Order of Darkness

by Philippa Gregory

  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
her it was the work of God to try us, or the work of the Devil to defeat Johann.’

  Luca shook his head. ‘Me neither. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Would you want to add anything?’

  Again, wearily, Luca shook his head. ‘It might just be something of Nature,’ he suggested. ‘Like rain.’

  The older man looked towards the sea where the great wave had come from nowhere and then lain flat again. ‘Like rain?’ he repeated incredulously.

  ‘There are many, many things that happen in this world and we really don’t know how,’ Luca said wearily. ‘We don’t even understand why it rains somewhere and not elsewhere. We don’t understand where clouds come from. You and I are scratching about like hens in the dirt trying to understand the nature of grit. Not seeing the mountains that overhang us, not knowing the wind that ruffles our stupid feathers. We don’t understand the wave, we don’t understand a rainbow. We don’t know why the winds blow, nor why the tides rise. We know nothing.’

  ‘We can’t blame ourselves for not understanding the wave. Nobody has seen anything like this in their lifetime!’

  ‘But they have! It has happened before,’ Luca exclaimed. ‘Last night the fishermen around the fire had all heard of great waves. Someone said they thought that the pestilence – the great plague – was first started by a wave a hundred years ago. What I am saying is that it might be caused by something other than the will of God; something which works in a way we don’t yet understand but which we might come to know. If we had known more, we might have known that it would happen. When the water went out we would have known it was gathering itself to return. We could have guarded the children. And Freize . . . and Freize . . .’ he broke off.

  The older man nodded, seeing that Luca was close to breaking down. ‘I’ll send this off as it is,’ he said. ‘And we’ll go on looking for him.’

  ‘You think it’s hopeless,’ Luca said flatly.

  Brother Peter crossed himself. ‘I’ll pray for him,’ he said. ‘Nothing is hopeless if God will hear our prayers.’

  ‘He didn’t hear the children singing hymns,’ Luca said flatly, and turned and stared out to sea. ‘Why should He hear us?’

  At dinner time, Isolde went down to the quayside to find Luca, wrapped in his cloak, looking at the darkening horizon. ‘Will you come in for dinner?’ she asked. ‘They have dried out the dining room and stewed a chicken.’

  He looked at her without seeing her heart-shaped face and grave eyes. ‘I’ll come in a moment,’ he said, indifferently. ‘Start without me.’

  She put a hand on his arm. ‘Come now, Luca,’ she whispered.

  ‘In a moment.’

  She took a few steps back and waited for him to turn around. He did not move. She hesitated. ‘Luca, come with me to dinner,’ she commanded sweetly. ‘You can’t stay here, you do no good mourning alone. Come and have something to eat and we’ll come out together, afterwards.’

  He did not even hear her. She waited for a little longer and then understood that he was deaf to her and could hardly see her. He was looking for his friend, and could see nothing else. She went back to the inn alone.

  The darkness of early autumn found Luca still seated on the quayside, still looking out at the darkening sea. A few of the mothers whose children had been lost on the crusade had come down and thrown a flower or a cross made from tied twigs into the gently washing water of the harbour, but they too were gone by nightfall. Only Luca stood waiting, looking out to the paler line of the horizon, as if the act of staring would make Freize visible, as if he gazed for long enough he would be bound to see the wet head of Freize, and his indomitable beaming smile, swimming for home.

  The church clock chimed for Matins: it was midnight.

  ‘You fear you have lost him, as you lost your mother and father,’ a cool voice said behind him, making him swing around. Ishraq was standing in the shadows, her head uncovered, her dark hair in a plait down her back. ‘You believe that you failed them, that you failed even to look for them. So you are looking for Freize, hoping that you will not fail him.’

  ‘I was not even there when they were taken,’ he said bitterly. ‘I was in the monastery. I heard the bell started to toll, the warning tocsin that rang in the village when they saw the galleys of the slaving ships approaching. We hid the holy things in the monastery and we locked ourselves into our cells and prayed. We spent the night in prayer. When we were allowed to go out, the abbot called me from the chapel and told me that he was afraid that the village had been attacked. I ran down to the village and across the fields to our farmhouse, which was a little way out towards the river. But I could see from a long way off that the front door was banging open, the house was empty, all the things of value were gone, and my mother and father disappeared.’

  ‘They came like a wave from the sea,’ Ishraq observed. ‘And you did not see them take your parents nor do you know where they are now.’

