Fools' Gold

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Pipe down,’ the woman advised rudely and slammed her shutters.

  Freize exchanged one wordless glance with Ishraq and set off, apparently in the direction of the Rialto Bridge. As quiet as a cat, Ishraq tried the handle of the door in the garden wall. She felt it yield, but the door would not open. Clearly, the Nacaris had locked it behind them when they left the house. Ishraq dropped back, took a short run at the garden wall and leaped up, her feet scrabbling to find a purchase on the smooth wall, until she got her knee on a branch of ivy and heaved up to the top of the wall and dropped down on the far side.

  She was on her feet in a moment, looking alertly all around the garden in case anyone had heard her. Already she had identified the tree that she would climb if a guard dog came rushing towards her, or a watchman, but there was silence in the sunlit garden, and a bird started to sing. On tiptoe, Ishraq went towards the house and tried the door that led from the garden to the storeroom. It was locked and the shutters were closed on the inside. She turned to her right and tried the shutters on the windows. They too were firmly bolted from the inside. She looked up. Overlooking the garden was a pretty balcony with a spiral stone staircase that led down to the lawn and the peach tree.

  Quiet as a ghost, Ishraq slipped up the stairs and found the window to the bedroom had been left latched open. She put her slim hand into the gap beneath the window and flicked the catch. As the window swung open, Ishraq went head first through the opening and landed as quietly as she could in a heap on the floor.

  At once she was on her feet, listening, sensing that the house was empty. She tiptoed from the room to the landing, head cocked, looking down the well of the stair. Nothing moved, there was no sound. Lightly, she ran down the stairs and unbolted the door just as Freize was walking briskly – a man with business to attend to – past the house. One swift sideways step and he was inside the house and the door was closed behind him.

  They beamed at each other. Ishraq slid the bolts across the door, locking it against the street. ‘In case they come back unexpectedly,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  They went first into the big room at the front of the house that overlooked the canal and found a table piled with rolls of manuscripts and some hand-copied bound books. Ishraq looked at them without touching. ‘Philosophy,’ she said. ‘Astronomy, and here – alchemy. These are a lot of books. It seems that he was telling the truth when he said he had been studying for decades.’

  ‘They both have,’ Freize corrected her. He pointed to a writing table beside the bigger table. There was a brown scarf over the back of the chair, and on the table a page of paper with a carefully copied drawing, and a page of notes. He looked from the book to the paper. ‘She’s translating something,’ he said. ‘She’s studying too.’

  Ishraq came and looked over his shoulder. ‘Alchemists often work in pairs, a man and a woman working together for the energy that they bring,’ she said. ‘Alchemy is about the transmutation from one form into another, liquids to solids, base to pure. It needs a man and a woman to make it work, it needs the spirit of a woman as well as that of a man.’

  ‘How d’you know all this?’ Freize asked curiously.

  Ishraq shrugged. ‘When I was studying in Spain, the Arab philosophers often studied alchemy texts,’ she said. ‘One of the universities even changed from studying the philosophy of Plato to that of Hermes. They said that there was more to learn from alchemy than from the Greeks – that gives you an idea of how important the work is, how much there is to understand. But this material is far beyond me.’

  Freize picked up a curiously shaped paperweight, a long pyramid of sparklingly clear glass, and then found a brass stamp beneath the paper. ‘What’s this?’ Freize asked. ‘Their seal?’

  Ishraq picked up the little gold stamp and looked at the base. It was an engraved gold picture, for stamping the hot wax of a letter or a parcel to mark the insignia.

  ‘This looks like a royal crest, or a ducal crest. Why would the Nacaris have it to seal their letters?’

  ‘Get a copy of it, we should show it to Luca,’ Freize advised. ‘I’ll look round upstairs,’ he said.

  She heard him going quietly upstairs and the creak of the door as he put his head into the two bedrooms, then the slight noise as he went upwards to the empty attic bedrooms for the servants. She was so intent on her work of heating the sealing wax at the embers of the fire, and dripping the melted wax onto a spare sheet of paper, that she hardly noticed as he came down the stairs again and went to the back room, the storeroom. She pressed the seal into the wax and saw the clear image. But then she heard him say urgently: ‘Ishraq! Come and see.’

