Philippa Gregory - Changeling

‘No!’ Luca shouted. ‘I forbid it! She is under arrest. Let justice be done!’

The lord suddenly tore himself away from the scene, strode past them all to the stables, and came out at once on his red-leather caparisoned horse with his men-at-arms closed up around him. ‘Open the gate,’ he ordered the porteress. ‘Open the gate or I will ride you down.’

Mutely she swung it open. The nuns did not even turn their heads as his cavalcade flung themselves through the gate and away down the road to his castle.

Luca could feel the weight of the women pressing against him. ‘I command . . .’ he started again, but they were like a wall bearing down on him, and he was being suffocated by their robes, by their remorseless thrusting against him as if they would stifle him with their numbers. He tried to push himself away from the side of the cart; but then he lost his footing and went down. He kicked and rolled in a spasm of terror at the thought that they would trample him, unknowingly, that he would die beneath their sandalled feet. The Lady Almoner would have clung to him but they dragged her off him. Half a dozen women held Luca down as others forced the Lady Almoner to the pyre that she herself had ordered them to build. Freize was shouting now, thrashing about as a dozen women pinned him to the floor. Brother Peter was frozen in shock, white-robed nuns crushing him into silence, against the side of the cart.

She had ordered them to make two high pyres of dry wood, each built around a central pole, set strongly in the ground. They carried her to the nearest, though she kicked and struggled and screamed for help, and they lashed her to the pole, wrapping the ropes tight around her writhing body.

‘Save me!’ she screamed to Luca. ‘For the love of God, save me!’

He had a wimple over his face so he could not see, he was suffocating on the ground under the fabric, but he shouted to them to stop, even as they took the torch from the gatehouse porteress, who gave it silently to them, even as they held it to the tarred wood at the foot of the pile, even as she disappeared from view in a cloud of dark smoke, even as he heard her piercing scream of agony as her expensive silk petticoats and her fine woollen gown blazed up in a plume of yellow flames.

The three young men rode away from the abbey in silence, sickened by the violence, glad to escape without a lynching themselves. Every now and then Luca would shudder and violently brush smuts from the sleeves of his jacket, and Freize would pass his broad hand over his bewildered face and say, ‘Sweet saints . . .’

They rode all the day on the high land above the forest, the autumn sun hard in their eyes, the stony ground hard underfoot, and when they saw the swinging bough of holly outside a house that marked it as an inn they turned their horses into the stable yard in silence. ‘Does Lord Lucretili own this land?’ Freize asked the stable lad, before they had even dismounted.

‘He does not, you are out of his lordship’s lands now. This inn belongs to Lord Piccante.’

‘Then we’ll stay,’ Luca decided. His voice was hoarse; he hawked and spat out the smell of the smoke. ‘Saints alive, I can hardly believe we are away from it all.’

Brother Peter shook his head, still lost for words.

Freize took the horses to the stables as the other two went into the taproom, shouting for the rough red wine of the region to take the taste of wood smoke and tallow from their mouths. They ordered their food in silence and prayed over it when it came.

‘I need to go to confession,’ Luca said, after they had eaten. ‘Our Lady intercede for me, I feel filthy with sin.’

‘I need to write a report,’ Brother Peter said.

They looked at one another, sharing their sense of horror. ‘Who would ever believe what we have seen?’ Luca wondered. ‘You can write what you like: who would ever believe it?’

‘He will,’ Brother Peter said. It was the first time he had owned his fealty to the lord and the Order. ‘He will understand. The lord of the Order. He has seen all this, and worse. He is studying the end of days. Nothing surprises him. He will read it, and understand it, and keep it under his hand, and wait for our next report.’

‘Our next report? We have to go on?’ Luca asked disbelievingly.

‘I have our next destination under his own seal,’ the clerk said.

‘Surely this inquiry was such a failure that we will be recalled?’

‘Oh no, he will see this as a success,’ Brother Peter said grimly. ‘You were sent to inquire after madness and manifestations of evil at the abbey and you have done so. You know how it was caused: the Lady Almoner giving the nuns belladonna so that they would run mad. You know why she did it: her desire to win the place of the Lady Abbess for herself and grow rich. You know that Lord Lucretili encouraged her to do it so that he could murder his sister under the pretence that she was a witch and so gain her inheritance of the abbey and the gold. It was your first investigation, and – though I may have had my doubts as to your methods – I will tell my lord that you have completed it successfully.’

‘An innocent woman died, a guilty woman was burned by a mob of madwomen, and two women who may be innocent of theft but who are undoubtedly guilty of witchcraft have disappeared into thin air, and you call that a success?’

Brother Peter allowed himself a thin smile. ‘I have seen worse investigations with worse outcomes.’

‘You must have been to the jaws of hell itself, then!’

He nodded, utterly serious. ‘I have.’

Luca paused. ‘With other investigators?’

‘There are many of you.’

‘Young men like me?’

‘Some like you, with gifts and a curiosity like you. Some quite unlike you. I don’t think I have ever met one with faerie blood before.’

Luca made a quick gesture of denial. ‘That’s nonsense.’

‘The master of the Order picks out the inquirers himself, sends them out, sees what they discover. You are his private army against sin and the coming of the end of days. He has been preparing for this, for years.’

Luca pushed back his chair from the table. ‘I’m going to bed. I hope to heaven that I don’t dream.’

‘You won’t dream,’ Brother Peter assured him. ‘He chose well with you. You have the nerves to bear it, and the courage to undertake it. Soon you will learn the wisdom to judge more carefully.’

‘And then?’

‘And then he will send you to the frontier of Christendom, where the heretics and the devils muster to wage war against us and there are no good people at all.’

The women rode side by side, with their horses shoulder to shoulder. Now and then Isolde would give a shuddering sob, and Ishraq would put out a hand to touch her fists, clenched tightly on the reins.

‘What do you think will become of the abbey?’ Isolde asked. ‘I have abandoned them. I have betrayed them.’

The other girl shrugged her shoulders. ‘We had no choice. Your brother was determined to get it back into his keeping, the Lady Almoner was determined to take your place. Either she would have poisoned us, or he would have had us burned as witches.’

‘How could she do such a thing – the poisoning, and driving us all mad?’

Ishraq shrugged. ‘She wanted the abbey for herself. She had worked her way up, she was determined to be Lady Abbess. She was always against you, for all that she seemed so pleasant and so kind when we first got there. And only she knows how long she was plotting with your brother. Perhaps he promised her the abbey long ago.’