Fools' Gold Page 26

  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.’


  ‘And not just that. They had the secret of life itself,’ Ishraq reminded her. ‘The philosophers’ stone which makes gold, leads to the philosophers’ elixir, the elixir of life that cures death itself.’

  ‘And we lost them,’ Luca said, staring at the coin in his friend’s hand. ‘We were standing by the forge where they had made the secret of life itself, and we let them go, and then we ran away. We have been fools indeed. We have been the greatest fools of all.’

  Freize tossed the coin high in the air and they watched it turn and glint in the bright sunshine and fall heavily, as a solid gold coin will fall. He caught it with a slap of his hand, shook his head in wonderment, and put the coin back in his pocket. ‘Fools’ gold,’ he said. ‘Fools indeed.’

  Ishraq smiled at him. ‘Do you still think you’re lucky?’ she asked. ‘Is it still a lucky penny? Since a woman with the secret of eternal life and the secret of how to make gold gave it to you and then she went away forever? With her secrets safely with her?’

  ‘Said I had a true heart, and then turned into my grandmother,’ Freize reminded her. ‘Gave a little monster into my keeping which frightened me to death. Strangest girl I have ever kissed. But am I lucky? I would say so.’

  Luca clapped him on the shoulder with sudden brotherly affection. ‘Still lucky,’ he said. ‘Always lucky. Not hanged for alchemy, not drowned in the flood. The sun going round him, his feet on a flat earth. A golden penny in his pocket. Freize is born lucky. Always lucky!’

  ‘Born to be hanged,’ Brother Peter said; but he smiled at Freize. ‘No fool.’

  THE END

  AUTHOR NOTE

  I hope you enjoyed Fools’ Gold and that you go on to explore anything that struck you as odd or interesting in the story. Some of it is based on historical truth, some of it is based on old beliefs, and some of it is made up.

  Luca, Isolde, Freize, Ishraq and Brother Peter are fictional characters – as are all the other characters they meet in this novel – but the world they inhabit is very like the medieval world of 1454, and some of that wonderful world survives today. You can go to Ravenna and see the rainbow mosaics in the tomb of Galla Placida or you can look for the images online. They are still there, perhaps sunk a little more deeply into the damp soil of Ravenna than at the time of Luca’s visit.

  The Venice that Luca and his friends discover is still there too, of course. Though the modern day Venice is served by a railway and an airport, and the islands are built-up and merged one with another, the gardens for which medieval Venice was famous are now squares and quays and pavements, but you can still see the medieval paths and canals and you can visit the Doge’s palace which they were building when Luca was there and is now completed. You can even take a tour through the winding wooden corridors where Luca was led for questioning, and you can see the double sound-proofed door into the secret rooms, and the cell where Freize was held prisoner.

  I am going to write more about the lives of Jews in the medieval world but the experience of Israel as a moneychanger was typical of the lives of many of the Jews of Venice. They had to live in a designated closed area known as the ‘ghetto’ meaning workplace, and they suffered persecution – blame for when things went wrong, and exploitation during good years. The villain of Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice would recognise the difficulties that Israel expressed in getting Christians to pay their legitimate debts to him, and surviving in a hostile world. But at least Venice was tolerant enough to allow anyone to live and work in their city. In a few decades from the date of this novel the Jews would be expelled from Spain and banned from many other European countries.

  The description of the alchemists in this story is based on the history of the times and you can find out more about alchemy from my website. Alchemy was a sort of medieval chemistry – it gave its name to the science – and many of the earliest experiments of what we would now call science were done by brilliant thinkers who would have called themselves philosophers or alchemists. Some of them believed that they had discovered the philosophers’ stone, and have left persuasive accounts of their work. The Voynich Manuscript which Drago brings to Luca is a real document – it has still not been translated or understood. I chose not to try to explain away some of these unsolved riddles, I wanted to leave Jacinta and Drago and their work as something of a mystery. And some things are still unknown. And here I have to thank Mr Mark Robinson and Mr Mark Edwards of the Physics Department at St Peter’s School in York, who helped me understand gold density.

  At the heart of this book is the dangerous and erratic market for gold nobles. This is a fictional story but the history of capital has included many enthusiasms and scares that have made and lost fortunes. In the western world we are in the middle of a slump which followed a boom right now, and in some ways the bundling of paper debt and the selling of it at an unreal price is like the other events in history which economic writers call ‘a bubble’ – because it always goes pop. I have written before about the great excitement around the tulip market (Earthly Joys, 1998) and here I am writing a fiction about a market for gold nobles created and destroyed by Luca’s mysterious boss, Milord.

  You can read more about him, and about our four young adventurers, Brother Peter and even the horse Rufino in the next Order of Darkness book which I hope to write and publish in 2014. You can find out the title and when it is due and all about my other books on my website PhilippaGregory.com

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  Table of Contents

  Half-title page

  Also by Philippa Gregory

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Map

  Contents

  RAVENNA, SPRING 1454

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  AUTHOR NOTE