‘And the stigmata? The sign of the cross on her palms?’
He could see the shock in her face. ‘Who told you about that?’
‘I saw the girl myself, last night, and the other women who ran after her.’
She bowed her head and clasped her hands together; he thought for a moment that she was praying for guidance as to what she should say next. ‘Perhaps it is a miracle,’ she said quietly. ‘The stigmata. We cannot know for sure. Perhaps not. Perhaps – Our Lady defend us from evil – it is something worse.’
Luca leaned across the table to hear her. ‘Worse? What d’you mean?’
‘Sometimes a devout young woman will mark herself with the five wounds of Christ. Mark herself as an act of devotion. Sometimes young women will go too far.’ She took a nervous shuddering breath. ‘That is why we need strong discipline in the house. The nuns need to feel that they can be cared for, as a daughter is cared for by her father. They need to know that there are strict limits to their behaviour. They need to be carefully ruled.’
‘You fear that the women are harming themselves?’ Luca asked, shocked.
‘They are young women,’ the Lady Almoner repeated. ‘And they have no leadership. They become passionate, stirred up. It is not unknown for them to cut themselves, or each other.’
Brother Peter and Luca exchanged a horrified glance, Brother Peter ducked down his head and made a note.
‘The abbey is wealthy,’ Luca observed, speaking at random, to divert himself from his shock.
She shook her head. ‘No, we have a vow of poverty, each and every one of us. Poverty, obedience and chastity. We can own nothing, we cannot follow our own will, and we cannot love a man. We have all taken these vows; there is no escaping them. We have all taken them. We have all willingly consented.’
‘Except the Lady Abbess,’ Luca suggested. ‘I understand that she protested. She did not want to come. She was ordered to enter the abbey. She did not choose to be obedient, poor, and without the love of a man.’
‘You would have to ask her,’ the Lady Almoner said with quiet dignity. ‘She went through the service. She gave up her rich gowns from the great chests of clothes that she brought in with her. Out of respect for her position in the world she was allowed to change her gown in private. Her own servant shaved her head and helped her dress in coarse linen, and a wool robe of our order, with a wimple around her head and a veil on top of that. When she was ready she came into the chapel and lay alone on the stone floor before the altar, her arms spread out, her face to the cold floor, and she gave herself to God. Only she can know if she took the vows in her heart. Her mind is hidden from us, her sisters.’
She hesitated. ‘But her servant, of course, did not take the vows. She lives among us as an outsider. Her servant, as far as I know, follows no rules at all. I don’t know if she even obeys the Lady Abbess, or if their relationship is more . . .’
‘More what?’ Luca asked, horrified.
‘More unusual,’ she said.
‘Her servant? Is she a lay sister?’
‘I don’t know quite what you would call her. She was the Lady Abbess’s personal servant from childhood, and when the Lady Abbess joined us, the slave came too; she just accompanied her when she came, like a dog follows his master. She lives in the house of the Lady Abbess. She used to sleep in the storeroom next door to the Lady Abbess’s room, she wouldn’t sleep in the nun’s cells, then she started to sleep on the threshold of her room, like a slave. Recently she has taken to sleeping in the bed with her.’ She paused. ‘Like a bedmate.’ She hesitated. ‘I am not suggesting anything else,’ she said.
Brother Peter’s pen was suspended, his mouth open; but he said nothing.
‘She attends the church, following the Lady Abbess like her shadow; but she doesn’t say the prayers, nor confess, nor take Mass. I assume she is an infidel. I really don’t know. She is an exception to our rule. We don’t call her Sister, we call her Ishraq.’
‘Ishraq?’ Luca repeated the strange name.
‘She was born an Ottoman,’ the Lady Almoner said, her voice carefully controlled. ‘You will notice her around the abbey. She wears a dark robe like a Moorish woman, sometimes she holds a veil across her face. Her skin is the colour of caramel sugar, it is the same colour: all over. Naked, she is golden, like a woman made of toffee. The last lord brought her back with him as a baby from Jerusalem when he returned from the crusades. Perhaps he owned her as a trophy, perhaps as a pet. He did not change her name nor did he have her baptised; but had her brought up with his daughter as her personal slave.’
