‘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 watch
ed 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.
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