Fools' Gold (23 page)

‘No,’ Isolde said flatly. ‘He will not long for you. And don’t offer me your disgusting money or your repellent cast-offs, for I don’t want them. I must ask you to leave. You won’t come back.’

‘Indeed I will come back,’ the woman swore. ‘In secret, with or without your help. You can wake in the night and know that he is with me, in the room just below yours. Or he will come to me. D’you think he doesn’t want me? D’you think I would be here without his explicit invitation? Last night he asked me to come home with him. Last night after the party. He wanted to meet me in the garden. He is in love with me, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.’

‘He is not!’ Isolde’s voice quavered as she realised that Lady Carintha was probably speaking the truth and that Luca might well have arranged to meet her. He might have been waiting for her in the garden when the gate opened. ‘He is not, and I would never let you into his room. Even if I did not—’ she broke off remembering the lie that they must tell. ‘Even if he were not my brother I would not condone it. You are an evil disgusting woman. Never mind Luca, I would not take you to Freize’s bedroom, for he is too good for you!’

‘Your servant!’ the woman half screamed.

‘General factotum!’ Isolde shouted at her. ‘He is a general factotum! And worth ten of you! For he is a great general factotum and you are an old whore!’

Lady Carintha launched herself at Isolde, slapped her face and pulled her hair. Isolde, furious, clenched her fist as she had seen Ishraq do when readying for a fight and punched the older woman – smack – on the jaw. Carintha reeled back at the blow, fell against the table, recovered and then came forward again, her hands outstretched, her fingernails like claws, aiming for Isolde’s eyes. She raked Isolde’s cheek with her right hand before Isolde grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her. With Carintha screaming with pain and trying to kick backwards with her high-heeled shoes, Isolde pushed her, slowly gaining ground, through the open doorway to the top of the stairs just as Brother Peter, at his most hospitable and dignified, was mounting the steps and saying: ‘I was told that Lady Carintha had honoured our house with a visit . . . Good God! What is this?’’

‘She’s leaving!’ Isolde panted, her cheeks scarlet from rage, her face streaked with blood. ‘The old whore is on her way out.’

Recklessly, she pushed Lady Carintha towards the stairs, and the woman almost fell into Brother Peter’s arms, grabbed him to steady herself and then thrust him away and tore down the steps. ‘A plague on you!’ the scream rang up the stairwell. ‘A plague on you, you prissy girl, and your pretty-boy brother. You will be sorry for insulting me.’

Her ladyship paused at the bottom of the well of the stair and looked back up at them – Isolde with her blonde hair tumbling down where her ladyship had pulled it, her right cheek scratched and bleeding, Brother Peter utterly stunned.

‘And who are you, anyway?’ Carintha demanded, suddenly swinging from rage to cunning. ‘For you are like no family that I have ever met before. And why do you keep your brother as closely guarded as a priest? What sister gambles for time with her brother? What game are you playing? Who knows you? What business do you have? Where does your money come from? You’ll have to answer to me!’

‘Oh! No game! I assure you, your ladyship . . .’ Brother Peter started down the stairs after her but she turned and was gone, and then they heard her shouting for her gondolier, and the sound of the watergate sliding open as her gondola went quickly away.

In the sudden silence, Brother Peter turned and looked at Isolde. ‘What on earth is this all about?’ he asked. ‘What were you doing fighting with her like a street urchin? Lady Isolde! Look at you! What were you thinking of?’

Isolde, tried for one sentence, tried for another, and then could say nothing but: ‘I hate her! And I hate Luca too!’ and ran into her room and slammed the door.

Luca, Freize and Ishraq waited at the quayside outside the alchemist’s house until the bell for Nones rang and they saw Drago Nacari and Jacinta coming towards them from the direction of the Rialto Bridge.

Freize went forwards to greet the girl and to bow to her father, and then they came towards the front door, Jacinta producing a giant key from the purse under her outer robe.

‘This is a surprise and a pleasure,’ the alchemist said warily.

