why you summoned him, Agnes.'
'I would not have disturbed you,' she said. 'But I had to.'
'Why?'
'Because of what I found. In this cell…'
And she spoke of family legends: of Orm, who may or may not have sailed with the Conqueror, and Eadgyth, or Edith, the wife he may or may not have found demented and raving in the ruins of an old Saxon church outside York, while William's Norman thugs rampaged across the north of England.
'Do you know why I was called Agnes? It is part of the old story – my mother told me this – in every generation there is an Agnes, so we remember that Eadgyth's church was dedicated to that saint. And it is said that Eadgyth returned to the church later, when she sickened, and her mind failed. Poor Orm had to seek her here again.
'When I ran away from home, I was only ten years old. I had travelled no further than a day's walk from home. I had no idea what shape England was, Harry! The only place I had ever heard of that had anything to do with the family was Eadgyth's church near York. So I made my way here.'
'This is Eadgyth's church?'
'Rebuilt since then – but yes, it is her church.'
'Quite a journey for a child,' Geoffrey murmured.
'I hardened.'
Harry thought there was a whole desperate saga contained in those two words. He was full of guilt.
She whispered, 'I worked here, on the farms. I knew how to shear a sheep. Then I worked for the parish. And, in time, God and Father Arthur granted me the privilege of this, my enclosed life of prayer. My only stipulation was that my cell had to be here, in this corner of the church, on the old foundations.'
Harry guessed, 'Because this was where Eadgyth had hidden.'
'And where she came back to at the end of her life. I know this, Harry, because she scraped an account of her visions into the wall. The lettering is faded and lichen-choked, half-buried by rubble, old-fashioned and hard to decipher – but it is here. And as I dig my trench, I have uncovered it steadily.'
Harry felt a return of that uncomfortable dread, a sense of enclosure. He wanted nothing to do with this antique strangeness. 'I know the story of the man called the Dove,' he said. 'Who will be the spawn of the spider, and so on. And in the last days before the end of the world is due, he must have his head turned west to the Ocean Sea…'
Geoffrey quoted from memory, ''All this I have witnessed / I and my mothers. / Send the Dove west! O, send him west!''
'There is more,' Agnes whispered. 'Orm remembered twelve lines. That is what we have come to know as Eadgyth's Testament. But there is more.'
'More lines scraped in the wall?'
'Yes,' Geoffrey said. 'Ten more lines, Harry. In which Eadgyth records her vision of what would become of the world if the Testament was not fulfilled – of a future in which the Dove turned, not west as he should, but east. I can see you're having trouble believing any of this, Harry. But when I tell you of this hideous future you will see why I summoned you here. Not just for your sister. We have to work out what to do about this. For we cannot let this dreadful future come about. He crossed himself.
Harry felt his whole life hingeing on this moment. He longed to flee from this madness, the woman in the hole, the terrible words scribbled on a wall, the memory of his dying, drunken father. But, as Geoffrey had seen, he had a sense of duty which would not allow him to walk away.
He said impulsively, 'Agnes – never mind prophecies. I still don't understand. What made you do this? Why run away – why throw away your life – why wall yourself up in a cell?'
'For the love of God.'
There must be more. 'And?'
She sighed. 'And because I thought I would be safe,' she said softly. 'If I am in here, far from Oxford, encased in stone, he could not reach me again.'
He thought he understood at last. 'Our father.'
'Yes. It was not until Geoffrey came that I learned he was dead.' She closed her eyes.
'What did he do, Agnes?'
'He was maddened. He was drunk. He didn't know what he was doing. I forgive him; I have prayed for him. But I was ten years old. I feared that if I stayed, if I became a woman, and if his seed was planted in me – I left to save myself, and him, from that terrible sin.'
'Oh, Agnes. I didn't know. You say I protected you. But I failed, I failed-'
'It wasn't your fault, but his. Agnes is the name he gave me. But Agnes was a holy virgin. I am no Agnes.'
Impulsively he pushed his hand through the slit window. Tentatively his sister clasped his fingers, and then he felt the softness of her cheek on his hand.
Later he asked Geoffrey about the trench in the cell. It was Agnes's own grave, Geoffrey said, a grave she scraped every day, for an anchoress was commanded to keep her death before her eyes at all times. Agnes would live and die in her stone box, and when her life was done she would lower herself into her self-dug tomb.
VI
Grace Bigod and Friar James had come to Seville to meet a man called Diego Ferron, a Dominican friar with contacts in the court of the Spanish monarchs. He was attached to a monastery outside the walls of the city, and had offices, it was said, in the palace complex of the Alcazar itself.
Ferron kept them waiting for days after their arrival. The date he suggested for their meeting, he told them in his note, was 'suitable for our joint purpose'. James didn't know what this meant.
On their tenth day in Seville, Grace and James were at last summoned to Ferron's presence, at a private house in an old part of the city. When they arrived early at his house, they were led by a barefoot servant through a complicated archway into a garden, where water bubbled languidly from a fountain into a pool full of carp. The house was clearly Moorish, presumably abandoned by its owner on the fall of the city more than two hundred years ago. At least the Christian owners of this place had taken care to preserve what they had taken, though the furniture, lumpy wooden chairs, benches and low tables, would not have looked out of place in the home of a well- to-do Englishman, and walls which still bore Arabic inscriptions in praise of Allah were now studded with crucifixes and statues of the Virgin.
Friar Diego Ferron walked in briskly, introduced himself, ensured they had been served with tea and sweetmeats, and sat upright on a severe wooden chair. His habit was adorned with a magnificent black and white cowl made of some very fine wool. He was perhaps forty, his tonsured hair jet black and well groomed. He was a handsome man, his features sharp, his eyes brown, and his skin, shining with oils, was so dark that if not for his vestments James might have thought he was a Moor himself.
James was uneasy in his presence. When the brothers in Buxton had learned he was to meet Dominican friars in Spain, they had laughed. 'They're an odd lot, those Dominicans,' one comfortable old friar had said. Saint Dominic, fired by his experience of the Albigensian heresy in France, had dedicated his order solely to the task of fighting heresy in all its forms. 'And they're worst of all in Spain. Mad as a bat.'
Ferron did not strike James as mad, but businesslike. Certainly he did not waste any time on pleasantries.
He focused his attentions on Grace. 'First let me be sure you understand my role in the court of our glorious monarchs, Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile.' He spoke fluent Latin. 'You wrote to court to request an audience with Tomas de Torquemada. The friar is a Dominican colleague of mine, and was confessor of the Queen.'
'Yes-'
'Friar Torquemada is now working with the Inquisition. The Queen's confessor is now Friar Hernando de Talavera, a Hieronymite. Pious, ascetic – a good man. The second of the Queen's chief prelates is Cardinal de