‘Do you think she could have had anything to do with the disturbances? Since they started when she came into the abbey? Since she came in with the Lady Abbess, at the same time?’
She shrugged. ‘Some of the nuns were afraid of her when they first saw her. She is a heretic, of course, and fierce-looking. She is always in the shadow of the Lady Abbess. They found her . . .’ She paused. ‘Disturbing,’ she said, then nodded at the word she had chosen. ‘She is disturbing. We would all say that: disturbing.’
‘What does she do?’
‘She does nothing for God,’ the Lady Almoner said with sudden passion. ‘For sure, she does nothing for the abbey. Wherever the Lady Abbess goes, she goes too. She never leaves her side.’
‘Surely she goes out? She is not enclosed?’
‘She never leaves the Lady Abbess’s side,’ she contradicted him. ‘And the Lady Abbess never goes out. The slave haunts the place. She walks in shadows, she stands in dark corners, she watches everything, and she speaks to none of us. It is as if we have trapped a strange animal. I feel as if I am keeping a tawny lioness, encaged.’
‘Are you afraid of her, yourself?’ Luca asked bluntly.
She raised her head and looked at him with her clear grey gaze. ‘I trust that God will protect me from all evil,’ she said. ‘But if I were not certain sure that I am under the hand of God she would be an utter terror to me.’
There was silence in the little room, as if a whisper of evil had passed among them. Luca felt the hairs on his neck prickle, while beneath the table Brother Peter felt for the crucifix that he wore at his belt.
‘Which of the nuns should I speak to first?’ Luca asked, breaking the silence. ‘Write down for me the names of those who have been walking in their sleep, showing stigmata, seeing visions, fasting.’
He pushed the paper and the quill before her and, without haste or hesitation, she wrote six names clearly, and returned the paper to him.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen visions, or walked in your sleep?’
Her smile at the younger man was almost alluring. ‘I wake in the night for the church services, and I go to my prayers,’ she said. ‘You won’t find me anywhere but warm in my bed.’
As Luca blinked that vision from his mind, she rose from the table and left the room.
‘Impressive woman,’ Peter said quietly, as the door shut behind her. ‘Think of her being in a nunnery from the age of four! If she’d been in the outside world, what might she have done?’
‘Silk petticoats,’ Freize remarked, inserting his broad head around the door from the hall outside. ‘Unusual.’
‘What? What?’ Luca demanded, furious for no reason, feeling his heart pound at the thought of the Lady Almoner sleeping in her chaste bed.
‘Unusual to find a nun in silk petticoats. Hair shirt, yes – that’s extreme perhaps, but traditional. Silk petticoats, no.’
‘How the Devil do you know that she wears silk petticoats?’ Peter demanded irritably. ‘And how dare you speak so, and of such a lady?’
‘Saw them drying in the laundry, wondered who they belonged to. Seemed an odd sort of garment for a nunnery vowed to poverty. Started to listen. I may be a fool but I can listen. Heard them whisper as she walked by me. She didn’t know I was listening, she walked by me as if I was a stone, a tree. Silk gives a little hss hss hss sound.’ He nodded smugly at Peter. ‘More than
one way to make inquiry. Don’t have to be able to write to be able to think. Sometimes it helps to just listen.’
Brother Peter ignored him completely. ‘Who next?’ he asked Luca.
‘The Lady Abbess,’ Luca ruled. ‘Then her servant, Ishraq.’
‘Why not see Ishraq first, and then we can hold her next door while the Lady Abbess speaks,’ Peter suggested. ‘That way we can make sure they don’t collude.’
‘Collude in what?’ Luca demanded, impatiently.
‘That’s the whole thing,’ Peter said. ‘We don’t know what they’re doing.’
‘Collude.’ Freize carefully repeated the strange word. ‘Col-lude. Funny how some words just sound guilty.’
