She rubbed her face with the corner of her apron. ‘I am Sara Fairley,’ she said. ‘Wife of Ralph Fairley. We have a good name in the village, anyone can tell you who I am.’

‘Would you bear witness against the werewolf?’

She gave him a faint smile with a world of sorrow behind it. ‘I don’t like to talk of it,’ she said simply. ‘I try not to think of it. I tried to do what the priest told me and bury my sorrow with the little shirt, and thank God for my second boy.’

Brother Peter hesitated. ‘We will certainly put it on trial and if it is proven to be a werewolf it will die.’

She nodded. ‘That won’t bring back my boy,’ she said quietly. ‘But I should be glad to know that my son and all the children are safe in the pasture.’

They rose up and left her. Brother Peter gave his arm to Isolde as they walked down the stony path, Luca helped Ishraq.

‘Why does Brother Peter not believe her?’ Ishraq asked him while she had her hand on his arm and was close enough to speak softly. ‘Why is he always so suspicious?’

‘This is not his first inquiry; he has travelled before and seen much. Your lady, Isolde, was very tender to her.’

‘She has a tender heart,’ Ishraq said. ‘Children, women, beggars, her purse is always open and her heart is always going out to them. The castle kitchen gave away two dozen dinners a day to the poor. She has always been this way.’

‘And has she ever loved anyone in particular?’ Luca asked casually. There was a big rock in the pathway and he stepped over it and turned to help Ishraq.

She laughed. ‘Nothing to do with you,’ she said abruptly. When she saw him flush she said, ‘Ah, Inquirer! Do you really have to know everything?’

‘I was just interested . . .’

‘No-one. She was supposed to marry a fat indulgent sinful man and she would never have considered him. She would never have stooped to him. She took her vows of celibacy with ease. That was not the problem for her. She loves her lands, and her people. No man has taken her fancy.’ She paused as if to tease him. ‘So far,’ she conceded.

Luca looked away. ‘Such a beautiful young woman is bound to . . .’

‘Quite,’ Ishraq said. ‘But tell me about Brother Peter. Is he always so miserable?’

‘He was suspicious of the mother here,’ Luca explained. ‘He thinks she may have killed the child herself, and tried to blame it on a wolf attack. I don’t think so myself; but of course, in these out-of-the-way villages, such things happen.’

Decisively, she shook her head. ‘Not her. That is a woman with a horror of wolves,’ she said. ‘It’s no accident she was not down in the village, though everyone else was there to see them bring it in.’

‘How do you know that?’ Luca said.

Ishraq looked at him as if he were blind. ‘Did you not see the garden?’

Luca had a vague memory of a well-tilled garden, filled with flowers and herbs. There had been a bed of vegetables and herbs near to the door to the kitchen, and flowers and lavender had billowed over the path. There were some autumn pumpkins growing fatly in one bed, and plump grapes on the vine which twisted around the door. It was a typical cottage garden: planted partly for medicine and partly for colour. ‘Of course I saw it, but I don’t remember anything special.’

She smiled. ‘She was growing a dozen different species of aconite, in half a dozen colours, and her boy had a fresh spray of the flower in his hat. She was growing it at every window and every doorway – I’ve never seen such a collection, and in every colour that can bloom, from pink to white to purple.’

‘And so?’ Luca asked.

‘Do you not know your herbs?’ Ishraq asked teasingly. ‘A great inquirer like yourself?’

‘Not like you do. What is aconite?’

‘The common name for aconite is wolfsbane,’ she said. ‘People have been using it against wolves and werewolves for hundreds of years. Dried and made into a powder it can poison a wolf. Fed to a werewolf it can turn him into a human again. In a lethal dose it can kill a werewolf outright, it all depends on the distillation of the herb and the amount that the wolf can be forced to eat. For sure, no wolf will touch it; no wolf will go near it. They won’t let their coats so much as brush against it. No wolf could get into that house – she has built a fortress of aconite.’

‘You think it proves that her story is true and that she fears the wolf? That she planted it to guard herself against the wolf, in case it came back for her?’

Ishraq nodded at the boy who was skipping ahead of them like a little lamb himself, leading the way back to the village, a sprig of fresh aconite tucked into his hatband. ‘I should think she is guarding him.’

A small crowd had gathered around the gate to the stable yard when Luca, Brother Peter and the girls arrived back at the inn.