Fools' Gold

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘I was trying to ransom you,’ Luca said breathlessly. ‘Bayeed refused the coins. But I will get pure gold. I will buy your freedom. I will come for you.’

  ‘Do you know where your mother is?’ His voice was husky, he rarely spoke these days. When they slaved over the oars, obedient to the beat of the pace-drum, they never spoke. In the evening when they were released to eat there was nothing to say. After the first year he had ceased to weep, after the second year he had stopped praying.

  ‘I am looking for her,’ Luca promised. ‘I swear I will find her and ransom her too.’

  There was a silence. Incredulously, Luca realised that he was within speaking distance of his long-lost father and he had so much to say that he could not find words.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ he asked.

  ‘Always,’ came the grim reply.

  ‘I have missed you and my mother,’ Luca said quietly.

  The man choked on his sore throat and spat. ‘You must think of me as dead to you,’ was all he said. ‘I believe I am dead and gone to hell.’

  ‘I won’t think of you as dead,’ Luca exclaimed passionately. ‘I will ransom you and return you to our farm. You will live again, as you used to live. We will be happy.’

  ‘I can’t think of it,’ his father flatly refused. ‘I would go mad if I thought of it. Go, son, leave me in hell. I cannot dream of freedom.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘No,’ came the stern reply.

  ‘Father!’

  ‘Don’t call me Father,’ he said chillingly. ‘You have no Father. I am dead to you and you to me. I cannot think of your world and your hopes and your plans. I can only think about every day and every night, and then the next one. The only hope that I have is that I will die tonight if possible, and this will end.’

  He turned to go back into the darkness of the prison, Luca saw the scars from the whip on his back. ‘Father! Don’t go! Of course I will call you Father, of course I will ransom you. You can hope! I will never leave you. I will never stop looking for you. I am your son!’

  ‘You’re a changeling.’ Gwilliam Vero rounded on Luca. ‘No son of mine. You said you would ransom me but you have not done so. You say you will come again but I cannot bear to hope. Do you understand that, Stranger? I cannot bear to hope. I don’t want to think of my farm and my son and my wife. I will go mad if I think of such things and live like this – in hell. I have no son. You are a stranger. You are a changeling. You have no reason to ransom me. Go away and forget all about me. I am a dead stranger to you, and you are a changeling boy to me.’

  Luca shook with emotion. ‘Father?’ he whispered. ‘Don’t speak so to me . . . you know I am . . . ’

  Gwilliam Vero stepped away from the light of the grille and all Luca could see was darkness.

  ‘Enough!’ the sentry said flatly. He gestured to Luca to get down from the barrel and go away. When Luca hesitated he put his right hand on the hilt of his long curved scimitar, and felt for the handgun strapped to his belt with the other.

  Ishraq stepped off the gondola and, holding the ring high above her head, came slowly across the quay. ‘Come, Luca!’ she said gently.

  He stumbled down from the barrel, and grabbed hold of it to support himself, as his knees buckled beneath him.

  ‘Come on,’ Ishraq beckoned to him. She saw his face was contorted with shock. ‘Luca!’ she said urgently. ‘Pick yourself up, get back to the gondola. We have to leave.’

  ‘He denied me!’ he gasped. He levered himself to his feet, using the barrel, but she saw he could not walk.

  ‘Be a man!’ she said harshly. ‘You are putting Freize and me in danger here. Now we must go. Find your feet! Walk!’

  The sentry stepped closer and drew the wicked blade from the scabbard. It shone in the moonlight. Ishraq knew that he could behead Luca with one blow, and would think nothing of it.

  ‘Get up, fool!’ she said and the anger in her voice cut through Luca’s grief. ‘Get up and be a man.’

  Slowly, Luca straightened up and hobbled, awkwardly, towards her. As soon as he was within reach she grabbed his arm and put it over her shoulders so that she could take his weight. ‘Now walk,’ she spat. ‘Or I will stab you myself.’

  ‘We thank you,’ Ishraq called towards the sentry, her voice sweet and untroubled. She sent the gold ring spinning through the air to him. She put her arm around Luca’s waist and helped him, as if he were mortally wounded, walk slowly and painfully to the gondola, step heavily on board and sit in silence as Giuseppe cast off, spun the gondola round, and headed back towards the palazzo.

  Isolde was waiting up for them but Luca went past her without a word, into his bedroom, and closed the door. She looked to Ishraq for an explanation.

  ‘I don’t know it all,’ Ishraq said quietly, scowling with worry. ‘We couldn’t hear what his father said, but Luca went white as if he was sick and his legs went from under him. We only just got him back to the gondola, and since then he has said nothing to either of us.’

  ‘Did his father blame Luca for the ransom failing?’

  Ishraq shook her head. ‘Luca said nothing, I don’t know. His father must have said something terrible; it just felled him.’

  ‘Did you comfort him?’ Isolde asked. ‘Couldn’t you talk to him?’

  Ishraq gave her a crooked little smile. ‘I was not tender to him,’ she said. ‘I was hard on him.’

  ‘I’m for my bed,’ Freize said. ‘I was glad to get away from that quayside.’ He nodded at Ishraq. ‘You did well to get him walking. Perhaps he’ll talk to us in the morning.’ He yawned and turned to the door.

  ‘You must be worried for him,’ Isolde said, putting her hand on his arm.

  Freize looked down at her. ‘I am worried for us all,’ he said. ‘It feels as if we are all bleeding in this city, not just the false nobles. Trying to make money in speculation and not in honest work has cost us all, very dear. I don’t think we even know how much.’

