‘I have something for you,’ she said smiling. ‘Hero or not.’
He waited.
From the inner pocket of her cape she produced the sleepy little kitten. Freize cupped his big hands and she put it gently into them. He took the kitten up to his face and inhaled the scent of warm fur, as the little thing stretched for a moment, and then wound its golden tail over its white nose and snuggled down clasped in his big hands.
‘You saved it for me?’
‘I woke in the night, last night, thinking of you and remembering it, and I got out of bed and went up the ladder to the roof in the darkness, and fetched it down from the chimney pot.’
‘You went up and down the roof in darkness?’
‘I should have remembered it before.’
‘Was it not dangerous?’
‘Nothing like you in the flood.’
‘You were thinking of me?’
‘Yes,’ she said frankly.
‘Worrying about me?’ he suggested.
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps crying for me? A little? When nobody was looking?’
She smiled a little, but she did not look away or pretend to shyness. She made a small nod of assent. ‘I cried for you and I told the whole village that I was sorry I had been unkind to you.’
‘Perhaps you were wishing that you had kissed an honest man when he asked you kindly, and not thrown him down in the mud, that time in Vittorito?’
Again, the tiny nod told him that she had thought very kindly of him and regretted the missed kiss.
‘You could always kiss me now,’ Freize suggested.
To his surprise, she did not refuse him, though he had expected her to box his ears for asking. Instead she stepped towards him and put one hand over the soft kitten in his cupped hands, as if to caress them both. She put her other hand on the nape of his warm neck, and drew his head down to her, and she kissed him, tenderly and fully on the lips so that he inhaled her breath, and tasted the soft dampness of the tender skin of her mouth.
Ishraq waited in their shared room for Isolde to come back from church and took her cape as she entered, and stood behind her as she sat on the wooden three-legged stool. Ishraq untied the ribbon in Isolde’s blonde hair and ran her fingers through the plaits, pulling them loose. Slowly, luxuriously, she combed the beautiful golden ringlets till they lay heavy and smooth over Isolde’s shoulders, and then plaited them back up for the night. The girls changed places and Isolde combed and then plaited her friend’s thick dark hair, twisting the locks around her fingers.
‘Isn’t it a blessing that he is safe?’ she said quietly, ‘I had lit half a dozen candles for him in the church and then I was able to give thanks.’
Ishraq bowed her head under the gentle caress. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘He came running after us up the hill to church and he looked filled with joy.’
‘Yes, I expect he did.’
‘Did you give him his kitten?’
Ishraq nodded.
‘Was he very pleased?’
‘Yes.’
Something in Ishraq’s reserve warned Isolde, who gave the fat dark plait a little admonitory tug. ‘What are you not telling me?’
Ishraq turned to face her friend. ‘How do you know that there is something that I am not telling you?’
‘Because his face was alight with joy. Because you are saying nothing – but you look the same as he did. So what passed between the two of you?’
Ishraq hesitated. ‘You won’t like it,’ she guessed.
‘Of course I won’t mind. Whatever it is. Why would I mind? Did he promise you his service for life, like he did to me?’
‘Oh no. He doesn’t think of me as a grand lady. He doesn’t want to be my squire. He asked me if I was sorry for throwing him down in the mud at Vittorito. And I said I was sorry.’
‘You apologised?’ Ishraq was amazed. ‘You never apologise!’
‘Well, I said sorry to him.’
‘Is that all?’
‘I said I wished that I had kissed him that time and not tripped him up.’
‘Ishraq!’ Isolde was playfully shocked. ‘What a thing to say to him! What can he have thought?’
‘Oh that was nothing. He asked me could he kiss me now?’
‘Well, he was bound to. And I hope you refused him kindly?’
‘Oh,’ Ishraq said nonchalantly. ‘I wanted to. So I kissed him.’
Isolde was genuinely shocked. She dropped the comb and stared at Ishraq’s reflection in the little mirror. ‘You kissed him?’
