Free Changeling by Philippa Gregory Page B

what she fears for me. I don’t know what I fear for myself. In truth, I think no-one knows what is happening here. Isn’t this what you are here to find out?’
    ‘Things seem to have gone very badly wrong since you came here.’
    She bowed her head in silence for a moment. ‘Now that is true,’ she conceded. ‘But it is nothing that I have deliberately done. I don’t know what is happening here. I regret it very much. It causes me, me personally, great pain. I am puzzled. I am . . . lost.’
    ‘Lost?’ Luca repeated the word that seemed freighted with loneliness.
    ‘Lost,’ she confirmed.
    ‘You don’t know how to rule the abbey?’
    Her head bowed down as if she were praying again. Then a small silent nod of her head admitted the truth of it: that she did not know how to command the abbey. ‘Not like this,’ she whispered. ‘Not when they say they are possessed, not when they behave like madwomen.’
    ‘You have no vocation,’ Luca said very quietly to her. ‘Do you wish yourself on the outside of these walls, even now?’
    She breathed out a tiny sigh of longing. Luca could almost feel her desire to be free, her sense that she should be free. Absurdly, he thought of the bee that Freize had released to fly out into the sunshine, he thought that every form of life, even the smallest bee, longs to be free.
    ‘How can this abbey hope to thrive with a Lady Abbess who wishes herself free?’ he asked her sternly. ‘You know that we have to serve where we have sworn to be.’
    ‘You don’t.’ She rounded on him almost as if she were angry. ‘For you were sworn to be a priest in a small country monastery; but here you are – free as a bird. Riding around the country on the best horses that the Church can give you, followed by a squire and a clerk. Going where you want and questioning anyone. Free to question me – even authorised to question me, who lives here and serves here and prays here, and does nothing but sometimes secretly wish . . .’
    ‘It is not for you to pass comment on us,’ Brother Peter intervened. ‘The Pope himself has authorised us. It is not for you to ask questions.’
    Luca let it go, secretly relieved that he did not have to admit to the Lady Abbess his joy at being released from his monastery, his delight in his horse, his unending insatiable curiosity.
    She tossed her head at Brother Peter’s ruling. ‘I would expect you to defend him,’ she remarked dismissively. ‘I would expect you to stick together, as men do, as men always do.’
    She turned to Luca. ‘Of course, I have thought that I am utterly unsuited to be a Lady Abbess. But what am I to do? My father’s wishes were clear, my brother orders everything now. My father wished me to be Lady Abbess and my brother has ordered that I am. So here I am. It may be against my wishes, it may be against the wishes of the community. But it is the command of my brother and my father. I will do what I can. I have taken my vows. I am bound here till death.’
    ‘You swore fully?’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘You shaved your head and renounced your wealth?’
    A tiny gesture of the veiled head warned him that he had caught her in some small deception. ‘I cut my hair, and I put away my mother’s jewels,’ she said cautiously. ‘I will never be bare-headed again, I will never wear her sapphires.’
    ‘Do you think that these manifestations of distress and trouble are caused by you?’ he asked bluntly.
    Her little gasp revealed her distress at the charge. Almost, she recoiled from what he was saying, then gathered her courage and leaned towards him. He caught a glimpse of intense dark blue eyes. ‘Perhaps. It is possible. You would be the one to discover such a thing. You have been appointed to discover such things, after all. Certainly I don’t wish things as they are. I don’t understand them, and they hurt me too. It is not just the sisters, I too am—’
    ‘You are?’
    ‘Touched,’ she said quietly.
    Luca, his head