  At dawn there was a sudden hammering on one of the bedroom doors. ‘Get up!’ they could all hear Luca shouting. ‘Get up!’

  Ishraq and Isolde lighted their candles from the dying embers of the fire in their room and pattered down the stairs, pulling shawls around their nightgowns. Freize was already on the shadowy stairs, his club in his hand, ready for an attack. Luca was hammering on Brother Peter’s bedroom door.

  ‘Let me see that letter! Show me that letter!’

  Brother Peter unlocked the door and came out, long-legged as a stork in his nightgown. He gave one reproachful look at the young women, turned his gaze from their bare feet and said: ‘What is it? What is this uproar? What’s happened now?’

  ‘The orders! The orders! The sealed orders that you opened yesterday! Let me see them.’

  ‘You read them yourself!’ Brother Peter protested. ‘Why do you need to see them again?’

  ‘Because I have to understand,’ Luca said passionately. ‘Always! You know what I’m like. I have to understand. And I don’t understand this. I was so distressed at the loss of my father that I couldn’t think. I lay down to sleep and in the darkness all I could see before my eyes was the letter from Milord: the orders. Show them to me!’

  Ishraq’s brown eyes were shining. ‘I ask why!’ she repeated to herself.

  Brother Peter sighed and went back into his room. He came out pulling on his robe over his nightshirt, with the letter in his hand. He gave it to Luca and sat down at the dining table with the air of a man tried beyond endurance. The others pulled out their chairs and took their places around the table in silence, while Luca read it, and reread it. Only Ishraq looked delighted.

  ‘What are we to do, when we have bought up the false nobles with all the gold that Milord provided?’ Luca asked, hardly glancing up from the page.

  ‘We are to store it at the bank, and open the orders with our next destination,’ Brother Peter said.

  ‘We are not to test the nobles? To separate the bad from the good?’
r />   Brother Peter shook his head.

  ‘So Milord does not care if there are good nobles among the bad,’ Luca muttered to himself. ‘Why would that be? Can he know already?’ To Brother Peter he said: ‘And he told you to open the instructions to buy the counterfeit coins as soon as you learned that the Ottomans had accused the occupied countries of trying to cheat?’

  ‘As I did,’ Brother Peter said patiently. ‘As I told you.’

  There was a silence. ‘What are you thinking, Luca?’ Ishraq said quietly.

  Luca looked across the table at her with a hard intensity. ‘What are you thinking?’ he countered. ‘For you have been suspicious of Milord from the moment that you met him. And yet you did not sell your nobles once you knew he was buying. You refused to sell your bleeding nobles to me for gold. Isolde wanted to – but you refused.’

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ she confessed. ‘I think he did you no favour with the ransoming of your father. First, he didn’t tell you about Father Pietro at all – it was Radu Bey, an Ottoman commander and your lord’s especial enemy, who did that. Then, if your lord had any reason to believe that the coins would fail he could have told you, to make sure that you paid the ransom in pure gold, or paid early. Then the coins would have failed but you would still have got your father back.’

  ‘Yes,’ Luca conceded. His mouth turned in a bitter twist for a young man. ‘This I know.’

  ‘Your lord allowed the failure of the ransom,’ Ishraq accused. ‘He let you try when he knew that the bad coins would be discovered.’

  ‘Milord’s doings should not be questioned!’ Brother Peter said hotly. ‘His calling is to command us, not to answer to us.’

  ‘Yes, but I question everything,’ Luca explained. ‘Like Ishraq. And what she says is true: he did not think of me, nor of my father, when he planned that we should come here. We have suffered, all of us, and so have many others: the alchemists, Israel the money changer, the people who have been left with worthless coins, the territories who will be punished for failing to pay a tribute, the city itself. There are many who will curse the day that Milord ordered us to trace forged gold nobles. All we did was expose the forgeries and break the market.’

  ‘Surely, all that he planned here was to find the counterfeiters,’ Brother Peter reasoned. ‘We were told to find them and report them to the authorities. We were told to stop them making false coins. We were here to inquire and then enforce the law. There was nothing wrong in that. There was much good. Our failure was that we did not find them and stop them quickly enough.’

  In answer, Luca silently raised the letter that commanded them to buy the false coins.

  ‘No, I don’t know why he wanted us to buy,’ Brother Peter admitted.

  ‘But I have an idea,’ Luca said slowly. ‘What if Milord knew all along that there were counterfeit nobles being made by Drago Nacari and Jacinta? What if he knew from the very beginning that they had great chests of gold nobles from the Duke of Bedford, that they were putting onto the market, and that they also had a recipe to make more? What if he sent us here too late on purpose?’

  Ishraq nodded. ‘But he would have known that sooner or later you would find them. He knew that you would not stop until you found them. So he must have wanted them to be exposed, he wanted them to put the false nobles out into the market place, and only then be arrested.’

  ‘I find them, they escape – but that is by the way – for the main thing is that they are unveiled. My task was to expose the forgery. My task was to be so blunderingly clumsy, so obvious, that all of Venice would know that there were counterfeit coins and a massive forgery had taken place.’ Luca’s face was white and bitter. ‘He knew that I would go after the scent like a stupid hound – showing everyone where I was going, a hue and cry all on my own.’

  ‘The coins bled,’ Ishraq pointed out. ‘That exposed the Nacaris, not us.’

  ‘We were going to expose them,’ Freize said. ‘Brother Peter insisted on it. Those were the orders. The coins bled the night before we would have reported them. We had all agreed to obey Milord’s orders. They would have been exposed one way or another.’

  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 s
mall 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.