The girl nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’
‘How could you allow him? I know you were happy that he came back safely – we all are – but how could you forget yourself so? How could you permit him? A servant?’
‘I didn’t really allow him. I didn’t “permit him”, as you say.’
‘He never forced you?’ Isolde was horrified.
‘No! No! It was I who kissed him.’
This was even worse. ‘But Ishraq, your honour!’
The girl met her friend’s stunned gaze. ‘Oh! Honour!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I suddenly felt, I suddenly thought, that nothing mattered more to me than that I had thought him dead, and that I was so happy that he was alive. I had thought he was lost and here he was – just as he had always been. And I was so glad of that – nothing else seemed to matter.’
Isolde shook her head. ‘If you were so happy for him, you could have given him a favour or a gift. You could have let him kiss your hand. But to lower yourself to kiss him! What about your honour as a lady?’
‘I am sick of all of this,’ Ishraq said impatiently. ‘Like in the church today – people doubting our reputation just because we were going to wash where the boys swim. As if all that matters is how a lady behaves around boys! I want my honour to be about me as a person, not me as an object with boundaries and gateways, as if I were a field, as if I were a property with hedges. One man can touch my hand, one can see my face, but another can’t even speak to me. If my honour is a real thing then it can’t depend on whether a man sees my face, or touches my hand, or kisses my lips. If I am an honourable woman then I am an honourable woman like a man is an honourable man – whatever I wear, however I appear. It is about my respect for myself – not how the world sees me, not what events happen. I know that I am an honourable woman, I don’t stoop to sin, I don’t embarrass myself, I don’t do things that I know to be wrong. I know I am a good woman whether I wear a veil or keep my hair plaited out of sight. I felt that I could, in honour, give him the kiss that he once asked for, and that I wanted to do so. And I did so.’
‘A lady should be untouchable until marriage,’ Isolde stated the absolute rule that they had both been taught from childhood. ‘Her husband should know that she has known no other man, that no other man has been closer to her than to kiss her hand. He must know that she has felt no desire, permitted no touch.’
‘It’s not true,’ Ishraq said roundly. ‘You are a lady, a great lady, and you will make a great marriage with some high lord. But you will have known love and you will have felt desire.’
‘I won’t!’ Isolde insisted. ‘I would never admit to it.’
‘But there is more to life than trying to fit inside men’s idea of an honourable woman!’ Ishraq exclaimed. ‘We didn’t come away from the castle and then run away from the nunnery to live as if we were still enclosed.’
Isolde was scandalised. ‘We should live as we were brought up to live! Not like loose women on the road, not as if we had no hopes of ourselves, no standards, no self-respect!’
‘Not me,’ Ishraq declared boldly. ‘I am out of the castle, I am out of the nunnery. I’m not going to wear a hood any more, I’m not going to wear a veil. I am going to dress as I please and do what I think right and I am going to kiss who I want to, and even lie with someone if I want to. My honour and my pride are in my heart, not in my dress, and not in what the world says.’
Isolde was genuinely distressed. ‘You can’t throw away your reputation, Ishraq. You can’t become a loose woman, a shamed woman.’
‘Nobody shames me,’ Ishraq said proudly. ‘But I will choose my own path and who I love and who loves me.’
‘When we were in church, before Luca, accused of being storm-bringers, we told everyone that we were women of good reputation!’ Isolde cried out. ‘It was one of the things that saved us. Everyone could see that we wouldn’t have gone running after boys to the green lake; everyone knew that we said that we were ladies of high regard, of good name. You risk everything if you behave lightly. It’s a terrible thing to do.’
‘We were saved in the church because the stable lad said that we had done nothing but swim,’ Ishraq argued. ‘All that about being the Lady of Lucretili might impress a few peasants but it means nothing. If the boy had not proved that we left the town gate in daylight and gone for a swim they would have burned us as storm-bringers whether we were virgins or not. We have to fight for our way in the world; nobody is going to give us safe conduct because we try to be ladylike.’