  Replacing the stick of wax just as it had been, putting the seal back into its velvet-lined case and waving the paper page to dry the cooling wax, she went to the store room at the back of the house and froze as Freize heaved open the heavy door.

  The room was no longer the homely store of a small Venice house, it was an alchemist’s workplace. The place stank of decay and rotting food, and a subterranean smell of mould and vomit. Ishraq put a hand over her nose and mouth trying to block the stench. Next to the doorway, a great round tank with a wooden lid bubbled and gave off a nauseating stink of death.

  ‘My God,’ Ishraq said, gagging. ‘It’s unbearable.’

  Freize shot one horrified look at her. ‘It smells like a midden,’ he says. ‘Worse than a midden, a plague ground. What are they cooking?’

  Under the window, before the locked shutters, was a stone bench. On its flat surface had been carved four small circular depressions, each one filled with charcoal ready for burning, each one ready with a tripod and a pan, or a small cauldron. On the shelves were strange-shaped metal baths, and some expensive glass containers, with spouts and tubes for pouring and distilling liquids. Standing on the floor in massive coils, and towering as tall as Ishraq, was a great glass distillation tube with its dripping foot oozing a yellow slime into a porcelain bowl. On a big table in the centre of the room there were trays of candle wax, some with flowers or herbs face down into the wax as their essences drained away.

  Freize looked around, his square face pale, his eyes darkening with superstitious fear. ‘What is this? What in God’s name are they doing here?’

  Under an airtight bell jar, which stood in a shallow bath of water, there was a small brown mouse on a platform, sitting up and cleaning its whiskers, beside a burning candle.

  ‘Are they roasting it?’ Freize whispered. ‘Killing it, the poor little creature?’

  Ishraq shook her head, as shaken as her friend. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

  The stone hearth beneath the chimney had been raised to waist-height – as high as a fire in a forge – and great bellows beside the chimney and cracks in the stone fire-back showed that it had been heated beyond bearing. Now it had burned down to red embers, but they could see that in the grey ashes there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of the piccoli silver coins, glowing like a thousand little eyes, pooling as they cooled into strange ominous shapes.

  ‘What are they doing to the money?’ Freize demanded.

  Ishraq shook her head in bewilderment.

  A range of shelves held the dried bodies of small animals: trapped mice, rats bought from the rat catcher and missing their tails, birds with their heads flopped to one side, a desiccated nest with four dried-out nestlings, and jar after jar of dead insects of all sorts. Freize made a face of disgust. ‘What do they do with these? Is this for alchemy? Is it magic? Are they killing things here for sport, for devilment?’

  Once more, Ishraq shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ She turned her eyes from the little limp bodies and could not suppress a shiver.

  Against one wall was an empty chair, as tall as a throne, draped in purple velvet, with a purple velvet cape and robe beside it. Turned to the wall was a hammered silver mirror.

  ‘What’s that for?’ whispered Freize. ‘Who is that for?’

  ‘It migh
t be for scrying,’ Ishraq replied. ‘Foreseeing the future. If one of them has the gift of Sight.’

  ‘What would they do then?’ Freize asked in fascinated horror.

  ‘Look in the mirror, see visions,’ Ishraq answered briefly.

  Draped around the mirror was a tent-like structure with curtains that could be let down for privacy, and before it was a small table like an altar. Above it, was pinned an illuminated manuscript in green ink.

  ‘The Emerald Tablet.’ Ishraq read the Arabic symbols. She turned to Freize. ‘These are the rules of alchemy,’ she whispered. ‘It says: These are the commandments that guide all seekers of this truth.’

  ‘What does it say?’ Freize asked. ‘Does it tell you what to do? Does it say how to make gold?’

  Ishraq shook her head, her eyes dark with fear. ‘I can translate it for you, but I can’t explain it,’ she warned him.

  ‘So tell me!’ he said.

  ‘Rule one,’ she read. ‘’Tis true without lying, certain and most true: that which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to do the miracles of one only thing. And as all things have been, and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.’

