Changeling Read online

  ‘And what do they say the brother is like?’ Luca asked, tempted to gossip despite his resolution.

  ‘Nothing but good of him. Good landlord, generous with the abbey. His grandfather built the abbey with a nunnery on one side and a brother house for the monks nearby. The nuns and the monks share the services in the abbey. His father endowed both houses and handed the woods and the high pasture over to the nuns, and gave some farms and fields to the monastery. They run themselves as independent houses, working together for the glory of God, and helping the poor. Now the new lord in his turn supports it. His father was a crusader, famously brave, very hot on religion. The new lord sounds quieter, stays at home, wants a bit of peace. Very keen that this is kept quiet, that you make your inquiry, take your decision, report the guilty, exorcise whatever is going on, and everything gets back to normal.’

  Above their heads the bell tolled for Prime, the dawn prayer.

  ‘Come on,’ Luca said, and led the way from the visiting priest’s rooms towards the cloisters and the beautiful church.

  They could hear the music as they crossed the yard, their way lit by a procession of white-gowned nuns, carrying torches and singing as they went like a choir of angels gliding through the pearly light of the morning. Luca stepped back, and even Freize fell silent at the beauty of the voices rising faultlessly into the dawn sky. Then the two men, joined by Brother Peter, followed the choir into the church and took their seats in an alcove at the back. Two hundred nuns, veiled with white wimples, filled the stalls of the choir either side of the screened altar, and stood in rows facing it.

  The service was a sung Mass; the voice of the serving priest at the altar rang out the sacred Latin words in a steady baritone, and the sweet high voices of the women answered. Luca gazed at the vaulting ceiling, the beautiful columns carved with stone fruit and flowers, and above them, stars and moons of silver-painted stone, all the while listening to the purity of the responses and wondering what could be tormenting such holy women every night, and how they could wake every dawn and sing like this to God.

  At the end of the service, the three visiting men remained seated on the stone bench at the back of the chapel as the nuns filed out past them, their eyes modestly down. Luca scanned their faces, looking for the young woman he had seen in such a frenzy last night, but one pale young face veiled in white was identical to another. He tried to see their palms, for the telltale sign of scabs, but all the women kept their hands clasped together, hidden in their long sleeves. As they filed out, their sandals pattering quietly on the stone floor, the priest followed them, and stopped before the young men to say pleasantly, ‘I’ll break my fast with you and then I have to go back to my side of the abbey.’

  ‘Are you not a resident priest?’ Luca asked, first shaking the man’s hand and then kneeling for his blessing.

  ‘We have a monastery just the other side of the great house,’ the priest explained. ‘The first Lord of Lucretili chose to found two religious houses: one for men and one for women. We priests come over daily to take the services. Alas, this house is of the order of Augustine nuns. We men are of the Dominican order.’ He leaned towards Luca. ‘As you’d understand, I think it would be better for everyone if the nunnery were put under the discipline of the Dominican order. They could be supervised from our monastery and enjoy the discipline of our order. Under the Augustinian order these women have been allowed to simply do as they please. And now you see what happens.’

  ‘They observe the services,’ Luca protested. ‘They’re not running wild.’

  ‘Only because they choose to do so. If they wanted to stop or to change, then they could. They have no rule, unlike us Dominicans, for whom everything is set down. Under the Augustinian order every house can live as they please. They serve God as they think best and as a result—’

  He broke off as the Lady Almoner came up, treading quietly on the beautiful marble floor of the church. ‘Well, here is my Lady Almoner come to bid us to breakfast, I am sure.’

  ‘You can take breakfast in my parlour,’ she said. ‘There is a fire lit there. Please, Father, show our guests the way.’

  ‘I will, I will,’ he said pleasantly and, as she left them, he turned to Luca. ‘She holds this place together,’ he said. ‘A remarkable woman. Manages the farmlands, maintains the buildings, buys the goods, sells the produce. She could have been the lady of any castle in Italy, a natural Magistra: a teacher, a leader, a natural lady of any great house.’ He beamed. ‘And, I have to say, her parlour is the most comfortable room in this place and her cook second to none.’

  He led the way out of the church across the cloister through the entrance yard to the house that formed the eastern side of the courtyard. The wooden front door stood open, and they went into the parlour, where a table was already laid for the three of them. Luca and Peter took their seats. Freize stood at the doorway to serve the men as one of the lay-woman cooks passed him dishes to set on the table. They had three sorts of roasted meats: ham, lamb and beef; and two types of bread: white manchet and dark rye. There were local cheeses, and jams, a basket of hard-boiled eggs, and a bowl of plums with a taste so strong that Luca sliced them on a slice of wheat bread to eat like sweet jam.

  ‘Does the Lady Almoner always eat privately and not dine with her sisters in the refectory?’ Luca asked curiously.

  ‘Wouldn’t you, if you had a cook like this?’ the priest asked. ‘High days and holy days, I don’t doubt that she sits with her sisters. But she likes things done just so; and one of the privileges of her office is that she has things as she likes them, in her own house. She doesn’t sleep in a dormitory nor eat in the refectory. The Lady Abbess is the same in her own house next door.

  ‘Now,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘I have a drop of brandy in my saddlebag. I’ll pour us a measure. It settles the belly after a good breakfast.’ He went out of the room and Peter got to his feet and looked out of the window at the entry courtyard where the priest’s mule was waiting.

  Idly, Luca glanced round the room as Freize cleared their plates. The chimney breast was a beautifully carved wall of polished wood. When Luca had been a little boy his grandfather, a carpenter, had made just such a carved chimney breast for the hall of their farmhouse. Then, it had been an innovation and the envy of the village. Behind one of the carvings had been a secret cupboard where his father had kept sugared plums, which he gave to Luca on a Sunday, if he had been good all the week. On a whim, Luca turned the five bosses along the front of the carved chimney breast one after the other. One yielded under his hand and, to his surprise, a hidden door swung open, just like the one he’d known as a child. Behind it was a glass jar holding not sugared plums but some sort of spice: dried black seeds. Beside it was a cobbler’s awl – a little tool for piercing lace holes in leather.

  Luca shut the cupboard door. ‘My father always used to hide sugared plums in the chimney cupboard,’ he remarked.

  ‘We didn’t have anything like this,’ Peter the clerk replied. ‘We all lived in the kitchen, and my mother turned her roast meats on the spit in the fireplace and smoked all her hams in the chimney. When it was morning and the fire was out and we children were really hungry, we’d put our heads up into the soot and nibble at the fatty edges of the hams. She used to tell my father it was mice, God bless her.’

  ‘How did you get your learning in such a poor house?’ Luca asked.

  Peter shrugged. ‘The priest saw that I was a bright boy, so my parents sent me to the monastery.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Milord asked me if I would serve him, serve the order. Of course I said yes.’

  The door opened and the priest returned, a small bottle discreetly tucked into the sleeve of his robe. ‘Just a drop helps me on my way,’ he said. Luca took a splash of the strong liquor in his earthenware cup, Peter refused, and the priest took a hearty swig from the mouth of the bottle. Freize looked longingly from the doorway, but decided against saying anything.

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