Fools' Gold Read online

  She smiled at him. ‘And not a young woman either,’ she said. ‘I am sorry to have deceived you. Dr Nacari and I have worked together for many many years, and we have discovered many things together. Among them, an elixir which prolongs life itself. I am an old, old soul in a young body. You, Freize, make this heart beat faster; but it’s only fair that I should tell you, that it is a very old heart. I’m an old woman behind this young face.’

  Freize glanced at Luca and raised his shoulders. ‘This is beyond me, Sparrow,’ he said. ‘Someone is mad here, it might be me or them.’

  But it was Ishraq who spoke next. ‘It’s about the gold,’ she said frankly. ‘We have come about the gold. We have come to warn you.’

  The alchemist smiled. ‘Was it you that broke into our house, Daughter?’

  Freize shook his head in instant denial, but Ishraq met the older man’s eyes fearlessly, and nodded. ‘I am sorry. We are commanded to find the source of the gold nobles. Our master demanded that we pretend to be a wealthy young family and investigate. We followed Israel the money changer and he came to your door. So we knew you had a store of gold nobles.’

  ‘We knew as soon as we came home, that someone had been into the inner room. And the things . . . the dark matter, the mouse in the jar, the coins in the fire, they were all disturbed, just a little, by your presence. Things are not the same when they are watched. Something changes when it has been seen.’

  ‘You knew we had been in the room?’ Freize asked sceptically.

  Luca stirred at the suggestion that an object might sense an observer; but Ishraq simply answered: ‘Yes, I thought you might know. And we took a print of the Duke of Bedford’s seal and a piece of glass from the writing table.’

  ‘The rainbow glass,’ Luca said. ‘The glass that makes a rainbow when the light falls on it. I have been interested in rainbows since I saw the mosaic at Ravenna. Do you know how they are made in the sky? How does the glass do it on the earth?’

  ‘The glass splits the light into its true colours,’ the alchemist told Luca, understanding his longing for knowledge. ‘Everyone thinks that light is the colour of sunshine. But it is not. It is made of many colours. You can see this when it goes through the glass.’

  ‘Is it always the same colours?’ Luca asked him. ‘I saw a mosaic of a rainbow, an ancient mosaic, centuries old, and it was the same colours that we see today. The ancients must have somehow known that light made a rainbow.’

  ‘Always the same colours,’ Jacinta confirmed. ‘And always following the same order. Light appears as clear brightness when all the colours flow together, but if you allow a beam of light to fall on a piece of glass, cut in the right way, it will split the light into its colours and you can see them. Put another piece of glass on the rainbow and you can make them meld together again and become invisible once more. One piece of glass can split the light, and then another makes it whole again.’

  ‘So what makes a rainbow in the sky?’ Ishraq asked.

  Jacinta turned to her. ‘I believe that the drops of water of the rain split the light, just like the glass splits it. You often see the rainbow against rain clouds, or against mist.’

  Luca nodded. ‘That’s true, you do.’

  ‘But the interesting question to me . . .’ Jacinta went on. ‘The interesting question is: why is it curved?’

  ‘Curved?’ Freize asked, utterly baffled, but wanting to join in.

  The alchemist smiled at him. ‘Why would the bow of the rainbow be curved?’ he asked. ‘Why would it not run straight across the sky?’

  Freize shook his head, even Luca was blank.

  ‘Because it follows the line of the earth. It proves that the earth is not flat but shaped like a ball. And the great length of the rainbow proves that the ball is far greater than philosophers think, and round, not humped. It tells us that the earth is round but bigger than we thought. Much bigger than we thought.’

  Freize put his hands down and held on to the table, as if to steady himself. ‘Why would you think such a thing?’ he said, complaining of their imaginations which made the ground heave beneath his feet. ‘Why would you repeat such a disturbing thing? And obviously untrue. Why would you say such a thing, even if you are mad enough to think it? It makes my head spin.’

  Jacinta put her small hand over his as he gripped the table. ‘Because we consider all possibilities,’ she answered. ‘And it is true about the world being round. But of course, people don’t like to think about it.’ She looked up and smiled at Luca. ‘Keep the glass piece,’ she said. ‘And see what light shines through it. Who knows what you will discover?’