‘You won’t be a fit companion for me, and Luca would be horrified,’ Isolde stormed. ‘Luca does not want to travel with a girl who has lost her honourable name. He would not tolerate you in his presence, if he thought you were dishonoured. He would send you away if he knew you had kissed his servant.’
‘No he wouldn’t, for he knows what it is to want someone to hold you, to want the comfort of love. When he was in his sorrow on the quayside I held him in my arms.’
‘What?’ Isolde nearly screamed.
‘I held him for pity when he was weeping, and I was not shamed. He did not think I was dishonoured. I was not shamed when he kissed me.’
Isolde gasped. ‘He kissed you?’
‘Yes. He was not horrified. He didn’t think me dishonoured.’
‘He kissed your lips?’ Isolde’s voice was shrill.
‘No! Not like that! How can you think such a thing? He kissed me tenderly, gently, on my forehead.’
‘How do you mean?’
Ishraq was irritated. ‘What do you think I mean? He held my face in his two hands and he kissed me on my forehead, practically on my hood. I hardly felt it. It was almost on my hood.’
‘It can’t have been on your hood if you felt it! If it had been on your hood you would not have known he had done it. So was it on your forehead or your hood?’
‘What difference does it make? What difference does it make to you?’
‘Was it on your forehead?’
‘Why would it matter? He’s obviously in love with you. I held him in my arms like a sister, I held him while he wept for his friend, and then, when he came into the inn, he gave me a kiss of tenderness: we were both grieving for Freize.’
‘You were hardly grieving very much, if you were kissing another man.’
Ishraq looked incredulously at her friend, and then crossly got to her feet, kicking the stool out of the way under the bed. ‘What on earth is the matter with you about all this?’ she said rudely. ‘You are screaming like a stuck pig.’
‘I am so shocked by you!’ Isolde’s voice quavered as if she were about to cry.
‘Shocked by what? By my holding a young man in my arms who was grieving for his friend? Or by my kissing a young man when he had just come back from the dead?’
‘And him! How could he? How can we travel with them – how can we travel at all – if you are going to be like this? How can we face them tomorrow knowing that you have kissed not just one but both of them!’
Ishraq almost laughed and then looked again at Isolde’s distressed face, saw even in the flickering candlelight the shine of tears on her pale cheeks. ‘Why you’re crying! Isolde, this is ridiculous. What’s the matter with you? Why are you so upset?’
‘I can’t bear that he should kiss you!’ burst out the girl. ‘I hate it. I hate you for allowing it! I hate you!’
There was a stunned silence.
‘This is about Luca. Not about me or Freize, not about my honour. It is about Luca,’ Ishraq said.
Isolde dropped on the bed and put her face in her hands. ‘No, it isn’t.’
‘So you are in love with him,’ Ishraq observed coldly. ‘This is serious.’
‘No! Of course not! How can it possibly be?’
‘You are jealous that I held him in my arms, and that he took my face in his hands and kissed me on the forehead.’
‘Shut up!’ Isolde rounded on her friend in a fury. ‘I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to have to imagine it, I wish you had not done it, and if you do it again – if you even think of doing it again – then we will have to part. I can’t stay with you if you are going to become some sort of . . .’
‘Some sort of what?’ Ishraq demanded icily.
‘Some sort of whore!’ Isolde spat out in her rage.
Ishraq was shocked into silence, then she got into bed, pulled up the covers of the bed as far as they would go, up to her chin, and turned over as if ready for sleep. ‘If you were a man I would have thrown you down for saying such a name to me,’ she said to the limewashed wall. ‘But as it is, I see that you are a stupid jealous girl who fears that the man she loves is being taken from her.’
Isolde gasped, but could not deny it.
