Order of Darkness Read online

  She shook her head. ‘I am too ashamed to confess.’

  ‘You were born and bred to be a lady,’ Brother Peter reminded her. ‘A lady with duties and obligations. It is your part in life to show self-control, good manners, self-discipline. You cannot be ruled by your heart in love, or by your temper and start fighting. You are meant to be better than this. Your father raised you for a great place in the world, not to be a silly girl with love affairs and fights. You carry his broadsword to remind you he was a crusader.’

  She looked up at him. ‘I know this,’ she said. ‘But I am not in a world where I can behave well and people around me behave well. I am in a world of temptation and anger. I want to be able to fight for myself. I want to be able to feel desire and act. I want to be able to defend myself against attack. I want to use the broadsword in my defence, not just carry it.’

  ‘A lady will find her defenders. The men around you will speak for you if needs be,’ Brother Peter assured her, not realising that he was recommending a view of women which had kept them powerless for centuries, and would lead them to be victims of male anger and male power forever.

  She bowed her head. ‘I will try,’ she said, for she did not know this either.

  At the back of the room, Ishraq, who disagreed with everything that Brother Peter had said, shook her head and could not stop herself making a little ‘tut’ noise of annoyance.

  ‘There they are now,’ Brother Peter remarked, seeing the boat swerve through the busy traffic on the canal.

  They heard Giuseppe call: ‘Gondola! Gondola! Gondola!’ in his bubbling cry as he turned the gondola across the bows of the other boats and steered it neatly into the house, and then they heard Luca and Freize, talking quietly as they came up the stairs and entered the dining room.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Isolde asked Luca, going straight to his side as she saw his slight frown.

  He nodded. ‘We sent seven nobles in case he asked for more. It ought to be all right. It’s just that the nobles are soaring in value against every other sort of coin. The slaver will not know what their value is in Venice when he sells my father in Trieste. It’s going up so fast you have to be at the money changer’s table to see it change. It’s even going up against gold.’

  ‘How can a coin be more valuable than its ingredient?’ Ishraq asked. ‘How can a gold coin be more valuable than gold itself?’

  ‘Because people trust the gold noble even more than gold,’ Freize answered her. ‘There was a long queue before Israel, the money changer. People were changing solid gold into nobles because it is worth more than its own weight. People are taking their gold jewellery, their wives’ necklaces, and exchanging them by weight for a gold noble, and then adding more to buy the coin. Buy a gold bar and it could be lead with a gold skin. You don’t know, you have to get it tested. Buy a gold necklace and you don’t know what you’re getting. But all the gold nobles are always good, and they’re all worth more today than they were yesterday.’

  The travellers exchanged an uncomfortable glance.

  ‘This is getting more and more serious,’ Brother Peter said. ‘People are speculating in gold nobles but only we know where they came from. Only we know that some of them are not pure gold and have been made by alchemy!’

  He crossed the room and checked that no one was listening at the door and then gestured that they should all sit around the table. ‘We have to decide what to do. This situation is getting worse and worse. I know you feel tenderness towards the alchemist and his daughter but we are bound to report them at once.’

  Luca paused for a moment, almost as if he was reminding himself that he was on a mission, and that he was the Inquirer. Slowly, he took the chair at the head of the table. For the first time it was as if he was consulting Brother Peter as his clerk – not as his mentor. ‘Wait. We have to think this through,’ he ruled. ‘Some things are clear. We can report to Milord, that we have completed our inquiries and we know what has happened here. The alchemist pair came with gold that they had obtained from their patron to trade on the market of Venice. They admit that they released many gold English nobles, but will not say whether this was alchemical gold that they had made or alchemical gold from the great master John, Duke or Bedford, or whether it was true gold, earthly gold, from the mint that he controlled at Calais.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Brother Peter said. ‘And I have prepared the report in code, saying just this. It is ready to go once you have signed it.’

  ‘They also said that the world was round,’ Freize pointed out. ‘And the pretty girl said that she was an old lady. So it might be that they are just mad, poor things.’

  ‘Peace!’ Luca commanded him. ‘Most scholars believe that the world is round.’

  ‘They do?’ Freize was scandalised. ‘What about the other side?’

  ‘What other side?’

  ‘The underneath. If the world is round, are we balanced on top? And what about the underneath? The underneath of the ball? What’s it sitting on? That’s the question. Never mind rainbows! And what happens when you go round the middle? If you travelled to the underneath you would fall off.’ He put both hands to his head and gently pulled his own ears. ‘You would be upside down! It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.’

  ‘Never mind all that. They were talking about something else entirely different.’

  ‘Why were they talking about the world being round at all?’ Isolde asked, distracted from the most important issue by Freize’s confusion. She leaned forwards and gently took his hands from his ears. ‘Hush, Freize. Be calm. It’s no worse than thinking that if the world were flat, you could travel to the edge and fall off it.’

  ‘Fall off it?’ he repeated, horrified. ‘There is an edge?’

  ‘We were talking about rainbows,’ Luca explained briefly to Isolde.

  ‘Actually, that’s no comfort,’ Freize said quietly to Isolde. ‘Actually, it’s worse. Falling off the edge? Saints save us!’

  ‘But, to our business with them,’ Luca said, interrupting the digression. ‘They say that after some weeks of trading the Bedford gold they started to make gold nobles of their own, with the Duke of Bedford’s own recipe. And then they released these gold nobles on the market with the others. So we can be sure that there is already a mixture of good English gold nobles and alchemy gold nobles coming onto the market together.’

  ‘Can you tell one from another?’ Brother Peter asked. ‘Or are they all equally good?”

  ‘They seemed to suggest that their own gold, made from silver and base metal, needed another stage of refining. They said they needed more time,’ Ishraq replied, worried.

  ‘Lady Carintha had new gold nobles in a necklace,’ Isolde offered. ‘They looked as good as the others. If they were alchemy gold, you couldn’t tell by looking.’

  ‘But their main work, their greatest work, was not the gold, they said, but life,’ Freize said. ‘They said that. Didn’t they?’

  ‘They did,’ Luca confirmed. ‘They were very clear that the making of gold was a lesser art, one for greedy men. Their principal ambition was to make, not the philosophers’ stone that can turn everything into gold, but the philosophers’ elixir – to make life itself.’

  ‘They have a powerful number of dead animals,’ Freize pointed out. ‘In all those jars. And for people making life they have a terrible stink of death in their storeroom.’

  ‘The young woman said that she was an old woman,’ Ishraq told Brother Peter. ‘She said she was not as she seemed. She said that she was an old woman in a young woman’s body, and that she and the man she calls her father had worked together for many many years.’

  There was a little silence.

  ‘But they said many things that cannot be true,’ Freize reminded them. ‘I don’t even want to think about it.’

  ‘We have to report them,’ Brother Peter said heavily. ‘I see that they are philosophers, and their work is perhaps valuable, but Milord was clear that we had to find the counter