Fools' Gold (36 page)

Luca nodded. ‘The bleeding coins made no real difference,’ he said. ‘They were the flaw in the Nacaris’ work. But the Nacaris would have been unveiled by us and reported.’

‘And then the price of the nobles collapses.’ Ishraq was thinking aloud with Luca. ‘As soon as everyone knows they are forged. As soon as we are arrested.’

‘And everyone wants to sell, and the Doge sets a tiny price, a price for scrap metal.’

‘And everyone sells; but Milord commands us to buy,’ Ishraq said. She tapped her hand on the table as she suddenly realised what she was saying. ‘Because he must know that some of the nobles, are good. Some of them will be old coins from England, they will be good. We tested them, we know that they are good. Perhaps all of the coins that came from the Calais mint were good. And if we buy up all of them, good and bad together, then some of them will be worth six times the price that we pay for them.’

‘And we will have made Milord a small fortune,’ Luca breathed.

Brother Peter bowed his head. ‘The Church,’ he said. ‘We will have made a small fortune for the Church. We must be glad of it. It is holy work to make a fortune for the Church. These have been dark days but perhaps we have done the right thing.’

‘But the Ottomans . . .’ Ishraq said slowly.

Luca switched his gaze to her. ‘What about them?’

‘They are sending back the bleeding nobles, and they are accepting a reduced tribute. They believe, that they were paid in worthless coins. They have been cheated of their tribute, they have been hugely cheated of the fee they draw from the conquered lands. They are settling for a reduced fee this year.’

‘They should not have it, they should not collect it in the first place!’ Brother Peter burst out. ‘They deserve to be cheated. It is God’s work to cheat them!’

Ishraq ignored him, she looked at Luca. ‘Milord has struck a powerful blow at the very heart of the Ottoman Empire,’ she said. ‘If this is his crusade he has had a powerful victory thanks to you. They may have won Constantinople; but this year they are much the poorer.’

Luca nodded. ‘Bayeed is poorer too,’ he said. ‘He rejected the ransom but some of the coins must have been good.’ He paused. ‘And my father suffers for it,’ he said. ‘My father suffers for this brilliant trick, and so do so many others.’ He shook his head. ‘So many, many others.’

Freize looked from one to another. ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked into the silence.

Nobody spoke and then slowly the four young people realised that there would be orders. One by one they looked towards Brother Peter. ‘I know that when our work here is successfully concluded we have to ride north,’ Brother Peter volunteered. ‘I am to open the orders later, but we are to set out northerly.’

‘And what’s in the orders then?’ Freize asked bitterly. ‘For I don’t think we can bear to succeed again like this. Luca has lost his father, Isolde has lost her fortune, and we have sickened ourselves of Venice.’

Ishraq rose from the table and opened the shutters. A cold morning light came into the room, making the candles look tawdry. Isolde blew them out.

‘We have completed our work here?’ Luca looked older in the grey light from the windows. ‘Another successful mission?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Our enemies cheated of their money, some people made bankrupt, my father still enslaved, his heart broken, and I am disowned by him. He denied me. He called me a changeling and dishonoured my mother and me. We have accomplished all that Milord wanted? We can leave? Our work is done? We should be happy?’

‘Often, it is hard,’ Brother Peter said quietly to the younger man. ‘You are walking a solitary path in hard country. Often a victory does not feel like victory. There is a great work of which we are only a small part. We cannot tell what part we play. We have to trust that there is a great cause that we serve in our own small way.’

Luca bowed his head over his clasped hands and closed his eyes as if he were praying for courage.

‘And I wonder where the alchemists have gone,’ Isolde said, speaking for the first time since Luca had called them all into the room. Luca raised his head and looked at her. ‘I wonder where they have been ordered to go,’ Isolde said. ‘For they have their patron, who gives them orders, just as we have Milord.’

There was a silence as Isolde, and then all the others, realised what she had said.

‘They have a patron that they don’t know,’ she went on, wonderingly. ‘He commanded them to come here and to make the counterfeit coins, he commanded them to make the alchemy coins. He ordered that they should find the secret of life. He sent them here, and then Milord sent us after them.’

