Order of Darkness Read online

  Brother Peter seated himself in the church before the damp church register and started a list of missing persons, to post on the church door. Every now and then a bedraggled child would come to the door and his mother would fall on him and snatch him up and bless him and scold him in the same breath. But the list of missing persons grew and grew in Brother Peter’s careful script, and no-one even knew the names of the children on their crusade. No-one knew how many of them had walked dry-shod in the harbour, no-one knew how many had turned back, nor how many of them were missing, nor even where their homes had been.

  Ishraq borrowed a gown and a cape from the priest’s housekeeper and then the five of them – Isolde and Ishraq, Luca, Brother Peter and the innkeeper – went back to the inn, looking out to sea as if Freize might be swimming home. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Luca said. ‘I can’t believe he didn’t come with us.’

  ‘He went out in the harbour to try to get the children to come back to land,’ Ishraq said. ‘It was the bravest thing I’ll ever see in my life. He pushed us towards the inn and then he turned back. He went out towards the sea.’

  ‘But he always comes with me. He’s always just behind me.’

  ‘He made sure we were safe,’ Isolde said. ‘As soon as we were running for the inn he went back for the children in the harbour.’

  ‘I can’t think how I let him go. I can’t think what I was doing. I really thought that the sea was going out, and I would walk with them, and then everything happened so fast. But why would he not come with me? He always comes with me.’

  ‘God forgive me that I did not value him,’ Brother Peter said quietly to himself. ‘He did the work of a great man today.’

  ‘Don’t talk of him as if he’s drowned!’ Isolde said sharply. ‘He could have climbed up high like we did. He could be on his way back to us right now.’

  Luca put his hand over his eyes. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘He’s always with me. I can’t get rid of him! – that’s what I always said. And he did a courageous thing, while I ran. But I thought he was with me. He’s always with me.’

  They stood for a moment on the quayside, looking at the empty sea. ‘You go on,’ Luca said. ‘I’ll come in a moment.’

  At the inn they found the innkeeper’s wife in the kitchen, furiously throwing buckets of muddy water from the stone-flagged kitchen into the wet stable yard outside.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ the innkeeper demanded of her, instantly angry.

  ‘In my laundry room,’ she shouted back. ‘Where else would I be? Where else do I ever go when there is trouble? Why didn’t you look for me? The door was jammed and I was locked in. I’d still be in there if I hadn’t broken it down. And anyway, I come out here and the yard is empty and the kitchen filled with water! Where have you been? Jaunting off when I could have been drowned?’

  Her husband shouted with laughter and clasped her round her broad waist. ‘Her laundry room!’ he exclaimed to the girls. ‘I should have looked there first. It’s a room without windows, backs onto the chimney breast – whenever there is trouble or a quarrel she goes there and tidies the sheets. But what woman would go to a laundry room when the greatest wave that has ever been seen in the world is rushing towards her house?’

  ‘A woman who wants to die with her sheets tidy,’ his wife answered him crossly. ‘If it was the last thing in the world, I’d want to be sure that my sheets were tidy. I heard the most terrible groaning noise and I thought straight away that the best place I could be was in my laundry room. I was tucked in there, heart beating pit-a-pat, when I heard the water banging into the house. I sorted my linen and I felt the cold water seeping under the door like an enemy. But I just kept arranging the linen, and sang a little song while the water got to my knees. Is it very bad in the village?’

  ‘As bad as a plague year, but come all at once,’ the innkeeper said. ‘Your friend Isabella is missing and her little girl. Like a plague year, a terrible year, but all the deaths done in an afternoon, in a moment, in a cruel wave.’

  The woman glanced out into the yard where the horses were drowned in their stalls, and the dog limp and wet like a black rag at the end of his chain, and then she turned her face from the window as if she did not want to see.

  ‘Hard times,’ she said. ‘Terrible times. What do they think it means, the sea rushing onto the land like this? Did Father Benito say anything?’

  Everyone turned to Brother Peter. He shook his head. ‘He is missing too, and I don’t know what it means,’ he said. ‘I thought I was witnessing a miracle, the parting of the waters – now I think I saw the work of Satan. Satan in his terrible power, standing like a wall of water between the children of God and Jerusalem.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Luca said coming in the kitchen door. ‘Or perhaps it was neither good nor evil. Perhaps it was just another thing that we don’t understand. It feels like our destiny is to live in a world that is filled with things that we don’t understand, and ruled by an unseen God. I know nothing. I can’t answer you. I am a fool in the middle of a disaster, and I have lost my dearest friend in the world.’

  Quietly, Isolde reached out and took his hand. ‘I’m sure everything will be all right,’ she said helplessly.

  ‘But how could a loving God ever take Freize?’ he asked her. ‘How could such a thing happen? And in only a moment? When he saved us and was going to help others? And how shall I live without him?’

  As darkness fell they got the fire lit in the kitchen and they took off some of their wet clothes to be dried before it. Most of their goods, their clothes, the precious manuscripts and the writing desk had gone down with the ship. They found the crusader sword in the rubble of the bedroom and the innkeeper’s wife found an old gown for Isolde and belted it around her narrow waist with a rope.

  ‘I have your mother’s jewels safely sewn into my chemise,’ Ishraq whispered to Isolde.

  She shook her head. ‘Rich in a flood is not rich at all. But thank you for keeping them safe.’

  Ishraq shrugged. ‘You’re right. We can’t hire another Freize, not if I had the jewels of Solomon.’

  People from the village who had been flooded out of their homes came to the inn and ate their dinners at the kitchen table. There was a cheese that someone had been storing in a high loft, and some sea-washed ham from the chimney. Someone had brought some bread from the only baker in the village whose shop stood higher up the hill, beyond the market square and whose oven was still lit. They drank some wine from bottles which were bobbing around the cellar, and then the villagers went back to their comfortless homes and Brother Peter, Luca, Isolde and Ishraq wrapped themselves up in their damp clothes and slept on the kitchen floor, with the innkeeper and his wife, while the rest of the house dripped mournfully all around them. Luca listened to the water falling from the timbers to the puddles on the stone floor all night, and woke at dawn to go out and look for Freize in the calm waters of the grey sea.

  All morning Luca waited on the quayside, continually starting up when a keg or a bit of driftwood bobbed on the water and made him think it was Freize’s wet head, swimming towards home. Now and then someone asked him for a hand with heaving some lumber, or pushing open a locked door, but mostly people left him alone and Luca realised that there were others alongside him, walking up and down the quayside, looking out to sea as if they too hoped that a friend or a husband or a lover might miraculously come home, even now, swimming through the sea that now lapped so quietly at the harbour steps that it was impossible to believe that it had ever raged through the town.

  Brother Peter came down to see him at noon as the church bells rang for Sext, the midday prayers, carrying some paper in his hand. ‘I have written my report, but I can’t explain the cause of the wave,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you want to add anything. I have said that Johann was following his calling, that the sea had parted as he said it would, when he was swallowed up by a flood. I don’t attempt to explain what it means. I don’t even comment on whet