Philippa Gregory - Changeling

‘But sometimes, of course, he is quite unendurable,’ Luca finished. ‘Freize, please serve the meal in silence.’

‘Silence, he says.’ Freize nodded at Isolde with a conspiratorial smile. ‘And silent I am. See me: utterly silent. I am reticent, you know. Reticent.’

She could not help but laugh as Freize folded lip over lip, put all the remaining dishes on the table, bowed low, and stood with his back to the door, facing the room like a perfect servant. Brother Peter sat down and started to help himself to the dishes, with his manuscript beside him and his ink pot adjacent to his wine glass.

‘I see that you are questioning me, as well as feeding me,’ she said to Luca.

‘As the sacred Mass,’ Brother Peter answered for him. ‘Where you have to answer for your soul and your faith before you partake. Can you answer for your soul, my lady?’

‘I have done nothing that I am ashamed of,’ she said steadily.

‘The attack on the dead woman?’

Luca shot a quelling look at Brother Peter but Isolde answered without fear. ‘It was no attack. We had to know what she had been given to eat. And by discovering that she had been poisoned we saved the others. I knew Sister Augusta, and you did not. I tell you: she would have been glad that we did that to her – after death – so that we could save her sisters pain in their lives. We found the berries of belladonna in her belly, which proved that the nuns were being poisoned, that they were not possessed or going mad as we all feared. I hoped we could have given you the berries as evidence and saved the abbey from my brother and the Lady Almoner.’

Luca spooned the fricassée of chicken onto a big slice of rye bread and passed it to her. Daintily, she produced a fork from the sleeve of her gown and ate the meat from the top of the bread. None of them had seen such table manners before. Luca quite forgot his questions. Freize at the doorway was transfixed.

‘I’ve never seen such a thing,’ Luca remarked.

‘It’s called a fork,’ Isolde said, as if it were quite ordinary. ‘They use them in the court of France. For eating. My father gave me this one.’

‘Never eaten anything that couldn’t be speared on the tip of a dagger,’ Freize offered from the doorway.

‘Enough,’ Luca advised this most interfering servant.

‘Or sucked it up,’ Freize said. He paused for a moment, to explain more clearly. ‘If soup.’

‘“If soup!”’ Luca turned on him wrathfully. ‘“If soup!” For God’s sake, be silent. No, better still, wait in the kitchen.’

‘Keeping the door,’ Freize said, motioning that his work was essential. ‘Keeping the door from intruders.’

‘God knows, I would rather have an intruder, I would rather have a band of brigands burst in, than have you commenting on everything that takes place.’

Freize shook his head in remorse and once again folded lower lip over upper lip to indicate his future silence. ‘Like the grave,’ he said to Luca. ‘You go on. Doing well: probing but respectful. Don’t mind me.’

Luca turned back to Isolde. ‘You don’t need an interrogation,’ he said. ‘But you must understand that we cannot release you unless we are convinced of your innocence. Eat your dinner and tell me honestly what happened at the abbey and what you plan for your future.’

‘May I ask you what happened at the abbey? Have you closed it down?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I will tell you more later, but we left the abbey with the nuns in prayer and a new Lady Abbess will be appointed.’

‘The Lady Almoner?’

‘Dead,’ was all he told her. ‘Now you tell me all that you know.’

Isolde ate a little more and then put the slice of bread to one side. Brother Peter served the ragout onto her slice of bread, and dipped his pen in the ink.

‘When I came to the abbey, I was grieving for my father and opposed to his wishes,’ she said honestly. ‘Ishraq came with me – we have never been parted since my father brought her and her mother home from the Holy Land.’

‘She is your slave?’ Brother Peter asked.

Vehemently, Isolde shook her head. ‘She is free. Just because she is of Moorish descent everyone always thinks she is enslaved. My father honoured and respected her mother and gave her a Christian burial when she died when Ishraq was seven years old. Ishraq is a free woman, as her mother was free.’

‘Freer than you?’ Luca asked.

He saw her flush. ‘Yes, as it turns out. For I was bound by the terms of my father’s will to join the abbey, and now that I have lost my place I am a wanted criminal.’

‘What were you doing with the body of Sister Augusta?’

She leaned forwards, fixing her dark blue gaze on him. Luca would have sworn she was speaking the truth. ‘Ishraq trained with the Moorish physicians in Spain. My father took us both to the Spanish court when he was advising them about a new crusade. Ishraq studied with one of the greatest doctors: she studied herbs, drugs and poisons. We suspected that the nuns were being drugged, and we knew that I was having the most extraordinary dreams and waking with wounds in my hands.’

‘You had the stigmata on your own hands?’ Luca interrupted her.

‘I believed that I did,’ she said, suddenly downcast at the memory. ‘At first I was so confused that I thought the marks were true: painful miracles.’

‘Was it you that came to my room and showed me your hands?’

Silently, she nodded.

‘There is no shame in it,’ Luca said gently to her.

‘It feels like a sin,’ she said quietly. ‘To show the wounds of Our Lord and to wake so troubled, after dreams of running and screaming . . .’

‘You thought it was the drug belladonna that made you dream?’

‘Ishraq thought it so. She thought that many of the nuns were taking the drug. Ishraq never ate in the refectory, she ate with the servants, and she never had the dreams. None of the servants were having dreams. Only the sisters who ate the refectory bread were affected. When Sister Augusta died so suddenly Ishraq thought that her heart had ceased to beat under the influence of the drug; she knew that if you have too much it kills you. We decided to open her belly to look for the berries.’

Brother Peter shaded his eyes with his hands, as if he could still see the two of them, bloodied to the elbow, about their terrible work.

‘It was a very great sin to touch the body,’ Luca prompted her. ‘It is a crime as well as a sin to touch a corpse.’

‘Not to Ishraq.’ She defended her friend. ‘She is not of our faith, she does not believe in the resurrection of the body. To her it was no greater sin than examining an animal. You can accuse her of nothing but of practising the craft of medicine.’

‘It was a great sin for you,’ he persisted. ‘And surely unbearable? How could you – a young lady – do such a thing?’

She bowed her head. ‘For me it was a sin. But I thought it had to be done, and I would not leave Ishraq to do it alone. I thought I should be . . .’ She paused. ‘I thought I should be courageous. I am the Lady Lucretili. I thought I should be as brave as the name I bear. And at least we saw the berries in her belly, dark specks of the dried berries.’ She put her hand into the pocket of her gown and brought out a couple of flecks of dark hard berries like peppercorns. ‘We found these. This is proof of what we were doing, and what we found.’

Luca hesitated. ‘You took these from the dead woman’s belly?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘It had to be done,’ she said. ‘How else could we prove to you that the nuns were being fed belladonna berries?’

Gingerly, Luca took them, and quickly passed them over to Brother Peter. ‘Did you know the Lady Almoner was working with your brother?’