Fools' Gold Read online

  ‘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