Fools' Gold Read online

  ‘Sin all around us,’ Brother Peter said, shaking his head in horror.

  ‘I know what I said about never kissing a man before marriage!’ Isolde whispered fervently to Ishraq, as she rose to her feet and pulled her hood forwards. ‘But that was weeks ago, it was before we pretended to be married. And then he kissed me, so I know what it’s like now, and besides it’s carnival, and everyone, everywhere we go is courting and making love.

  ‘Don’t you see it?’ she urged her friend. ‘Don’t you feel it? It’s as if the very air is caressing the skin of my neck, is touching my lips. Don’t you feel it? I can hardly breathe for it.’

  Isolde stepped out of the gondola and stood at the water’s edge. Ishraq was helped on shore and took her hand and held it tightly as they waited for the two men to disembark. ‘Isolde, what are you going to do?’

  Isolde’s dark blue eyes glittered like sapphires through the dark blue of her mask. ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘Of course! Always! But not to disaster . . .’

  ‘We’ll follow you as you go in,’ Brother Peter said, getting out of the gondola and gesturing that the two young women should lead the way up the stairs to the inside of the palace. Isolde, as if recalled to the proper behaviour for a young woman of a noble family, tightened the tie on her mask and went up the marble steps into the brightly lit house.

  They were expected, and at once a lady-in-waiting took the two young women up the sweeping stairs to the upper floor where the lady of the house was entertaining her friends. Menservants greeted Luca and Brother Peter and took their capes and hats, leaving them in their dark masks, and showed them up to the first floor. Freize, always at his happiest when he was heading towards dinner, stepped into the servants’ hall at the canal side.

  As she climbed the stairs, Isolde looked back and saw Luca swallowed up by the crowd of young men, and heard the rattle of dice and a cheer as someone won a small fortune at cards, and a ripple of laughter from the courtesans who would entertain the men, while the ladies had to go up to the next floor.

  ‘Greetings, how pleasant to meet you.’ The lady of the house, Lady Carintha, came forward and took their hands. She was an elegant woman, dressed in dark blue, almost the match of Isolde’s gown, except that hers plunged low at the front and almost slid off her broad shoulders in an open invitation. Her shining gold hair was piled up on the top of her head, in a swirl of blue silk, except for three ringlets which fell over her creamy naked shoulders. Her eyes, a calculating blue, scanned the two young women and her rouged mouth smiled without warmth.

  ‘You can take your masks off now we are indoors and among friends.’ She exclaimed at their beauty. ‘Oh my dears! How you are going to break hearts in this wicked city of ours! One of you so very fair and one so very dark, no man could resist the two of you. Most of them will want both of you together!’

  She drew them forwards and introduced them to other ladies, who were drinking wine from brightly coloured glasses and eating small sweet pastries. ‘Some wine?’ She pressed a couple of glasses on them. ‘But I daresay I should not praise your looks, for you will have heard it all before. You will have dozens of lovers already, you must tell me all about them.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Isolde said, flushing.

  The lady laughed and patted her cheek. ‘Only a matter of time for both of you, only a matter of moments, I swear it. Indeed! Why not tonight? I can’t believe how beautiful you are, and you match so well together. You must always go around together, you are each a perfect foil for the other.’ She turned to Ishraq. ‘You must have a lover, I am sure! Someone who prefers brunettes?’

  Ishraq shook her head, not at all flattered by the woman’s cloying warmth. ‘No. We have been brought up very carefully. I have no husband.’

  ‘Someone else’s husband then?’ someone suggested, prompting laughter from all the ladies.

  ‘My lady’s brother is very strict,’ Ishraq said, hiding her irritation behind a polite smile. ‘We go out very little.’

  ‘The older brother, yes! You can see it clearly. No one would invite him for an affair of the heart. But the other brother, the younger one, Luca Vero, now he cannot be so very virtuous? Surely? Don’t disappoint me! He is truly a man that turns heads! No one as tempting as that could be monkish.’

  Someone else laughed and agreed. ‘Turns heads! I’d turn down the sheets!’

  ‘We were looking out of the window at him! We are so jealous of Carintha having him for a neighbour,’ one of the ladies told Ishraq, squeezing her elbow. ‘We’ve all laid bets on her taking her own gondola and serenading him! She would, you know. She’s quite shameless! If she sets her heart on him, she’ll have him!’

  They laughed, again, as Ishraq silently detached herself from the stranger’s hold.

  ‘You’d open your front door for me, wouldn’t you?’ Lady Carintha asked, putting her hand on Isolde’s arm. ‘Open the door and let me run up the stairs to your brother’s room?’

  Isolde gave a little shiver, but did not shake off the unwelcome caress. ‘I am sorry. I would not be allowed,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Then he’ll have to give me a key himself!’ Her ladyship smiled and turned to take a glass of wine. Ishraq saw Isolde grit her teeth, and tweaked her sleeve to remind her to be polite to her hostess.

  ‘Make sure you tell him that I shall visit,’ Lady Carintha turned back and whispered to both girls. ‘I am absolutely serious. I had one look at him and I knew who would be my lover for this Carnevale. Good Lord, I might not be able to give him up for Lent!’

  Isolde made a little exclamation and tore herself away from Lady Carintha’s touch. Her ladyship hardly noticed.

  ‘I’ve never failed,’ she went on to one of her friends, ignoring Isolde’s half-turned back. ‘I’ve never failed to capture a young man once I’ve set my heart on him. Do you think he is a virgin? That would be too delicious! I shall be as innocent as him! You know I think I could tremble. D’you know, I think I could gasp?’

  ‘Surely he can’t be!’

  ‘Not with looks like that!’

  ‘Someone must have beaten you to it, Carintha!’

  ‘This is unbearable!’ Isolde exclaimed in an undertone to Ishraq.

  ‘Be patient,’ she replied. ‘We only have to stay for an hour. And have you seen her earrings?’

  ‘What about them?’ Isolde said crossly.

  ‘Half English nobles,’ Ishraq pointed out. ‘Drilled and mounted as earrings.’

  There was gambling in this salon too, and conversation, though there was little to talk about but fashion and love affairs. Isolde drew Ishraq away from the spiteful women and towards the gambling tables. There were musicians playing in one corner and half a dozen women dancing listlessly together.

  ‘I am afraid that I have no money,’ Ishraq confessed to Carintha, who followed them, sipping greedily from her wine glass. ‘I didn’t think to bring any. Though I changed some money only a few days ago. I bought English gold nobles, I changed all that I had into English nobles. Do you think that was wise?’

  ‘Oh! aren’t they divine? They’re all I use now,’ Carintha replied. ‘As clean as if someone had washed them for me. Have you seen my earrings?’

  ‘She just remarked on them,’ Isolde said.

  ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Lady Carintha turned her head one way and another so that they could see. In her ears, dangling from a gold pin, were two half noble coins. ‘I’m having a necklace made of them too. I shall start a fashion. Everyone will want them.’

  ‘They are such pretty coins. Are they minted in Venice?’ Ishraq wondered aloud, watching the play at the table and not looking at Carintha at all.

  ‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘They are English, through and through. My husband trades in them. They come from the English treasure house at Bordeaux. When they lost Bordeaux last year the French captured their treasury, all the wealth of John of Bedford, the Regent of France. And now they need nobles so badly in England that they