Fools' Gold (27 page)

‘Cut it off!’ Lady Carintha screamed. ‘It doesn’t matter that it’s gold. Get it off me! It’s bleeding on me! It’s burning! It’s burning my skin!’

Her husband held the necklace away from the nape of her neck as the young officer pulled upwards and away with his knife. His knife was as red as if he had stabbed her in the heart, and the necklace pulled against her neck and made her shriek before it clattered to the ground, smearing scarlet on the marble floors as if a murder had been done in the horrified room.

There was a sudden black flash of something going past the window, but only Luca, facing in that direction, saw that it was Ishraq, pointed like a spear in a long fearless swallow dive, from her high bedroom window into the canal.

‘What the hell was that?’ demanded the officer of the guard, pushing past Lady Carintha to look out of the window. ‘I saw something go by . . . ’

‘Nothing,’ Luca said at once. ‘A cormorant perhaps.’ Luca looked down with him. In the canal they could see a circle of bubbles but nothing else.

‘A murdered body bleeds when the murderer comes near!’ Lady Carintha declaimed, pushing herself forward, scrubbing with a cloth at her reddened neck. ‘These coins are bleeding because they are in the house of the counterfeiters!’

‘I’m going to have to search your property,’ the officer said, turning from the window to Brother Peter.

Luca was still looking out at the Grand Canal. After what felt like a long, long time he saw Ishraq’s dark head, wet as a seal, emerging from the water. Someone pulled her on board a rowing boat and she crouched in the prow, but they did not return to the house. The boatman leaned over his oars and rowed as hard as he could down the canal, before anyone from the palazzo could raise the alarm or come after them. They were out of sight in a moment. Luca guessed Freize was at the oars and Ishraq was urging him on to warn the alchemists.

‘What was that?’ The officer returned to look out with Luca. ‘Looked like something was thrown from an upper window.’

‘I’ll go and see,’ Isolde volunteered. ‘My servant may have dropped something.’

‘You’d better not have thrown away any evidence,’ the officer warned. ‘We can drag the canal, you know.’

‘Of course not!’ Isolde said.

Before anyone could stop her, she pushed past Lady Carintha and ran up the stairs to her room. They heard her slam the door and turn the key in the lock as Lady Carintha poked the bleeding necklace with the toe of her satin shoes and said, her voice shaking: ‘False coins, false hearts. Bleeding coins are a sign of guilt. These are wicked people. You must arrest them all. Especially the young women. They must be put to the question. They must be taken to the Doge’s Palace, and held in his prisons.’

‘Where did you get this purse from?’ The officer spilled the bloodstained coins onto the dinner table, they smeared their sticky redness in a pool.

Brother Peter exchanged one brief look with Luca.

‘I can find out,’ the officer said. ‘I only have to ask in the Rialto and someone will tell me. But it would be better for you if you were to answer me now.’

Luca nodded. Clearly, they would have to tell the truth. ‘We got our nobles from the money changer Israel,’ he said. ‘But I am certain that he thought that they were good. We certainly thought they were good. It was a simple transaction between two honest parties.’

The officer turned his head and spoke briefly to one of his men. At once he left the room and they could hear him running down the stairs.

‘I am arresting you on suspicion,’ the officer said.

‘Of what?’ Luca said. ‘We may have received forged nobles, but so has Lady Carintha. Where did she get her necklace from? It was not from us! We are buyers of coins, not counterfeiters. You can search the house.’

‘We know Lady Carintha, she is a Venetian born and bred, and her husband is a great trader in this city, his name is in the Gold Book. He is on the Council. You, on the other hand, have just arrived and everything about you is strange. Lady Carintha says you are not what you seem, you have been arranging to buy a fortune in gold from one money changer, you speak of a ship that has yet to come in, you are often seen with Father Pietro and you seem to be favoured by one of the greatest enemies of Christendom.’

Luca raised his eyebrows at the extent of the officer’s knowledge. ‘You have been watching me?’

