Order of Darkness

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Then try them!’ someone shouted.

  ‘You say that you are an Inquirer – hold an inquiry!’

  ‘Right now!’

  ‘I will hold an inquiry,’ Luca tried to seize control of the angry crowd. ‘I will hold an inquiry this afternoon. A proper inquiry . . .’

  ‘Not this afternoon – now!’ the man with the dirty jacket shouted him down.

  ‘I’ll hold an inquiry,’ Luca insisted through gritted teeth. ‘A proper inquiry at the time that I appoint, and Brother Peter will write a report to the lord of our order and to the Holy Father. And you shall give evidence on oath of what you have seen –’ he glared at the angry women – ‘what you have really seen – not what you imagine. And if there has been any witchcraft or magic I will find it out and punish it.’

  ‘Even if she has seduced you with her witch skills?’ Mrs Ricci asked, her voice clear and accusing. ‘She, who crept into the men’s room in the night?’

  Isolde’s cheeks burned red for shame, but it was Ishraq who stepped forward and spat out her reply. ‘There is no witch, and there is no seduction. There are friends and fellow travellers, Christians and pilgrims and a terrible, terrible tragedy which you make worse by your slurs and scandals. Let the Inquirer hold his inquiry without fear or favour and we will all abide by his judgement.’

  ‘Right now, then,’ Mrs Ricci insisted.

  ‘Right now,’ said another voice, the commander of the guard of the sea walls. ‘I would know what made the sea turn on us.’

  ‘Right now,’ Brother Peter conceded, frightened by the hostility and the numbers of the crowd. ‘We’ll go to the inn and meet in the dining room. I’ll get some paper and ink from Father Benito. We will hold an inquiry, as we are bound to do, and you shall have your say.’

  The man in the dirty jacket suddenly lunged forwards, grabbed Luca by the jacket, thrust his big face forwards. ‘Right now!’ he shouted. ‘We said right now, we mean right now! Not down at the inn! Not when you have fetched paper! Not when you have whispered together and made up a story. Now! Justice for the drowned!’

  Luca pushed him away but he was a strong, angry man, and he did not release his grip. Ishraq flexed her fingers and looked around as if to measure how many people might try to drag them down. Isolde saw from her face that she thought they would not escape a beating, perhaps worse. The two young women stood a little closer, knowing that they were hopelessly outnumbered.

  ‘Justice for the drowned!’ someone else shouted from the back and then there were more people, running up the narrow streets, shouting and catcalling. ‘Justice for the drowned!’

  ‘Right now,’ Luca offered. Gently he pushed the big man away, sensing that the whole crowd was on the edge of a riot. ‘Where? In the church?’

  ‘In the church,’ the big man agreed, and he released Luca and led the way to the church with half the village following, and the other half running through the streets to join them. He looked back at Brother Peter. ‘And you write it down, like you should,’ he insisted. ‘There’s ink and paper in the church. And if they are guilty you write down that they are to be given to us, the people of Piccolo, for us to do as we please.’

  ‘If they are guilty,’ Father Benito specified.

  Ishraq took a look around, thinking that she and Isolde and Rosa might be able to break away. Isolde took a firm grip of Rosa’s hand, lifted the hem of her own long gown ready to run.

  ‘Not so fast,’ Mrs Ricci said with an evil smile. ‘You’re coming too. Don’t think you’ll get away again to bathe in the water and call down a wave from hell on us poor Christians, you vile heretic and you vile witch and you vile child.’

  Ishraq looked at her, the fury in her dark gaze veiled by her dark lashes, and the three of them submitted to being hustled into the church.

  The people filed into the church, ranged around the stone walls and stood in a murmuring hush, waiting for what was to happen next. Luca took a seat in the choir stalls, Brother Peter on one side of him, Father Benito on the other, the witnesses, as they came up to make their statements took the front row of the opposing choir stalls, the light on the altar behind the rood screen shining warmly on them all. The commander of the sea walls waited at the door. The hushed holiness of the place silenced the crowd but they were still determined to see justice done, and one after another, the villagers stepped up to the choir stalls and spoke of their experiences with the crusade and then with the flood.