  Freize looked back, over his shoulder at the dead animals on the shelves. ‘What does it mean?’ he asked unhappily. ‘For I can understand nothing but cruelty here.’

  ‘These are mysteries,’ Ishraq told him. ‘I did say that I can’t explain it.’

  ‘You did,’ Freize confirmed. ‘And you spoke fairly then. Can we go now, d’you think?’

  Ishraq looked round. ‘We should search for the gold nobles,’ she reminded him.

  ‘God knows what we will find if we open these boxes,’ Freize said anxiously. ‘Dead grandmothers, if not worse. The lad said there was a golem to guard the Jewish banker. I thought he was joking.’

  ‘A what?’ Ishraq asked suddenly intent.

  ‘A golem. A sort of guardsman, a monster with a word of command on his forehead.’

  Despite herself Ishraq shivered.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Freize urged her.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to see . . . ’

  On the table were two tablets of wax with strange insignia drawn on their surface, and under the table, covered in a velvet cloth, was a chest. Ishraq bent down and tried to slide the bolts. They did not move. It was somehow locked.

  ‘Don’t,’ Freize said bluntly. ‘Don’t force it open. What if there is . . .’ He broke off, he realized he could not imagine what the alchemists might have in a small locked chest.

  On the furthest wall a great glass vessel suddenly released a gush of foul-smelling liquid into a tray. They both jumped nervously at the splashing sound. Then they saw that below the big table was another closed box, broader than the one beneath the altar. This one was unlocked. Ishraq tried it, and Freize stepped forward to help her lift the heavy lid. She glanced at him and saw his face screwed up in a grimace of fear at what they might find. The lid opened. Freize still had his eyes closed.

  ‘Look,’ she whispered, quite entranced.

  Freize opened his eyes. ‘Now, will you look at this?’ he whispered, as if it were his own discovery, and he was showing it to her. ‘Will you look at this?’

  Inside the box was a metal tray with a dozen indentations, almost like a sweetmeat maker would use to make little bonbons. But each indentation was beautifully wrought. They were moulds. Freize squinted to be sure what he was seeing. ‘Moulds for coins,’ he said. ‘Moulds for English nobles. See the shape of them? See the picture on the moulds? The king in the boat and the rose?’

  ‘So they really are coiners,’ Ishraq whispered. ‘Alchemists, as we have seen; but they are coiners as well. Practising magic and crime side by side. They really are.’ She looked around. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it. But they really are coining gold nobles. So they make them here, at this forge. But where do they keep the coins? Where’s the gold?’

  ‘Hadn’t we better get out of here?’ Freize suggested. ‘If they come back and catch us, God knows what they might do. These are not simple magic-makers, these are a couple of criminals turning over a fortune.’

  ‘Let’s be quick,’ Ishraq agreed. Freize closed the lid on the box of moulds, looked around the room and saw for the first time, set low on the floor, the arched entrance to the cellar.

  ‘See that?’ he pointed it out to her.

  ‘Can we open it?’ Ishraq was there in a moment. The half-door was locked. Ishraq looked around for the key as Freize bent down, put the sharp blade of his knife in the keyhole, and turned carefully. There was a series of clicks and the door swung open. Ishraq raised her eyebrows at Freize’s convenient range of skills.

  ‘You didn’t learn that in the monastery.’

  ‘I did actually,’ he said. ‘Kitchen stores. I was always hungry. And Sparrow would have faded away if I hadn’t fed him up.’

  Ishraq bent down to swing the door outwards and peer through. The door was so low that she had to go down on her hands and knees and then lie on her belly and squirm forwards.

  ‘What can you see?’ Freize whispered behind her.

  ‘Nothing, it’s too dark,’ she replied, coming back out again.

  He turned to the chimney and lifted down a rushlight, lit it at the fire, and handed it to her. Ishraq thrust it into the dark opening, wriggled her shoulders through and looked down. Freize held her feet.

  ‘Don’t fall,’ he warned her. ‘And don’t for pity’s sake leave me here.’

