Luca flushed at the boy’s insight. ‘I had no doubts when I heard you speak. I had no doubts then. My father was taken by the slavers when I was only fourteen. I long to see him again. My mother was taken too. Sometimes I dream of them and the childhood that I had with them. Sometimes even now I cannot bear that they are lost to me, cannot bear to think that they may be suffering. I was helpless to save them then, I am helpless now.’

Johann was silent for a moment, his brilliant blue eyes searching Luca’s face. ‘You will see them,’ he said gently. ‘You will see them again. I know it.’

Luca put his hand on his heart, as if to hold down his grief. ‘I pray for it,’ he said.

‘And I will pray for you,’ Johann said. ‘And tomorrow morning at dawn, we will walk on.’

‘To Bari?’ Luca confirmed. ‘You will allow me to guide you and help you to Bari?’

‘As God wills,’ Johann said cheerfully.

In the top bedroom of the inn Ishraq and Isolde were packing their few clothes in a saddlebag, for the journey on the next day. Isolde twisted back her plait of fair hair. ‘D’you think the landlady would send up a bath and hot water?’

Ishraq shook her head. ‘I already asked. She is boiling our linen in her washday copper and she was displeased at having to get that out for us. She washes her own things once a month. They bathe only once a year, and that on Good Friday. She was scandalised when I said we wanted more than a jug of water for washing.’

Isolde laughed out loud. ‘No! So what are we to do?’

‘There’s a little lake in the woods outside the west gate – the stable boy told me that the lads go there to swim in summer. Could you bear to wash in cold water?’

‘Better than nothing,’ Isolde agreed. ‘Shall we go now?’

‘Before the sun goes down,’ Ishraq agreed with a shiver. ‘And whether she likes it or not I shall have some linen towels from the landlady to dry us off, and our clean clothes to wear.’

Discreetly, the two girls watched Luca talking to Johann on the quayside, checked that Freize was helping in the kitchen and Brother Peter studying in the dining room and then went up the cobbled steps to the market square, and out through the west gate. The porter watched them go. ‘Gate closes at dusk!’ he shouted.

‘We’ll be back before then,’ Ishraq called back. ‘We’re just going for a walk.’

He shook his head at the peculiarities of ladies and let them go, distracted by the stable boy from the inn. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ the gatekeeper demanded.

‘Afternoon off,’ the lad replied.

‘Well the gate closes . . .’