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.’
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. ‘But 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 that the water would flow back. 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 a ripe peach 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. 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?’
‘They weren’t doing that,’ the boy said flatly. ‘They were just playing about and washing like girls. And anyway, it was the middle of the afternoon.’
‘The porter warned them of the curfew?’
‘He always warns everyone,’ the boy said to a murmur of agreement. ‘He always closes the gate early and he always opens it late. He never keeps time. He always does just what he wants and then tells all of us that we are too late or too early.’
Luca looked around the room, testing his sense that the people were satisfied, that he could declare the inquiry over. He saw the angry spiteful faces of Mrs Ricci and the two wise women, but he also saw the exhaustion in the other people, who were grieving for the children and the people they had lost, and now felt that they had wasted their time, accusing girls who had done nothing more than walk out of town in the afternoon for a swim.
‘I am satisfied that neither the children of the pilgrimage nor these lady travellers did anything to summon the wave,’ he said. His words were greeted in silence, and then a sigh of agreement. ‘I shall so report,’ he said.
‘We agree,’ Father Benito said, rising to his feet and looking around his flock. ‘This is a sorrow which came upon us for no reason. God forgive us and help us in the future.’
‘And the little girl?’ the landlady asked. She looked to where Isolde was holding Ree’s hand. ‘She is cleared too?’
‘How can they all three be cleared?’ one of the midwives said irritably.
‘Because they are all three innocent,’ Luca said sternly. ‘There is no evidence against them.’
‘Ree is innocent of everything,’ Isolde confirmed to the landlady. ‘Can we find a home for her? She is far from her village and all alone in the world.’
The villagers nodded and slowly filed from the church, some of them stopping to light a candle for loved ones who were still missing. Luca nodded to Brother Peter. ‘Perhaps give them all a glass of grappa down at the inn?’ he asked. ‘For good will?’
Brother Peter nodded and whispered the order to the innkeeper who bustled off with his wife. Brother Peter started to collect up his papers. There was a space and a silence for Luca and the two young women.
‘You’re cleared,’ Luca said to them both. ‘Again.’
They smiled a little ruefully. ‘We don’t seek trouble,’ Isolde said.
‘It seems to follow you.’
Ishraq heard the criticism in his voice. ‘If any woman steps outside the common way then she will find trouble,’ she said simply. ‘It does follow us. We have to fight it.’
‘You are thinking about the wave?’ Isolde asked Luca as he watched Brother Peter reading through his notes.
‘This is no report,’ Luca said, frustrated, flicking at the papers with his fingertips. ‘This is nothing. This is a village scandal, a few old women frightening themselves. But the question that they ask is the right one. What caused such a thing? What could make such a great wave happen? I can say that it was not you two – washing in a lake – but I can’t tell them what it was. And most importantly, I can’t tell them if it could happen again. Could it happen again? Tonight, even?’
Isolde crossed herself at once at the thought of such a terror, and Luca lowered his voice so the people leaving the church would not hear.
‘I have been thinking of this too, and I think it may have been an earthquake, the fall of a mountain or a mighty cliff, perhaps far far away,’ Ishraq said, surprisingly. ‘Perhaps it caused a wave, just one great wave, as a bowl of water will make waves and spill over, if you were to throw a stone into it.’
Brother Peter rose to his feet and smiled at the prosaic image, typical of a woman who cannot imagine the earth as void and empty, and darkness upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moving over the waters, as the Bible itself describes. ‘The ocean is not a bowl of water,’ he corrected her gently. ‘It does not move with waves because someone throws a stone. It is not rocked in a basin for you to wash dishes in.’
‘I am not saying that it is. But small things sometimes work the same way as larger. The wave may have been caused by an earthquake, a great falling of rock. Just as you can make a wave in a bowl of water if you throw in a pebble.’
‘That’s true,’ Luca said. ‘But what made you think of this?’
‘Plato describes the drowning of the country of Atlantis in just such a way,’ she said. ‘He says that a great earthquake caused a great wave which drowned the island.’
‘Plato?’ Brother Peter repeated sceptically. ‘How has a girl such as you read Plato? I’ve heard of him, but I’ve read nothing that he wrote. There are no copies of anything he wrote.’
‘No, not that you could read, not translated into Italian; but we Arabs have his books. A few of them have been translated from the Greek into Arabic. I read a little part of them in Arabic when I was in Spain, with Isolde and her father, and I was allowed to attend the university. Plato is a philosopher who talks about great mysteries such as the wave, and has strange understandings.’
