‘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.’