archway with his skewbald cob tacked up, and watched him haul himself into the saddle.

‘I ride alone,’ Luca said sharply.

‘You can. I’ll ride alone too,’ Freize said equably.

‘I don’t want you with me.’

‘I won’t be with you.’

‘Ride in the other direction then.’

‘Just as you say.’

Freize paused, tightened his girth, and went through the gate, bowing with elaborate courtesy to the old porteress who scowled at him, and then he waited outside the gate for Luca to come trotting through.

‘I told you, I don’t want you riding with me.’

‘Which is why I waited,’ Freize explained patiently. ‘To see what direction you were going in, so that I could make sure I took the opposite one. But of course, there may be wolves, or thieves, highwaymen or brigands, so I don’t mind your company for the first hour or so.’

‘Just shut up and let me think,’ Luca said ungraciously.

‘Not a word,’ Freize remarked to his horse, who flickered a brown ear at him. ‘Silent as the grave.’

He actually managed to keep his silence for several hours as they rode north, at a hard pace away from the abbey, from Castle Lucretili, and the little village that sheltered beneath its walls. They took a broad smooth track with matted grass growing down the middle and Luca put his horse in a canter, hardly seeing the odd farmhouse, the scattering flock of sheep, the carefully tended vines. But then, as it grew hotter towards midday, Luca drew up his horse, suddenly realising that they were some way from the abbey, and said, ‘I suppose we should be heading back.’

‘Maybe you’d like a drop of small ale and a speck of bread and ham first?’ Freize offered invitingly.

‘Do you have that?’

‘In my pack. Just in case we got to this very point and thought we might like a drop of small ale and a bite to eat.’

Luca grinned. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing food, and thank you for coming with me.’

Freize nodded smugly, and led the way off the road into a small copse where they would be sheltered from the sun. He dismounted from his cob and slung the reins loosely over the saddle. The horse immediately dropped its head and started to graze the thin grass of the forest floor. Freize spread his cape for Luca to sit, and unpacked a stone jug of small ale, and two loaves of bread. The two men ate in silence, then Freize produced, with a flourish, a half bottle of exquisitely good red wine.

‘This is excellent,’ Luca observed.

‘Best in the house,’ Freize answered, draining the very dregs.

Luca rose, brushed off the crumbs, and took up the reins of his horse, which he had looped over a bush.

‘Horses could do with watering before we go back,’ Freize remarked.

The two young men led the horses back along the track, and then mounted up to head for home. They rode for some time until they heard the noise of a stream, off to their left, deeper in the forest. They broke off from the track and, guided by the noise of running water, first found their way to a broad stream, and then followed it downhill to where it formed a wide deep pool. The bank was muddy and well-trodden, as if many people came here for water, an odd sight in the deserted forest. Luca could see the marks in the mud of the wooden pattens that the nuns wore over their shoes when they were working in the abbey gardens and fields.

Freize slipped, nearly losing his footing, and exclaimed as he saw that he had stepped in a dark green puddle of goose-shit. ‘Look at that! Damned bird. I would snare and eat him, I would.’

Luca took both horses’ reins and let them drink from the water as Freize bent to wipe his boot with a dock leaf.

‘Well, I’ll be . . . !’

‘What is it?’

Wordlessly, Freize held out the leaf with the dirt on it.

‘What?’ asked Luca, leaning away from the offering.

‘Look closer. People always say that there’s money where muck is – and here it is. Look closer, for I think I have made my fortune!’

Luca looked closer. Speckled among the dark green of the goose-shit were tiny grains of sand, shining brightly. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s gold, little lord!’ Freize was bubbling with delight. ‘See it? Goose feeds on the reeds in the river, the river water is carrying tiny grains of gold washed out of a seam somewhere in the mountain, probably nobody knows where. Goose eats it up, passes it out, I find it on my boot. All I need to do now is to find out who owns the lands around the stream, buy it off them for pennies, pan for gold, and I am a lord myself and shall ride a handsome horse and own my own hounds!’

‘If the landlord will sell,’ Luca cautioned him. ‘And I think we are still on the lands of the Lord of Lucretili. Perhaps he would like to pan for his own gold.’

‘I’ll buy it from him without telling him,’ Freize exulted. ‘I’ll tell him I want to live by the stream. I’ll tell him I have a vocation, like that poor lass, his sister. I’ll tell him I have a calling, I want to be a holy hermit and live by the pool and pray all day.’

Luca laughed aloud at the thought of Freize’s vocation for solitary prayer but suddenly Freize held up his hand. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he warned. ‘Hush, let’s get ourselves out of the way.’

‘Why should we hide? We’re doing no harm.’

‘You never know,’ Freize whispered. ‘And I’d rather not be found by a gold-bearing stream.’

The two of them backed their horses deeper into the forest, off the path, and waited. Luca threw his cape over his horse’s head so that it would make no noise, and Freize reached up to his cob’s ear and whispered one word to it. The horse bent his head and stood quietly. The two men watched through the trees as half a dozen nuns wearing their dark brown working robes wound their way along the path, their wooden pattens squelching in the mud. Freize gently gripped the nose of his horse so that it did not whinny.

The last two nuns were leading a little donkey, its back piled high with dirty fleeces from the nunnery flock. As Freize and Luca watched through the sheltering bushes, the women pegged the fleeces down in the stream, for the waters to rinse them clean, and then turned the donkey round and went back the way they had come. Obedient to their vows, they worked in silence, but as they led the little donkey away they struck up a psalm and the two young men could hear them singing:

‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I’ll not want . . .’

‘I’ll not want,’ Freize muttered, as the two emerged from hiding. ‘Damn. Damn “I’ll not want” indeed! Because I will want. I do want. And I will go on wanting, wanting and dreaming and always disappointed.’

‘Why?’ Luca asked. ‘They’re just washing the fleeces. You can still buy your stream and pan for gold.’

‘Not them,’ Freize said. ‘Not them, the cunning little vixens. They’re not washing the fleeces. Why come all this way just to wash fleeces, when there are half a dozen streams between here and the abbey? No, they’re panning for gold in the old way. They put the fleeces in the stream – see how they’ve pegged them out all across the stream so the water flows through? The staple of the wool catches the grains of gold, catches even the smallest dust. In a week or so, they’ll come back and pull out their harvest: wet fleeces, heavy with gold. They’ll take them back to the abbey, dry them, brush out the gold dust and there they are with a fortune on the floor! Little thieves!’

‘How much would it be worth?’ Luca demanded. ‘How much gold would a fleece of wool hold?’

‘And why has no-one mentioned this little business of theirs?’ Freize demanded. ‘I wonder if the Lord of Lucretili knows? It’d be a good joke on him if he put his sister in the nunnery only for her to steal his fortune from under his nose, using the very nuns he gave her to rule.’

Luca looked blankly at Freize. ‘What?’

‘I was jesting . . .’

‘No, it might not be a joke. What if she came here and found the gold, just like you did, and set the nuns to work. And then thought that she would make out that the nunnery had fallen into sin, so that no-one came to visit any more, so that no-one would trust the word of the nuns . . .’

‘Then she wouldn’t be caught in her little enterprise and, though she’d still be a Lady Abbess, she could live like a lady once more,’ Freize finished. ‘Happy all the day long, rolling in gold dust.’

‘I’ll be damned,’ Luca said heavily. He and Freize stood in silence for a long moment, and then Luca turned without another word, mounted his horse and kicked it into a canter. He realised as he rode that he was not just shocked by the massive crime that the whole nunnery was undertaking, but personally offended by the Lady Abbess – as if he thought he could have done anything to help her! As if his promise to help her had meant anything to her! As if she had wanted anything from him but his naïve trust, and his faith in her story. ‘Damn!’ he said again.

They rode in silence, Freize shaking his head over the loss of his imaginary fortune, Luca raging at being played as a fool. As they drew near to the nunnery, Luca tightened his reins and pulled his horse up until Freize drew level. ‘You truly think it is her? Because she struck me as a most unhappy woman, a grieving daughter – she was sincere in her grief for her father, I am sure of that. And yet to face me and lie to me about everything else . . . do you think she is capable of such dishonesty? I can’t see it.’

‘They might be doing it behind her back,’ Freize conceded. ‘Though the madness in the nunnery is a good way of keeping strangers away. But I suppose she might be in ignorance of it all. We’d have to know who takes the gold to be sold. That’s how you’d know who was taking the fortune. And we’d have to know if it was going on before she got here.’

Luca nodded. ‘Say nothing to Brother Peter.’

‘The spy,’ supplemented Freize cheerfully.

‘But tonight we will break into the storeroom and see if we can find any evidence: any drying fleeces, any gold.’

‘No need to break in, I have the key.’

‘How did you get that?’

‘How did you think you got such superb wine after dinner?’

Luca shook his head at his servant, and then said quietly, ‘We’ll meet at two of the clock.’

The two young men rode on together and, behind them, making no more sound than the trees that sighed in the wind, the slave Ishraq watched them go.

Isolde was in her bed, tied like a prisoner to the four posts, her feet strapped at the bottom, her two hands lashed to the two upper posts of the headboard. Ishraq pulled the covers up under her chin and smoothed them flat. ‘I hate to see you like this. It is beyond bearing. For your own God’s sake tell me that we can leave this place. I cannot tie you to your bed like some madwoman.’

‘I know,’ Isolde replied, ‘but I can’t risk walking in my sleep. I can’t bear it. I will not have this madness descend on me. Ishraq, I won’t walk in the night, scream out in dreams. If I go mad, if I really go mad, you will have to kill me. I cannot bear it.’

Ishraq leaned down and put her brown cheek to the other girl’s pale face. ‘I never would. I never could. We will fight this, and we will defeat them.’

‘What about the inquirer?’

‘He is talking to all of the sisters, he is learning far too much. His report will destroy this abbey, will ruin your good name. Everything they tell him blames us, names you, dates the start of the troubles to the time when we arrived. We have to get hold of him. We have to stop him.’

‘Stop him?’ she asked.

Ishraq nodded, her face grim. ‘We have to stop him, one way or another. We have to do whatever it takes to stop him.’