‘You were privileged,’ Brother Peter said irritably scooping up the papers and stoppering the bottle of ink. ‘A heretic and a woman to read such a thinker. You must take care that it does not strain your nature, putting too much pressure on you. Women cannot think of abstractions..’
She gave a small shrug. ‘My brain is well enough so far, though I thank you for your concern. At any rate, Plato says that the drowning of Atlantis might have followed a great movement of the earth. It made me think that this might be a natural occurrence, not an act of God, nor of the devil, nor of storm-bringers – if there are such people. Perhaps it occurs naturally, from the world of nature. Though why God would make a world where such a thing could happen, is another question.’
Brother Peter knew himself to be on firmer ground. ‘Ah, you ask an important question. It is because the perfect world that God first made was destroyed by sin in the garden of Eden, when the woman ate the apple.’
Isolde exchanged a quick smiling glance with Luca. They both knew that Ishraq and Brother Peter would be quarrelling within a moment.
Ishraq looked at him quite blankly. ‘What is wrong with eating an apple?’
‘Because it does not mean an apple. The apple signifies knowledge.’
Luca winked at Isolde.
‘The woman wanted knowledge?’
‘Yes,’ Peter said, adopting his teacher’s voice. ‘But it was God’s will that the woman and her husband should be innocent of knowledge.’
Ishraq looked as if she did not need his instruction. ‘I would have thought an all-seeing God could have foreseen that a woman would want knowledge,’ she said. ‘Why should she not? Why should I not? Would any woman want to live in ignorance? Would any man? And what does it benefit God to have people so ignorant that they are like these poor peasants – believing that people call up storms and the devil takes the time and the trouble to make them unhappy?’
Brother Peter was almost too irritated to speak. He picked up his papers, bowed to the altar and turned away. ‘There is no point trying to explain such things to you,’ he said. ‘You are a heretic and a girl.’ It would have been impossible to say which he thought was worse.
‘The Lord Lucretili believed that a girl could study, without straining her nature,’ Ishraq insisted. ‘Women like Hypatia of Alexandria taught Plato to her students without illness. So when Lord Lucretili was in Spain he sent me to study at the university of Granada. Education is important to us heretics. There are many Arab women who are educated. We Moors believe that a woman can study as well as a man. We do not think that it is godly for a woman to be an ignorant fool.’
‘But he did not send his daughter, Isolde, to learn heretic knowledge? He took care to protect her,’ Brother Peter said pointedly.
‘I wish he had!’ Isolde interrupted.
‘The lessons were in Arabic or Spanish,’ Ishraq said. ‘Lady Isolde speaks neither. And besides, she was raised to be a Christian lady ruling her lands.’
‘But how would we ever find out?’ Luca asked, almost to himself, going down the aisle to the open doorway, and looking downhill to the harbour where the quietly moving sea with its ugly burden of wre
ckage, looked as if it had never raged inland. ‘How would we discover if the earth had moved and caused the wave? If it happened far out at sea, or even under the sea? If no one was there to see it happen? How could we ever discover the cause?’
Father Benito walked beside him. ‘You know, the people of the village tell a story of a great earthquake that threw down the harbour walls – all this was about a hundred years ago – and then there was a great wave that washed all the boats out to sea and destroyed all the houses two deep back from the harbour. The bell tower of my own church was thrown down when the ground shook. It was rebuilt; we have the stonemason’s costs still in the church records. That’s how I know it to be true.’
Ishraq nodded towards Luca. ‘An earthquake followed by a wave,’ she remarked.
‘A hundred years ago?’ Luca pressed Father Benito. ‘Exactly a hundred?’
‘More,’ he said quietly. ‘The earthquake was in 1348. And after the wave the Black Death came to the village. First the ground shook, then the wave came, then the plague. God forbid that this wave brings the pestilence also.’
‘The Black Death?’ Brother Peter queried.
The priest nodded. ‘It was the worst in Friuli, but they felt it as far away as Rome. It shook this village. I have the accounts of the church rebuilding, which is how I know the dates. It was almost impossible to get the stone masons to repair the tower, for within months of the wave, they were all dead.’
‘I shall write this in my report,’ Luca said. ‘Perhaps we should see it as a warning. Do you think you should store grain, and food? In case a pestilence follows this wave, as it did a hundred years ago?’
Father Benito crossed himself. ‘God forbid,’ he said. ‘For last time they had to dig great plague pits in the graveyard to take the bodies. I wouldn’t want to have to open them again. They buried half the village, more than a hundred people, old and young. And the priest himself died. God spare me.’
‘God help us all,’ Luca said solemnly. ‘Perhaps this is, as they say, the end of days.’ No one answered him, and he turned and went down the hill to the quayside alone.