‘As bad as a plague year, but come all at once,’ the innkeeper said. ‘Your friend Isabella is missing and her little girl. Like a plague year, a terrible year, but all the deaths done in an afternoon, in a moment, in a cruel wave.’

The woman glanced out into the yard where the horses were drowned in their stalls, and the dog limp and wet like a black rag at the end of his chain, and then she turned her face from the window as if she did not want to see.

‘Hard times,’ she said. ‘Terrible times. What do they think it means, the sea rushing onto the land like this? Did Father Benito say anything?’

Everyone turned to Brother Peter. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what it means,’ he said. ‘I thought I was witnessing a miracle, the parting of the waters – now I think I saw the work of Satan. Satan in his terrible power, standing like a wall of water between the children of God and Jerusalem.’

‘Perhaps,’ Luca said coming in the kitchen door. ‘Or perhaps it was neither good nor evil. Perhaps it was just another thing that we don’t understand. It feels like our punishment for sin is to live in a world that is filled with things that we don’t understand, and ruled by an unseen God. I know nothing. I can’t answer you. I am a fool in a disaster, and I have lost my dearest friend in the world.’

Quietly, Isolde reached out and took his hand. ‘I’m sure everything will be all right,’ she said helplessly.

‘But how could a loving God ever take Freize?’ he asked her. ‘How could such a thing happen? And in only a moment? When he saved us and was going to help others? And how shall I live without him?’

As darkness fell they got the fire lit in the kitchen and they took off some of their wet clothes to be dried before it. Most of their goods, their clothes, the precious manuscripts and the writing desk had gone down with the ship. The innkeeper’s wife found an old gown for Ishraq and belted it around her narrow waist with a rope.

‘I have your mother’s jewels safely sewn into my chemise,’ Ishraq whispered to Isolde.

She shook her head. ‘Rich in a flood is not rich at all. But thank you for keeping them safe.’

Ishraq shrugged. ‘You’re right. We can’t hire another Freize, not if I had the jewels of Solomon.’

People from the village who had been washed out of their homes came to the inn and ate their dinners at the kitchen table. There was a cheese that someone had been storing in a high loft, and some sea-washed ham from the chimney. Someone had brought some bread from the only baker in the village whose shop stood higher up the hill, beyond the market square and whose oven was still lit. They drank some wine from bottles which were bobbing around the cellar, and then the villagers went back to their comfortless homes and Brother Peter, Luca, Isolde and Ishraq wrapped themselves up in their damp clothes and slept on the kitchen floor, with the innkeeper and his wife, while the rest of the house dripped mournfully all around them. Luca listened to the water falling from the timbers to the puddles on the stone floor all night, and woke at dawn to go out and look for Freize in the calm waters of the grey sea.