Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘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?’

  Luca bowed his head so that she could not see the bitter twist of his mouth. ‘So at the end of my inquiry, you are Lady Abbess, the gold runs quietly in the stream, and the Lady Isolde is as a dead woman.’

  Something in his tone alerted her keen senses. ‘This is justice!’ she said quickly. ‘This is how it should be. This is your decision.’

  ‘Certainly, I am beginning to see that this is how some people think it should be,’ Luca said drily.

  ‘Here is the writ of arrest and the finding of guilt for the Lady Isolde, formerly known as Lady Abbess of the abbey of Lucretili,’ Brother Peter said, pushing the document across the table, the ink still wet. ‘And here is the letter approving the Lady Almoner as the new Lady Abbess.’

  ‘Very efficient,’ Luca remarked. ‘Quick.’

  Brother Peter looked startled at the coldness of his tone. ‘I thought we had all agreed?’

  ‘There is just one thing remaining,’ Luca said. He opened the door and Freize was standing there, holding a leather sack. Luca took it without a word, and put it on the table, then untied the string. He unpacked the objects in order. ‘A shoemaker’s awl, from the Lady Almoner’s secret cupboard in the carved chimney breast of her parlour . . .’ He heard her sharp gasp and whisper of denial. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the piece of paper. Slowly, in the silently attentive room, he unfolded it and showed them the print of the bloodstained palm of the nun who had come to him in the night and shown him the stigmata. He put the sharp triangular point of the shoemaker’s awl over the bloodstained print: it fitted exactly.

  Luca gritted his teeth, facing the fact that his suspicions were true, though he had hoped so much that this hunch, this late awareness, would prove false. He felt like a man gambling with blank-faced dice; now he did not even know what he was betting on. ‘There is only one thing that I think certain,’ he said tightly. ‘There is only one thing that I can be sure of. I think it most unlikely that Our Lord’s sacred wounds would be exactly the shape and size of a common shoemaker’s awl. These wounds, which I saw and recorded on the palm of a nun of this abbey, were made by human hands, with a cobbler’s tools, with this tool in particular.’

  ‘They were hurting themselves,’ the Lady Almoner said quickly. ‘Hysterical women will do that. I warned you of it.’

  ‘Using the awl from your cupboard?’ He took out the little glass jar of seeds, and showed them to the Lady Almoner. ‘I take it that these are belladonna seeds?’

  Lord Lucretili interrupted. ‘I don’t know what you are suggesting?’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Luca asked, as if he were interested. ‘Does anyone? Do you know what I am suggesting, my Lady Almoner?’

  Her face was as white as the wimple that framed it. She shook her head, her grey eyes wordlessly begging him to say nothing more. Luca looked at her, his young face grim. ‘I have to go on,’ he said, as if in answer to her unspoken question. ‘I was sent here to inquire and I have to go on. Besides, I have to know. I always have to know.’

  ‘There is no need . . .’ she whispered. ‘The wicked Lady Abbess is gone, whatever she did with the awl, with belladonna . . .’

  ‘I need to know,’ he repeated. The last object he brought out was the book of the abbey’s accounts that Freize had taken from her room.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the list of work,’ she said, suddenly confident. ‘You cannot say that there is anything missing from the goods listed and the market takings. I have been a good steward to this abbey. I have cared for it as if it were my own house. I have worked for it as if I were the lady of the house, I have been the Magistra, I have been in command here.’

  ‘There is no doubt that you have been a good steward,’ Luca assured her. ‘But there is one thing missing.’ He turned to the clerk. ‘Brother Peter, look at these and tell me, do you see a fortune in gold mentioned anywhere?’

  Peter took the leather-bound book and flipped the pages quickly. ‘Eggs,’ he volunteered. ‘Vegetables, some sewing work, some laundry work, some copying work – no fortune. Certainly no fortune in gold. Brother Luca? What are you saying?’

  ‘You know I didn’t take the gold,’ the Lady Almoner said, turning to Luca, putting a pleading hand on his arm. ‘I stole nothing. It was all the Lady Abbess, she that is a witch. She set the nuns to soak the fleeces in the river, she stole the gold dust and sent it out for sale to the gold merchants. As I told you, as you saw for yourself. It was not me. Nobody will say it was me. It was done by her.’

  ‘Gold?’ Lord Lucretili demanded. ‘What gold?’

  ‘The Lady Abbess and her slave have been panning for gold in the abbey stream, and selling it,’ the Lady Almoner told him quickly. ‘I learned of it by chance when they first came here. The Inquirer discovered this only yesterday.’

  ‘And where is the gold now?’ Luca asked.

  ‘Sold to the merchants on Via Portico d’Ottavia, I suppose,’ she flared at him. ‘And the profit taken by the witches. We will never get it back. We will never know for sure.’

  ‘But who sold it?’ Luca asked, as if genuinely curious.

  ‘The slave, the heretic slave, she must have gone to the Jews, to the gold merchants,’ she said quickly. ‘She would know what to do, she would trade with them. She would speak their language, she would know how to haggle with them. She is a heretic like them, greedy like them, allowed to profiteer like they are. As bad as them . . . worse.’

  Luca shook his head at her, almost as if he was sorry as his trap closed on her. ‘You told me yourself that she never left the nunnery,’ he reminded her. He nodded at Brother Peter. ‘You took a note of what the Lady Almoner said, that first day, when she was so charming and so helpful.’

  Brother Peter turned to the page in his collection of papers, riffling the manuscript pages. ‘She said: “She never leaves the Lady Abbess’s side. And the Lady Abbess never goes out. The slave haunts the place.” ’

  Luca turned back to the Lady Almoner whose grey eyes flicked – just once – to the lord, as if asking for his help, and then back to Luca.

  ‘You told me yourself she was the Lady Abbess’s shadow,’ Luca said steadily. ‘She never left the nunnery: the gold has never left the nunnery. You have it hidden here.’

  Her white face blanched yet more pale but she seemed to draw courage from somewhere. ‘Search for it!’ she defied him. ‘You can tear my sto