‘Just fetch the slave,’ Luca commanded. ‘You’re not the inquirer, you are supposed to be serving me as your lord. And make sure she doesn’t talk to anyone as she comes to us.’
Freize walked round to the Lady Abbess’s kitchen door and asked for the servant, Ishraq. She came veiled like a desert-dweller, dressed in a tunic and pantaloons of black, a shawl over her head pinned across her face, hiding her mouth. All he could see of her were her bare brown feet – a silver ring on one toe – and her dark inscrutable eyes above her veil. Freize smiled reassuringly at her; but she responded not at all, and they walked in silence to the room. She seated herself before Luca and Brother Peter without uttering one word.
‘Your name is Ishraq?’ Luca asked her.
‘I don’t speak Italian,’ she said in perfect Italian.
‘You are speaking it now.’
She shook her head and said again: ‘I don’t speak Italian.’
‘Your name is Ishraq.’ He tried again in French.
‘I don’t speak French,’ she replied in perfectly accented French.
‘Your name is Ishraq,’ he said in Latin.
‘It is,’ she conceded in Latin. ‘But I don’t speak Latin.’
‘What language do you speak?’
‘I don’t speak.’
Luca recognised a stalemate and leaned forwards, drawing on as much authority as he could. ‘Listen, woman: I am commanded by the Holy Father himself to make inquiry into the events in this nunnery and to send him my report. You had better answer me, or face not just my displeasure, but his.’
She shrugged. ‘I am dumb,’ she said simply, in Latin. ‘And of course, he may be your Holy Father, but he is not mine.’
‘Clearly you can speak,’ Brother Peter intervened. ‘Clearly you can speak several languages.’
She turned her insolent eyes to him, and shook her head.
‘You speak to the Lady Abbess.’
Silence.
‘We have powers to make you speak,’ Brother Peter warned her.
At once she looked down, her dark eyelashes veiling her gaze. When she looked up Luca saw that her dark brown eyes were crinkled at the edges, and she was fighting her desire to laugh out loud at Brother Peter. ‘I don’t speak,’ was all she said. ‘And I don’t think you have any powers over me.’
Luca flushed scarlet with the quick temper of a young man who has been mocked by a woman. ‘Just go,’ Luca said shortly.
To Freize, who put his long face around the door, he snapped: ‘Send for the Lady Abbess. And hold this dumb woman next door, alone.’
Isolde stood in the inner doorway, her hood pulled so far forwards that it cast a deep shadow over her face, her hands hidden in her deep sleeves, only her lithe white feet showing below her robe, in their plain sandals. Irrelevantly Luca noticed that her toes were rosy with cold and her insteps arched high. ‘Come in,’ Luca said, trying to recover his temper. ‘Please take a seat.’
She sat; but she did not put back her hood, so Luca found he was forced to bend his head to peer under it to try to see her. In the shadow of the hood he could make out only a heart-shaped jaw line with a determined mouth. The rest of her remained a mystery.
‘Will you put back your hood, Lady Abbess?’
‘I would rather not.’
‘The Lady Almoner faced us without a hood.’
‘I was made to swear to avoid the company of men,’ she said coldly. ‘I was commanded to swear to remain inside this order and not meet or speak with men except for the fewest words and the briefest meeting. I am obeying the vows I was forced to take. It was not my choice, it was laid upon me by the Church. You, from the Church, should be pleased at my obedience.’
Brother Peter tucked his papers together and waited, pen poised.
‘Would you tell us of the circumstances of your coming to the nunnery?’ Luca asked.
‘They are well-enough known,’ she said. ‘My father died three and a half months ago and left his castle and his lands entirely to my brother, the new lord, as is right and proper. My mother was dead, and to me he left nothing but the choice of a suitor in marriage or a place in the abbey. My brother, the new Lord Lucretili, accepted my decision not to marry and did me the great favour of putting me in charge of this nunnery, and I came in, took my vows, and started my service as their Lady Abbess.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I am seventeen,’ she told him.
‘Isn’t that very young to be a Lady Abbess?’
