Philippa Gregory - Changeling

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.