  They reported seeing the children begging and praying. They all agreed that Johann had preached of the end of days and had promised that they would be able to walk dry-shod to Jerusalem. They all reported that he had tempted them, by promising them sight of a beloved lost kinsman. People wept again as they said that Johann had spoken to them personally, described events that he could not possible have known unless he had been guided by the Devil himself, that they had been sure of him as an angel, now they knew he was accursed.

  Brother Peter made notes, Luca listened intently, fearing more and more that some terrible wrong had happened in this town and that he had missed it. Remorsefully, he remembered coming into the town at dusk, after riding all day with Isolde, quite entranced by her, noticing nothing about the gateway, the harbour or the inn. He remembered saying goodnight to her on the stairs of the inn, thinking of nothing but the closeness of her and that if she had leaned a little nearer they could have kissed. He thought of the arrival of the children on the quayside and how he had looked up to see the two beautiful girls at their window as they had called down that hundreds of children were on the road; he had heard what they had said, but what he had seen was the two exquisite young women. He remembered warning Ishraq that she should not wear her Arab dress and how he had told her that her skin was the colour of heather honey. He knew now that he had been instantly and completely persuaded by Johann, that he had been determined to join the crusade to Jerusalem, hoping selfishly that he would see his parents again. Distracted, filled with sinful desire, obsessed with his own hopes and fears, Luca blamed himself for being quite blind to the events unfolding before his very eyes, and letting this town be swept through by the flood.

  He should have been a Noah, he thought – he should have known that the flood was coming and prepared a safe haven. If he had been a true Inquirer, and not a lovesick boy, he would not have been distracted and perhaps he would have seen something: a movement of the sea, the largeness of the moon – something that could have warned him of the disaster that was coming. Luca sat very still, listening intently, filled with shame at his own failure.

  ‘What about the young ladies?’ one of the midwives called from the body of the church. ‘You are asking about things that we know, that we all know. What about the young ladies and what they were doing?’

  At once there was a murmur of suspicion and anxiety in the echoing chancel. ‘Call them. And have them answer to you.’

  Wearily Luca rose to his feet and looked into the shadowy body of the church. ‘Lady Isolde, Mistress Ishraq!’ he called. He could see the girls coming slowly from where they had been kneeling at the back of the church and then the quiet patter of their leather slippers as they came up the stone-flagged aisle and hesitated. Solemnly, he waved them into the choir stalls opposite his seat, so that they should take their place like the other witnesses. He looked at them, and he knew he was looking at them as if they were strangers to him: strangers filled with the incomprehensible powers of women.

  ‘And the child,’ someone insisted. ‘The child who escaped the wave.’

  Isolde bowed her head to hide her resentment, and went back down the aisle and returned with Rosa holding her hand.

  The two of them sat opposite him, in silence, Rosa between them, their eyes on the floor. Luca remembered that when he first met Isolde she was accused of witchcraft and now she sat before him accused of the worst of crimes, once again. He could not help but feel a superstitious shiver that so much trouble seemed to swirl around her, though she always looked,
as now, so shiningly innocent. He couldn’t help but think that a woman who was truly good would not have one slander against her name, let alone two. This woman seemed to attract trouble as iron bars sown in a field will attract a thunderstorm.

  His anxiety about her strengthened his resolve to hold a proper inquiry. He dismissed his feelings for Isolde and stared at her critically, without affection, and tried to see her, as these people saw her: a strange, exotic and dangerously independent woman.

  ‘You have been accused of working as a storm-bringer,’ he said, his voice firm and level. ‘Both of you have been so accused, by people who say that you went out of the town as night was falling, to a place called the green lake and that there you called up a storm by splashing and making waves in the lake.’

  The two young women looked at him in utter silence. Luca flushed as he imagined that he saw contempt in their level gaze.

  ‘What do you say?’ he asked them. ‘To these charges? I am bound to put them to you, you are bound to answer.’

  ‘They are unworthy of an educated man,’ Ishraq said icily. ‘They are the fears of fools.’

  There was a buzz, like an angry swarm of bees, at the arrogance of her tone. One of the wise women looked around triumphantly. ‘Hear how she calls us fools!’

