He saw that she held her hands cupped, as if she were hiding something small in her palms.
‘You wanted to see me,’ she said quietly. Her voice was low and sweet. ‘You wanted to see this.’
She held out her hands to him. Luca flinched in horror as he saw that in the centre of both was a neat shallow hole, and each palm was filled with blood. ‘Jesu save us!’
‘Amen,’ she said instantly.
Luca reached for the linen washcloth and tore a strip roughly off the side. He splashed water onto it from the ewer, and gently patted each wound. She flinched a little as he touched her. ‘I am sorry, I am sorry.’
‘They don’t hurt much, they’re not deep.’
Luca dabbed away the blood and saw that both wounds had stopped bleeding and were beginning to form small scabs. ‘When did this happen?’
‘I woke just now, and they were like this.’
‘Has it happened before?’
‘Last night. I had a terrible dream, and when I woke I was in my cell, in my bed, but my feet were muddy and my hands were filled with blood.’
‘I think that it was you that I saw,’ he said. ‘In the entrance yard? Do you remember nothing?’
She shook her head and the lace veil moved but did not reveal her face. ‘I just woke and my hands were like this, newly marked. It has happened before. Sometimes I have woken in the morning and found them wounded but they have already stopped bleeding, as if they came earlier in the night, without even waking me. They are not deep, you see, they heal within days.’
‘Do you have a vision?’
‘A vision of horror!’ she suddenly broke out. ‘I cannot believe it is the work of God to wake me with bleeding hands. I have no sense of holiness, I feel nothing but terror. This cannot be God stabbing me. These must be blasphemous wounds.’
‘God might be working through you, mysteriously . . .’ Luca tried.
She shook her head. ‘It feels more like punishment. For being here, for following the services, and yet being cursed with a rebellious heart.’
‘How many of you are here unwillingly?’
‘Who knows? Who knows what people think when they go through each day in silence, praying as they are commanded to do, singing as they are ordered? We are not allowed to speak to one another during the day except to repeat our orders or say our prayers. Who knows what anyone is thinking? Who knows what we are all privately thinking?’
She spoke so powerfully to Luca’s own sense that the nunnery was full of secrets that he could not bring himself to ask her anything more, but chose to act instead. He took a sheet of clean paper. ‘Put your palms down on this,’ he commanded. ‘First the right and then the left.’
She looked as if she would like to refuse but did as he ordered, and they both looked, in horror, at the two neat triangular prints that her blood left on the whiteness of the manuscript and the haze of her bloody palm print around them.
‘Brother Peter has to see your hands,’ Luca decided. ‘You will have to make a statement.’
He expected her to protest; but she did not. She bowed her head in obedience to him.
‘Come to my inquiry room tomorrow, first thing,’ he said. ‘Straight after Prime.’
‘Very well,’ she said easily. She opened the door and slipped through.
‘And what is your name, Sister?’ Luca asked, but she was already gone. It was only then that he realised that she would not come to the inquiry room and testify, and that he did not know her name.
Luca waited impatiently after Prime, but the nun did not come. He was too irritated with himself to explain to Freize and Brother Peter why he would see no-one else, but sat in the room, the door open, the papers on the table before them.
In the end, he declared that he had to ride out to clear his head, and went to the stables. One of the lay sisters was hauling muck out of the stable yard, and she brought his horse and saddled it for him. It was odd to Luca, who had lived for so long in a world without women, to see all the hard labouring work done by women, all the religious services observed by women, living completely self-sufficiently, in a world without men except for the visiting priest. It added to his sense of unease and displacement. These women lived in a community as if men did not exist, as if God had not created men to be their masters. They were complete to themselves and ruled by a girl. It was against everything he had observed and everything he had been taught and it seemed to him no wonder at all that everything had gone wrong.
As Luca was waiting for his horse to be led out, he saw Freize appear in the archway with his skewbald cob tacked up, and watched him haul himself into the saddle.
