‘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.’