  ‘And what about you?’ Ishraq asked. ‘You know, you can’t stay here, counterfeiting coins. This has to stop.’

  ‘You call us counterfeiters?’ The alchemist drew himself up to his full height. ‘You think I am a common criminal?’

  For the first time Ishraq felt uneasy. She looked from Jacinta to the man who had passed as her father and remembered that she, Luca and Freize were three, against the two of them. But there was something about these two that made her wonder if they were safe, even with those odds. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Doctor Nacari; but what else am I to think?’ she said carefully.

  ‘We saw the silver piccoli in the hearth,’ Freize said bluntly. ‘We saw the sacks of gold at your watergate. We know that you supply Israel, the money changer, with his gold coins. We assume that you supply others. You’ve got the seal of the Duke of Bedford, we know it’s his seal. Altogether, it looks very bad.’ He turned to Jacinta. ‘It looks as if you are counterfeiting gold. You may be as old as my great-grandmother and the world may be round – though I have to tell you that I doubt it – but I would not have any harm come to a lass with a smile like yours.’

  At once she beamed, as radiant as a girl. ‘Ah Freize,’ she said intimately. ‘You have a true heart. I can see that as clearly as I can see anything.’

  The alchemist sighed. ‘Come in here,’ he said. He opened the door to what had once been the storeroom in the house and the warm rotting smell intensified. He led the way into the inner room and Luca looked around in amazement from the vat of rotting garbage, to the bubbling, dripping glass vessels.

  ‘I won’t deny that we have started to make gold,’ the alchemist said to Freize. ‘There are the moulds for pouring the gold. Here . . .’ He pointed to a great round crock sealed and thrust into the deep heat of the fire. ‘Do you know what they call that?’

  Freize dumbly shook his head.

  ‘The philosophers’ egg,’ he said and smiled. ‘It absorbs an unbearable heat and inside it the metals, pure and impure, melt and blend. When we pour the molten mix into the moulds we make gold nobles.’

  ‘Pure gold?’ Luca confirmed, hardly able to believe it. ‘Because we tested some coins when we first arrived in Venice.’

  ‘Those would have been the first we ever had, from our patron. We didn’t make them. Those were real gold nobles, from the Calais mint. We sowed the market with them. At first we just sold the coins he provided, creating an interest in the market, watching the price rise, and then we started to make our own. We have only just started making our own, from mixed metals. They pass as gold, they are just one step away from being pure gold, they are close, very close to perfect. I need only a little time to make them pure. I have to work on them some more. One last stage of refinement.’

  ‘We can’t do it here, any more,’ Jacinta reminded him. ‘Freize is good to warn us. We’ll have to move on.’

  ‘Yes, I see we must be on our travels again. We will have to tell our patron that we have to find a new home.’

  Ishraq saw the young woman turn from the alchemist with regret, saw her glance at a bell jar on the table. Where the little brown mouse had been on their last visit, there was now another creature, a little like a lizard. Ishraq could not see more than the hairless back and the little outspread legs as the creature slept on its tiny belly at the bottom of the jar.

  ‘Wh
o is your patron?’ Luca asked.

  The alchemist smiled at him. ‘He works in secret,’ he said. ‘He works in darkness. But we have done what he wanted us to do. He commanded us to come here and put the coins that he gave us into the market place, and then make our own, and now we are only one step from pure gold, only one step from eternal life.’

  ‘Wait a moment, you brought gold coins here?’ Freize asked. ‘You didn’t make them all here?’

  ‘Our first task was only to trade gold coins.’ Jacinta moved to the table and tossed, nonchalantly, a cloth over the bell jar. The little thing inside moved as the cloth fell down, hiding it from sight, and then lay still. ‘We found a trader we could trust – Israel, the man that you know – and then we put the gold nobles out into the market. We watched the traders bid for them and drive up the price. Everyone wanted them. We created a fashion for them, and we supplied them in thousands from our store. Our second task, once people were calling out for the coins, was to take enough silver to make our own gold. To refine it and work on it according to the recipe. You saw us collecting silver in the market square, with the cups and ball game. You saw the coins heating up in the forge. Then, when we had converted it into gold we sold our alchemical gold into the market we had created for the real gold nobles. But you have seen all this. You know how we do it?’

