Philippa Gregory - Changeling

Luca looked at his new clerk and saw that the man was deeply afraid of the mystery and the terrible nature of the two women. ‘You were right to be cautious,’ he said, reassuringly. ‘We don’t know what powers they have.’

‘Good God, when I saw them with blood up to the elbows, and they looked at us, their faces as innocent as scholars at a desk! What were they doing? What Satan’s work were they doing? Was it a Mass? Were they really eating her flesh and drinking her blood in a Satanic Mass?’

‘I don’t know,’ Luca said. He put his hand to his head. ‘I can’t think . . .’

‘Now look at you!’ Freize exclaimed. ‘You should still be in bed, and the Lord knows I feel badly myself. I’ll take you back to the hospital and you can rest.’

Luca recoiled. ‘Not there,’ he said. ‘I’m not going back in there. Take me to my room at the priest house and I will sleep till Lord Lucretili gets here. Wake me as soon as he comes.’

In the cellar, the two young women were shrouded in darkness as if they were already in their grave. It was like being buried alive. They blinked and strained their eyes but they were blind.

‘I can’t see you,’ Isolde said, her voice catching on a sob.

‘I can see you.’ The reply came steadily out of the pitch blackness. ‘And anyway, I always know when you are near.’

‘We have to get word to the inquirer. We have to find some way to speak with him.’

‘I know.’

‘They will be fetching my brother. He will put us on trial.’

There was a silence from Ishraq.

‘Ishraq, I should be certain that my brother will hear me, that he will believe what I say, that he will free me – but more and more do I think that he has betrayed me. He encouraged the prince to come to my room, he left me no choice but to come here as Lady Abbess. What if he has been trying to drive me away from my home all along? What if he has been trying to destroy me?’

‘I think so,’ the other girl said steadily. ‘I do think so.’

There was a silence while Isolde absorbed the thought. ‘How could he be so false? How could he be so wicked?’

The chains clinked as Ishraq shrugged.

‘What shall we do?’ Isolde asked hopelessly.

‘Hush.’

‘Hush? Why? What are you doing?’

‘I am wishing . . .’

‘Ishraq – we need a plan, wishing won’t save us.’

‘Let me wish. This is deep wishing. And it might save us.’

Luca had thought he would toss and turn with the pain in his neck and shoulder, but as soon as his boots were off and his head was on the pillow he slipped into a deep sleep. Almost at once he started to dream.

He dreamed that he was running after the Lady Abbess again, and she was outpacing him easily. The ground beneath his feet changed from the cobbles of the yard to the floor of the forest, and all the leaves were crisp like autumn, and then he saw they had been dipped in gold and he was running through a forest of gold. Still she kept ahead of him, weaving in and out of golden tree trunks, passing bushes crusted with gold, until he managed a sudden burst of speed, far faster than before, and he leaped towards her, like a mountain lion will leap on a deer, and caught her around the waist to bring her down. But as she fell, she turned in his arms and he saw her smiling as if with desire, as if she had all along wanted him to catch her, to hold her, to lie foot to foot, leg against leg, his hard young body against her lithe slimness, looking into her eyes, their faces close enough to kiss. Her thick mane of blonde hair swirled around him and he smelt the heady scent of rosewater again. Her eyes were dark, so dark; he had thought they were blue so he looked again, but the blue of her eyes was only a tiny rim around the darkness of the pupil. Her eyes were so dilated they were not blue but black. In his head he heard the words ‘beautiful lady’ and he thought, ‘Yes, she is a beautiful lady.’

‘ Bella donna .’ He heard the words in Latin and it was the voice of the slave to the Lady Abbess with her odd foreign accent as she repeated, with a strange urgency: ‘ Bella donna! Luca, listen! Bella donna! ’

The door to the guest room opened, as Luca lurched out of his dream and held his aching head.

‘Only me,’ Freize said, slopping warmed small ale out of a jug as he banged into the room with a tray of bread, meat, cheese and a mug.

‘Saints, Freize, I am glad that you waked me. I have had the strangest of dreams.’

‘Me too,’ Freize said. ‘All night long I dreamed that I was gathering berries in the hedgerow, like a gipsy.’

‘I dreamed of a beautiful woman, and the words bella donna .’

At once Freize burst into song:

‘Bella donna, give me your love –

Bella donna, bright stars above . . .’

‘What?’ Luca sat himself at the table and let his servant put the food before him.

‘It’s a song, a popular song. Did you never hear it in the monastery?’

‘We only ever sang hymns and psalms in the church,’ Luca reminded him. ‘Not love songs in the kitchen like you.’

‘Anyway, everyone was singing it last summer. Bella donna: beautiful lady.’

Luca cut himself a slice of meat from the joint, chewed thoughtfully, and drank three deep gulps of small ale. ‘There’s another meaning of the words bella donna ,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t just mean beautiful lady. It’s a plant, a hedgerow plant.’

Freize slapped his head. ‘It’s the plant in my dream! I dreamed I was in the hedgerow, looking for berries, black berries; but though I wanted blackberries or sloe berries or even elderberries, all I could find was deadly nightshade . . . the black berries of deadly nightshade.’

Luca got to his feet, taking a hunk of the bread in his hand. ‘It’s a poison,’ he said. ‘The Lady Abbess said that they believed the nun was poisoned. She said they were cutting her open to see what she had eaten, what she had in her belly.’

‘It’s a drug,’ Freize said. ‘They use it in the torture rooms, to make people speak out, to drive them mad. It gives the wildest dreams, it could make—’ He broke off.

‘It could make a whole nunnery of women go mad,’ Luca finished for him. ‘It could make them have visions, and sleepwalk – it could make them dream and imagine things. And, if you were given too much . . . it would kill you.’

Without another word the two young men went to the guesthouse door and walked quickly to the hospital. In the centre of the entrance yard the lay sisters were making two massive piles of wood, as if they were preparing for a bonfire. Freize paused there, but Luca went past them without a second glance, completely focused on the hospital where he could see through the open windows, the nursing nuns moving about setting things to rights. Luca went through the open doors, and looked around him in surprise.

It was all as clean and as tidy as if there had never been anything wrong. The door to the mortuary was open and the body of the dead nun was gone, the candles and censers taken away. Half a dozen beds were made ready with clean plain sheets, a cross hung centrally on the lime washed walls. As Luca stood there, baffled, a nun came in with a jug of water in her hand from the pump outside, poured it into a bowl and went down on her knees to scrub the floor.

‘Where is the body of the sister who died?’ Luca asked. His voice sounded too loud in the empty silent room. The nun sat back on her heels and answered him. ‘She is lying in the chapel. The Lady Almoner closed the coffin herself, nailed it down and ordered a vigil to be kept in the chapel. Shall I take you to pray?’