The moon was up, but it was a half moon hidden behind scudding clouds and shedding little light as Luca went quietly across the cobbled yard. He saw a shadowy figure step out of the darkness: Freize. In his hand he had the key ready, oiled to make no sound, and slid it quietly in the lock. The door creaked as Luca pushed it open and both men froze at the sound, but no-one stirred. All the narrow windows that faced over the courtyard were dark, apart from the window of the Lady Abbess’s house, where a candle burned, but other than that flickering light, there was no sign that she was awake.

The two young men slipped into the storeroom and closed the door quietly behind them. Freize struck a spark from a flint, blew a flame, lit a tallow candle taken from his pocket, and they looked around.

‘Wine is over there.’ Freize gestured to a sturdy grille. ‘Key’s hidden up high on the wall, any fool could find it – practically an invitation. They make their own wine. Small ale over there, home-brewed too. Foods are over there.’ He pointed to the sacks of wheat, rye and rice. Smoked hams in their linen sleeves hung above them, and on the cold inner wall were racks of round cheeses.

Luca was looking around; there was no sign of the fleeces. They ducked through an archway to a room at the back. Here there were piles of cloth of all different sorts of quality, all in the unbleached cream that the nuns wore. A pile of brown hessian cloth for their working robes was heaped in another corner. Leather for making their own shoes, satchels, and even saddlery, was sorted in tidy piles according to the grade. A rickety wooden ladder led up to the half-floor above.

‘Nothing down here,’ Freize observed.

‘Next we’ll search the Lady Abbess’s house,’ Luca ruled. ‘But first, I’ll check upstairs.’ He took the candle and started up the ladder. ‘You wait down here.’

‘Not without a light,’ pleaded Freize.

‘Just stand still.’

Freize watched the wavering flame go upwards and then stood, nervously, in pitch darkness. From above he heard a sudden strangled exclamation. ‘What is it?’ he hissed into the darkness. ‘Are you all right?’

Just then a cloth was flung over his head, blinding him, and as he ducked down he heard the whistle of a heavy blow in the air above him. He flung himself to the ground and rolled sideways, shouting a muffled warning as something thudded against the side of his head. He heard Luca coming quickly down the ladder and then a splintering sound as the ladder was heaved away from the wall. Freize struggled against the pain and the darkness, took a wickedly placed kick in the belly, heard Luca’s whooping shout as he fell, and then the terrible thud as he hit the stone floor. Freize, gasping for breath, called out for his master, but there was nothing but silence.

Both young men lay still for long frightening moments in the darkness, then Freize sat up, pulled the hood from his head, and patted himself all over. His hand came away wet from his face; he was bleeding from forehead to chin. ‘Are you there, Sparrow?’ he asked hoarsely.

He was answered by silence. ‘Dearest saints, don’t say she has killed him,’ he moaned. ‘Not the little lord, not the changeling boy!’

He got to his hands and knees and crawled his way around, feeling across the floor, bumping into the heaped piles of cloth, as he quartered the room. It took him painful stumbling minutes to be sure: Luca was not in the storeroom at all.

Luca was gone.

‘Fool that I am, why did I not lock the door behind me?’ Freize muttered remorsefully to himself. He staggered to his feet and felt his way round the wall, past the broken stair, to the opening. There was a little light in the front storeroom, for the door was wide open and the waning moon shone in. As Freize stumbled towards it, he saw the iron grille to the wine and ale cellar stood wide open. He rubbed his bleeding head, leaned for a moment on the trestle table, and went on towards the light. As he reached the doorway, the abbey bell rang for Lauds and he realised he had been unconscious for perhaps half an hour.

He was setting out for the chapel to raise the alarm for Luca when he saw a light at the hospital window. He turned towards it, just as the Lady Almoner came hastily out into the yard. ‘Freize! Is that you?’

He stumbled towards her, and saw her recoil as she saw his bloodstained face. ‘Saints save us! What has happened to you?’

‘Somebody hit me,’ Freize said shortly. ‘I have lost the little lord! Raise the alarm, he can’t be far.’

‘I have him! I have him! He is in a stupor,’ she said. ‘What happened to him?’

‘Praise God you have him. Where was he?’

‘I found him staggering in the yard just now on my way to Lauds. When I got him into the infirmary he fainted. I was coming to wake you and Brother Peter.’

‘Take me to him.’

She turned, and Freize staggered after her into the long low room. There were about ten beds arranged on both sides of the room, poor pallet beds of straw with unbleached sacking thrown over them. Only one was occupied. It was Luca – deathly pale, eyes shut, breathing lightly.

‘Dearest saints!’ Freize murmured, in an agony of anxiety. ‘Little lord, speak to me!’

Slowly Luca opened his hazel eyes. ‘Is that you?’

‘Praise God, it is. Thank Our Lady that it is, as ever it was.’

‘I heard you shout and then I fell down the stairs,’ he said, his speech muffled by the bruise on his mouth.

‘I heard you come down like a sack of potatoes,’ confirmed Freize. ‘Dearest saints, when I heard you hit the floor! And someone hit me . . .’

‘I feel like the damned in hell.’

‘Me too.’

‘Sleep then, we’ll talk in the morning.’

Luca closed his eyes. The Lady Almoner approached. ‘Let me bathe your wounds.’ She was holding a bowl with a white linen cloth, and there was a scent of lavender and crushed leaves of arnica. Freize allowed himself to be persuaded onto another bed.

‘Were you attacked in your beds?’ she asked him. ‘How did this happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ Freize said, too stunned by the blow to make anything up. Besides, she could see the open door to the storeroom as well as he, and she had found Luca in the yard. ‘I can’t remember anything,’ he said lamely and, as she dabbed and exclaimed at the bruises and scratches on his face, he stretched out under the luxury of a woman’s care, and fell fast asleep.

Freize woke to a very grey cold dawn. Luca was snoring slightly on the opposite bed, a little snuffle followed by a long relaxed whistle. Freize lay listening to the penetrating noise for some time before he opened his eyes, and then he blinked and raised himself up onto his arm. He could not believe what he saw. The bed next to him was now occupied by a nun, laid on her back, her face as white as her hood, which was pushed back exposing her clammy shaven head. Her fingers, enfolded in a position of prayer on her completely still breast, were blue, the fingernails rimmed as if with ink. But worst of all were her eyes, which were horribly open, the pupils dilated black in black. She was completely still. She was clearly – even to Freize’s inexperienced frightened stare – dead.

A praying nun knelt at her feet, endlessly murmuring the rosary. Another knelt by her head, muttering the same prayers. The narrow bed was ringed with candles, which illuminated the scene like a tableau of martyrdom. Freize sat up, certain that he was dreaming, hoping that he was dreaming, pinched himself in the hope of waking, and put his feet on the floor, silently cursing the thudding in his head, not daring to stand yet. ‘Sister, God bless you. What happened to the poor girl?’

The nun at the head of the bed did not speak until she finished the prayer but looked at him with eyes that were dark with unshed tears. ‘She died in her sleep,’ she said eventually. ‘We don’t know why.’

‘Who is she?’ Freize crossed himself with a sudden superstitious fear that it was one of the nuns who had come to give evidence to their inquiry. ‘Bless her soul and keep her.’

‘Sister Augusta,’ she said, a name he did not know.

He stole a quick glance at the white cold face and recoiled from the blackness of her dead gaze.

‘Saint’s sake! Why have you not closed her eyes and weighted them?’

‘They won’t close,’ the nun at the foot of the bed said, trembling. ‘We have tried and tried. They won’t close.’

‘They must do! Why would they not?’

She spoke in a low monotone: ‘Her eyes are black because she was dreaming of Death again. She was always dreaming of Death. And now He has come for her. Her dark eyes are filled with that last vision, of Him coming for her. That’s why they won’t close, that’s why they are as black as jet. If you look deeply into her terrible black eyes you will see Death himself reflected in them like a mirror. You will see the face of Death looking out at you.’

The first nun let out a little wail, a cold keening noise. ‘He will come for us all,’ she whispered.

They both crossed themselves and returned to their muttered prayers as Freize shuddered and bowed his head in a prayer for the dead. Gingerly, he got up and, gritting his teeth against his swimming head, walked cautiously around the nuns to the bed where Luca still snored. He shook his shoulder: ‘Little lord, wake up.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that,’ said Luca groggily.

‘Wake up, wake up. One of the nuns is dead.’

Luca sat up abruptly then held his head and swayed. ‘Was she attacked?’

Freize nodded at the praying nuns. ‘They say she died in her sleep.’

‘Can you see?’ Luca whispered.

Freize shook his head. ‘She has no head wound, I can’t see anything else.’

‘What do they say?’ Luca’s nod indicated the praying nuns who had returned to their devotions. To his surprise, he saw Freize shiver as if a cold wind had touched him.

‘They don’t make any sense,’ Freize said, denying the thought that Death was coming for them all.

Just then, the door opened and the Lady Almoner came in, leading four lay sisters. The nuns at the head and foot of the corpse rose up and stood aside as the women in brown robes carefully lifted the lifeless body onto a rough stretcher, and took it through an arched stone doorway into the neighbouring room.

‘They will dress her and prepare her for burial tomorrow,’ the Lady Almoner said in reply to Luca’s questioning glance. She was white with strain and fatigue. The nuns took their candles and went to keep their vigil in the cold outer room. Luca saw their shadows jump huge on the stone walls, black as big monsters, as they set down their lights and knelt to pray, then someone closed the door on them.

‘What happened to her?’ he asked quietly.

‘She died in her sleep,’ the Lady Almoner said. ‘God alone knows what is happening here. When they went to wake her early, for she was to serve at Prime, she was gone. She was cold and stiff and her eyes were fixed open. Who knows what she saw or dreamed, or what came to torment her?’ Quickly she crossed herself and put her hand to the small gold cross that hung from a gold chain on her belt.

She came closer to Luca and looked into his eyes. ‘And you? Are you dizzy? Or faint?’

‘I’ll live,’ he said wryly.

‘I’m faint,’ Freize volunteered hopefully.

‘I’ll get you some small ale,’ she said, and poured some from a pitcher. She handed them both a cup. ‘Did you see your assassin?’

‘Assassin.’ Freize repeated the word, strange to him, which usually meant a hired Arab killer.