  ‘Everyone says they are dead,’ Luca said blankly. ‘Just as everyone thinks Freize is dead. Everyone I love is taken from me, I have no one. And I never do anything to save them. I lock myself into safety or I run like a coward, I save myself, I save my own life, and then I realise that my life is nothing without them.’

  Ishraq raised a finger, to silence him. ‘Don’t pity yourself,’ she said. ‘You will lose all your courage if you wallow in sympathy for yourself.’

  He flushed. ‘I am an orphan,’ he said bitterly. ‘I had no friend in the world but Freize. He was the only person in my life who loved me, and now I have lost him to the sea.’

  ‘And what do you think he would say?’ she demanded. ‘If he saw you here like this?’

  Luca’s mask of sorrow suddenly melted and he found he was smiling at the thought of his lost friend. Colour rushed into his cheeks and his voice choked. ‘He would say, “There’s a good inn and a good dinner, let’s go and eat. Time enough for all this in the morning.” ’

  Ishraq stood waiting, knowing that Luca’s heart was racing with grief.

  A cry broke from him and he turned to her and she opened her arms to him. He stepped towards her and she held him tightly, her arms wrapped around him as he wept with great heaving sobs, on her shoulder. She said nothing at all but just held him, her arms wrapped around him in a hug as strong as a man’s, rocking him gently as he wept broken-hearted for the loss of his friend.

  ‘I never told him,’ he finally gasped, as the truth was wrenched out of him. ‘I never told him that I loved him as if he were my own brother.’

  ‘Oh he knew,’ she assured him, quietly and steadily in his ear. ‘His love for you was one of his greatest joys. His pride in you, his admiration for you, his pleasure in your company was well known to him and to us all. You did not need to speak of it. You both knew. We all knew. He loved you and he knew you loved him.’

  The storm of his weeping subsided and he pulled back from her, wiped his face roughly on his damp cloak. ‘You will think me a fool,’ he said. ‘As soft as a girl.’

  She let him go at once, and stepped back to perch on one of the capstans, the mooring posts where they tied up the ships, as if she were settling down to talk all night. She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think you a fool to mourn for one you love.’

  ‘You think me a weakling?’

  ‘Only when you were writing your life into a ballad of self-pity. On the contrary, I thought that you were too strong in your grief. You can’t bring him back to life by your determination. Alas, if he is lost to us then you cannot bring him back again by wishing. You have to know that there are things you cannot do. You have to let him go.

  Perhaps you will have to let your parents go too.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think that I will never see any of them again!’

  ‘Perhaps the task of your life is to think the unthinkable,’ she suggested. ‘Certainly, your mission is to look at the unknown and try to understand it. Perhaps you are called to understand things that most people nev
er consider. Perhaps you have to find the courage to think terrible things. The disappearance of your parents, like the loss of Freize, is a mystery. Perhaps you have to let yourself know that the very worst thing that could have happened, has indeed taken place. Your task is to start to think about it, to ask why such things happen? Perhaps this is why you are an Inquirer.’

  ‘You think my grief prepares me for my work?’

  She nodded. ‘I am certain of it. You will have to look at the worst things in the world. How can you do that if you have not faced them in your own life, already?’

  He was quiet, turning over her words in his mind. ‘You’re a very wise woman,’ he said as if seeing her for the first time. ‘It was good of you to come down here for me.’

  ‘Of course I would come for you,’ she replied. ‘I would go anywhere for you.’

  He was thinking of something else. ‘Did Isolde come earlier?’

  ‘Yes. She came to fetch you for dinner. But you were deaf and blind to her.’

  ‘That was some time ago?’

  ‘Hours.’

  ‘It’s very late now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Past midnight,’ she said. She rose and came close to him as if she would touch him again. ‘Luca,’ she said his name very quietly.

  ‘Did Isolde ask you to come for me?’ he asked. ‘Did she send you to me?’

  A rueful smile flickered across her face and she took a careful step back from him. ‘Is that what you would wish?’

  He made a little gesture. ‘I dare not hope that she is thinking of me. And today she has seen me act like a fool and yesterday like a coward. If she thought of me at all before now, she will not think of me again.’

  ‘But she is thinking of you, and of Freize,’ Ishraq claimed. ‘She and Brother Peter are at church now, praying for him and for you.’ She considered him. ‘You know that you will serve your love of him best if you come back to the inn now and take your grief like a man, and live your life in such a way that he might be proud of you?’