  ‘Answer,’ said the commander of the sea walls.

  ‘Even so,’ Luca said, irritated, ‘you will answer. And be advised not to abuse these good people. What were you doing at the lake?’

  ‘We went out of the town in the afternoon,’ Isolde spoke for them both, her voice very clear and steady. ‘We wanted to wash and the landlady didn’t have hot water for us, nor a bath that we could carry up to our room.’

  ‘Why would they want to wash? In November?’ one of the women said from the centre of the crowd standing before the chancel steps. People murmured in agreement. Ishraq looked around at them scornfully.

  ‘The stable lad had told us of a place where boys went swimming . . .’ Isolde went on.

  ‘So what young lady would go there?’ someone demanded. ‘What young lady would go where the boys go? These must be girls of bad repute, little whores.’

  Isolde gasped at the word, and looked at Luca, expecting him to silence the shouts. He said nothing to defend her.

  ‘And the gatekeeper says they went out at night.’

  ‘It was afternoon,’ Isolde insisted.

  Luca raised his hand on the groan from the crowd and the single shout: ‘Liar. Dirty liar!’

  There was a scuffle at the doorway, as the door banged, and the porter from the west gate came into the church.

  ‘You tell him,’ they pushed him forward till he arrived before Luca, Father Benito, and Brother Peter,

  ‘You are?’ Brother Peter dipped his pen in the ink.

  ‘Porter. Gatekeeper Paolo. I saw the women, and I warned them to be back inside the gates before dusk,’ he said.

  ‘Was the sun setting as they left?’ Luca asked.

  ‘It must have been, for I warned them of the curfew.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said they were going for a walk.’

  ‘Why should they lie?’ someone shouted. ‘If they were going for a wash? Why not say that?’

  ‘And they went out as night fell! Why would they do that?’

  ‘They went out as night was coming, so that no one could see them calling up a storm in the green lake!’

  Luca looked at Isolde and saw defiance in her dark blue eyes. She looked as she did when he first met her, a woman against the world, despite her own desire to live at peace in her home. A woman driven to defiance. A woman with no trust in him, nor in any man: a woman at bay.

  ‘Tell these people,’ he said. Suddenly he broke into Latin, confident that she would understand him but few other people in the church would. ‘Please, please my dearest, trust us with the truth. Tell them that you would not call up a storm. Tell them that you are not a storm-bringer. Ishraq too. Just tell them. For God’s sake, Isolde, we are all in trouble here. I can only ask you questions – you have to save yourself. Tell them what you were doing.’

  For a moment he thought she would defy him; defy them all from her pride. But then, slowly, Isolde rose to her feet and stepped down from the choir stalls to face the crowded church ‘I am no storm-bringer,’ she said, speaking simply and loudly so that her words echoed off the stone walls. ‘I am no witch. I am a woman of good repute and good behaviour. I am a woman who does not obey a father, since my father is dead, nor do I obey a husband, since I have no fortune and no man will take me without a dowry. I don’t obey my brother, since he is false and faithless. So you see me as I am – a woman without a man to represent her, a woman alone in the world. But none of this – none of this makes me a bad woman. It makes me an unlucky one. I am a woman who would not knowingly do a wicked act. I cannot prove this to you, you have to trust me, as you trust your mothers and your wives and your sisters. I have to call on you to think of me with generosity, as a good woman of high repute, raised to be a lady in a castle. And my friend here, Ishraq, was raised beside me almost as my sister, she is the same.’

  Ishraq slowly rose to her feet, and stood beside Isolde as if she were answering to a tribunal on oath. ‘I am a heretic and a stranger,’ she said. ‘It is possible, you know, to be a stranger and yet not an enemy. I have done nothing to harm anyone. I did not call up the wave. I don’t believe that any mortal has the power to call up a wave like this. I would never have called up a wave to hurt the children, nor you, and I would never have done anything to put our travelling companion, my friend Freize, in danger.’

