‘And the gatekeeper says they went out at night.’

‘It was afternoon,’ Isolde insisted.

Luca raised his hand on the groan from the crowd and the single shout: ‘Liar. Dirty liar!’

There was a scuffle at the doorway, as the door banged, and the porter from the west gate came into the church.

‘You tell him,’ they pushed him forward till he arrived before Luca, Father Benito, and Brother Peter,

‘You are?’ Brother Peter dipped his pen in the ink.

‘Porter. Gatekeeper Paolo. I saw the women, and I warned them to be back inside the gates before dusk,’ he said.

‘Was the sun setting as they left?’ Luca asked.

‘It must have been, for I warned them of the curfew.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They said they were going for a walk.’

‘Why should they lie?’ someone shouted. ‘If they were going for a wash? Why not say that?’

‘And they went out as night fell! Why would they do that?’

‘They went out as night was coming, so that no one could see them calling up a storm in the green lake!’

Luca looked at Isolde and saw defiance in her dark blue eyes. She looked as she did when he first met her, a woman against the world, despite her own desire to live at peace in her home. A woman driven to defiance. A woman with no trust in him, nor in any man: a woman at bay.

‘Tell these people,’ he said. Suddenly he broke into Latin, confident that she would understand him but few other people in the church would. ‘Please, please my dearest, trust us with the truth. Tell them that you would not call up a storm. Tell them that you are not a storm-bringer. Ishraq too. Just tell them. For God’s sake, Isolde, we are all in trouble here. I can only ask you questions – you have to save yourself. Tell them what you were doing.’

Slowly, Isolde rose to her feet and stepped down from the choir stalls to face the crowded church ‘I am no storm-bringer,’ she said, speaking simply and loudly so that her words echoed off the stone walls. ‘I am no witch. I am a woman of good repute and good behaviour. I am a woman who does not obey a father, since my father is dead, nor do I obey a husband, since I have no fortune and no man will take me without a dowry. I don’t obey my brother, since he is false and faithless. So you see me as I am – a woman without a man to represent her, a woman alone in the world. But none of this – none of this makes me a bad woman. It makes me an unlucky one. I am a woman who would not knowingly do a wicked act. I cannot prove this to you, you have to trust me, as you trust your mothers and your wives and your sisters. I have to call on you to think of me with generosity, as a good woman of high repute, raised to be a lady in a castle. And my friend here, Ishraq, was raised beside me almost as my sister, she is the same.’