‘Of course. We watch all strangers. Venice is filled with spies. There is a
Bocca di Leone
for denouncing the guilty in every square. And you have great wealth and dubious friends. You have been under suspicion from the moment you arrived.’

‘He is not a dubious friend. Radu Bey was a chance acquaintance, who chose to help me trace my father who was captured as a slave of the Ottomans. The city of Venice itself trades with the Ottoman Empire. The Doge himself trades with Radu Bey.’

‘But the Doge does not use counterfeit coins,’ the man returned.

‘He does,’ Lady Carintha said spitefully, pulling her earrings out of her ears and throwing them down on the table with a shudder. They sat in a little pool of redness, oozing wetly. ‘He almost certainly does. His hands will be bloody too.’

‘What?’

‘Since this family arrived, everyone in Venice has gone mad for the English gold. Ask my husband. The price has soared. No doubt the Doge has bought them, no doubt he has sold them on. Perhaps his hands are dirty too. Perhaps we are all going to be ruined.’ She rubbed her stained hands against the skirts of her gown and shuddered. ‘What
is
this?’

‘It looks like a sort of rust,’ Luca said. ‘Perhaps the metals are breaking down, and rusting away.’

She looked at him and her beautiful face was twisted with jealousy and spite. ‘Rusting gold?’ she said. ‘Against the laws of nature. You and that sister of yours? Unnatural too. As unnatural as forgery. As false as counterfeit coin.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ the officer asked her. ‘Are you saying they are sinners as well as criminals?’

‘God knows what they are guilty of,’ Lady Carintha swore. ‘You should take them in at once. He is false as the most beautiful gold coin, and she passes for a lady but fights like a cat. Who knows what they have done together?’

‘My dear . . .’ her husband interpolated.

‘I want to go home.’ Lady Carintha suddenly became soft and tearful. She turned to her husband. ‘We have done our duty here. I can’t bear it here with these bloodstained coins in this house of wicked strangers.’

Solemnly, he nodded. ‘Do your duty for the Doge and the Republic,’ he said pompously to the officer. ‘The survival of the greatest city in the world depends on our wealth and our trustworthiness. This family – if they are truly a family and not a counterfeiting ring in disguise – have challenged both. They must be destroyed before they destroy us! Arrest them at once and take them before the Council of Ten!’

The two of them were too powerful to be denied. The officer looked from Luca to the stained gold nobles scattered over the table. ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of counterfeiting coins, trading in false gold with a Jew, and incestuous relations with your sister,’ he said. ‘You will have to come with me. In fact, I am arresting you all.’

Brother Peter put his hand over his eyes and made a little noise like a low sigh, but at that moment, the door opened and Isolde came into the room. She was transformed. She was wearing her blonde hair piled high on her head and a tall scarlet pointed headdress on top of it that made her look six feet tall. She was wearing one of her most beautiful Venetian-made gowns in a deep crimson, the slashed sleeves showing white silk underneath. She stood very tall and very proudly. Beside her Lady Carintha looked old and tawdry with her dirty neck and her bloodstained ears.

‘This has gone far enough,’ Isolde ruled. ‘It must stop now.’ At her tone of command the officer hesitated, and Lady Carintha’s husband made a half bow, halted by a sharp hidden pinch from his wife.

‘I am Lady Isolde of Lucretili,’ Isolde said directly to the officer. ‘This is my mother’s signet ring. You can see our family crest. I am travelling with my servant and companion Ishraq, and with this escort: my tutor Brother Peter, a man of unquestioned probity, his scholar Luca Vero and our manservant and general factotum. We decided to pass as a noble family interested in trade in order to travel without being known and for my personal safety.’

‘Why would you do that?’ the officer queried. Lady Carintha stood dumb, clearly overwhelmed by Isolde’s grandeur.

Isolde answered the officer, completely ignoring the woman. ‘My brother has usurped my place at the castle,’ she said. ‘He is passing himself off as the new Lord of Lucretili. I don’t want him to know that I am going to seek help against him from my godfather’s son. That is why we are travelling through Venice. That is why we assumed different names.’