‘I ride alone,’ Luca said sharply.
‘You can. I’ll ride alone too,’ Freize said equably.
‘I don’t want you with me.’
‘I won’t be with you.’
‘Ride in the other direction then.’
‘Just as you say.’
Freize paused, tightened his girth, and went through the gate, bowing with elaborate courtesy to the old porteress who scowled at him, and then he waited outside the gate for Luca to come trotting through.
‘I told you, I don’t want you riding with me.’
‘Which is why I waited,’ Freize explained patiently. ‘To see what direction you were going in, so that I could make sure I took the opposite one. But of course, there may be wolves, or thieves, highwaymen or brigands, so I don’t mind your company for the first hour or so.’
‘Just shut up and let me think,’ Luca said ungraciously.
‘Not a word,’ Freize remarked to his horse, who flickered a brown ear at him. ‘Silent as the grave.’
He actually managed to keep his silence for several hours as they rode north, at a hard pace away from the abbey, from Castle Lucretili, and the little village that sheltered beneath its walls. They took a broad smooth track with matted grass growing down the middle and Luca put his horse in a canter, hardly seeing the odd farmhouse, the scattering flock of sheep, the carefully tended vines. But then, as it grew hotter towards midday, Luca drew up his horse, suddenly realising that they were some way from the abbey, and said, ‘I suppose we should be heading back.’
‘Maybe you’d like a drop of small ale and a speck of bread and ham first?’ Freize offered invitingly.
‘Do you have that?’
‘In my pack. Just in case we got to this very point and thought we might like a drop of small ale and a bite to eat.’
Luca grinned. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing food, and thank you for coming with me.’
Freize nodded smugly, and led the way off the road into a small copse where they would be sheltered from the sun. He dismounted from his cob and slung the reins loosely over the saddle. The horse immediately dropped its head and started to graze the thin grass of the forest floor. Freize spread his cape for Luca to sit, and unpacked a stone jug of small ale, and two loaves of bread. The two men ate in silence, then Freize produced, with a flourish, a half bottle of exquisitely good red wine.
‘This is excellent,’ Luca observed.
‘Best in the house,’ Freize answered, draining the very dregs.
Luca rose, brushed off the crumbs, and took up the reins of his horse, which he had looped over a bush.
‘Horses could do with watering before we go back,’ Freize remarked.
The two young men led the horses back along the track, and then mounted up to head for home. They rode for some time until they heard the noise of a stream, off to their left, deeper in the forest. They broke off from the track and, guided by the noise of running water, first found their way to a broad stream, and then followed it downhill to where it formed a wide deep pool. The bank was muddy and well-trodden, as if many people came here for water, an odd sight in the deserted forest. Luca could see the marks in the mud of the wooden pattens that the nuns wore over their shoes when they were working in the abbey gardens and fields.
Freize slipped, nearly losing his footi
ng, and exclaimed as he saw that he had stepped in a dark green puddle of goose-shit. ‘Look at that! Damned bird. I would snare and eat him, I would.’
Luca took both horses’ reins and let them drink from the water as Freize bent to wipe his boot with a dock leaf.
‘Well, I’ll be . . . !’
‘What is it?’
Wordlessly, Freize held out the leaf with the dirt on it.
‘What?’ asked Luca, leaning away from the offering.
‘Look closer. People always say that there’s money where muck is – and here it is. Look closer, for I think I have made my fortune!’
Luca looked closer. Speckled among the dark green of the goose-shit were tiny grains of sand, shining brightly. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s gold, little lord!’ Freize was bubbling with delight. ‘See it? Goose feeds on the reeds in the river, the river water is carrying tiny grains of gold washed out of a seam somewhere in the mountain, probably nobody knows where. Goose eats it up, passes it out, I find it on my boot. All I need to do now is to find out who owns the lands around the stream, buy it off them for pennies, pan for gold, and I am a lord myself and shall ride a handsome horse and own my own hounds!’