‘Whoever it was who tried to kill you,’ she amended. ‘And anyway, what were you doing in the storeroom?’

‘I was searching for something,’ Luca said evasively. ‘Will you take me there now?’

‘We should wait for sunrise,’ she replied.

‘You have the keys?’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Then Freize will let us in with his key.’

The look she gave Freize was very cold. ‘You have a key to my storeroom?’

Freize nodded, his face a picture of guilt. ‘Just for essential supplies. So as not to be a nuisance.’

‘I don’t think you are well enough to walk over there,’ she said to Luca.

‘Yes I am,’ he said. ‘We have to go.’

‘The stair is broken.’

‘Then we’ll get a ladder.’

She realised that he would insist. ‘I’m afraid. To be honest, I am afraid to go.’

‘I understand,’ Luca said with a quick smile. ‘Of course you are. Terrible things happened last night. But you have to be brave. You will be with us and we won’t be caught like fools again. Take courage, come on.’

‘Can we not go after sunrise, when it is fully light?’

‘No,’ he said gently. ‘It has to be now.’

She bit her lip. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Very well.’

She lifted a torch from the sconce in the wall and led the way across the courtyard to the storerooms. Someone had closed the door and she opened it, and stood back to let them go in. The wooden ladder was still on the floor, where it had been thrown down. Freize lifted it back into place, and shook it to make sure that it was firm. ‘This time, I’ll lock the door behind us,’ he remarked, and turned the key and locked them in.

‘Oh, she can get through a locked door,’ the Lady Almoner said with a frightened little laugh. ‘I think she can go through walls. I think she can go anywhere she wishes.’

‘Who can?’ Luca demanded.

She shrugged. ‘Go on up, I will tell you everything. I will keep no more secrets. A nun has died under this roof, in our care. The time has come for you to know everything that has been done here. And you must stop it. You must stop her. I have been driven far beyond defending this nunnery, far beyond defending this Lady Abbess. I will tell you everything now. But first you shall see what she has done.’

Luca went carefully up the steps, the Lady Almoner following, holding her robe out of the way as she climbed. Freize stood at the bottom with the torch, lighting their way.

It was dark in the loft, but the Lady Almoner crossed to the far wall and threw open the half-door, for the dawn light. The beams from the rising sun poured into the loft through the opening and shone on glistening fleeces of gold, hanging up to dry, as the gold dust sifted through the wool to fall onto the linen sheets spread on the floor below. The room was like a treasure chamber, with gold dust underfoot and golden fleeces hanging like priceless washing on the bowed lines.

‘Good God,’ Luca whispered. ‘It is so. The gold . . .’ He looked around as if he could not believe what he was seeing. ‘So much! So bright!’

She sighed. ‘It is. Have you seen enough?’

He bent and took a pinch of the dust. Here and there were little nuggets of gold, like grit. ‘How much? How much is this worth?’

‘She harvests a couple of fleeces a month,’ the Lady Almoner said. ‘If she is allowed to continue it will add up to a fortune.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

She closed the half-door to shut out the sunlight, and barred it. ‘Ever since the Lady Abbess came. She knows the land, being brought up here; she knows it better than her brother, for he was sent away for his education while she stayed at home with their father. The stream belongs to our abbey, it is in our woods. Her slave, being a Moor, knew how her people pan for gold and she taught the sisters to peg out the fleeces in the stream, telling them it would clean the wool. They have no idea what they are doing, she plays them for fools – she told them that the stream has special purifying qualities for the wool, and they know no better. They peg out the fleeces in the stream and bring them back here to dry; they never see them drying out and the gold pattering down on the linen sheets. The slave comes in secretly to sweep up the gold dust, takes it to sell, and the sisters come in when the gold is gone and the loft is empty, and take the fleeces away to card and spin.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Sometimes they remark how soft the wool is. They are fools for her. She has made fools of us all.’

‘The slave brings the money to you? For the abbey?’

The Lady Almoner turned to go down the ladder. ‘What do you think? Does this look like an abbey that is rich in its own gold? Have you seen my infirmary? Have you seen any costly medicines? You have seen my storeroom, I know. Do we seem wealthy to you?’

‘Where does she sell it? How does she sell the gold?’

The Lady Almoner shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Rome, I suppose. I know nothing about it. She sends the slave in secret.’

Luca hesitated, briefly, as if there were something more he would ask, but then he turned and went down after her, ignoring the bruise on his shoulder and the pain in his neck. ‘You are saying that the Lady Abbess uses the nuns to pan for gold and keeps the money for herself?’

She nodded. ‘You have seen it for yourself now. And I think she hopes to close the nunnery altogether. I believe that she plans to open a gold mine here, on our fields. I think she is deliberately leading the nunnery into disgrace so that you recommend it should be closed down. When it is abolished as a nunnery she will say she is free from her father’s will. She will renounce her vows, she will claim it as her inheritance from her father, she will continue to live here, and she and the slave will be left here alone.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Luca demanded. ‘When I opened the inquiry? Why keep this back?’

‘Because this place is my life,’ she said fiercely. ‘It has been a beacon on the hill, a refuge for women and a place to serve God. I hoped that the Lady Abbess would learn to live here in peace. I thought God would call her, that her vocation would grow. Then I hoped that she would be satisfied with making a fortune here. I thought she might be an evil woman, but that we might contain her. But since a nun has died – in our care—’ She choked on a sob. ‘Sister Augusta, one of the most innocent and simple women who has been here for years—’ She broke off.

‘Well, now it is all over,’ she said with dignity. ‘I can’t hide what she is doing. She is using this place of God to hide her fortune-hunting, and I believe that her slave is practising witchcraft on the nuns. They dream, they sleepwalk, they show strange signs, and now one has died in her sleep. Before God, I believe that the Lady Abbess and her slave are driving us all mad so that they can get at the gold.’

Her hand sought the cross at her waist and Luca saw her hold it tightly, as if it were a talisman.

‘I understand,’ he said, as calmly as he could, though his own throat was dry with superstitious fear. ‘I have been sent here to end these heresies, these sins. I am authorised by the Pope himself to inquire and judge. There is nothing that I will not see with my own eyes. There is nothing I will not question. Later this morning I will speak to the Lady Abbess again and, if she cannot explain herself, I will see that she is dismissed from her post.’

‘Sent away from here?’

He nodded.

‘And the gold? You will let the abbey keep the gold so that we can feed the poor and establish a library? Be a beacon on the hill for the benighted?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The abbey should have its fortune.’

He saw her face light up with joy. ‘Nothing matters more than the abbey,’ she assured him. ‘You will let my sisters stay here and live their former lives, their holy lives? You will put them under the discipline of a good woman, a new Lady Abbess who can command them and guide them?’

‘I will put it under the charge of the Dominican brothers,’ Luca decided. ‘And they will harvest the gold from the stream and endow the abbey. This is no longer a house in the service of God, as it has been suborned. I will put it under the control of men, there will be no Lady Abbess. The gold shall be restored to God, the abbey to the brothers.’

She gave a shuddering sigh and hid her face in her hands. Luca stretched his hand towards her to comfort her and only a warning glance from Freize reminded him that she was still in holy orders and he should not touch her.

‘What will you do?’ Luca asked quietly.

‘I don’t know. My whole life has been here. I will serve as Lady Almoner until we come under the command of the Brothers. They will need me for the first months, no-one but me knows how this place is run. Then perhaps I will ask if I may go to another order. I would like an order that was more enclosed, more at peace. These have been terrible days. I want to go to an order where the vows are kept more strictly.’

‘Poverty?’ Freize asked at random. ‘You want to be poor?’

She nodded. ‘An order that respects the commands, an order with more simplicity. Knowing that we were storing a fortune of gold in our own loft . . . not knowing what the Lady Abbess was doing or what she intended, fearing she was serving the Devil himself . . . it has been heavy on my conscience.’

The bell tolled the call to chapel, echoing in the morning air. ‘Prime,’ she said. ‘I have to go to church. The sisters need to see me there.’

‘We’ll come too,’ Luca said.

They closed the door to the storeroom and locked it behind them. While Luca watched, she turned to Freize and held out her hand for his key. Luca smiled at her simple dignity as she stood still while Freize patted his pockets in a pantomime of searching, and then, reluctantly, handed over the key. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘If you want anything from the abbey stores you may come to me.’

Freize gave a funny little mock bow, as if to recognise her authority. She turned to Luca. ‘I could be the new Lady Abbess,’ she said quietly. ‘You could recommend me for the post. The abbey would be safe in my keeping.’

Before he could answer she looked beyond him at the windows of the hospital, suddenly paused, and put her hand on Luca’s sleeve. At once he froze, acutely aware of her touch. Freize behind him stopped still. She held her finger to her lips for silence and then slowly pointed ahead. She was indicating the mortuary beside the hospital, where a little light gleamed from the slatted shutters, and they could see someone moving.

‘What is it?’ Luca whispered. ‘Who is in there?’

‘The lights should be shielded, and the nuns should be still and silent in their vigil,’ she breathed. ‘But someone is moving in there.’

‘The sisters, washing her?’ Luca asked.

‘They should have finished their work.’

Quietly, the three of them moved across the yard and looked in the open door to the hospital. The door leading from the hospital ward through to the mortuary was firmly closed. The Lady Almoner stepped back, as if she were too afraid to go further.

‘Is there another way in?’

‘They take the pauper coffins out through a back door, to the stables,’ she whispered. ‘That door may be unbolted.’

Quickly, they crossed the stable yard to the double door to the mortuary, big enough for a cart and a horse, barred by a thick beam of wood. The two young men silently lifted the beam from its sockets and the door stood closed, held shut only by its own weight. Freize lifted a useful pitchfork from the nearby wall, and Luca bent and took his dagger from the scabbard in his boot.

‘When I give the word, open it quickly,’ he said to the Lady Almoner. She nodded, her face as white as her veil.

‘Now!’

The Lady Almoner flung the door open, the two young men rushed into the room, weapons at the ready – then fell back in horror.