  Freize shook his head. ‘We were in a hurry,’ he said, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘We visited, as it were, like burglars.’

  The alchemist turned to Luca. ‘If I could have gone on here with my work I would have changed this vat of dirt into gold itself. Imagine it. The purest metal from the basest filth. But as it is, we have made a start, transforming the piccoli. We collected purses of silver and copper. Jacinta won it for us every day.’

  ‘But where did those first gold coins come from?’ Freize asked, clinging to the few facts that he thought he might be able to understand. ‘Your master’s gold that he gave you? The first gold that you didn’t make, but only sold on. Where did your master get it?’

  Jacinta lifted some of the glass jars off the table and put them up high, on the shelves. Ishraq glimpsed the desiccated bodies of a couple of mice, and one splayed specimen, pinned on a board, which looked like a dead cat. The young woman tidied them out of sight, and then turned to answer Freize.

  ‘They were true gold nobles,’ she said. ‘We cannot be accused of forging them, they were the real thing. Gold nobles created and stored by John, Duke of Bedford. A great alchemist. A great adept. They came in his caskets for us to use, under his own seal.’

  ‘From the mint at Calais? He had them made from real gold and stored to pay the English troops? When he was regent?’ Luca asked.

  She laughed and wagged a finger at him as if it was a great joke. ‘Ah, don’t ask me!’ she said. ‘He commanded the mint, so they may be English gold. They might be the real thing. But he also owned the manuscript book that we showed you, he was translating it when he died. His is the recipe that we are using to turn dark matter into gold. He spent his life and his fortune trying to make the philosophers’ stone. Who knows whether the gold came from mines or from his alchemical forge? Who knows? Who cares? As long as it is good coin?’

  ‘Because if it’s alchemy gold, then he had found the secret of life, and you have it, even if you can’t read it yet!’ Ishraq exclaimed. ‘You are working towards it. In the pages of the manuscript, in your forge here, in your still, you have the secret of how to make gold from nothing, how to make eternal life!’

  Jacinta smiled. ‘Of course we do. But if we had stolen the gold and all that we have made is a clever forgery, then we are counterfeiters and we will confess it to no one,’ Jacinta replied steadily. ‘So don’t ask me which it is. Because I won’t say.’

  Freize sat down heavily on one of the stools. ‘It’s beyond me,’ he said. ‘But I know one thing . . . ’

  There was silence in the room but for the gurgle in the vat of first matter, and the drip of a distilling pipe.

  ‘No, I know two things,’ Freize said, thinking furiously. ‘The world is flat, of course, for if not how could hell be below and heaven above? And that I was taught in the monastery and they even had a picture of it on the wall of the church that I saw several times a day and many times on Sunday so I am sure of that at least: hell below, earth in the middle and heaven above.

  ‘And the other thing is something that I know, but you do not. Something that you should know, and be warned. Our master, that is to say Luca’s master, Milord, has ordered that we find the counterfeiters and report them. Our travelling companion, Brother Peter, will obey him, whether we agree or not. If you want to save your skins, you had better pack and go. It doesn’t matter if you confess to alchemy or confess to counterfeiting, or deny them both, for Brother Peter will report you; and I, for one, would rather not see the Doge’s men come here and take you off to boil you in oil.’

  ‘They boil forgers?’ the girl asked with a horrified shudder.

  ‘God knows what they do to them,’ Freize said to her. ‘But sweetheart, you don’t want to find out.’

  Solemnly the alchemist nodded. ‘You are right to remind us that we are in danger. We will take the most precious things and leave tomorrow, at dawn.’

  ‘Better go tonight,’ Freize prompted him.

  ‘I am sorry for it,’ Luca said. ‘I see that you have been doing great work here. I should have loved to work with you. I should have been honoured to see the transformation from first matter to gold.’

