Fools' Gold Read online

  Everyone was happy to be leaving the city behind them. Brother Peter was glad to be in his robes again and not living a lie, Ishraq was revelling in the freedom of being on the road and not cooped up as a Venetian lady companion, Isolde was setting off to her godfather’s son with renewed determination, and Luca was heading for his next inquiry with a sense that the world was filled with mystery – even his own mission puzzled him.

  ‘Are you glad to leave Venice?’ he asked Isolde.

  ‘It is the most beautiful city I have ever seen,’ she said. ‘But it has a darker side. Do you know I saw the strangest thing as we were going in the ferry to fetch the horses?’

  ‘What did you see?’ he asked, eager to be distracted from his own sense of failure and loss.

  ‘I thought I saw a child,’ she said seriously. ‘Swimming in the water, after our boat. I nearly called out for us to stop. A little child coming after us, but then I saw it was tiny, no bigger than a little fish, but swimming and keeping up with the ship.’

  Luca felt himself freeze. ‘What d’you think it was?’ he asked, trying to sound careless. ‘That’s odd.’

  She looked at him. ‘I assumed I had seen a pale-coloured fish and made a mistake. There could be nothing in the lagoon like a tiny person?’

  He contained his own shiver of superstition, and leaned towards her to put his hand over hers. ‘I won’t let anything hurt you,’ he promised her. ‘Nothing can come after us. And there couldn’t be anything like that in the waters.’

  Trustingly she let his hand rest on hers, slowly she smiled at him. ‘I feel safe with you,’ she said. ‘And at least Venice taught me to stand up for myself.’

  He laughed. ‘Will you protect me, Isolde?’

  She was radiant. ‘I will,’ she promised.

  ‘And did you learn to choose the one you love?’ he asked her very quietly.

  ‘Did you?’ she whispered. ‘Do you even know who you chose?’

  Luca gasped at her teasing, and laughed aloud, glancing back to see that no one was in earshot.

  Behind them, completely deaf to their low-voiced conversation, Freize was wordlessly delighted to be reunited with his horse. Gently, he pulled Rufino’s thick mane, and patted his neck, and sometimes leaned forwards to stroke his ears. ‘You would not believe it,’ he remarked to the horse. ‘No roads! No fields! No forage nor meadows, not even a grass verge for you to have a quiet graze. “What sort of a city do you call this?” I asked them. They could not answer me. For sure, a city that has no room for horses cannot thrive. You must have missed me. Indeed, I missed you.’

  The donkey behind him was dawdling. Freize turned in the saddle and gave it a little admonitory whistle.

  ‘The dross of the coins is rusting away,’ Ishraq observed, riding alongside him. ‘It is dripping from the bags as we go. At this rate we will be left with saddlebags of gold.’

  Freize was distracted from his conversation with Rufino. ‘He’s a clever man, that Milord,’ he said. ‘What an engine to set in motion! Devious.’

  ‘He’s made himself a fortune, but I think his main aim was to cheat the Ottomans,’ Ishraq observed. ‘And in this round of the battle between him and Radu Bey, I think he has won.’

  ‘Because they were forced to accept only a third of the tribute?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘But best of all for him would be – don’t you think? – that he made fools of them. He tricked them into sending back good gold. He made them think it was all bad. He tricked us, he tricked Venice, but really he tricked them. That is what will infuriate them worse than the reduced tribute. He tricked them into sending back good gold. He destroyed the reputation of the coins and then we bought them. He made fools of them. It really is fools’ gold.’

  Freize shook his head at the mendacity of the man. ‘He is a cunning man,’ he said. ‘Deep. But I know that I’d like to ask him one thing,’ he said.

  ‘Only one thing? I’d like to ask him lots of things,’ she agreed. ‘What would you ask?’

  ‘About this world,’ Freize said thoughtfully. ‘A man like him with so much knowledge? I’d ask him whether he truly thinks that it might be round, as the pretty girl said.’

  She nodded, without a glimmer of a smile, as thoughtful as he was. ‘Freize, you do know that the sun stays in the same place all the time, night and day, and the world goes round it, don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ he exclaimed so loudly that Rufino threw up his head in alarm, and Freize soothed him with a touch. He looked at her more closely and saw her smile. ‘Ah, you are joking,’ Freize decided. ‘But you don’t fool me.’ He pointed to the comforting sun, slowly rising up in the sky towards the midday height, and shining down on him, as it had always done. ‘East to west, every day of my life,’ he said. ‘Never failed. Course it goes round me.’

  Ahead of them, Brother Peter started to sing a psalm, and the other four joined in, their voices blending in a harmony in the cool air as tuneful as a choir. Freize put his hand in his pocket, seeking his little whistle to play a descant, and suddenly checked.

  ‘I had forgotten! I had quite forgotten!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘What?’ Ishraq asked, glancing over to him.

  In answer he drew a coin from his pocket. ‘My lucky penny,’ he said. ‘The lass, Jacinta, the gambling girl, put it back in my pocket the last time I saw her, and wished me luck with it. I had quite forgotten it. But here it is again. I shall be lucky, don’t you think? After all that has passed, to have it returned to me as a gift from her must make it more lucky than ever.’

  ‘Why did she have it?’ Ishraq asked. ‘Did you give it to her?’

  ‘She took it from me and then returned it as a keepsake,’ Freize said. ‘Gave me a kiss for it.’ Without looking at it closely he passed it over to her. Ishraq took it, and then pulled her horse to a standstill. ‘I should think you are very lucky,’ she said oddly. ‘Very lucky indeed. Look at it.’

  Isolde glanced back and, seeing that they had stopped, called to Brother Peter and halted her own horse. The older man rode back and they all gathered round as Freize took his lucky penny from Ishraq and examined it.

  ‘You know, it does look very like gold,’ he said quietly. ‘But it is the one I gave to her, I swear it. I would know it anywhere. It is my own lucky penny. I recognise the mint and the date, it is mine without a doubt. Just as I gave it to her. But now it looks like gold.’

  ‘Enamelled with gold,’ Brother Peter said. ‘She put a skin of gold on it for you. Another pretty trick.’

  Without a word, Freize handed it to Luca, who took a knife from his belt and made the tiniest of nicks in the side of it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The same colour all the way through. We can test it properly when we get to an inn; but it looks like gold. It looks like solid gold.’

  There was a silence as they each absorbed what this meant.

  ‘You are certain it is your lucky penny and not another gold coin that she gave you?’ Isolde asked.

  Mutely, Freize passed it to her. ‘The penny. My lucky penny. Minted in the Vatican in the year of my birth. She would not have such another. She could not have such another. It must be mine. But now it is as heavy as gold, and soft as gold and golden as gold.’

  ‘Did they do it then?’ Ishraq wondered. ‘They really did it? They found the philosophers’ stone that can change everything to gold, and they turned Freize’s penny to gold?’ She nodded to Luca. ‘D’you remember that they said that they had one more step to take and they would be able to refine any matter to gold? Perhaps they did it, on this one coin, and we were in the room where they did it. They made true gold from dross. They really did.’

  ‘And the Venetians drove them away,’ Isolde said. ‘Sent them into exile with the secret of how to make gold in their pocket.’

  ‘We gave them the boat!’ Freize exclaimed, his voice cracking on a laugh. ‘We helped them to run away with the secret of a fortune, the secret that alchemists have never yet found.’