Before them was a nightmare scene, like a butcher’s shop, with the butcher and his lad working over a fresh carcass. But it was worse by far than that. It was not a butcher, and it was no animal on the slab. The Lady Abbess was in a brown working gown, her head tied in a scarf, and Ishraq was in her usual black robe covered with a white apron. The two girls had their sleeves rolled up, and were bloodstained to the elbows, standing over the dead body of Sister Augusta, Ishraq wielding a bloodied knife in her hand, disembowelling the dead girl. The nuns keeping vigil were nowhere to be seen. As the men burst in, the two young women looked up and froze, the knife poised above the open belly of the dead nun, blood on their aprons, blood on the bed, blood on their hands.

‘Step back,’ Luca ordered, his voice ice-cold with shock. He pointed his dagger at Ishraq, who looked to the Lady Abbess for her command. Freize raised his pitchfork as if he would spear her on the tines.

‘Step back from that body, and no-one will be hurt,’ Luca said. ‘Leave this – whatever it is that you are doing.’ He could not bear to look, he could not find the words to name it. ‘Leave it, and step against the wall.’

He heard the Lady Almoner come in behind him and her gasp of horror at the butchery before them. ‘Merciful God!’ She staggered and he heard her lean against the wall, then retch.

‘Get a rope,’ Freize said, without turning his head to her. ‘Get two ropes. And fetch Brother Peter.’

She choked back her nausea. ‘What in the name of God are you doing? Lady Abbess, answer me! What are you doing to her?’

‘Go,’ said Luca. ‘Go at once.’

They heard her running feet cross the cobbles of the stable yard as the Lady Abbess raised her eyes to Luca. ‘I can explain this,’ she said.

He nodded, gripping the dagger. Clearly, nothing could explain this scene: her sleeves rolled to her elbows, her hands stained red with the blood of a dead nun.

‘I believe that this woman has been poisoned,’ she said. ‘My friend is a physician—’

‘Can’t be,’ Freize said quietly.

‘She is,’ the Lady Abbess insisted. ‘We . . . we decided to cut open her belly and see what she had been fed.’

‘They were eating her.’ The Lady Almoner’s voice trembled from the doorway. She came back into the room, Brother Peter white-faced behind her. ‘The two of them were eating her in a Satanic Mass. They were eating the body of Sister Augusta. Look at the blood on their hands. They were drinking her blood. The Lady Abbess has gone over to Satan and she and her heretic slave are holding a Devil’s Mass on this, our sanctified ground.’

Luca shuddered and crossed himself. Brother Peter stepped towards the slave with a rope held out before him. ‘Put down the knife and put out your hands,’ he said. ‘Give yourself up. In the name of God, I command you, demon or woman or fallen angel, to surrender.’

Holding Freize’s gaze, Ishraq put down the knife on the bed beside the dead nun, then suddenly darted for the doorway that led into the empty hospital. She flung it open and was through it, followed in a moment by the Lady Abbess. As Luca and Freize raced after the two young women, she led the way, running across the yard to the main gate.

Luca bellowed to the porteress, ‘Bar the gate! Stop thief!’ and flung himself on the Lady Abbess as she sprinted ahead of him, bringing her down to the ground in a heavy tackle and knocking the air out of her. As they went down, her veil fell from her head and a tumble of blonde hair swept over his face with the haunting scent of rosewater.

The Moorish slave was half way up the outer gate now, springing from hinge to beam like a lithe animal, as Freize grabbed at her bare feet and missed, and then leaped up and snatched a handful of her robe and tore her off the gate, bringing her tumbling down to fall backwards on the stone cobbles with a cry of pain.

Freize gripped her arms to her sides so tightly that she could barely breathe, while Brother Peter tied her hands behind her back, roped her feet together, and then turned to the Lady Abbess, still pinned down by Luca. As Luca dragged her to her feet, holding her wrists, her thick golden-blonde hair tumbled down over her shoulders, hiding her face.

‘Shame!’ the Lady Almoner exclaimed. ‘Her hair!’

Luca could not drag his eyes from this girl who had veiled her face from him, and hooded her hair so that he should never know what she looked like. In the golden light of the rising sun he stared at her, seeing her for the first time, her dark blue eyes under brown up-swinging brows, a straight perfect nose, and a warm tempting mouth. Then Brother Peter came towards them and he saw her bloodstained hands as the clerk bound them with a rope, and Luca realised that she was a thing of horror, a beautiful thing of horror, the worst thing between heaven and hell: a fallen angel.

‘The lay sisters will be coming into the yards to work, the nuns will be coming from church, we must tidy up,’ the Lady Almoner ruled. ‘They cannot see this. It will distress them beyond anything . . . it will break their hearts. I must shield them from this evil. They cannot see Sister Augusta so abused. They cannot see these . . . these . . .’ She could not find the words for the Lady Abbess and her slave. ‘These devils. These missionaries from hell.’

‘Do you have a secure room for them?’ Brother Peter asked. ‘They will have to stand trial. We’ll have to send for Lord Lucretili. He is the lord of these lands. This is outside our jurisdiction now. This is a criminal matter, this is a hanging offence, a burning offence; he will have to judge.’

‘The cellar of the gatehouse,’ the Lady Almoner replied promptly. ‘The only way in or out is a hatch in the floor.’

Freize had the Moorish girl slung like a sack over his shoulder. Brother Peter took the tied hands of the Lady Abbess and led her to the gatehouse. Luca was left alone with the Lady Almoner.

‘What will you do with the body?’

‘I will ask the village midwives to put her into her coffin. Poor child, I cannot let her sisters see her. And I will send for the priest to bless what is left of her poor body. She can lie in the church for now and then I will ask Lord Lucretili if she can lie in his chapel. I won’t leave her in the mortuary, I won’t have her in our chapel. As soon as they have cleaned her up and dressed her again she shall go to sanctified ground away from here.’

She shuddered and swayed, almost as if she might faint. Luca put his hand around her waist to support her and she leaned towards him for a moment, resting her head on his shoulder.

‘You were very brave,’ he said to her. ‘This has been a terrible ordeal.’

She looked up at him, and then, as if she had suddenly realised that his arm was around her, and that she was leaning against him, he felt her heart flutter like a captured bird and she stepped away. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I am not allowed . . .’

‘I know,’ he said quickly. ‘It is for you to forgive me. I should not have touched you.’

‘It has been so shocking . . .’ There was a tremble in her voice that she could not conceal.

Luca put his hands behind his back so that he would not reach for her again. ‘You must rest,’ he said helplessly. ‘This has been too much for any woman.’

‘I can’t rest,’ she said brokenly. ‘I must put things to rights here. I cannot let my sisters see this terrible sight, or find out what has been done here. I will fetch the women to clean up. I must make everything right again. I will command them, I will lead them, out of error into the ways of righteousness; out of darkness into light.’ She smoothed her robe and shook it out. Luca heard the seductive whisper of her silk shift, and then she turned away from him to go to her work.

At the door of the hospital she paused and glanced back. She saw that he was looking after her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, with a tiny smile. ‘No man has ever held me, not in all my life before. I am glad to know a man’s kindness. I will live here all my life, I will live here inside this order, perhaps as the Lady Abbess, and yet I will always remember this.’

He almost stepped towards her as she held his gaze for just a moment and then was gone.

Freize and Brother Peter joined Luca in the cobbled yard. ‘Are they secure?’ Luca asked.

‘Regular gaol they have there,’ Freize remarked. ‘There were chains fixed on the wall, handcuffs, manacles. He insisted that we put everything on them, and I hammered them on as if they were both slaves.’

‘Just till the Lord Lucretili gets here,’ Brother Peter replied defensively. ‘And if we had left them in ropes and they had got themselves free, what would we have done?’

‘Caught them again when we opened the hatch?’ Freize suggested. To Luca he said, ‘They’re in a round cave, no way in or out except a hatch in the roof and they can’t reach that until it is opened and a wooden ladder lowered in. They aren’t even stone walls, the cellar is dug down into solid rock. They’re secure as a pair of mice in a trap. But he had to put them in irons as if they were pirates.’

Luca looked at his new clerk and saw that the man was deeply afraid of the mystery and the terrible nature of the two women. ‘You were right to be cautious,’ he said, reassuringly. ‘We don’t know what powers they have.’

‘Good God, when I saw them with blood up to the elbows, and they looked at us, their faces as innocent as scholars at a desk! What were they doing? What Satan’s work were they doing? Was it a Mass? Were they really eating her flesh and drinking her blood in a Satanic Mass?’

‘I don’t know,’ Luca said. He put his hand to his head. ‘I can’t think . . .’

‘Now look at you!’ Freize exclaimed. ‘You should still be in bed, and the Lord knows I feel badly myself. I’ll take you back to the hospital and you can rest.’

Luca recoiled. ‘Not there,’ he said. ‘I’m not going back in there. Take me to my room at the priest house and I will sleep till Lord Lucretili gets here. Wake me as soon as he comes.’

In the cellar, the two young women were shrouded in darkness as if they were already in their grave. It was like being buried alive. They blinked and strained their eyes but they were blind.

‘I can’t see you,’ Isolde said, her voice catching on a sob.

‘I can see you.’ The reply came steadily out of the pitch blackness. ‘And anyway, I always know when you are near.’

‘We have to get word to the inquirer. We have to find some way to speak with him.’

‘I know.’

‘They will be fetching my brother. He will put us on trial.’

There was a silence from Ishraq.

‘Ishraq, I should be certain that my brother will hear me, that he will believe what I say, that he will free me – but more and more do I think that he has betrayed me. He encouraged the prince to come to my room, he left me no choice but to come here as Lady Abbess. What if he has been trying to drive me away from my home all along? What if he has been trying to destroy me?’

‘I think so,’ the other girl said steadily. ‘I do think so.’

There was a silence while Isolde absorbed the thought. ‘How could he be so false? How could he be so wicked?’

The chains clinked as Ishraq shrugged.

‘What shall we do?’ Isolde asked hopelessly.

‘Hush.’

‘Hush? Why? What are you doing?’

‘I am wishing . . .’

‘Ishraq – we need a plan, wishing won’t save us.’

‘Let me wish. This is deep wishing. And it might save us.’

Luca had thought he would toss and turn with the pain in his neck and shoulder, but as soon as his boots were off and his head was on the pillow he slipped into a deep sleep. Almost at once he started to dream.