  The man shrugged. ‘We will have to start again. But this time we start with a proven recipe. Making gold is for the greedy criminals of this world. We wanted to make life itself. That is the point of alchemy, translation from the lesser to the greater till the purest point of all. Gold is nothing, life is the great secret.’

  Luca shook his head at the waste of them packing their treasures and leaving when they were on the brink of discovery. ‘I wish to God you could tell me all that you know,’ he said.

  ‘Then we are equal, for I wish to God that you could tell me what you know, for I think you have it in you to be a great adept,’ the alchemist said gently. ‘Mortal born or changeling boy, you have the third eye.’

  ‘What?’ Freize asked. ‘What do you say he has got?’

  Drago Nacari put his forefinger to the centre of his own forehead, between his eyebrows, and then pointed to Luca’s forehead. Luca flinched as if at a touch. ‘The third eye,’ Drago said. ‘The gaze that can see the unseen things. I think you are indeed of faerie blood – you are a changeling.’

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ Freize decided, disturbed by this talk about his friend. He got to his feet and took Jacinta’s hand and kissed it. ‘We’ll do what we can to prevent Brother Peter reporting you at once. But don’t you wait upon your going – pack up and go at once, for your own safety.’

  She took his hand and put it to her cheek in a brief, warm gesture. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I will remember you as the sweetest thing in this extraordinary city. Truer than true gold itself, a finer thing than we could refine.’

  He flushed like a boy, and turned to the alchemist and gave him an awkward nod. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘About the breaking and entering. Work, you understand.’

  Drago Nacari nodded in return. ‘Sorry about the false coins,’ he said. ‘Work, you understand.’

  Luca went to the doorway and bowed to them both. ‘I wish you the very best,’ he said. ‘And we will not report you till tomorrow, after dawn, at the earliest. You will have till then to get away.’

  The young woman came after them, and slipped her slim hand into Freize’s pocket.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, pausing.

  ‘Your penny,’ she said softly. ‘I promised I would return it to you. It is as true as you.’ She raised her face to his and Freize bent down and kissed her warm lips. ‘Good luck follow you,’ she said. ‘Blessings be.’ She went back to stand beside Drago Nacari, beside their bench, in the noisome laborator
y among the bubbling stills.

  Freize looked back, to get a last sight of her, and thought that they were like a lost couple heroically going down on a little boat, sunk by their own determination, then he caught up with Ishraq and Luca as they went quietly out of the front door and closed it behind them.

  The waves lapped at the stone quays as their gondola went quietly down the small canals. ‘Drop me here,’ Luca said suddenly. ‘I want to see if Father Pietro is still at the Rialto Bridge.’

  ‘We’ll wait for you,’ Ishraq decided. The gondola took Luca to a set of stairs in the quayside and he ran lightly up and then crossed the square to where Father Pietro was seated, in his usual place, with his little table before him and his tragic roll of names unfurled.

  ‘Father Pietro, do you have news?’

  The priest leaped to his feet and came to Luca with his hands held out. ‘Praise God!’ he said. ‘Praise God, I have news. My messenger saw Bayeed and was able to take a passage on a fast ship back to me with the greatest of news.’

  ‘My father? Gwilliam Vero?’

  ‘He is found. He is found, my son!’

  A great darkness clouded Luca’s vision, he felt his head swirl. Out of the mist he felt the priest grab his arm, tap his cheek. ‘Luca? Luca Vero?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Luca gasped. ‘I could not hear. I cannot believe what I heard! My father is alive? And can we ransom him?’

  The priest beamed at him. ‘I didn’t know you had friends in high places. You should have told me that you had a great friend.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Luca stammered. ‘I have no great friend. I am all but friendless. Until this moment I was all but an orphan. I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘A very great man had already sent a message to Bayeed, asking him if he had a Gwilliam Vero on board, telling him that he must release him to his son Luca, if requested. You know who did that?’

  Luca started to shake his head. ‘I know no one except . . . the man who told me of you, he went by the name of Radu Bey.’