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 was swinging a heavy silver censer leaving a misty layer of 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 the lord 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 the 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. ‘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 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 horses with black trappings 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. The lord’s squire brought in the crusader broadsword and set it in a stone so it stood upright in the centre of the room.
‘What’s that?’ Luca asked.
‘My sister will recognise it at once,’ the lord said. ‘It’s a crusader sword. My father swapped his sword with that of his dearest friend. They engraved a sentence of great power on their blades and bolted the sword in the scabbard. My father would have the sword before him when he was going to pass a death sentence. She knows that.’
‘You can bring yourself to do this?’ Luca asked curiously. ‘To your sister?’
‘It is my duty,’ the lord replied.
Luca nodded and drew him to one side. ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘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. It would cause a riot. 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 will prepare them. 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 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. ‘Heaven
ly 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. ‘Are they not chained?’ Two more rungs of the ladder and he could see the walls were black and shiny with damp. The women would be chilled, weighted with iron fetters, 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 saw 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. ‘How?’
‘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 blackness 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 thought of her.
‘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?’
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