He dreamed that he was running after the Lady Abbess again, and she was outpacing him easily. The ground beneath his feet changed from the cobbles of the yard to the floor of the forest, and all the leaves were crisp like autumn, and then he saw they had been dipped in gold and he was running through a forest of gold. Still she kept ahead of him, weaving in and out of golden tree trunks, passing bushes crusted with gold, until he managed a sudden burst of speed, far faster than before, and he leaped towards her, like a mountain lion will leap on a deer, and caught her around the waist to bring her down. But as she fell, she turned in his arms and he saw her smiling as if with desire, as if she had all along wanted him to catch her, to hold her, to lie foot to foot, leg against leg, his hard young body against her lithe slimness, looking into her eyes, their faces close enough to kiss. Her thick mane of blonde hair swirled around him and he smelt the heady scent of rosewater again. Her eyes were dark, so dark; he had thought they were blue so he looked again, but the blue of her eyes was only a tiny rim around the darkness of the pupil. Her eyes were so dilated they were not blue but black. In his head he heard the words ‘beautiful lady’ and he thought, ‘Yes, she is a beautiful lady.’

‘Bella donna.’ He heard the words in Latin and it was the voice of the slave to the Lady Abbess with her odd foreign accent as she repeated, with a strange urgency: ‘Bella donna! Luca, listen! Bella donna!’

The door to the guest room opened, as Luca lurched out of his dream and held his aching head.

‘Only me,’ Freize said, slopping warmed small ale out of a jug as he banged into the room with a tray of bread, meat, cheese and a mug.

‘Saints, Freize, I am glad that you waked me. I have had the strangest of dreams.’

‘Me too,’ Freize said. ‘All night long I dreamed that I was gathering berries in the hedgerow, like a gipsy.’

‘I dreamed of a beautiful woman, and the words bella donna.’

At once Freize burst into song:

‘Bella donna, give me your love –

Bella donna, bright stars above . . .’

‘What?’ Luca sat himself at the table and let his servant put the food before him.

‘It’s a song, a popular song. Did you never hear it in the monastery?’

‘We only ever sang hymns and psalms in the church,’ Luca reminded him. ‘Not love songs in the kitchen like you.’

‘Anyway, everyone was singing it last summer. Bella donna: beautiful lady.’

Luca cut himself a slice of meat from the joint, chewed thoughtfully, and drank three deep gulps of small ale. ‘There’s another meaning of the words bella donna,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t just mean beautiful lady. It’s a plant, a hedgerow plant.’

Freize slapped his head. ‘It’s the plant in my dream! I dreamed I was in the hedgerow, looking for berries, black berries; but though I wanted blackberries or sloe berries or even elderberries, all I could find was deadly nightshade . . . the black berries of deadly nightshade.’

Luca got to his feet, taking a hunk of the bread in his hand. ‘It’s a poison,’ he said. ‘The Lady Abbess said that they believed the nun was poisoned. She said they were cutting her open to see what she had eaten, what she had in her belly.’

‘It’s a drug,’ Freize said. ‘They use it in the torture rooms, to make people speak out, to drive them mad. It gives the wildest dreams, it could make—’ He broke off.

‘It could make a whole nunnery of women go mad,’ Luca finished for him. ‘It could make them have visions, and sleepwalk – it could make them dream and imagine things. And, if you were given too much . . . it would kill you.’

Without another word the two young men went to the guesthouse door and walked quickly to the hospital. In the centre of the entrance yard the lay sisters were making two massive piles of wood, as if they were preparing for a bonfire. Freize paused there, but Luca went past them without a second glance, completely focused on the hospital where he could see through the open windows, the nursing nuns moving about setting things to rights. Luca went through the open doors, and looked around him in surprise.

It was all as clean and as tidy as if there had never been anything wrong. The door to the mortuary was open and the body of the dead nun was gone, the candles and censers taken away. Half a dozen beds were made ready with clean plain sheets, a cross hung centrally on the lime washed walls. As Luca stood there, baffled, a nun came in with a jug of water in her hand from the pump outside, poured it into a bowl and went down on her knees to scrub the floor.

‘Where is the body of the sister who died?’ Luca asked. His voice sounded too loud in the empty silent room. The nun sat back on her heels and answered him. ‘She is lying in the chapel. The Lady Almoner closed the coffin herself, nailed it down and ordered a vigil to be kept in the chapel. Shall I take you to pray?’

He nodded. There was something uncanny about the complete restoration of the room. He could hardly believe that he had burst through that door, chased the Lady Abbess and her slave, knocked her to the ground and sent them chained into a windowless cellar; that he had seen them, bloodstained to their elbows, hacking into the body of the dead nun.

‘The Lady Almoner said that she is to lie on sacred ground in the Lucretili chapel,’ the nun remarked, leading the way out of the hospital. ‘Both for her vigil and her burial. The Lord Lucretili is to bring the special coffin carriage and take her to lie for a night in the castle chapel. Then she’ll be buried in our graveyard. God bless her soul.’

As they went past the piles of wood, Freize fell into step beside Luca. ‘Pyres,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Two pyres for two witches. Lord Lucretili is on his way to sit in judgement, but it looks like they have already decided what the verdict will be and are preparing for the sentence already. These are the stakes and firewood for burning the witches.’

Luca reeled around, in shock. ‘No!’

Freize nodded, his face grim. ‘Why not? We saw ourselves what they were doing. There’s no doubt they were engaged in witchcraft, a Satanic Mass, or cutting up the body. Either way it’s a crime punishable by death. But I will say that your Lady Almoner doesn’t waste much time in preparation. Here she is with two bonfires ready before the trial has even started.’

The waiting nun tapped her foot. Luca turned back to her. ‘What are these wood piles for?’

‘I think we are selling the firewood,’ she said. ‘The Lady Almoner ordered the lay sisters to make two piles like this. May I show you to the chapel now? I have to get back to the hospital and wash the floor.’

‘Yes, I am sorry to have delayed you.’

Luca and Freize followed her past the refectory, through the cloisters to the chapel. As soon as the nun pushed open the heavy wooden door they could hear the low musical chanting of nuns keeping vigil over the body. Blinking, as their eyes were blinded by the darkness, they went slowly up the aisle until they could see that the space before the altar was covered with a snowy white cloth, and on the cloth lay a newly made simple wooden coffin with the lid nailed firmly shut.

Luca grimaced at the sight. ‘We have to see the body,’ he whispered. ‘It’s the only way we can know if she was poisoned.’

‘Rather you than me,’ Freize said bluntly. ‘I wouldn’t want to tell the Lady Almoner that I’m opening a sanctified coffin because I had a funny dream.’

‘We have to know.’

‘She won’t want anyone seeing the body,’ Freize whispered to Luca. ‘She was horribly cut up. And if those witches ate her flesh, then the poor girl will bleed when she is resurrected, God help her. The Lady Almoner won’t want the nuns to know that.’

‘We’ll have to get permission from the priest,’ Luca decided. ‘We’d better ask him, not the Lady Almoner – we’ll give him a request in writing. Peter can write it.’

They stepped back and watched the priest. He had a heavy silver censer that blew incense smoke all around the coffin. When the air was chokingly thick with the heavy perfume, he handed it to one of the nuns and then took the holy water from another and doused the coffin. Then he went to the altar and, turning his back on them all, he lifted his hands in prayer for their departed sister.

The two men bowed to the altar, crossed themselves, and went quietly out of the church. At once they could hear a commotion from the stable yard, the sound of many horses arriving, and the great gates being thrown open.

‘Lord Lucretili,’ Luca guessed, and strode back to the yard.

The lord, and patron of the abbey, was mounted on a big black warhorse, which pawed the ground, its iron horseshoes throwing sparks from the cobbles. As Luca watched he threw his red leather reins to his pageboy and jumped easily from the saddle. The Lady Almoner went up to him, curtseyed, and then stood quietly, her hands hidden inside her long sleeves, her head bowed, her hood modestly shielding her face.

Following Lord Lucretili into the courtyard came half a dozen men wearing the lord’s livery of an olive bough overlaid with a sword, signifying the peaceful descendant of a crusader knight. Three or four grave-looking clerks came in on horseback, then the Lord Abbot of Lucretili with his own retinue of priests.

As the men dismounted, Luca stepped forwards.

‘You must be Luca Vero. I am glad you are here,’ Lord Lucretili said pleasantly. ‘I am Giorgio, Lord Lucretili. This is my Lord Abbot. He will sit in judgement with me. I understand you are in the middle of your investigation here?’

‘I am,’ Luca said. ‘Forgive me, but I have to go to the visitors’ house. I am looking for my clerk.’

The Lord Lucretili intervened. ‘Fetch the inquirer’s clerk,’ he said to his pageboy, who set off to the visitors’ house at a run. The lord turned back to Luca. ‘They tell me that it was you who arrested the Lady Abbess, and her slave?’

‘His own sister,’ Freize breathed from behind. ‘Though I might remark that he doesn’t seem very upset.’

‘Myself, my clerk Brother Peter, and my servant Freize, together with the Lady Almoner,’ Luca confirmed. ‘Brother Peter and my servant put the two women in the cellar below the gatehouse.’

‘We’ll hold our trial in the first-floor room of the gatehouse,’ Lord Lucretili decided. ‘That way they can be brought up the ladder, and we’ll keep it all out of the way of the nunnery.’

‘I would prefer that,’ the Lady Almoner said. ‘The fewer people who see them, and know of this, the better.’

The lord nodded. ‘It shames us all,’ he said. ‘God alone knows what my father would have made of it. So let’s get it over and done with.’

Two black-plumed horses pulled a cart into the yard, and stood waiting. ‘For the coffin,’ the lord explained to Luca. To the Lady Almoner he said: ‘You’ll see it’s loaded up and my men will take it to my chapel?’

The Lady Almoner nodded, then turned from the men and led the way to the gatehouse room, where she watched the clerks set a long table and chairs for the Lord Lucretili, the Lord Abbot, Luca and Brother Peter. While they were preparing the room, Luca went to Lord Lucretili. ‘I think we need to have the coffin opened before Sister Augusta is buried,’ he said quietly. ‘I am sorry to say that I suspect the sister was poisoned.’