Slowly, Luca rose to his feet and went to the windows. There was a little paler strip of cloud to the east where dawn was beginning to break.

‘They said they had a patron that was no friend,’ Ishraq supplemented. ‘They never saw his face but he sent them orders, and gave them the recipe for the false nobles. He gave them the chests of the good nobles too. He told them to make a market for the coins and then swell it with forgeries.’

‘Do you think that it was perhaps Milord who commanded them?’ Luca asked, speaking almost idly, not turning back to the room but staring out of the window at the silvery canal and the black cormorants sitting on the water and then suddenly folding their wings and plunging below for fish. ‘Do you think that Milord ordered both the counterfeiters and those that were to unveil them? Did he command both the hind and the hounds. Do you think he played both sides at once?’

‘Perhaps to him it is a game.’ Isolde came and stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Like the cups and ball that Jacinta played. Perhaps Milord has quick hands too, nobody can see what he is doing till the end of the game. Perhaps he has cheated us all.’

They rode out of Venice heading north, the warm spring sun on their right-hand side. Brother Peter led the way with Luca behind him, Isolde at his side. Behind them came Freize and Ishraq, and the little donkey heavily laden followed Freize’s big cob Rufino. Another donkey came behind the first, also carrying sacks of gold nobles. Some of them were rusting away inside the leather purses, but in every rusting coin there was a heart of solid gold. Milord’s great gamble would pay off.

Everyone was happy to be leaving the city behind them. Brother Peter was glad to be in his robes again and not living a lie, Ishraq was revelling in the freedom of being on the road and not cooped up as a Venetian lady companion, Isolde was setting off to her godfather’s son with renewed determination, and Luca was heading for his next inquiry with a sense that the world was filled with mystery – even his own mission puzzled him.

‘Are you glad to leave Venice?’ he asked Isolde.

‘It is the most beautiful city I have ever seen,’ she said. ‘But it has a darker side. Do you know I saw the strangest thing as we were going in the ferry to fetch the horses?’

‘What did you see?’ he asked, eager to be distracted from his own sense of failure and loss.

‘I thought I saw a child,’ she said seriously. ‘Swimming in the water, after our boat. I nearly called out for us to stop. A little child coming after us, but then I saw it was tiny, no bigger than a little fish, but swimming and keeping up with the ship.’

Luca felt himself freeze. ‘What d’you think it was?’ he asked, trying to sound careless. ‘That’s odd.’

She looked at him. ‘I assumed I had seen a pale-coloured fish and made a mistake. There could be nothing in the lagoon like a tiny person?’

He contained his own shiver of superstition, and leaned towards her to put his hand over hers. ‘I won’t let anything hurt you,’ he promised her. ‘Nothing can come after us. And there couldn’t be anything like that in the waters.’

Trustingly she let his hand rest on hers, slowly she smiled at him. ‘I feel safe with you,’ she said. ‘And at least Venice taught me to stand up for myself.’

He laughed. ‘Will you protect me, Isolde?’

She was radiant. ‘I will,’ she promised.

‘And did you learn to choose the one you love?’ he asked her very quietly.

‘Did you?’ she whispered. ‘Do you even know who you chose?’

Luca gasped at her teasing, and laughed aloud, glancing back to see that no one was in earshot.

Behind them, completely deaf to their low-voiced conversation, Freize was wordlessly delighted to be reunited with his horse. Gently, he pulled Rufino’s thick mane, and patted his neck, and sometimes leaned forwards to stroke his ears. ‘You would not believe it,’ he remarked to the horse. ‘No roads! No fields! No forage nor meadows, not even a grass verge for you to have a quiet graze. “What sort of a city do you call this?” I asked them. They could not answer me. For sure, a city that has no room for horses cannot thrive. You must have missed me. Indeed, I missed you.’

The donkey behind him was dawdling. Freize turned in the saddle and gave it a little admonitory whistle.

‘The dross of the coins is rusting away,’ Ishraq observed, riding alongside him. ‘It is dripping from the bags as we go. At this rate we will be left with saddlebags of gold.’

