The priest crossed himself. ‘About twenty people,’ he said. ‘And half a dozen of our own children. It is a terrible blow but this is a community of people who experience terrible blows, very often. In a bad plague year we would lose that number. If there is a storm which catches the fishermen at sea we might lose a ship or even two, five or six fathers lost at sea and five or six families thrown into grief and want. When the Black Death came through here a century ago, the village was emptied – half of them dead in a month, the fields barren of crops because there was no one to plant, the fish spawned in the sea without fishermen! God sends these things to try us; but this week He has sent us a trial indeed.’

‘A curse on them not a blessing!’ they heard a woman pantingly scream, running up the stone steps, out of the little town gate, and then ploughing breathlessly up the hill towards them, her gown bunched up in her fist, her hair wildly loose, her face ugly with grief. ‘Let Satan drag them down to hell! You should have thrown their bodies over the cliff, not given them a grave in sacred ground. Curse them all!’

‘What’s this?’ the priest spread his arms wide and intercepted her as if she were a runaway horse, halfway up the hill. ‘What’s this, Mistress Ricci? What are you doing running around like this? For shame, Mrs Ricci! Calm yourself!’

She glared wildly around, it was obvious that she hardly saw him. ‘They should be flung in the sea not buried with rites!’ she cried. ‘Beware. They are the storm-bringers! You are honouring our murderers! Demons! Every one of them!’

Half a dozen people, some coming down the hill from the simple funeral, others attracted from inside the village by the noise at the gate, started to gather around. ‘Storm-bringers?’ somebody repeated, a note of fear in their voice. ‘Storm-bringers?’

‘Devils,’ she said flatly. ‘These false children, saying that they were on a crusade! Weren’t they storm-bringers all along? Pretending to a holy quest, just to trick us? Were they mortals at all, that they appeared here without so much as a father or mother between them? Led by a boy as beautiful as an angel but with strange sea-green eyes? And we gave them bread, and meat and cheese and they unleashed this horror on us? And now my son is missing at sea and my husband too, and the storm-bringers have destroyed our peace. And you dare to bless them? And bury them like Christians? Giving them our ground just as we gave them our own kin?’

The priest exchanged one anxious glance with Luca.

‘What is she talking about?’ Luca asked quickly.

‘This is a fishing town, dependent on the sea for their livelihood, dependent on good weather for their safety,’ Father Benito answered him. ‘They cling to the belief that there are storm-bringers who can make spells and call up bad weather.’