Changeling Read online

  He saw that she held her hands cupped, as if she were hiding something small in her palms.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ she said quietly. Her voice was low and sweet. ‘You wanted to see this.’

  She held out her hands to him. Luca flinched in horror as he saw that in the centre of both was a neat shallow hole, and each palm was filled with blood. ‘Jesu save us!’

  ‘Amen,’ she said instantly.

  Luca reached for the linen washcloth and tore a strip roughly off the side. He splashed water onto it from the ewer, and gently patted each wound. She flinched a little as he touched her. ‘I am sorry, I am sorry.’

  ‘They don’t hurt much, they’re not deep.’

  Luca dabbed away the blood and saw that both wounds had stopped bleeding and were beginning to form small scabs. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘I woke just now, and they were like this.’

  ‘Has it happened before?’

  ‘Last night. I had a terrible dream, and when I woke I was in my cell, in my bed, but my feet were muddy and my hands were filled with blood.’

  ‘I think that it was you that I saw,’ he said. ‘In the entrance yard? Do you remember nothing?’

  She shook her head and the lace veil moved but did not reveal her face. ‘I just woke and my hands were like this, newly marked. It has happened before. Sometimes I have woken in the morning and found them wounded but they have already stopped bleeding, as if they came earlier in the night, without even waking me. They are not deep, you see, they heal within days.’

  ‘Do you have a vision?’

  ‘A vision of horror!’ she suddenly broke out. ‘I cannot believe it is the work of God to wake me with bleeding hands. I have no sense of holiness, I feel nothing but terror. This cannot be God stabbing me. These must be blasphemous wounds.’

  ‘God might be working through you, mysteriously . . .’ Luca tried.

  She shook her head. ‘It feels more like punishment. For being here, for following the services, and yet being cursed with a rebellious heart.’

  ‘How many of you are here unwillingly?’

  ‘Who knows? Who knows what people think when they go through each day in silence, praying as they are commanded to do, singing as they are ordered? We are not allowed to speak to one another during the day except to repeat our orders or say our prayers. Who knows what anyone is thinking? Who knows what we are all privately thinking?’

  She spoke so powerfully to Luca’s own sense that the nunnery was full of secrets that he could not bring himself to ask her anything more, but chose to act instead. He took a sheet of clean paper. ‘Put your palms down on this,’ he commanded. ‘First the right and then the left.’

  She looked as if she would like to refuse but did as he ordered, and they both looked, in horror, at the two neat triangular prints that her blood left on the whiteness of the manuscript and the haze of her bloody palm print around them.

  ‘Brother Peter has to see your hands,’ Luca decided. ‘You will have to make a statement.’

  He expected her to protest; but she did not. She bowed her head in obedience to him.

  ‘Come to my inquiry room tomorrow, first thing,’ he said. ‘Straight after Prime.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said easily. She opened the door and slipped through.

  ‘And what is your name, Sister?’ Luca asked, but she was already gone. It was only then that he realised that she would not come to the inquiry room and testify, and that he did not know her name.

  Luca waited impatiently after Prime, but the nun did not come. He was too irritated with himself to explain to Freize and Brother Peter why he would see no-one else, but sat in the room, the door open, the papers on the table before them.

  In the end, he declared that he had to ride out to clear his head, and went to the stables. One of the lay sisters was hauling muck out of the stable yard, and she brought his horse and saddled it for him. It was odd to Luca, who had lived for so long in a world without women, to see all the hard labouring work done by women, all the religious services observed by women, living completely self-sufficiently, in a world without men except for the visiting priest. It added to his sense of unease and displacement. These women lived in a community as if men did not exist, as if God had not created men to be their masters. They were complete to themselves and ruled by a girl. It was against everything he had observed and everything he had been taught and it seemed to him no wonder at all that everything had gone wrong.

  As Luca was waiting for his horse to be led out, he saw Freize appear in the archway with his skewbald cob tacked up, and watched him haul himself into the saddle.

  ‘I ride alone,’ Luca said sharply.

  ‘You can. I’ll ride alone too,’ Freize said equably.

  ‘I don’t want you with me.’

  ‘I won’t be with you.’

  ‘Ride in the other direction then.’

  ‘Just as you say.’

  Freize paused, tightened his girth, and went through the gate, bowing with elaborate courtesy to the old porteress who scowled at him, and then he waited outside the gate for Luca to come trotting through.

  ‘I told you, I don’t want you riding with me.’

  ‘Which is why I waited,’ Freize explained patiently. ‘To see what direction you were going in, so that I could make sure I took the opposite one. But of course, there may be wolves, or thieves, highwaymen or brigands, so I don’t mind your company for the first hour or so.’

  ‘Just shut up and let me think,’ Luca said ungraciously.

  ‘Not a word,’ Freize remarked to his horse, who flickered a brown ear at him. ‘Silent as the grave.’

  He actually managed to keep his silence for several hours as they rode north, at a hard pace away from the abbey, from Castle Lucretili, and the little village that sheltered beneath its walls. They took a broad smooth track with matted grass growing down the middle and Luca put his horse in a canter, hardly seeing the odd farmhouse, the scattering flock of sheep, the carefully tended vines. But then, as it grew hotter towards midday, Luca drew up his horse, suddenly realising that they were some way from the abbey, and said, ‘I suppose we should be heading back.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like a drop of small ale and a speck of bread and ham first?’ Freize offered invitingly.

  ‘Do you have that?’

  ‘In my pack. Just in case we got to this very point and thought we might like a drop of small ale and a bite to eat.’

  Luca grinned. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing food, and thank you for coming with me.’

  Freize nodded smugly, and led the way off the road into a small copse where they would be sheltered from the sun. He dismounted from his cob and slung the reins loosely over the saddle. The horse immediately dropped its head and started to graze the thin grass of the forest floor. Freize spread his cape for Luca to sit, and unpacked a stone jug of small ale, and two loaves of bread. The two men ate in silence, then Freize produced, with a flourish, a half bottle of exquisitely good red wine.

  ‘This is excellent,’ Luca observed.

  ‘Best in the house,’ Freize answered, draining the very dregs.

  Luca rose, brushed off the crumbs, and took up the reins of his horse, which he had looped over a bush.

  ‘Horses could do with watering before we go back,’ Freize remarked.

  The two young men led the horses back along the track, and then mounted up to head for home. They rode for some time until they heard the noise of a stream, off to their left, deeper in the forest. They broke off from the track and, guided by the noise of running water, first found their way to a broad stream, and then followed it downhill to where it formed a wide deep pool. The bank was muddy and well-trodden, as if many people came here for water, an odd sight in the deserted forest. Luca could see the marks in the mud of the wooden pattens that the nuns wore over their shoes when they were working in the abbey gardens and fields.

  Freize slipped, nearly losing his footi