‘Poisoned?’

Luca nodded.

The lord shook his head in shock. ‘God save her soul and forgive my sister her sins. But anyway, we can’t open the coffin here. The nuns would be far too distressed. Come to my castle this evening and we’ll do it privately at my chapel. In the meantime, we’ll question the Lady Abbess and her slave.’

‘They won’t answer,’ Luca said certainly. ‘The slave swore she was dumb in three languages when I questioned her before.’

The lord laughed shortly. ‘I think they can be made to answer. You are an inquirer for the Church, you have the right to use the rack, the press, you can bleed them. They are only young women, vain and frail as all women are. You will see that they will answer your questions rather than have their joints pulled from the sockets. They will speak rather than have boulders placed on their chests. I can promise you that my sister will say anything rather than have leeches on her face.’

Luca went white. ‘That’s not how I make an inquiry. I have never . . .’ he started. ‘I would never . . .’

The older man put a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘I will do it for you,’ he said. ‘You shall wrestle with them for their souls until their evil pride has been broken and they are crying to confess. I have seen it done, it is easily done. You can trust me to make them ready for their confession.’

‘I could not allow . . .’ Luca choked.

‘The room is ready for your lordship.’ The Lady Almoner came out from the gatehouse and stood aside as the lord went in without another word. He seated himself behind the table where the great chair, like a throne, was placed ready for him, the Lord Abbot to his left. Luca was on his right, with a clerk at one end of the table and Brother Peter at the other. When everyone was seated, the lord ordered the door to the yard closed, and Luca saw Freize’s anxious face peering in, as the Lord Lucretili said, ‘My Lord Abbot, will you bless the work that we are doing today?’

The abbot half-closed his eyes and folded his hands over his curved stomach. ‘Heavenly Father, bless the work that is done here today. May this abbey be purified and cleansed of sin and returned to the discipline of God and man. May these women understand their sins and cleanse their hearts with penitence, and may we, their judges, be just and righteous in our wrath. May we offer you a willing brand for the burning, Lord, always remembering that vengeance is not ours; but only yours. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ Lord Lucretili confirmed. He gestured to the two priests who were standing guard at the outer door. ‘Get them up.’

Brother Peter rose to his feet. ‘Freize has the key to the chains,’ he said. He opened the door to get the ring of keys from Freize, who was hovering on the threshold. The men inside the courtroom could see the stable yard filled with curious faces. Brother Peter closed the door on the crowd outside, stepped forwards and opened the trap-door set in the wooden floorboards. Everyone went silent as Brother Peter looked down into the dark cellar. Leaning against the wall of the gatehouse room was a rough wooden ladder. One of the priests lifted it and lowered it into the darkness of the hole. Everyone hesitated. There was something very forbidding about the deep blackness below, almost as if it were a well, and the women far below had been drowned in the inky waters. Brother Peter handed the keys to Luca, and everyone looked at him. Clearly they were all expecting him to go down into the darkness and fetch the women up.

Luca found that he was chilled, perhaps by a blast of cold air from the windowless deep room below. He thought of the two young women down there, chained to the damp walls, waiting for judgement, their eyes wide and glassy in the darkness. He remembered the black glazed look of the dead nun and thought that perhaps the Lady Abbess and her Moorish slave would be drugged into hallucinations too. At the thought of their dark eyes, shining in the darkness like waiting rats, he got to his feet, determined to delay. ‘I’ll get a torch,’ he said and went out into the entrance yard.

Outside, in the clean air, he sent one of the lord’s servants running for a light. The man returned with one of the sconces from the refectory burning brightly. Luca took it in his hand and went back into the gatehouse, feeling as if he were about to go deep into an ancient cave to face a monster.

He held the torch up high as he stepped on the first rung of the ladder. He had to go backwards, and he could not help looking over his shoulder and down between his feet, trying to see what was there waiting for him in the darkness.

‘Take care!’ Brother Peter said, his voice sharp with warning.

‘What of?’ Luca asked impatiently, hiding his own fear. Two more rungs of the ladder and he could see the walls were black and shiny with damp. The women would be chilled, chained down here in the darkness. Two steps more and he could see a little pool of light at the foot of the ladder and his own leaping shadow on the wall and the shadow of the ladder like a black hatched line going downwards into nothingness. He was at the bottom rung now. He kept one hand on the rough wood for safety, as he turned and looked around.

Nothing.

There was nothing there.

There was nobody there.

He swung the pool of light ahead of him; the stone floor was empty of anything, and the dark wall just six paces away from him on all sides was blank stone, black stone. The cellar was empty. They were not there.

Luca exclaimed and held the torch higher, looking all around. For a moment he had a terror of them making a sudden rush at him out of the darkness, the two women freed and dashing at him like dark devils in hell; but there was no-one there. His eye caught a glint of metal on the floor.

‘What is it?’ Brother Peter peered down from the floor above. ‘What’s the matter?’

Luca raised the torch high, so that the beams of light raked the darkness of the circular room all around him. Now, he could see the handcuffs and leg-cuffs lying on the ground, still safely locked, still firmly chained to the wall, intact and undamaged. But of the Lady Abbess and the Moorish girl there was no sign at all.

‘Witchcraft!’ Lord Lucretili hissed, his face as white as a sheet, looking down at Luca from the floor above. ‘God save us from them.’ He crossed himself, kissed his thumbnail, and crossed himself again. ‘The manacles are not broken?’

‘No.’ Luca gave them a kick and they rattled but did not spring open.

‘I locked them myself, I made no mistake,’ Brother Peter said, scrambling down the ladder and shaking as he tested the chains on the wall.

Luca thrust the torch at Peter and swarmed his way up the ladder to the light, obeying a panic-stricken sense that he did not want to be trapped in the dark cellar from which the women had, so mysteriously, disappeared. Lord Lucretili took his hand and heaved him up the last steps and then stayed hand clasped with him. Luca, feeling his own hands were icy in the lord’s warm grip, had a sense of relief at a human touch.

‘Be of good heart, Inquirer,’ the lord said. ‘For these are dark and terrible days. It must be witchcraft. It must be so. My sister is a witch. I have lost her to Satan.’

‘Where could they have gone?’ Luca asked the older man.

‘Anywhere they choose, since they got out of locked chains and a closed cellar. They could be anywhere in this world or the next.’

Brother Peter came up from the darkness, carrying the torch. It was as if he came out of a well and the dark water closed behind him. He shut the door of the hatch, and stamped the bolt into place as if he were afraid of the very darkness beneath their feet. ‘What shall we do now?’ he asked Luca.

Luca hesitated, unsure. He glanced towards Lord Lucretili who smoothly took command. ‘We’ll set a hue and cry for them, naming them as witches, but I don’t expect them to be found,’ the lord ruled. ‘In her absence I shall declare my sister dead.’ He turned his head, to hide his grief. ‘I can’t even have Masses said for her soul . . . A sainted father and a cursed sister both gone within four months. He will never even meet her in heaven.’

Luca gave him a moment to recover. ‘Admit the Lady Almoner,’ he said to Brother Peter.

She was waiting outside the door. Luca caught a glimpse of Freize’s grimace of curiosity as she came quietly in and closed the door behind her. She observed the closed hatch, and looked to Luca for an explanation. Carefully, she did not address the Lord Lucretili. Luca assumed that her vows forbade anything but the briefest of contact with men who were not already ordained in the priesthood. ‘What has happened, my brother?’ she asked him quietly.

‘The accused women are missing.’

Her head jolted up to exchange one swift glance with Lord Lucretili. ‘How is it possible?’ she demanded.

‘These are mysteries,’ Luca said shortly. ‘My question, though, is this: now that we have no suspects, now their guilt is strongly shown by their disappearance, and the way they have got away – what is to be done? Should I continue my inquiry? Or is it closed? You are the Lady Almoner, and in the absence of the Lady Abbess you are the senior lady of the abbey. What is your opinion?’

He could see her flush with pleasure that he had consulted her, that he had named her as the most senior woman of the abbey. ‘I think you have completed your inquiry,’ she said quietly to him. ‘I think you have done everything that anyone could ask of you. You found the very cause of the troubles here, you proved what she was doing, you arrested her and her heretic slave and named them as witches, and they are now gone. Their escape proves their guilt. Your inquiry is closed and – if God is merciful – this abbey is cleansed of their presence. We can get back to normal here.’

Luca nodded. ‘You will appoint a new Lady Abbess?’ he asked Lord Lucretili.

The Lady Almoner folded her hands inside her sleeves and looked down, modestly, at the floor.

‘I would.’ He paused, still very shaken. ‘If there was anyone I could trust to take the place of such a false sister! When I think of the damage that she might have done!’

‘What she did!’ the Lady Almoner reminded him. ‘The house destroyed and distracted, one nun dead—’

‘Is that all she has done?’ Luca inquired limpidly.

‘All?’ the lord exclaimed. ‘Escaping her chains and practising witchcraft, keeping a Moorish slave, heretical practices and murder?’

‘Give me a moment,’ Luca said thoughtfully. He went to the door and said a quiet word to Freize, then came back to them. ‘I am sorry. I knew he would wait there all day until he had a word from me. I have told him to pack our things, so we can leave this afternoon. You are ready to send your report, Brother Peter?’

Luca looked towards Brother Peter but sensed, out of the corner of his eye, a second quick exchange of glances between the Lord Lucretili and the Lady Almoner.

‘Oh, of course.’ Luca turned to her. ‘Lady Almoner, you will be wondering what I recommend for the future of the abbey?’

‘It is a great concern to me,’ she said, her eyes lowered once more. ‘It is my life here, you understand. I am in your hands. We are, all of us, in your hands.’

Luca paused for a moment. ‘I can think of no-one who would make a better Lady Abbess. If the nunnery were not handed over to the monastery but were to remain a sister house, an independent sister house for women, would you undertake the duty of being the Lady Abbess?’

She bowed. ‘I am very sure that our holy brothers could run this order very well, but if I were called to serve . . .’

‘But if I were to recommend that it remain under the rule of women?’ For a moment only he remembered the bright pride of the Lady Abbess when she told him that she had never learned that women should be under the rule of men. Almost, he smiled at the memory.