‘If the landlord will sell,’ Luca cautioned him. ‘And I think we are still on the lands of the Lord of Lucretili. Perhaps he would like to pan for his own gold.’
‘I’ll buy it from him without telling him,’ Freize exulted. ‘I’ll tell him I want to live by the stream. I’ll tell him I have a vocation, like that poor lass, his sister. I’ll tell him I have a calling, I want to be a holy hermit and live by the pool and pray all day.’
Luca laughed aloud at the thought of Freize’s vocation for solitary prayer but suddenly Freize held up his hand. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he warned. ‘Hush, let’s get ourselves out of the way.’
‘Why should we hide? We’re doing no harm.’
‘You never know,’ Freize whispered. ‘And I’d rather not be found by a gold-bearing stream.’
The two of them backed their horses deeper into the forest, off the path, and waited. Luca threw his cape over his horse’s head so that it would make no noise, and Freize reached up to his cob’s ear and whispered one word to it. The horse bent his head and stood quietly. The two men watched through the trees as half a dozen nuns wearing their dark brown working robes wound their way along the path, their wooden pattens squelching in the mud. Freize gently gripped the nose of his horse so that it did not whinny.
The last two nuns were leading a little donkey, its back piled high with dirty fleeces from the nunnery flock. As Freize and Luca watched through the sheltering bushes, the women pegged the fleeces down in the stream, for the waters to rinse them clean, and then turned the donkey round and went back the way they had come. Obedient to their vows, they worked in silence, but as they led the little donkey away they struck up a psalm and the two young men could hear them singing:
‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I’ll not want . . .’
‘I’ll not want,’ Freize muttered, as the two emerged from hiding. ‘Damn. Damn “I’ll not want” indeed! Because I will want. I do want. And I will go on wanting, wanting and dreaming and always disappointed.’
‘Why?’ Luca asked. ‘They’re just washing the fleeces. You can still buy your stream and pan for gold.’
‘Not them,’ Freize said. ‘Not them, the cunning little vixens. They’re not washing the fleeces. Why come all this way just to wash fleeces, when there are half a dozen streams between here and the abbey? No, they’re panning for gold in the old way. They put the fleeces in the stream – see how they’ve pegged them out all across the stream so the water flows through? The staple of the wool catches the grains of gold, catches even the smallest dust. In a week or so, they’ll come back and pull out their harvest: wet fleeces, heavy with gold. They’ll take them back to the abbey, dry them, brush out the gold dust and there they are with a fortune on the floor! Little thieves!’
‘How much would it be worth?’ Luca demanded. ‘How much gold would a fleece of wool hold?’
‘And why has no-one mentioned this little business of theirs?’ Freize demanded. ‘I wonder if the Lord of Lucretili knows? It’d be a good joke on him if he put his sister in the nunnery only for her to steal his fortune from under his nose, using the very nuns he gave her to rule.’
Luca looked blankly at Freize. ‘What?’
‘I was jesting . . .’
‘No, it might not be a joke. What if she came here and found the gold, just like you did, and set the nuns to work. And then thought that she would make out that the nunnery had fallen into sin, so that no-one came to visit any more, so that no-one would trust the word of the nuns . . .’
‘Then she wouldn’t be caught in her little enterprise and, though she’d still be a Lady Abbess, she could live like a lady once more,’ Freize finished. ‘Happy all the day long, rolling in gold dust.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ Luca said heavily. He and Freize stood in silence for a long moment, and then Luca turned without another word, mounted his horse and kicked it into a canter. He realised as he rode that he was not just shocked by the massive crime that the whole nunnery was undertaking, but personally offended by the Lady Abbess – as if he thought he could have done anything to help her! As if his promise to help her had meant anything to her! As if she had wanted anything from him but his naïve trust, and his faith in her story. ‘Damn!’ he said again.