Luca nodded. ‘I wanted to return to you the page of manuscript. I can’t see how to make any progress with it. I was hoping that there would be a code that I could understand, but whatever I try, it doesn’t come out.’

The man nodded. ‘Would you discover more if you had the entire book?’

‘I might,’ Luca said cautiously. ‘But I couldn’t be sure of it. The more words you had to compare, the more likely to discover their meaning. And some might recur which would tell you they were commonly used words, but I couldn’t promise it. I’ve made no headway, I don’t have enough skill—’ He broke off as the alchemist opened the door and ushered them inside.

‘Come into my study.’ The alchemist showed them into the large room where the table was heaped with papers. Quickly, Jacinta closed the big double doors to the storeroom but the guests could smell the strange sweet smell of rotting vegetation, and beneath the smell of decay, something more foul like excrement.

‘That’s the smell of dark matter,’ the alchemist said, matter-of-factly. ‘We get used to it; but for strangers it’s a disturbing scent.’

‘You refine dark matter?’ Luca asked.

The man nodded. ‘I have the recipe for refining . . . ’ He paused. ‘To the ultimate point. I am guessing that is why you have really come today? You could have sent the page back by a messenger. I am assuming that really, you wanted to see our work.’

The girl stood with her back to the storeroom door as if she would bar them from entering, she looked at her father as if she would stop him speaking. The alchemist glanced at her and smiled, returning his attention to Luca. ‘Jacinta is anxious for me, for our safety,’ he said. ‘But I too have had a dream about you, and it prompts me to trust you. Shall I tell you what it was?’

Luca nodded. ‘Tell me.’

‘I dreamed that you were a babe in arms. You were somehow shining. Your mother brought you to me, and told me that she had found you. You were not a child born of man,’ he said quietly. ‘Does that make any sense to you?’

Ishraq drew a quick breath and glanced at Freize. Luca’s unhappy childhood, when his whole village had called him a changeling, was known only to Freize, and the travelling companions, but they would never speak of it outside the group.

‘I have spent my life denying that I was a changeling,’ Luca said with quiet honesty. ‘My mother told me that it was only ignorant frightened people who would say such a thing, and that I should deny it. I have always denied it. I will always deny it, for her sake, for her honour as well as my own.’

‘Your mother would have her reasons,’ Drago Nacari said gently. ‘But in my dream you were faerie-born, and to be faerie-born is a great privilege.’

Jacinta stepped forwards from the door and put her hand on Luca’s arm. ‘I knew that you could see the cups move,’ she said gently. ‘Then you told me that you could calculate where they would stop. No ordinary man can see them move, it’s too fast. And nobody could calculate the odds of them stopping in one place or another. You are gifted. Perhaps you are gifted in a way that is not of this world. Dr Nacari too is a gifted seer. He is speaking a truth from his dream. Perhaps even a truth that cannot be understood in this world.’

‘Doctor?’ Ishraq asked.

Jacinta turned to her. ‘This is not my real father,’ she said. ‘We are partners in this venture. He is a great alchemist, I am his equal. In the world we pass as father and daughter because the world likes to place women in the care of a man, and the world likes a woman to have an owner. But in the real world, the world beyond this one, we are equal seekers after truth, and we have come together to work together.’

‘Not his daughter?’ Freize said bluntly, grasping the one fact he could be certain of, in this talk of one world and another.

She smiled at him. ‘And not a young woman either,’ she said. ‘I am sorry to have deceived you. Dr Nacari and I have worked together for many many years, and we have discovered many things together. Among them, an elixir which prolongs life itself. I am an old, old soul in a young body. You, Freize, make this heart beat faster; but it’s only fair that I should tell you, that it is a very old heart. I’m an old woman behind this young face.’

Freize glanced at Luca and raised his shoulders. ‘This is beyond me, Sparrow,’ he said. ‘Someone is mad here, it might be me or them.’

But it was Ishraq who spoke next. ‘It’s about the gold,’ she said frankly. ‘We have come about the gold. We have come to warn you.’

