Philippa Gregory - Changeling

‘I could not allow . . .’ Luca choked.

‘The room is ready for your lordship.’ The Lady Almoner came out from the gatehouse and stood aside as the lord went in without another word. He seated himself behind the table where the great chair, like a throne, was placed ready for him, the Lord Abbot to his left. Luca was on his right, with a clerk at one end of the table and Brother Peter at the other. When everyone was seated, the lord ordered the door to the yard closed, and Luca saw Freize’s anxious face peering in, as the Lord Lucretili said, ‘My Lord Abbot, will you bless the work that we are doing today?’

The abbot half-closed his eyes and folded his hands over his curved stomach. ‘Heavenly Father, bless the work that is done here today. May this abbey be purified and cleansed of sin and returned to the discipline of God and man. May these women understand their sins and cleanse their hearts with penitence, and may we, their judges, be just and righteous in our wrath. May we offer you a willing brand for the burning, Lord, always remembering that vengeance is not ours; but only yours. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ Lord Lucretili confirmed. He gestured to the two priests who were standing guard at the outer door. ‘Get them up.’

Brother Peter rose to his feet. ‘Freize has the key to the chains,’ he said. He opened the door to get the ring of keys from Freize, who was hovering on the threshold. The men inside the courtroom could see the stable yard filled with curious faces. Brother Peter closed the door on the crowd outside, stepped forwards and opened the trap-door set in the wooden floorboards. Everyone went silent as Brother Peter looked down into the dark cellar. Leaning against the wall of the gatehouse room was a rough wooden ladder. One of the priests lifted it and lowered it into the darkness of the hole. Everyone hesitated. There was something very forbidding about the deep blackness below, almost as if it were a well, and the women far below had been drowned in the inky waters. Brother Peter handed the keys to Luca, and everyone looked at him. Clearly they were all expecting him to go down into the darkness and fetch the women up.

Luca found that he was chilled, perhaps by a blast of cold air from the windowless deep room below. He thought of the two young women down there, chained to the damp walls, waiting for judgement, their eyes wide and glassy in the darkness. He remembered the black glazed look of the dead nun and thought that perhaps the Lady Abbess and her Moorish slave would be drugged into hallucinations too. At the thought of their dark eyes, shining in the darkness like waiting rats, he got to his feet, determined to delay. ‘I’ll get a torch,’ he said and went out into the entrance yard.

Outside, in the clean air, he sent one of the lord’s servants running for a light. The man returned with one of the sconces from the refectory burning brightly. Luca took it in his hand and went back into the gatehouse, feeling as if he were about to go deep into an ancient cave to face a monster.

He held the torch up high as he stepped on the first rung of the ladder. He had to go backwards, and he could not help looking over his shoulder and down between his feet, trying to see what was there waiting for him in the darkness.

‘Take care!’ Brother Peter said, his voice sharp with warning.

‘What of?’ Luca asked impatiently, hiding his own fear. Two more rungs of the ladder and he could see the walls were black and shiny with damp. The women would be chilled, chained down here in the darkness. Two steps more and he could see a little pool of light at the foot of the ladder and his own leaping shadow on the wall and the shadow of the ladder like a black hatched line going downwards into nothingness. He was at the bottom rung now. He kept one hand on the rough wood for safety, as he turned and looked around.

Nothing.

There was nothing there.

There was nobody there.

He swung the pool of light ahead of him; the stone floor was empty of anything, and the dark wall just six paces away from him on all sides was blank stone, black stone. The cellar was empty. They were not there.

Luca exclaimed and held the torch higher, looking all around. For a moment he had a terror of them making a sudden rush at him out of the darkness, the two women freed and dashing at him like dark devils in hell; but there was no-one there. His eye caught a glint of metal on the floor.

‘What is it?’ Brother Peter peered down from the floor above. ‘What’s the matter?’

Luca raised the torch high, so that the beams of light raked the darkness of the circular room all around him. Now, he could see the handcuffs and leg-cuffs lying on the ground, still safely locked, still firmly chained to the wall, intact and undamaged. But of the Lady Abbess and the Moorish girl there was no sign at all.

‘Witchcraft!’ Lord Lucretili hissed, his face as white as a sheet, looking down at Luca from the floor above. ‘God save us from them.’ He crossed himself, kissed his thumbnail, and crossed himself again. ‘The manacles are not broken?’

‘No.’ Luca gave them a kick and they rattled but did not spring open.

‘I locked them myself, I made no mistake,’ Brother Peter said, scrambling down the ladder and shaking as he tested the chains on the wall.

Luca thrust the torch at Peter and swarmed his way up the ladder to the light, obeying a panic-stricken sense that he did not want to be trapped in the dark cellar from which the women had, so mysteriously, disappeared. Lord Lucretili took his hand and heaved him up the last steps and then stayed hand clasped with him. Luca, feeling his own hands were icy in the lord’s warm grip, had a sense of relief at a human touch.

‘Be of good heart, Inquirer,’ the lord said. ‘For these are dark and terrible days. It must be witchcraft. It must be so. My sister is a witch. I have lost her to Satan.’

‘Where could they have gone?’ Luca asked the older man.

‘Anywhere they choose, since they got out of locked chains and a closed cellar. They could be anywhere in this world or the next.’

Brother Peter came up from the darkness, carrying the torch. It was as if he came out of a well and the dark water closed behind him. He shut the door of the hatch, and stamped the bolt into place as if he were afraid of the very darkness beneath their feet. ‘What shall we do now?’ he asked Luca.

Luca hesitated, unsure. He glanced towards Lord Lucretili who smoothly took command. ‘We’ll set a hue and cry for them, naming them as witches, but I don’t expect them to be found,’ the lord ruled. ‘In her absence I shall declare my sister dead.’ He turned his head, to hide his grief. ‘I can’t even have Masses said for her soul . . . A sainted father and a cursed sister both gone within four months. He will never even meet her in heaven.’

Luca gave him a moment to recover. ‘Admit the Lady Almoner,’ he said to Brother Peter.

She was waiting outside the door. Luca caught a glimpse of Freize’s grimace of curiosity as she came quietly in and closed the door behind her. She observed the closed hatch, and looked to Luca for an explanation. Carefully, she did not address the Lord Lucretili. Luca assumed that her vows forbade anything but the briefest of contact with men who were not already ordained in the priesthood. ‘What has happened, my brother?’ she asked him quietly.

‘The accused women are missing.’

Her head jolted up to exchange one swift glance with Lord Lucretili. ‘How is it possible?’ she demanded.

‘These are mysteries,’ Luca said shortly. ‘My question, though, is this: now that we have no suspects, now their guilt is strongly shown by their disappearance, and the way they have got away – what is to be done? Should I continue my inquiry? Or is it closed? You are the Lady Almoner, and in the absence of the Lady Abbess you are the senior lady of the abbey. What is your opinion?’