They rode in silence, Freize shaking his head over the loss of his imaginary fortune, Luca raging at being played as a fool. As they drew near to the nunnery, Luca tightened his reins and pulled his horse up until Freize drew level. ‘You truly think it is her? Because she struck me as a most unhappy woman, a grieving daughter – she was sincere in her grief for her father, I am sure of that. And yet to face me and lie to me about everything else . . . do you think she is capable of such dishonesty? I can’t see it.’
‘They might be doing it behind her back,’ Freize conceded. ‘Though the madness in the nunnery is a good way of keeping strangers away. But I suppose she might be in ignorance of it all. We’d have to know who takes the gold to be sold. That’s how you’d know who was taking the fortune. And we’d have to know if it was going on before she got here.’
Luca nodded. ‘Say nothing to Brother Peter.’
‘The spy,’ supplemented Freize cheerfully.
‘But tonight we will break into the storeroom and see if we can find any evidence: any drying fleeces, any gold.’
‘No need to break in, I have the key.’
‘How did you get that?’
‘How did you think you got such superb wine after dinner?’
Luca shook his head at his servant, and then said quietly, ‘We’ll meet at two of the clock.’
The two young men rode on together and, behind them, making no more sound than the trees that sighed in the wind, the slave Ishraq watched them go.
Isolde was in her bed, tied like a prisoner to the four posts, her feet strapped at the bottom, her two hands lashed to the two upper posts of the headboard. Ishraq pulled the covers up under her chin and smoothed them flat. ‘I hate to see you like this. It is beyond bearing. For your own God’s sake tell me that we can leave this place. I cannot tie you to your bed like some madwoman.’
‘I know,’ Isolde replied, ‘but I can’t risk walking in my sleep. I can’t bear it. I will not have this madness descend on me. Ishraq, I won’t walk in the night, scream out in dreams. If I go mad, if I really go mad, you will have to kill me. I cannot bear it.’
Ishraq leaned down and put her brown cheek to the other girl’s pale face. ‘I never would. I never could. We will fight this, and we will defeat them.’
‘What about the inquirer?’
‘He is talking to all of the sisters, he is learning far too much. His report will destroy this abbey, will ruin your good name. Everything they tell him blames us, names you, dates the start of the troubles to the time when we arrived. We
have to get hold of him. We have to stop him.’
‘Stop him?’ she asked.
Ishraq nodded, her face grim. ‘We have to stop him, one way or another. We have to do whatever it takes to stop him.’
The moon was up, but it was a half moon hidden behind scudding clouds and shedding little light as Luca went quietly across the cobbled yard. He saw a shadowy figure step out of the darkness: Freize. In his hand he had the key ready, oiled to make no sound, and slid it quietly in the lock. The door creaked as Luca pushed it open and both men froze at the sound, but no-one stirred. All the narrow windows that faced over the courtyard were dark, apart from the window of the Lady Abbess’s house, where a candle burned, but other than that flickering light, there was no sign that she was awake.
The two young men slipped into the storeroom and closed the door quietly behind them. Freize struck a spark from a flint, blew a flame, lit a tallow candle taken from his pocket, and they looked around.
‘Wine is over there.’ Freize gestured to a sturdy grille. ‘Key’s hidden up high on the wall, any fool could find it – practically an invitation. They make their own wine. Small ale over there, home-brewed too. Foods are over there.’ He pointed to the sacks of wheat, rye and rice. Smoked hams in their linen sleeves hung above them, and on the cold inner wall were racks of round cheeses.
Luca was looking around; there was no sign of the fleeces. They ducked through an archway to a room at the back. Here there were piles of cloth of all different sorts of quality, all in the unbleached cream that the nuns wore. A pile of brown hessian cloth for their working robes was heaped in another corner. Leather for making their own shoes, satchels, and even saddlery, was sorted in tidy piles according to the grade. A rickety wooden ladder led up to the half-floor above.