‘A woman who wants to die with her sheets tidy,’ his wife answered him crossly. ‘If it was the last thing in the world, I’d want to be sure that my sheets were tidy. I heard the most terrible groaning noise and I thought straight away that the best place I could be was in my laundry room. I was tucked in there, heart beating pit-a-pat, when I heard the water banging into the house. I sorted my linen and I felt the cold water seeping under the door like an enemy. But I just kept arranging the linen, and sang a little song. Is it very bad in the village?’

‘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.