‘But could you see them again? After they put you into your novitiate?’

‘Yes. Bless them, they came to the abbey church most mornings, twice on Sundays. I would see them standing at the back and looking for me, when I was a choir boy too small to see over the choir stall. I had to stand on a kneeler so that I could see them in the congregation. My mother came to visit me every month and always brought me something from home, a sprig of lavender or a couple of eggs. I know how much she missed me. I was her only child. God Himself only knows how much I missed her.’

‘Did she not want to keep you at home, despite your father’s ambition?’ Isolde asked, thinking of the delightful boy that Luca must have been.

He hesitated. ‘There was something else,’ he admitted. ‘Another reason for them to send me away. You see – they were quite old when they had me. They had prayed for a son for years and God had not given them a child, so there were many people in the village who were surprised when I was born.’

‘Surprised?’ she queried. The cobblestones were slippery; she skidded for a moment and he caught her up. The two of them paused as if struck by the other’s touch, then they walked together, in step, their long stride matching easily together.

‘To tell you the truth, it was worse than that,’ Luca said honestly. ‘I don’t like to speak of it. It was an awful time. The village said that I was a changeling, a child given to my parents, not made by them. People said that they had found me on their doorstep, or perhaps in the woods. People called me a f . . .’ He could not bring himself to say the word. ‘A f . . .’

‘A faerie child?’ she asked, her voice very low, conscious of his painful embarrassment.

He nodded as if he were confessing to a crime.

‘There’s no shame in that,’ she said stoutly. ‘People say the most ridiculous things, and ignorant people long to believe in magic rather than an ordinary explanation..’

‘We were shamed,’ he admitted. ‘There was a wood near to our house, on our own land, that they called a faerie wood. They said that my mother had gone there, desperate to have a child, and that she had lain with a faerie lord. They said that she gave birth to me and passed me off to my father as a mortal boy. Then, when I grew up and could learn languages, and understand numbers in the blink of an eye, they all said that it proved that I had wisdom beyond the making of mortals.’

Isolde’s face was filled with pity as she turned to the handsome young man. ‘People can be so cruel. They thought you the child of a faerie lord?’

He turned his head away and nodded in silence.