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I made my way directly to my house and shut myself in there with orders that on no account should any visitor be admitted. They would disobey me if it was someone of rank or wealth, but it was all I could do. All that day my door was opened only twice and that was to Caterina, when she brought me first soup and bread and later some pastries of a kind I recognised. Stefanos had been, she told me, thinking I might be ill, and he had brought them with him. It occurred to me only now that Stefanos himself might be in some danger, through his long employment in Yusuf's Diwan. My doing…
Something there might be among Yusuf's records, if I could come at them, something to give substance to my suspicions. I decided to make the attempt. I waited till after the supper hour, in the hope I would find no one still working there. If I saw signs of any presence I was resolved to retire immediately. I took a dagger with me, one with a short and broad blade, which I thought might be useful if I had to force a door.
The guards were at the gate by which I usually entered and they greeted me with no apparent difference of bearing, and opened to me readily enough, supposing I had forgotten something or intended to work late into the night, a thing I did sometimes after an absence. All was quiet as I crossed the courtyard and mounted the stairway. I lit the lamp on the wall at the begi
I crossed the room, my feet kicking against account books that had fallen to the floor and been disregarded. Yusuf's door on this side was closed with a latch only, easily lifted. There was a similar scene of desolation here. Everything had been turned out and scattered in some close search, for incriminating evidence against him, as I supposed – or against themselves. This, if they had found it, they had borne away.
They had left behind them a scene of ruin, with documents spilled out of their covers and shed over table and floor. I walked over to the room beyond, his sanctum, where he kept his state when there were visitors, or private talks to be held. The heavy oak door swung widely open and there was a similar devastation within, the same litter of documents, the cabinets gaping empty.
It was here, as I stood at the threshold of his i
Always the same form of words because he was fashioned so, never fully at ease when he was too close.
That I would not hear this voice again, no more seek to find some answer to his words about my clothes and my singing, only now came fully home to me. So far I had felt nothing but horror – at the violence done to him, at my part in it. Horror like a morass, a quagmire, leaving no ground to stand, no ground for grief. Now I felt the sobs rise in my throat and I choked and wept for Yusuf, whom I had blamed unjustly for my unhappiness when the reason was in myself. I had blamed my father also for this unhappiness of mine and I wondered now, through my tears, what ruin of his world there had been that had taken him that day to the monastery gate.
It was here that I had known Yusuf and it was here that I mourned him, in the midst of this desolate litter that was all he would leave for memorial. I stood there until my storm of weeping was over and I was a little soothed and could see again. I was turning to leave when the memory came to me, like a message from him, of a day when I had come earlier than expected to his summons and found him in his finery, having just returned from a cavalcade with his fellow-Saracens. I remembered the sumptuous silks he was wearing, the blue and scarlet and gold. He had spoken of this display of power and wealth as causing greater hatred for the Saracens and yet as being caused by this very hatred, in a circle that could only be broken by God's teaching. But by then he was back behind his desk. He had been close to the wall when I entered, bending down as if to gather something he had let fall below the wooden panelling. But there had been nothing on the floor and nothing in his hand as he moved away…
As if in obedience to some whispered command from him, I crossed to the place where he had been and crouched down to look. But there was nothing to see there, only the smooth face of the walnut they had used for the inlay. Still crouching there, I felt along the lower edge of the panelling, along the narrow line where the wood was inset. After some moments my fingers found an irregularity, a smooth boss of wood, smaller than a thumbnail. Pressing on this I heard the faintest of sounds and the panel swung open along the line of the join. Inside the opening thus made were loose sheets of parchment held between covers of stiffened cloth and secured with thin cord. They were numbered on the backs though without other distinction among them.
I took out the first and opened it and found details of sums paid and received with entries in Arabic against them. These would be irregular or unlawful payments of some kind, monies that had to be kept in a separate record, not passing through the official accounts of the Diwan.
The next one I opened was concerned with the providing of Moslem serfs in grant to Christian religious foundations in the region of Palermo.
Such grants of labour, usually renewable after a certain term of years, were greatly sought after by monasteries, especially the richer ones with more land than the monks were able or willing to work themselves, and they had to be paid for in one way or another. There were no records of payments here, which I supposed was the reason why the documents were kept secret.
I might have stopped here, concluding that there was nothing of great interest, but I took up one more and opened it at random. These were not accounts but reports from various sources in Greek and Arabic and some few in Italian. A name sprang out: Wilfred of Aachen; after it another, marked off in parenthesis: Rinaldo Gallicanus. So Wilfred the archivist had more than one name. I remembered his pale face and reddish hair and pedantic use of Latin. It had seemed to me that he kept a watch for eavesdroppers while Atenulf was explaining my mission to Potenza… I closed the door of the panel, heard that faint scraping sound as it fitted into place. I took the documents, still in their cloth cover, and bore them back with me along the passage to my room.
Wilfred's was the name that had caught my eye and I began with him. It seemed he was not German, as all had believed, and as he himself had given out: he was the son of one Stephen Gallicanus, who had been a knight in the following of Rainulf of Alife and one of his closest supporters in the rebellion against King Roger twelve years before.