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—’