‘Lord love you and bless you,’ the landlady said. ‘And him a gentleman from Rome and everything damp still.’

‘It’s fine,’ Ishraq assured her. She took their two bowls of stew and some rough bread and started for the stairs. Freize held the door open for her.

‘What did he say to you?’ he asked her quietly as she went past him.

Her head came up. ‘What did who say?’

‘The infidel nobleman. He spoke to you in his foreign language. He took you aside to the boat, when you were carrying his package for him. I saw you go with him, but I have no skill in languages. But I saw him speak quietly. I didn’t know what he said to you – nor what you said to him?’

‘I didn’t understand him,’ she said quickly. ‘He spoke too fast.’

‘So what did you reply?’

‘That I couldn’t understand him.’

There was a second, a split second when Freize saw her dark eyes slide away from him, and he knew that she was lying. ‘Seems to be an important man,’ he said easily.

‘Very learned, from what he was saying to Luca,’ she said indifferently, and went from the room and started to climb the stairs.

‘Are you serving dinner, or flirting with the young lady?’ the landlady demanded from her place by the blazing fire where she was spooning fat over a roasting duck on the spit.

‘Flirting,’ Freize replied instantly. ‘Firstly with the young lady and now – thank the lord she has gone – I can start on my greater quarry: yourself. Shall we go to your laundry room? Shall we say to hell with the duck and will you lock me in and ravish me among the sheets?’

The lord from Rome ate better than he could have hoped in a village recovering from a disaster, and pushed back his chair and bit into a fresh apple. Luca, and Brother Peter arrived with the fruits and sweetmeats to stand before the dining room table and report as best they could about the Crusade, about the wave, about the slaving galley, and waited for his opinion.

He sat at his ease, in a robe of beautiful dark blue cloth but with the hood over his head so that his face was in shadow. ‘I’ve heard of this Plato you speak of,’ he said. ‘And I’ve read him. But only in Greek. We have a manuscript in Rome but it’s an imperfect copy. They had a better one in our library in Constantinople, but that’s now in Muslim hands with the rest of the wealth of Christendom, all our great library now owned by the infidel. Brother Peter, you can give me a copy of what the infidel said.’

Brother Peter nodded his head. He did not explain that the copy had been made by Ishraq.

‘And now I hear you are travelling with two ladies?’ the lord said. ‘They arrived with you, and they are still here?’