Freize was distracted from his conversation with Rufino. ‘He’s a clever man, that Milord,’ he said. ‘What an engine to set in motion! Devious.’

‘He’s made himself a fortune, but I think his main aim was to cheat the Ottomans,’ Ishraq observed. ‘And in this round of the battle between him and Radu Bey, I think he has won.’

‘Because they were forced to accept only a third of the tribute?’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘But best of all for him would be – don’t you think? – that he made fools of them. He tricked them into sending back good gold. He made them think it was all bad. He tricked us, he tricked Venice, but really he tricked them. That is what will infuriate them worse than the reduced tribute. He tricked them into sending back good gold. He destroyed the reputation of the coins and then we bought them. He made fools of them. It really is fools’ gold.’

Freize shook his head at the mendacity of the man. ‘He is a cunning man,’ he said. ‘Deep. But I know that I’d like to ask him one thing,’ he said.

‘Only one thing? I’d like to ask him lots of things,’ she agreed. ‘What would you ask?’

‘About this world,’ Freize said thoughtfully. ‘A man like him with so much knowledge? I’d ask him whether he truly thinks that it might be round, as the pretty girl said.’

She nodded, without a glimmer of a smile, as thoughtful as he was. ‘Freize, you do know that the sun stays in the same place all the time, night and day, and the world goes round it, don’t you?’ she asked.

‘What?’ he exclaimed so loudly that Rufino threw up his head in alarm, and Freize soothed him with a touch. He looked at her more closely and saw her smile. ‘Ah, you are joking,’ Freize decided. ‘But you don’t fool me.’ He pointed to the comforting sun, slowly rising up in the sky towards the midday height, and shining down on him, as it had always done. ‘East to west, every day of my life,’ he said. ‘Never failed. Course it goes round me.’

Ahead of them, Brother Peter started to sing a psalm, and the other four joined in, their voices blending in a harmony in the cool air as tuneful as a choir. Freize put his hand in his pocket, seeking his little whistle to play a descant, and suddenly checked.

‘I had forgotten! I had quite forgotten!’ he exclaimed.

‘What?’ Ishraq asked, glancing over to him.

In answer he drew a coin from his pocket. ‘My lucky penny,’ he said. ‘The lass, Jacinta, the gambling girl, put it back in my pocket the last time I saw her, and wished me luck with it. I had quite forgotten it. But here it is again. I shall be lucky, don’t you think? After all that has passed, to have it returned to me as a gift from her must make it more lucky than ever.’

‘Why did she have it?’ Ishraq asked. ‘Did you give it to her?’

‘She took it from me and then returned it as a keepsake,’ Freize said. ‘Gave me a kiss for it.’ Without looking at it closely he passed it over to her. Ishraq took it, and then pulled her horse to a standstill. ‘I should think you are very lucky,’ she said oddly. ‘Very lucky indeed. Look at it.’

Isolde glanced back and, seeing that they had stopped, called to Brother Peter and halted her own horse. The older man rode back and they all gathered round as Freize took his lucky penny from Ishraq and examined it.

‘You know, it does look very like gold,’ he said quietly. ‘But it is the one I gave to her, I swear it. I would know it anywhere. It is my own lucky penny. I recognise the mint and the date, it is mine without a doubt. Just as I gave it to her. But now it looks like gold.’

‘Enamelled with gold,’ Brother Peter said. ‘She put a skin of gold on it for you. Another pretty trick.’

Without a word, Freize handed it to Luca, who took a knife from his belt and made the tiniest of nicks in the side of it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The same colour all the way through. We can test it properly when we get to an inn; but it looks like gold. It looks like solid gold.’

There was a silence as they each absorbed what this meant.

‘You are certain it is your lucky penny and not another gold coin that she gave you?’ Isolde asked.

Mutely, Freize passed it to her. ‘The penny. My lucky penny. Minted in the Vatican in the year of my birth. She would not have such another. She could not have such another. It must be mine. But now it is as heavy as gold, and soft as gold and golden as gold.’