‘God bless you and keep you,’ a clear voice said. ‘I welcome you to this abbey. I am the Lady Abbess here.’

‘I am Luca Vero.’ Luca stepped up to the grille, but he could see only the silhouette of a woman through the richly wrought ironwork of grapes, fruit, leaves and flowers. There was a faint light perfume, like rosewater. Behind the lady, he could just make out the shadowy outline of another woman in a dark robe.

‘This is my clerk Brother Peter, and my servant Freize. And I have been sent here to make an inquiry into your abbey.’

‘I know,’ she said quietly.

‘I did not know that you were enclosed,’ Luca said, careful not to offend.

‘It is the tradition that visitors speak to the ladies of our order through a grille.’

‘But I shall need to speak with them for my inquiry. I shall need them to come to report to me.’

He could sense her reluctance through the bars.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Since we have agreed to your inquiry.’

Luca knew perfectly well, that this cool Lady Abbess had not agreed to the inquiry: she had been offered no choice in the matter. His inquiry had been sent to her house by the lord of the Order, and he would interrogate her sisters with or without her consent.

‘I shall need a room for my private use, and the nuns will have to come and report to me, under oath, what has been happening here,’ Luca said more confidently. At his side the priest nodded his approval.

‘I have ordered them to prepare a room for you next door to this one,’ she said. ‘I think it better that you should hear evidence in my house, in the house of the Lady Abbess. They will know then that I am co-operating with your inquiry, that they come here to speak to you under my blessing.’

‘It would be better somewhere else altogether,’ the priest said quietly to Luca. ‘You should come to the monastery and order them to attend in our house, under our supervision. The rule of men, you know . . . the logic of men . . . always a powerful thing to invoke. This needs a man’s mind on it, not a woman’s fleeting whimsy.’

‘Thank you, but I will meet them here,’ Luca said to the priest. To the Lady Abbess he said, ‘I thank you for your assistance. I am happy to meet with the nuns in your house.’

‘But I do wonder why,’ Freize prompted under his breath to a fat bee bumbling against the small leaded window pane.

‘But I do wonder why,’ Luca repeated out loud.

Freize opened the little window and released the bee out into the sunshine.

‘There has been much scandal talked, and some of it directed against me,’ the Lady Abbess said frankly. ‘I have been accused personally. It is better that the house sees that the inquiry is under my control, is under my blessing. I hope that you will clear my name, as well as discovering any wrong-doing and rooting it out.’

‘We will have to interview you, as well as all the members of the order,’ Luca pointed out.

He could see through the grille that the white figure had moved, and realised she had bowed her head as if he had shamed her.

‘I am ordered from Rome to help you to discover the truth,’ he insisted.

She did not reply but merely turned her head and spoke to someone out of his sight and then the door to the room opened and the elderly nun, the porteress Sister Anna who had greeted them on their first night, said abruptly, ‘The Lady Abbess says I am to show you the room for your inquiry.’

It appeared that their interview with the Lady Abbess was over, and they had not even seen her face.

It was a plain room, looking out over the woods behind the abbey, in the back of the house so that they could not see the cloister, the nuns’ cells, or the comings and goings of the courtyard before the church. But, equally, the community could not see who came to give evidence.