‘I could only be appointed by the lord himself,’ the Lady Almoner said deferentially, recalling him to the present.

‘What do you think?’ Luca said, turning to the lord.

‘If the place were to be thoroughly exorcised by the priests, if my Lady Almoner were to accept the duty, if you recommend it, I can think of no-one better to guide the souls of these poor young women.’

‘I agree,’ said Luca. He paused as if a thought had suddenly struck him. ‘But doesn’t this overset your father’s will? Was the abbey not left entirely to your sister? The abbey and the lands around it? The woods and the streams? Were they not to be in your sister’s keeping and she to be Lady Abbess till death?’

‘As a murderer and a witch, then she is a dead woman in law,’ the lord said. ‘She is disinherited by her sins; it will be as if she had never been born. She will be an outlaw, with no home anywhere in Christendom. The declaration of her guilt will mean that no-one can offer her shelter, she will have nowhere to lay her false head. She will be dead to the law, a ghost to the people. The Lady Almoner can become the new Lady Abbess and command the lands and the abbey and all.’ He put his hand up to shield his eyes. ‘Forgive me, I can’t help but grieve for my sister!’

‘Very well,’ Luca said.

‘I’ll draw up the finding of guilt and the writ for her arrest,’ Brother Peter said, unfurling his papers. ‘You can sign it at once.’

‘And then you will leave, and we will never meet again,’ the Lady Almoner said quietly to Luca. Her voice was filled with regret.

‘I have to,’ he said for her ears alone. ‘I have my duty and my vows too.’

‘And I have to stay here,’ she replied. ‘To serve my sisters as well as I can. Our paths will never cross again – but I won’t forget you. I won’t ever forget you.’

He stepped close so that his mouth was almost against her veil. He could smell a hint of perfume on the linen. ‘What of the gold?’

She shook her head. ‘I shall leave it where it lies in the waters of the stream,’ she promised him. ‘It has cost us too dear. I shall lead my sisters to renew their vows of poverty. I won’t even tell Lord Lucretili about it. It shall be our secret: yours and mine. Will you keep the secret with me? Shall it be the last thing that we share together?’

Luca bowed his head so that she could not see the bitter twist of his mouth. ‘So at the end of my inquiry, you are Lady Abbess, the gold runs quietly in the stream, and the Lady Isolde is as a dead woman.’

Something in his tone alerted her keen senses. ‘This is justice!’ she said quickly. ‘This is how it should be.’

‘Certainly, I am beginning to see that this is how some people think it should be,’ Luca said drily.

‘Here is the writ of arrest and the finding of guilt for the Lady Isolde, formerly known as Lady Abbess of the abbey of Lucretili,’ Brother Peter said, pushing the document across the table, the ink still wet. ‘And here is the letter approving the Lady Almoner as the new Lady Abbess.’

‘Very efficient,’ Luca remarked. ‘Quick.’

Brother Peter looked startled at the coldness of his tone. ‘I thought we had all agreed?’

‘There is just one thing remaining,’ Luca said. He opened the door and Freize was standing there, holding a leather sack. Luca took it without a word, and put it on the table, then untied the string. He unpacked the objects in order. ‘A shoemaker’s awl, from the Lady Almoner’s secret cupboard in the carved chimney breast of her parlour . . .’ He heard her sharp gasp and whisper of denial. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the piece of paper. Slowly, in the silently attentive room, he unfolded it and showed them the print of the bloodstained palm of the nun who had come to him in the night and shown him the stigmata. He put the sharp triangular point of the shoemaker’s awl over the bloodstained print: it fitted exactly.

Luca gritted his teeth, facing the fact that his suspicions were true, though he had hoped so much that this hunch, this late awareness, would prove false. He felt like a man gambling with blank-faced dice; now he did not even know what he was betting on. ‘There is only one thing that I think certain,’ he said tightly. ‘There is only one thing that I can be sure of. I think it most unlikely that Our Lord’s sacred wounds would be exactly the shape and size of a common shoemaker’s awl. These wounds, which I saw and recorded on the palm of a nun of this abbey, were made by human hands, with a cobbler’s tools, with this tool in particular.’

‘They were hurting themselves,’ the Lady Almoner said quickly. ‘Hysterical women will do that. I warned you of it.’

‘Using the awl from your cupboard?’ He took out the little glass jar of seeds, and showed them to the Lady Almoner. ‘I take it that these are belladonna seeds?’

Lord Lucretili interrupted. ‘I don’t know what you are suggesting?’

‘Don’t you?’ Luca asked, as if he were interested. ‘Does anyone? Do you know what I am suggesting, my Lady Almoner?’

Her face was as white as the wimple that framed it. She shook her head, her grey eyes wordlessly begging him to say nothing more. Luca looked at her, his young face grim. ‘I have to go on,’ he said, as if in answer to her unspoken question. ‘I was sent here to inquire and I have to go on. Besides, I have to know. I always have to know.’

‘There is no need . . .’ she whispered. ‘The wicked Lady Abbess is gone, whatever she did with the awl, with belladonna . . .’

‘I need to know,’ he repeated. The last object he brought out was the book of the abbey’s accounts that Freize had taken from her room.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the list of work,’ she said, suddenly confident. ‘You cannot say that there is anything missing from the goods listed and the market takings. I have been a good steward to this abbey. I have cared for it as if it were my own house. I have worked for it as if I were the lady of the house, I have been the Magistra, I have been in command here.’

‘There is no doubt that you have been a good steward,’ Luca assured her. ‘But there is one thing missing.’ He turned to the clerk. ‘Brother Peter, look at these and tell me, do you see a fortune in gold mentioned anywhere?’

Peter took the leather-bound book and flipped the pages quickly. ‘Eggs,’ he volunteered. ‘Vegetables, some sewing work, some laundry work, some copying work – no fortune. Certainly no fortune in gold.’

‘You know I didn’t take the gold,’ the Lady Almoner said, turning to Luca, putting a pleading hand on his arm. ‘I stole nothing. It was all the Lady Abbess, she that is a witch. She set the nuns to soak the fleeces in the river, she stole the gold dust and sent it out for sale to the gold merchants. As I told you, as you saw for yourself. It was not me. Nobody will say it was me. It was done by her.’

‘Gold?’ Lord Lucretili demanded in a stagey shout of surprise. ‘What gold?’

‘The Lady Abbess and her slave have been panning for gold in the abbey stream, and selling it,’ the Lady Almoner told him quickly. ‘I learned of it by chance when they first came. The inquirer discovered this only yesterday.’

‘And where is the gold now?’ Luca asked.

‘Sold to the merchants on Via Portico d’Ottavia, I suppose,’ she flared at him. ‘And the profit taken by the witches. We will never get it back. We will never know for sure.’

‘Who sold it?’ Luca asked, as if genuinely curious.

‘The slave, the heretic slave, she must have gone to the Jews, to the gold merchants,’ she said quickly. ‘She would know what to do, she would trade with them. She would speak their language, she would know how to haggle with them. She is a heretic like them, greedy like them, allowed to profiteer like they are. As bad as them . . . worse.’

Luca shook his head at her, almost as if he was sorry as his trap closed on her. ‘You told me yourself that she never left the nunnery,’ he said slowly. He nodded at Brother Peter. ‘You took a note of what the Lady Almoner said, that first day, when she was so charming and so helpful.’

Brother Peter turned to the page in his collection of papers, riffling the manuscript pages. ‘She said: “She never leaves the Lady Abbess’s side. And the Lady Abbess never goes out. The slave haunts the place.”’

Luca turned back to the Lady Almoner whose grey eyes flicked – just once – to the lord, as if asking for his help, and then back to Luca.

‘You told me yourself she was the Lady Abbess’s shadow,’ Luca said steadily. ‘She never left the nunnery: the gold has never left the nunnery. You have it hidden here.’

Her white face blanched yet more pale but she seemed to draw courage from somewhere. ‘Search for it!’ she defied him. ‘You can tear my storeroom apart and you will not find it. Search my room, search my house, I have no hidden gold here! You can prove nothing against me!’

‘Enough of this. My damned sister was a sinner, a heretic, a witch, and now a thief,’ Lord Lucretili suddenly intervened. He signed the contract for her arrest without hesitation, and handed it back to Brother Peter. ‘Get this published at once. Announce a hue and cry for her. If we take her and her heretic familiar, I shall burn them without further trial. I shall burn them without allowing them to open their mouths.’ He reached towards Luca. ‘Give me your hand,’ he said. ‘I thank you, for all you have done here. You have pursued an inquiry and completed it. It’s over, thank God. It’s done. Let’s make an end to it now, like men. Let’s finish it here.’

‘No, it’s not quite over,’ Luca said, detaching himself from the lord’s grip. He opened the gatehouse door and led all of them out to the yard where they were loading the coffin of the dead nun onto the black-draped cart.

‘What’s this?’ the lord said irritably, following Luca outside. ‘You can’t interfere with the coffin. We agreed. I am taking it to a vigil in my chapel. You cannot touch it. You must show respect. Hasn’t she suffered enough?’

The lay sisters heaved at the coffin, sweating with effort. There were eight of them hauling it onto the low cart. Luca observed, grimly, that it was a heavy load.

The lord took Luca firmly by the arm. ‘Come tonight to the castle,’ he whispered. ‘We can open it there if you insist. I will help you, as I promised I would.’

Luca was watching Freize, who had gone to help the lay sisters slide the coffin onto the cart. First he shouldered the coffin with them, and then nimbly climbed up into the cart, standing alongside the coffin, a crowbar in his hand.

‘Don’t you dare touch it!’ The Lady Almoner was on the cart, beside him, in a moment, her hands on his forearm. ‘This coffin is sanctified, blessed by the priest himself. Don’t you dare touch her coffin, she has been censed and blessed with sanctified water, let her rest in peace!’

There was a murmur from the lay sisters and one of them, seeing Freize’s determined face as he gently put the Lady Almoner aside, slipped away to the chapel where the nuns were praying for their departed sister’s soul.

‘Get down,’ the Lady Almoner commanded Freize, holding on to his arm. ‘I order it. You shall not abuse her in death! You shall not see her poor sainted face!’