‘A jealous girl, a stupid girl,’ Ishraq went on bitterly, still with her back turned. ‘A girl truly dishonoured by thinking such things of her friend and saying such a word to her friend. That is dishonour, that is to be poor in heart. And you are wrong, so wrong. I would not take the man you loved away from you, even supposing that he would be willing. I would not do such a thing to you, for I never forget that we love each other like sisters, and that our love should matter more than what we might feel for a man. A passing man,’ she said driving the point home, into the silence of the darkened bedroom. ‘A man that you met just a month ago. A man who is promised to a monastery and to an order and is not free to kiss anyone, anyway. A young man who probably cares for neither of us.
‘But you have put your stupid girlish feelings for him above your love for me. And then you accuse me of being dishonoured! And then you call me a foul name! You’re no sister to me, Isolde, though I have lived my life thinking of you as dearly as a sister. But at the first sight of a handsome young man you become a rival. A stupid rivalrous girl. You’re not fit to be my sister, you don’t deserve my love.’
She heard a sob behind her, but she refused to turn around.
‘And it is you who are dishonoured,’ she said fiercely. ‘For you are in love with a man who is not free, and who has not spoken to your family to ask for your hand in marriage. So you are a fool.’
She was answered by a little shaky gasp.
‘Goodnight,’ Ishraq said frostily, and closed her eyes and fell, almost at once, asleep, as Isolde got on her knees at the foot of the bed and prayed to God for forgiveness for the sin of jealousy, for speaking cruelly and wrongly to her dearest friend; and then – reluctantly – owning the truth to herself: she prayed for forgiveness for the terrible sin of desire.
In the morning the two girls were pointedly polite to each other, but hardly spoke at all. Luca and Freize, in the joy of being reunited, completely failed to notice the icy atmosphere. Brother Peter regarded the young women critically, and thought to himself that they were – like all women – as changeable as the weather, and as inexplicable. He would have thought they would be overjoyed to have the favourite Freize back with them again – but here they were sour-faced and silent. Why would God make such beings but for the trouble and puzzlement of men? Who could ever doubt that they were a lesser being to the men that God had made in His image and set over them for their guidance? What could he do but thank God for preserving him from their company by keeping him safe in a religion governed by men in an order exclusively male?
As Freize went down to the harbour to confirm the arrangements for them to s
ail, Luca, Brother Peter and Isolde went up the hill to the church for Terce, the third service of prayer in the day. Isolde made her confession to the priest and then kneeled in prayer, her face buried in her hands throughout the Mass. When it was over, and the men had said farewell to Father Benito, she was still kneeling. They left her to follow them and walked back to the inn.
Freize greeted them on the threshold of the inn, his face grave. ‘We can’t take a ship to Split,’ he said. ‘I found a man who has just come from there. He’ll be the first of many. The town is all but destroyed, the country for miles around laden with broken boats and upturned trees, wrecked houses and drowned barns. The place was hit by a greater wave than we were; it is far worse than here. There’s no house standing for miles around, and nothing to eat that has not been spoiled with salt water. We can’t go to that coast at all.’
Luca shook his head at himself. ‘I should have thought of that! What a fool I am! Of course we won’t be the only town that had the wave. If the sea moved, then every town on the coast would have been affected.’ For a moment they could see him furiously thinking, then he turned to Brother Peter. ‘If we knew which town was worst affected then we would know which town was closest to the source of the wave,’ he said. ‘If Ishraq is right, and it was like a pebble in a bowl, then the wave is deepest nearest to where it starts and gets more and more shallow as it rolls away. If we knew where the wave was greatest we might at least discover where it came from.’
‘That’s true,’ Brother Peter said. ‘But . . .’
Suddenly, shockingly, the warning bell of the lookout on the harbour wall started to sound, a single jangling bell, an urgent clangour, terrible for the whole village, terrifying for those on the quayside.
‘Not again!’ Brother Peter exclaimed. ‘God save us from another wave.’
‘Where’s Isolde?’ Freize demanded urgently. ‘Where did you leave her?’
‘At the church,’ Luca shouted. ‘Get up there, get to higher ground! Where is Ishraq?’
Everyone tumbled out of the inn, the innkeeper and Ishraq among them.
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