Changeling (Preview)

Changeling - Chapter 2

THE CASTLE OF LUCRETILI,

JUNE 1453

At about the time that Luca was being questioned, a young woman was seated in a rich chair in the chapel of her family home, the Castle of Lucretili, about twenty miles north-east of Rome, her dark blue eyes fixed on the rich crucifix, her fair hair twisted in a careless plait under a black veil, her face strained and pale. A candle in a rose crystal bowl flickered on the altar as the priest moved in the shadows. She knelt, her hands clasped tightly together, praying fervently for her father, who was fighting for his life in his bedchamber, refusing to see her.

The door at the back of the chapel opened and her brother came in quietly, saw her bowed head and went to kneel beside her. She looked sideways at him, a handsome young man, dark-haired, dark-browed, his face stern with grief.

‘He’s gone, Isolde, he’s gone. May he rest in peace.’

Her white face crumpled and she put her hands over her eyes. ‘He didn’t ask for me? Not even at the end?’

‘He didn’t want you to see him in pain. He wanted you to remember him as he had been, strong and healthy. But his last words were to send you his blessing, and his last thoughts were of your future.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he would not give me his blessing.’

Giorgio turned from her and spoke to the priest, who hurried at once to the back of the chapel. Isolde heard the big bell start to toll; everyone would know that the great crusader, the Lord of Lucretili, was dead.

‘I must pray for him,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ll bring his body here?’

He nodded.

‘I will share the vigil tonight,’ she decided. ‘I will sit beside him now that he is dead though he didn’t allow it while he lived.’ She paused. ‘He didn’t leave me a letter? Nothing?’

‘His will,’ her brother said softly. ‘He planned for you. At the very end of his life he was thinking of you.’

She nodded, her dark blue eyes filling with tears, then she clasped her hands together, and prayed for her father’s soul.

Isolde spent the first long night of her father’s death in a silent vigil beside his coffin, which lay in the family chapel. Four of his men-at-arms stood, one at each point of the compass, their heads bowed over their broadswords, the light from the tall wax candles glittering on the holy water that had been sprinkled on the coffin lid. Isolde, dressed in white, knelt before the coffin all night long until dawn when the priest came to say Prime, the first office of prayers of the day. Only then did she rise up and let her ladies-in-waiting help her to her room to sleep, until a message from her brother told her that she must get up and show herself, it was time for dinner and the household would want to see their lady.

She did not hesitate. She had been raised to do her duty by the great household and she had a sense of obligation to the people who lived on the lands of Lucretili. Her father, she knew, had left the castle and the lands to her; these people were in her charge. They would want to see her at  the head of the table, they would want to see her enter the great hall. Even if her eyes were red from crying over the loss of a very beloved father, they would expect her to dine with them. Her father himself would have expected it. She would not fail them or him.

There was a sudden hush as she entered the great hall where the servants were sitting at trestle tables, talking quietly, waiting for dinner to be served. More than two hundred men-at-arms, servants and grooms filled the hall, where the smoke from the central fire coiled up to the darkened beams of the high ceiling.