‘Tell your man to get down,’ Lord Lucretili said quietly to Luca, as one man to another. ‘Whatever you suspect, it won’t help if there is a scandal now, and these women have borne too much already. We have all gone through too much today. We can sort this out later in my chapel. Let the nuns say farewell to their sister and get the coffin away.’

The nuns were pouring out of the chapel towards the yard, their faces white and furious. When they saw Freize on the cart, they started to run.

‘Freize!’ Luca shouted a warning, as the women fell onto the cart like a sea of white, keening high notes, like a mad choir turning on an enemy. ‘Freize, leave it!’

He was too late. Freize had got his crowbar beneath the lid and heaved it up as the first nuns reached the cart and started to grab at him. With a terrible creak the nails yielded on one side and the lid lifted up. Dourly triumphant, Freize fended off one slight woman, and nodded down at Luca. ‘As you thought,’ he said.

The first of the nuns recoiled at the sight of the open coffin and whispered to the others what they had seen. The others, running up, checked and stopped, as someone at the back let out a bewildered sob. ‘What is it now? What in the name of Our Lady is it now?’

Luca climbed up beside Freize, and the sight of the coffin blazed at him. He saw that the dead nun had been packed in bags of gold and one of them had split, showering her with treasure so that she appeared like a glorious pharaoh. Gold dust filled her coffin, gilded her face, enamelled the coins on her staring eyes, glittered in her wimple and turned her gown to treasure. She was a golden icon, a Byzantine glory, not a corpse.

‘The witches did this! It’s their work,’ the Lady Almoner shouted. ‘They put their stolen treasure in with their victim.’

Luca shook his head, at this, her last attempt, and turned to the Lady Almoner and to Lord Lucretili, his young face grave. ‘I charge you, Lady Almoner, with the murder of this young woman, Sister Augusta, by feeding her belladonna to cause dreams and hallucinations to disturb the peace and serenity of this nunnery, to shame the Lady Abbess and drive her from her place. I charge you, Lord Lucretili, of conspiring with the Lady Almoner to drive the Lady Abbess from her home, which was her inheritance under the terms of her father’s will, and setting the Lady Almoner to steal the gold from the abbey. I charge you both with attempting to smuggle this gold, the Lady Abbess’s property, from the abbey in this coffin, and of falsely accusing the Lady Abbess and her slave of witchcraft and conspiring to cause their deaths.’

The lord tried to laugh. ‘You’re dreaming too. They’ve driven you mad too!’ he started. ‘You’re wandering in your wits!’

Luca shook his head. ‘No, I am not.’

‘But the evidence?’ Brother Peter muttered to him. ‘Evidence?’

‘The slave never sold the gold, she never left the abbey – the Lady Almoner told us so. So neither she nor the Lady Abbess ever profited from the gold-panning. But the Lady Almoner accused them, even naming the street in Rome where the gold merchants trade. The only people who tried to get this month’s gold out of the abbey were the Lady Almoner and the Lord Lucretili – right now in this coffin. The only woman who showed any signs of wealth was the Lady Almoner, in her silk petticoats and her fine leather slippers. She plotted with the lord to drive his sister from the abbey so that she could become Lady Abbess and they would share the gold together.’

Lord Lucretili looked at Brother Peter, Freize and Luca, and then at his own men-at-arms, the clerks and priests. Then he turned to the blank-faced nuns who were swaying like a field of white lilies and whispering, ‘What is he saying? What is the stranger saying? Is he saying bad things? Is he accusing us? Who is he? I don’t like him. Did he kill Sister Augusta? Is he the figure of Death that she saw?’

‘Whatever you believe, whatever you say, I think you are outnumbered,’ Lord Lucretili said in quiet triumph. ‘You can leave now safely, or you can face these madwomen. Just as you like. But I warn you, I think they are so crazed that they will tear you apart.’

The crowd of young women, more than two hundred of them, gathered closer to the coffin cart, one after the other, to see the icon that had been made of their innocent sister, and their sibilant whispers were like a thousand hissing snakes as they saw her lying there in her opened coffin, bathed in gold, and Freize standing above her like an abusing man – an emblem of all the wickedness of the world – with a crowbar in his hands.

‘This man is our enemy,’ the Lady Almoner told them, stepping away from him to put herself at the head of the women. ‘He is defending the false Lady Abbess, who killed our sister. He has broken into our sister’s consecrated coffin.’

The nuns’ faces turned towards her, their expressions blank, as if they were beyond words; and still the sibilant whispers went on.

‘They will do what is right,’ Luca gambled. He turned to the white-faced women, and tried to capture their attention. ‘Sisters, listen to me. Your Lady Abbess has been driven from her home and you have been driven half-mad by belladonna fed to you in bread from this woman’s table. Are you still so sick with the drug that you will be obedient to her? Or will you find your own way? Will you think for yourselves? Can you think for yourselves?’

There was a terrible silence. Luca could see the haunted faces of all the women staring blankly at him and for a moment he thought that they were indeed so sick from the drug that they would take him and Freize and Brother Peter and tear them to pieces. He took hold of the side of the cart with one hand, so that no-one could see it shaking, and he pointed his other hand at the Lady Almoner. ‘Get down from the cart,’ he said. ‘I am taking you to Rome to answer for your crimes against your sisters, against the Lady Abbess, and against God.’

She stayed where she was, high above him, and she looked at the nuns, whose faces turned obediently towards her. She said three short terrible words. ‘Sisters! Kill him!’

Luca whirled around, pulling his dagger from his boot, and Freize jumped down to stand alongside him. Brother Peter moved towards them, but in a second the three men were surrounded. The nuns, pale and dull-faced, formed themselves into an unbreakable circle, like a wall of coldness, took one step towards the three men, and then took another step closer.

‘St James the Greater protect me,’ Freize swore. He raised his crowbar, but the nuns neither flinched nor stopped their steady onward pace.

The first nun put her hand to her head, took hold of her wimple, and threw it down on the ground. Horridly, her shaven head made her look like neither man nor woman, but a strange being, some kind of hairless animal. Beside her the next nun did the same, then they all threw their wimples down showing their heads, some cropped, some shaven quite bald.

‘God help us!’ Luca whispered to his comrades on either side of him. ‘What are they doing?’

‘I think—’ Brother Peter began.

‘Traitor!’ the nuns whispered together, like a choir.

Luca looked desperately around, but there was no way to break out of the circle of women.

‘Traitor!’ they said again, more loudly. But now they were not looking at the men, they were looking over the men’s heads, upwards, to the Lady Almoner high on the hearse.

‘Traitor!’ they breathed again.

‘Not me!’ she said, her voice cracked with sudden fear. ‘These men are your enemies, and the witches who are fled.’

They shook their bald heads in one terrible movement, and now they closed on the cart and their grasping hands reached past the men, as if they were nothing, reached up to pull the Lady Almoner down. She looked from one sister to another, then at the locked gate and the porteress who stood before it, arms folded. ‘Traitor!’ they said and now they had hold of her robe, of her silk petticoats beneath her robe, and were pawing at her, shaking her gown, pulling at her, grasping hold of the fine leather belt of her rosary, gripping the gold chain of keys, bringing her to her knees.

She tore herself from their grip and jumped over the side of the cart to Luca, clinging to his arm. ‘Arrest me!’ she said with sudden urgency. ‘Arrest me and take me now. I confess. I am your prisoner. Protect me!’

‘I have this woman under arrest!’ Luca said clearly to the nuns. ‘She is my prisoner, in my charge. I will see that justice is done.’

‘Traitor!’ They were closing in steadily and fast; nothing could stop them.

‘Save me!’ she screamed in his ear.

Luca put his arm in front of her but the nuns were pressing forwards. ‘Freize! Get her out of here!’

Freize was pinned to the cart by a solid wall of women.

‘Giorgio!’ she called to Lord Lucretili. ‘Giorgio! Save me!’

He shook his head convulsively, like a man in a fit, flinching back from the mob of nuns.

‘I did it for you!’ she cried to him. ‘I did it all for you!’

He turned a hard face to Luca. ‘I don’t know what she’s saying, I don’t know what she means.’

The blank-faced women came closer, pressing against the men. Luca tried to gently push them away but it was like pushing against an avalanche of snow. They reached for the Lady Almoner with pinching hands.

‘No!’ Luca shouted. ‘I forbid it! She is under arrest. Let justice be done!’

The lord suddenly tore himself away from the scene, strode past them all to the stables, and came out at once on his red-leather caparisoned horse with his men-at-arms closed up around him. ‘Open the gate,’ he ordered the porteress. ‘Open the gate or I will ride you down.’

Mutely she swung it open. The nuns did not even turn their heads as his cavalcade flung themselves through the gate and away down the road to his castle.

Luca could feel the weight of the women pressing against him. ‘I command . . .’ he started again, but they were like a wall bearing down on him, and he was being suffocated by their robes, by their remorseless thrusting against him as if they would stifle him with their numbers. He tried to push himself away from the side of the cart; but then he lost his footing and went down. He kicked and rolled in a spasm of terror at the thought that they would trample him, unknowingly, that he would die beneath their sandalled feet. The Lady Almoner would have clung to him but they dragged her off him. Half a dozen women held Luca down as others forced the Lady Almoner to the pyre that she herself had ordered them to build. Freize was shouting now, thrashing about as a dozen women pinned him to the floor. Brother Peter was frozen in shock, white-robed nuns crushing him into silence, against the side of the cart.

She had ordered them to make two high pyres of dry wood, each built around a central pole, set strongly in the ground. They carried her to the nearest, though she kicked and struggled and screamed for help, and they lashed her to the pole, wrapping the ropes tight around her writhing body.

‘Save me!’ she screamed to Luca. ‘For the love of God, save me!’

He had a wimple over his face so he could not see, he was suffocating on the ground under the fabric, but he shouted to them to stop, even as they took the torch from the gatehouse porteress, who gave it silently to them, even as they held it to the tarred wood at the foot of the pile, even as she disappeared from view in a cloud of dark smoke, even as he heard her piercing scream of agony as her expensive silk petticoats and her fine woollen gown blazed up in a plume of yellow flames.