‘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?’

He could see her flush with pleasure that he had consulted her, that he had named her as the most senior woman of the abbey. ‘I think you have completed your inquiry,’ she said quietly to him. ‘I think you have done everything that anyone could ask of you. You found the very cause of the troubles here, you proved what she was doing, you arrested her and her heretic slave and named them as witches, and they are now gone. Their escape proves their guilt. Your inquiry is closed and – if God is merciful – this abbey is cleansed of their presence. We can get back to normal here.’

Luca nodded. ‘You will appoint a new Lady Abbess?’ he asked Lord Lucretili.

The Lady Almoner folded her hands inside her sleeves and looked down, modestly, at the floor.

‘I would.’ He paused, still very shaken. ‘If there was anyone I could trust to take the place of such a false sister! When I think of the damage that she might have done!’

‘What she did!’ the Lady Almoner reminded him. ‘The house destroyed and distracted, one nun dead—’

‘Is that all she has done?’ Luca inquired limpidly.

‘All?’ the lord exclaimed. ‘Escaping her chains and practising witchcraft, keeping a Moorish slave, heretical practices and murder?’

‘Give me a moment,’ Luca said thoughtfully. He went to the door and said a quiet word to Freize, then came back to them. ‘I am sorry. I knew he would wait there all day until he had a word from me. I have told him to pack our things, so we can leave this afternoon. You are ready to send your report, Brother Peter?’

Luca looked towards Brother Peter but sensed, out of the corner of his eye, a second quick exchange of glances between the Lord Lucretili and the Lady Almoner.

‘Oh, of course.’ Luca turned to her. ‘Lady Almoner, you will be wondering what I recommend for the future of the abbey?’

‘It is a great concern to me,’ she said, her eyes lowered once more. ‘It is my life here, you understand. I am in your hands. We are, all of us, in your hands.’

Luca paused for a moment. ‘I can think of no-one who would make a better Lady Abbess. If the nunnery were not handed over to the monastery but were to remain a sister house, an independent sister house for women, would you undertake the duty of being the Lady Abbess?’

She bowed. ‘I am very sure that our holy brothers could run this order very well, but if I were called to serve . . .’

‘But if I were to recommend that it remain under the rule of women?’ For a moment only he remembered the bright pride of the Lady Abbess when she told him that she had never learned that women should be under the rule of men. Almost, he smiled at the memory.

‘I could only be appointed by the lord himself,’ the Lady Almoner said deferentially, recalling him to the present.

‘What do you think?’ Luca said, turning to the lord.

‘If the place were to be thoroughly exorcised by the priests, if my Lady Almoner were to accept the duty, if you recommend it, I can think of no-one better to guide the souls of these poor young women.’

‘I agree,’ said Luca. He paused as if a thought had suddenly struck him. ‘But doesn’t this overset your father’s will? Was the abbey not left entirely to your sister? The abbey and the lands around it? The woods and the streams? Were they not to be in your sister’s keeping and she to be Lady Abbess till death?’

‘As a murderer and a witch, then she is a dead woman in law,’ the lord said. ‘She is disinherited by her sins; it will be as if she had never been born. She will be an outlaw, with no home anywhere in Christendom. The declaration of her guilt will mean that no-one can offer her shelter, she will have nowhere to lay her false head. She will be dead to the law, a ghost to the people. The Lady Almoner can become the new Lady Abbess and command the lands and the abbey and all.’ He put his hand up to shield his eyes. ‘Forgive me, I can’t help but grieve for my sister!’

‘Very well,’ Luca said.

‘I’ll draw up the finding of guilt and the writ for her arrest,’ Brother Peter said, unfurling his papers. ‘You can sign it at once.’

‘And then you will leave, and we will never meet again,’ the Lady Almoner said quietly to Luca. Her voice was filled with regret.

‘I have to,’ he said for her ears alone. ‘I have my duty and my vows too.’

‘And I have to stay here,’ she replied. ‘To serve my sisters as well as I can. Our paths will never cross again – but I won’t forget you. I won’t ever forget you.’

He stepped close so that his mouth was almost against her veil. He could smell a hint of perfume on the linen. ‘What of the gold?’

She shook her head. ‘I shall leave it where it lies in the waters of the stream,’ she promised him. ‘It has cost us too dear. I shall lead my sisters to renew their vows of poverty. I won’t even tell Lord Lucretili about it. It shall be our secret: yours and mine. Will you keep the secret with me? Shall it be the last thing that we share together?’