They came to her old cell, still fixed on the wall of the church. It was strange to Agnes to peer on it from outside. It looked so tiny, yet once it had been her whole world.

But it had changed. The squint, the one tiny window, had been stopped up with loose brick.

Arthur said regretfully, ‘I’m afraid we have to contain her. The noises she makes are sometimes rather disturbing. The screams, you know. The yelling in half a dozen languages. Some of my flock believe she is possessed, not by the Holy Spirit but by His malevolent counterpart. Oh, we miss you, Agnes! There’s no other word for it. My flock were drawn to your piety and your patience. They loved you in a way they will never love her.’

Somewhere in Agnes’s bruised heart, she was touched. She had a bit of parchment with her and some charcoal. She scribbled, But she more interesting. True word of God in her rambling. Truth that underlies the universe. Chaos of it all.

He looked at her strangely. ‘You have changed. You have been hurt.’

Hurt long before I went into cell. Won’t go back. Other plans.

He nodded, accepting, regretful, wary.

On impulse Agnes bent and pulled one brick out of the stopped-up squint.

There was a rat-like scrabbling, and a single pale eye was pressed to the hole, its pupil huge from the darkness within. ‘You. You hell-spawned witch! I should have destroyed you while I had the chance—’

Agnes rammed the brick back in the hole.

‘You see what I mean about stopping her up,’ said the priest, troubled.

Better this than Inquisition. By the time she’s got her grave dug out she’ll find peace.

‘I pray you are right,’ said the priest.

Agnes and Arthur walked away from the church, while the verdant life of the English summer rustled and swarmed around them. But if she listened hard, Agnes could still make out the cries of the woman trapped in the brick cell.

‘I am Grace Bigod. My ancestors fought with the Conqueror, took the Cross, and built a holy kingdom in the Outremer. I do not deserve this - not this! Let me out, oh, let me out...’

Afterword

Afterword

I’m very grateful to Adam Roberts for his expert assistance with the Latin of the Incendium Dei cryptogram.

A general history of Islamic Spain is Richard Fletcher’s Moorish Spain (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1992). I have used Fletcher, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2001 edition), as references for variant spellings of personal names, both Moorish and Christianised.