  Luca, who had been looking down at his papers, praying that the village people would hear the raw sincerity in Isolde’s explanation, suddenly flicked his gaze up to see Ishraq’s dark eyes were filling with tears. ‘He was a true friend, and a loyal heart,’ Ishraq’s voice was low, choked with tears. ‘I think he wanted to be my sweetheart and I was such a vain fool that I refused him a kiss.’

  There was a murmur of sympathy in the room from some of the younger women. ‘Ah, God bless you,’ one of them said. ‘And now you’ve lost him. Before you could tell him.’

  ‘I’ve lost him,’ Ishraq agreed. ‘And now I’ll never be able to tell him that I loved how he laughed at things, and I loved how kind he was to everything, even a kitten, and how he understood things without learning. He was no scholar but he was wiser than I will ever be. He taught me that you can be wise without being clever. The last thing he did – almost the very last thing on earth that he did – was to send me and Isolde and his friend Luca to safety. That’s how we got back to the inn, that’s how we knew to get high, up to our room and then to the roof. There was no mystery about it. It was Freize who had the sense to notice that his kitten was crying for fear, and he saw the kitten climbing up to the roof. He guessed from that the water would flow back. He had no schooling but he noticed things. He was not too proud to see things. He could learn – even from a kitten. He was a fine young man; and I am grieving for him now.

  ‘I have lost the dearest sweetheart that a woman might have. I lost him through my own pride and my own folly and I only knew that he was a fine young man when he sent me to safety and went back himself to save the horses. You have to know that I would never ever have done anything that would endanger him. You can call me a heretic. You can call me a stranger. But you can’t think that I would have put Freize in the way of a great wave – I would never have hurt him.’

  ‘Let me through!’ a voice from the doorway interrupted and the crowd parted as the stable boy came in, propelled by the innkeeper, red-faced and furious.

  ‘What’s this? Brother Peter asked, alarmed by the sudden noise, and then, as he recognised the innkeeper with the landlady behind him, he said: ‘Dear Lord, who is this now?’

  ‘He’s got something to say,’ the landlord said. ‘Dirty little tyke.’

  The boy, his face as scarlet as his twisted ear, ducked his head before
Luca’s gaze.

  ‘Do you have something to tell us?’ Luca asked. ‘You can speak without fear.’ To the innkeeper he said: ‘Do let him go, that can’t be good for him.’

  ‘I followed them,’ the boy confessed, rubbing his ear. ‘Out of town, and down to the lake.’

  There was a whisper of excitement from the packed church.

  ‘What did you see?’

  The lad shook his head, his colour deepening. ‘They went naked,’ he confessed. ‘I watched them.’

  Oddly, Luca’s colour rose too, burning red in his cheeks, in his ears. ‘They undressed to swim?’

  ‘They swam and they washed each other with soap. The water was cold. They squealed like little piglets. They washed their hair, they plaited it. Then they got out of the water.’

  ‘Did they do anything,’ Luca paused and cleared his throat. ‘Did they do anything like making waves in the water, pouring water from a jug, did they say words over the water, did they do anything that was not washing and swimming?’

  ‘They played about,’ the boy said. He looked at Luca as if he hoped he would understand. ‘They swam and splashed and kicked. They were . . . very . . .’

  ‘Very?’

  ‘Very bonny.’ His chin dropped to his chest, his whole body slumped with his shame. ‘I watched them. I couldn’t look away. She . . .’ he made a shrugging gesture with his shoulder towards Isolde, as if he did not dare to point a finger. ‘She wore a shift. But t’other one went naked.’ He looked up and saw Luca’s flushed face. ‘Stark naked and she had skin like burned sugar all over. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And her . . .’

  ‘You will have to confess,’ the priest interrupted quickly, before the boy could continue his description of Ishraq glowing like a peach, naked in the lake. ‘You have had unclean thoughts.’

  The boy went an even deeper red. He looked imploringly at Luca. ‘So bonny,’ he said. ‘Anybody would have watched. Anybody would have unclean thoughts. You couldn’t look away.’

  Luca dropped his eyes to his papers, conscious of his own guilty desire. ‘Yes, very well,’ he said shortly. ‘I think we understand that. But at any rate you saw nothing that made you think they were calling up the wave?’