The alchemist smiled. ‘Was it you that broke into our house, Daughter?’

Freize shook his head in instant denial, but Ishraq met the older man’s eyes fearlessly, and nodded. ‘I am sorry. We are commanded to find the source of the gold nobles. Our master demanded that we pretend to be a wealthy young family and investigate. We followed Israel the money changer and he came to your door. So we knew you had a store of gold nobles.’

‘We knew as soon as we came home, that someone had been into the inner room. And the things . . . the dark matter, the mouse in the jar, the coins in the fire, they were all disturbed, just a little, by your presence. Things are not the same when they are watched. Something changes when it has been seen.’

‘You knew we had been in the room?’ Freize asked sceptically.

Luca stirred at the suggestion that an object might sense an observer; but Ishraq simply answered: ‘Yes, I thought you might know. And we took a print of the Duke of Bedford’s seal and a piece of glass from the writing table.’

‘The rainbow glass,’ Luca said. ‘The glass that makes a rainbow when the light falls on it. I have been interested in rainbows since I saw the mosaic at Ravenna. Do you know how they are made in the sky? How does the glass do it on the earth?’

‘The glass splits the light into its true colours,’ the alchemist told Luca, understanding his longing for knowledge. ‘Everyone thinks that light is the colour of sunshine. But it is not. It is made of many colours. You can see this when it goes through the glass.’

‘Is it always the same colours?’ Luca asked him. ‘I saw a mosaic of a rainbow, an ancient mosaic, centuries old, and it was the same colours that we see today. The ancients must have somehow known that light made a rainbow.’

‘Always the same colours,’ Jacinta confirmed. ‘And always following the same order. Light appears as clear brightness when all the colours flow together, but if you allow a beam of light to fall on a piece of glass, cut in the right way, it will split the light into its colours and you can see them. Put another piece of glass on the rainbow and you can make them meld together again and become invisible once more. One piece of glass can split the light, and then another makes it whole again.’

‘So what makes a rainbow in the sky?’ Ishraq asked.

Jacinta turned to her. ‘I believe that the drops of water of the rain split the light, just like the glass splits it. You often see the rainbow against rain clouds, or against mist.’

Luca nodded. ‘That’s true, you do.’

‘But the interesting question to me . . .’ Jacinta went on. ‘The interesting question is: why is it curved?’

‘Curved?’ Freize asked, utterly baffled, but wanting to join in.

The alchemist smiled at him. ‘Why would the bow of the rainbow be curved?’ he asked. ‘Why would it not run straight across the sky?’

Freize shook his head, even Luca was blank.

‘Because it follows the line of the earth. It proves that the earth is not flat but shaped like a ball. And the great length of the rainbow proves that the ball is far greater than philosophers think, and round, not humped. It tells us that the earth is round but bigger than we thought. Much bigger than we thought.’

Freize put his hands down and held on to the table, as if to steady himself. ‘Why would you think such a thing?’ he said, complaining of their imaginations which made the ground heave beneath his feet. ‘Why would you repeat such a disturbing thing? And obviously untrue. Why would you say such a thing, even if you are mad enough to think it? It makes my head spin.’

Jacinta put her small hand over his as he gripped the table. ‘Because we consider all possibilities,’ she answered. ‘And it is true about the world being round. But of course, people don’t like to think about it.’ She looked up and smiled at Luca. ‘Keep the glass piece,’ she said. ‘And see what light shines through it. Who knows what you will discover?’

‘And what about you?’ Ishraq asked. ‘You know, you can’t stay here, counterfeiting coins. This has to stop.’

‘You call us counterfeiters?’ The alchemist drew himself up to his full height. ‘You think I am a common criminal?’

For the first time Ishraq felt uneasy. She looked from Jacinta to the man who had passed as her father and remembered that she, Luca and Freize were three, against the two of them. But there was something about these two that made her wonder if they were safe, even with those odds. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Doctor Nacari; but what else am I to think?’ she said carefully.