  Fitfully, the flame flickered, illuminating the dark moving water at the end of the stone quay, immediately below her, and on the stones a glint here, a blaze of reflected light there, and then finally a cold draught of air blew the light out altogether and left her in damp blackness with nothing but the eerie slap of the dark waters to warn her of the edge of the quay.

  ‘What can you see?’ Freize’s voice whispered from the room behind her. ‘Come back! What can you see?’

  ‘Gold,’ Ishraq said, her voice quiet with awe. ‘An absolute fortune in sacks and sacks of gold nobles.’

  Brother Peter and Luca watched the gamblers at their place and then went into San Giacomo church. As they had expected, Father Pietro was kneeling at a side chapel before the flickering flame of a candle placed at the feet of an exquisite statue of the Madonna and Child. Both men bent their knee and crossed themselves. Luca went to kneel in silence beside the priest.

  ‘You do not disturb me, because I was praying for you,’ Father Pietro said quietly, hardly opening his eyes.

  ‘I suppose that it’s too soon for any news?’

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow, or the next day. You can come to me on the Rialto or I can send you a message.’

  ‘I’ll come to you,’ Luca promised. ‘I hardly dare to pray for the safety of my father. I hardly dare to think that he might come home to me.’

  The priest turned and made the sign of a cross over Luca’s bowed head. ‘God is merciful,’ he said quietly. ‘He is always merciful. Perhaps He will be merciful to you and your father and your mother.’

  ‘Amen,’ Luca whispered.

  Father Pietro looked up at the serene face of the Madonna. He smiled at her, as a man who knows that his work is blessed. Luca thought that a more superstitious man would have thought that the beautiful statue smiled back.

  ‘Thank you, Father Pietro,’ he said. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

  ‘Thank me when your father holds you in his arms, my son,’ the priest replied.

  Luca and Brother Peter completed their prayers and went to the back of the church and quietly opened the great wooden door and slipped out together.

  Luca squinted at the brightness of the sunlight on the square, looked in one direction, and then another, and then quietly said: ‘Oh no.’

  The place where Jacinta had laid out her game earlier was empty. Drago and his daughter were missing.r />
  And Isolde, their lookout, had vanished into thin air.

  Isolde, her long skirt bunched into her hand, was running as fast as she could, through the narrow alleyway, her feet pounding on the damp cobblestones of the poorer streets, speeding up as she crossed a square paved with flagstones. She had watched Jacinta play for a crowd of people and Nacari stand over her and then suddenly, without a word of warning, far ahead of their usual time, they had packed up the game, stepped to the quayside and hailed a passing gondola.

  Isolde, her breath coming short, hammered over the little wooden bridges, hailed the ferry boats in a panting shout, and then raced down the road from the bridge to where the Nacari’s tall house stood by the ghetto, trying to beat them by running the short cut which Freize had described to her, while the gondola went round by water.

  She recognised the house at once from Ishraq’s drawing and hammered on the door. ‘Freize! Ishraq!’ she shouted.‘Come away!’

  In the quiet house, the hammering on the door was shockingly loud. In the storeroom, Ishraq and Freize, locking up the hatch, both jumped in fear at the explosion of noise. Freize’s first terrified thought was that the mysterious golem had come for them, as Ishraq started for the hall. ‘It’s Isolde,’ she said.

  ‘Open the door, quick,’ Freize said. ‘She’ll turn out the watch in a moment.’

  Ishraq raced along the narrow hall and slid the bolts to throw open the door.

  ‘They’ve left the square, they could be coming here!’ Isolde gasped. ‘I don’t know where they’re going, they took a gondola. I ran as fast as I could.’ Her nun’s hood had fallen from her head, and her blonde hair was tumbling down around her shoulders. She was panting from her run.

  Ishraq at once put her arm around her friend’s shoulders as if to leave at once. ‘Come on,’ she said to Freize. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Not out of the front door, they left it bolted from the inside,’ Freize reminded her.

  As she hesitated, Isolde glanced down the narrow canal and saw the frightening silhouette of the shadow of the prow of a gondola on the canal wall, just as it was about to turn the corner and see them, on the doorstep of the house. They heard the gondolier cry a warning: ‘Gondola! Gondola! Gondola!’