The half-hidden mouth showed a wry smile. ‘Not if your grandfather founded the abbey and your brother is its only patron, of course. The Lord of Lucretili can appoint who he chooses.’
‘You had a vocation?’
‘Alas, I did not. I came here in obedience to my brother’s wish and my father’s will. Not because I feel I have a calling.’
‘Did you not want to rebel against your brother’s wish and your father’s will?’
There was a moment of silence. She raised her head and from the depth of her hood he saw her regard him thoughtfully, as if she were considering him as a man who might understand her.
‘Of course, I was tempted by the sin of disobedience,’ she said levelly. ‘I did not understand why my father would treat me so. He had never spoken to me of the abbey nor suggested that he wanted a life of holiness for me. On the contrary, he spoke to me of the outside world, of being a woman of honour and power in the world, of managing my lands and supporting the Church as it comes under attack both here and in the Holy Land. But my brother was with my father on his deathbed, heard his last words, and afterwards he showed me his will. It was clearly my father’s last wish that I come here. I loved my father, I love him still. I obey him in death as I obeyed him in life.’ Her voice shook slightly as she spoke of her father. ‘I am a good daughter to him; now as then.’
‘They say that you brought your slave with you, a Moorish girl named Ishraq, and that she is neither a lay sister nor has she taken her vows.’
‘She is not my slave; she is a free woman. She may do as she pleases.’
‘So what is she doing here?’
‘Whatever she wishes.’
Luca was sure that he saw in her shadowed eyes the same gleam of defiance that the slave had shown. ‘Lady Abbess,’ he said sternly. ‘You should have no companions but the sisters of your order.’
She looked at him with an untameable confidence. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you have the authority to tell me so. And I don’t think that I would listen to you, even if you said that you had the authority. As far as I know there is no law that says a woman, an infidel, may not enter a nunnery and serve alongside the nuns. There is no tradition that excludes her. We are of the Augustine order, and as Lady Abbess I can manage this house as I see fit. Nobody can tell me how to do it. If you make me Lady Abbess then you give me the right to decide how this house shall be run. Having forced me to take the power, you can be sure that I shall rule.’ The words were defiant, but her voice was very calm.
‘They say she has not left your side since you came to the abbey?’
‘This is true.’
‘She has never gone out of the gates?’
‘Neither have I.’
‘She is with you night and day?’
>
‘Yes.’
‘They say that she sleeps in your bed?’ Luca said boldly.
‘Who says?’ the Lady Abbess asked him evenly.
Luca looked down at his notes, and Brother Peter shuffled the papers.
She shrugged, as if she were filled with disdain for them and for their gossipy inquiry. ‘I suppose you have to ask everybody, everything that they imagine,’ she said dismissively. ‘You will have to chatter like a clattering of choughs. You will hear the wildest of talk from the most fearful and imaginative people. You will ask silly girls to tell you tales.’
‘Where does she sleep?’ Luca persisted, feeling a fool.
‘Since the abbey became so disturbed she has chosen to sleep in my bed, as she did when we were children. This way she can protect me.’
‘Against what?’
She sighed as if she were weary of his curiosity. ‘Of course, I don’t know. I don’t know what she fears for me. I don’t know what I fear for myself. In truth, I think no-one knows what is happening here. Isn’t this what you are here to find out?’
‘Things seem to have gone very badly wrong since you came here.’
She bowed her head in silence for a moment. ‘Now that is true,’ she conceded. ‘But it is nothing that I have deliberately done. I don’t know what is happening here. I regret it very much. It causes me, me personally, great pain. I am puzzled. I am . . . lost.’
‘Lost?’ Luca repeated the word that seemed freighted with loneliness.
‘Lost,’ she confirmed.
‘You don’t know how to rule the abbey?’
Her head bowed down as if she were praying again. Then a small silent nod of her head admitted the truth of it: that she did not know how to command the abbey. ‘Not like this,’ she whispered. ‘Not when they say they are possessed, not when they behave like madwomen.’