‘And who is your godfather’s son, Milady?’ the officer asked deferentially.

‘He is Count Vlad Tepes the Third, of Wallachia,’ Isolde said proudly.

The officer and all the guards pulled off their hats at the mention of one of the greatest commanders on the frontiers of Christendom, a man who had defended his country of Wallachia from the unstoppable Ottoman army, been driven out, and would, without a doubt, conquer it again. ‘You are the great count’s god-daughter?’ the officer confirmed.

‘I am,’ Isolde said. ‘So you see, I am a woman of some importance.’ She took another step into the centre of the room and looked Lady Carintha up and down with an expression of utter contempt. ‘This woman is a bawd,’ she said simply. ‘She keeps a disorderly house where there is gambling and prostitutes. She boasts of her own immorality and she quarrelled with me only when I refused to join in her lascivious ways.’

Slowly, Lady Carintha’s husband detached himself from her gripping hand and turned to look at her.

‘I imagine it is well known to everyone but you, Sir,’ Isolde said gently to him. ‘Your wife is little more than a common whore. She has quarrelled with me because I would not let her into this house at night and lead her to the room of this young man of my household, whose spiritual well-being is my responsibility. She wanted to lie with him, she offered to buy time with him by giving me jewellery or an alibi for my own absences, or introduce me to a lover. She said she would make him into her toy, she would have him for
Carnevale
and then give him up for Lent.’

Brother Peter crossed himself at the description of sin. Luca could not take his eyes off Isolde, fighting for their safety.

‘She’s lying,’ Lady Carintha spat.

‘When I treated these offers with contempt, this woman attacked me,’ Isolde said steadily.

Lady Carintha crossed the room and stood, her hands on her hips, glaring at Isolde. ‘I will slap your face again,’ she said. ‘Shut up. Or you will be sorry.’

‘I am sorry that I have to speak like this at all,’ Isolde said glacially, one glance at Brother Peter as if she was remembering his claim that a lady should not fight for herself. ‘A lady does not tell such shameful secrets, a lady does not soil her mouth with such words. But sometimes, a lady has to defend herself, and her reputation. I will not be bullied by this old streetwalker. I will not be scratched and pinched by such a she-wolf.’ She smoothed back the veil which flowed from her headdress and showed the officer the scratch marks on her cheeks. ‘This is what she did to me this very afternoon for refusing her disgusting offers. I will not be assaulted in my own home. And you should not work at her bidding. Any denunciation from such as her means nothing.’

‘Absolutely not!’ he said, quite convinced. ‘My lord?’ He turned to Lady Carintha’s husband. ‘Will you take the woman home? We cannot accept her denunciation of this family when she clearly has a private quarrel with them. And this lady,’ he bowed towards Isolde, who stood like a queen, ‘this lady is above question.’

‘And she receives forged coins,’ Isolde added quietly. ‘And gambles with them.’

‘We’ll go,’ Lady Carintha’s husband decided. To Isolde he bowed very low. ‘I am very sorry that such a misunderstanding should have come about,’ he said. ‘Just a misunderstanding. No need to take it further? I would not want our name mentioned to the count, your kinsman. I would not have such a great man thinking badly of me. I am so sorry that we have offended, inadvertently offended . . . ’

Isolde inclined her head very grandly. ‘You may go.’

The officer turned to Brother Peter and Luca. ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘Of course, no arrest. You are free to come and go as you please.’

He bowed very low to Isolde, who stood very still while he ordered the men from the room, and they waited until they heard the clatter of their boots on the stairs and then the bang of the outer door.

There was a sudden total silence. Isolde turned and looked at Brother Peter as if she expected him to criticise her for being too bold. Brother Peter was silent, amazed at this newly powerful version of the girl he had seen before as a victim of her circumstances: clinging to a roof in a flood, or weeping for the loss of her father.

‘I will defend myself,’ she said flatly. ‘Against her, or against anyone. From now on, I am going to fight for my rights.’