**

He forced her along the gallery that ran high up above the floor of the Grand Chamber. It was the best place to view the pattern of the glazed tiles made by the skilled craftsmen from Byzantium on the floor below.

Now, although she was not close enough to the parapet to see, worshippers would be kneeling on them, the pope himself would be standing on them with his arms raised to receive the Eucharist, the choir would sing the responses while standing on them, and an ironic and misplaced holiness would fill the stone vault with its hymns.

Incense was spreading an intoxicating languor as it floated upwards to the gallery. To recall the wayward soul to the ineluctable passage of time a bell sounded, emptying with diminishing overtones into the empyrean.

Escrick was immune to everything but Hildegard. ‘I can’t wait.’ His grasp tightened as he dragged her to a standstill and forced his mouth over hers. The heat from his body carried a powerful stench of raw meat, horse dung and his own personal smell. She tried not to breathe it in. He lifted his mouth from hers long enough to snarl, ‘Shut your eyes as you did in Florence. Surrender to me. Say my name.’ He squeezed one of her breasts but she refused to cry out at the pain. ‘Say it!’ he repeated.

‘Escrick –’ she gasped.

‘Tell me you want me.’ He squeezed again.

‘I want you – ’

‘And only me.’

‘Escrick, I’m fainting – ’

‘Say you want only me.’

‘Only you.’ She was gasping with pain and rage and the violent desire to wrench from out of his grasp but he was overpoweringly strong, no match for any but the most muscle-bound champion of the militia.

He backed her against the wall. Nearby, further along, was a door. It was ajar. As he pressed against her, she moved in his embrace and when he dragged her skirt up she slid along the wall, with Escrick, breathing hard, mirroring her moves until they were close to it. Taking him by surprise, she suddenly wrenched herself from his under his weight and hurled herself through the opening. Putting her shoulder to the door, she slammed it hard into his face as he sprang after her.

He yowled like a wounded beast. Curses followed. It was a moment or two before he recovered sufficiently to throw his full weight against it.

By the time it flew open and he burst after her, she was running up the stairs and into a labyrinth of narrow passages and arcades. Ducking and weaving under the roof supports she ran blindly until, gasping for breath, for life, she squeezed through a gap between two pillars and found herself in an open gully on the outside of the building.

She flattened herself against the stonework and held her breath. Somewhere in the corridor came the clatter of Escrick’s mail boots on the stone paving, followed by a bang as a door ddown below was flung back, more footsteps, this time fading, and then the sound of another door opening, distantly. His footsteps receded.

She glanced round. The last people to walk the gulley must have been the masons as they put the finishing touches to the gargoyles on the roof more than a decade ago.

A cacophony of screeches started up when she made a move. An eagle owl with huge wings outspread was streaking down towards her with its hooked beak darting for her eyes. She pulled her hood over her face and beat wildly to deflect it with her spare hand then began to crawl slowly along the gulley towards a niche behind one of the stone gargoyles. More hawks began to circle the towers of the palace with inhuman screeches at the interloper.

She dare not look down but crouched in terror as the birds corkscrewed into the air then dropped towards her, only at the last moment spinning away with baffled cries as they understood this new prey was unreachable. Their endless screams would surely draw attention to a human interloper in their eyrie. When one of the larger hawks stooped to attack she reached into her sleeve and threw a morsel of bread, earning enough time to crawl further along the gully into a cavity underneath the stone-work. The wind grasped and tuckered and tried to loosen her grip but little by little she edged out of sight of the birds.

There was no sound of Escrick climbing onto the roof. He would not expect her to have risked climbing outside. He would be searching the labyrinth of passages in the tower.

Somehow she forced herself to crawl further along until she found a space out of sight of anyone climbing onto the roof. With the wind still blustering at her robes she tucked the spare fabric into her belt and crouched down to plan a way of escape.

How long would she have to remain here? She would have to sit it out until it seemed safe enough to return inside. A sob of fear at the height of the building blurred her thoughts for a moment but she fought it back. She would not fall if she was careful and it might be some time before Escrick brought help to search her out, some long time before they thought of looking up here for her.

A leering gargoyle with tangled locks provided a vantage point from behind which she could peer down into the main courtyard and yet remain out of sight. As she reached for a handhold, a piece of stone broke off and she saw it go spinning over the edge of the gutter to fall without a sound into the yard far below.

**

Cramped and cold and fearing to move but thankfully still unseen, she watched the comings and goings in the courtyard. Eventually, the recognisable shape of Escrick Fitzjohn appeared, accompanied by a figure wearing a long, black cloak. It must be Athanasius. Someone had set him free.

Both men walked slowly along, staring upwards as if trying to catch sight of a movement that would reveal her hiding place to them. A group of men-at-arms joined them. She was frozen, both with the cold and with the more abstract feeling of fear. She told herself that if she kept still long enough they might go on thinking she had found a hiding place inside and she prayed that they would lead themselves on a wild goose chase and search the hundreds of chambers in the palace. They would probably imagine no woman would dare climb out onto the roof of such a frighteningly high edifice.

The hawks had lost interest in her. If she kept still enough they would forget she was here at all.

She watched the men below through a chink in the sculpted stone as they walked the entire length of the yard with their attention fixed up towards the spires of the roof. Then she watched them walk back again. A crowd of onlookers gathered. Everyone was staring upwards and pointing. She saw Sir John Fitzjohn’s colours down there. No sign of Sir John himself.

Eventually, the men moved off and entered la Grande Chapelle for the next office, followed by a few onlookers. The day shortened. Shadows filled the corners of the yard. Eventually, a posse of riders rounded the corner of the stable yard. They looked like toys, so small and distant were they,

It turned out to be quite a large retinue, prepared for travel by the look of the sumpter wagon that followed. She stared more intently. A litter was slung between two horses. The cardinal on a high-stepping grey was surely Cardinal Fondi. The litter must be carrying Carlotta and her daughter.

When the cavalcade reached the gatehouse a figure in white stepped out to meet them and, with a wave of one hand, watched the horses jostle under the arch onto the lane outside. She daren’t even imagine it was Hubert.

The cavalcade continued to ride out through the walls. She was high enough to see them take the road on the other side going east. Fondi’s pennants fluttered above the wall of the enclave for some distance. He was travelling away, then. Not back to the villa on the other side of the bridge - but taking the road to Urbino.