‘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. This is your decision.’
‘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. Brother Luca? What are you saying?’
‘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. ‘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 here. 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.’
‘But 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 reminded her. 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 sto
reroom 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. Spare the women this.’
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! This is sacrilege!’
‘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. With the Lady Almoner clawing at his shoulder 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 the women, 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 Lady Almoner, 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, 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 came to the side of the wagon and urgently 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, she even knows 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. He smiled. ‘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. ‘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. ‘Our enemy,’ they repeated. ‘Our enemy, our enemies. They should be crucified like the Lord.’
‘They will do what is right,’ Luca claimed. 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 broken only by the whispered word ‘enemy!’. Luca could see the haunted faces of all the women staring blankly up 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 he was shaking, and he pointed his other hand at the Lady Almoner. ‘Get down from the cart. 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, surrounded by the nuns, whose faces turned obediently towards her. Then 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 above her pale gown 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.
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