Fools' Gold

The two girls looked up.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Luca asked.

  ‘I think we have to,’ Brother Peter said heavily. ‘We have to mix with people who have these gold nobles to discover where they come from and how much English gold is circulating. Milord himself said that we would have to gamble to maintain the appearance of being a wealthy worldly family. I shall pray before we go out and when we come back. I shall pray that the Lord will keep me from temptation.’

  ‘For any woman is certain to fling herself at him,’ whispered Ishraq to Isolde, prompting a smile.

  ‘And shall we come?’ Isolde asked. ‘Since I am to play the part of your sister?’

  ‘You are invited to visit with the ladies of the house.’ Brother Peter handed over a letter addressed to Signorina Vero.

  ‘They think I have your name!’ Isolde exclaimed to Luca and then suddenly flushed.

  ‘Of course they do,’ Brother Peter said wearily. ‘We are all using Luca’s name. They think I am called Peter Vero, his older brother.’

  ‘It just sounds so odd! As if we were married,’ Isolde said, red to her ears.

  ‘It sounds as if you are his sister,’ Brother Peter said coldly. ‘As we agreed that you should pretend to be. Will you visit the ladies while we go gambling? Ishraq should accompany you as your servant and companion.’

  ‘Yes,’ Isolde said. ‘Though gambling and a banquet sound like much more fun than visiting with ladies.’

  ‘We are not going to have fun,’ Brother Peter said severely. ‘We are going to trace false gold and to do this we will have to enter into the very heart of sin.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Isolde agreed but did not dare look at Ishraq whose shoulders were shaking with suppressed laughter. ‘And we will do our part. We can listen for any news of gold while we are talking to the ladies, we can ask them what their husbands are paying for the gold nobles on the Rialto and where they are getting them.’

  Next morning, Freize, Luca and Brother Peter went again to the Rialto Bridge to see the money changers. ‘How will we know how much gold they keep by them?’ Brother Peter asked anxiously, as the gondola wove its way through the many ships. ‘We need to demand enough to make them go to their suppliers, so that we can see where they go. But how shall we know how much to ask for?’

  ‘I saw only one chest behind the Jewish money changer, when we went before, I don’t think he carries many coins into the square. But I don’t know what he might keep at home,’ Freize said.

  ‘Brother Peter has shown me the manifest for the cargo that Milord has given us,’ Luca volunteered. ‘It’s due to come in from Russia next week. We’ll get a quarter of the cargo of a full-sized ship. We are talking about a fortune.’

  Freize whistled. ‘Milord has this to give away? What’s the ship carrying?’

  ‘Amber, furs, ivory.’

  ‘How is Milord so wealthy?’ Freize asked. ‘Is he not sworn to poverty like the brothers in our abbey?’

  Brother Peter frowned. ‘His business is his own concern, Freize; nothing to do with you. But of course, he has the wealth of the Holy Church behind him.’

  ‘As you say.’ Luca adjusted his view of his mysterious master yet again. ‘I knew he had great power. I didn’t know he could command great wealth too.’

  ‘They are one and the same,’ Brother Peter said dolefully. ‘Both the doorway to sin.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Freize said cheerfully. ‘And clearly, none of my business, dealing as I do with petty power and small change.’

  ‘We’ll say that we want to trade the cargo for gold, as soon as the ship comes in,’ Luca decided. ‘We’ll ask them if they keep enough gold in store. I’ll show them the manifest if I need to. We’ll have to match our words to what seems most likely and make it up as we go along.’

  Brother Peter shook his head. ‘I am lying every time I draw breath in this city,’ he said unhappily.

  ‘Me too,’ Freize said without any sign of discomfort. ‘Terrible.’

  The gondolier drew the craft up to the water steps and held the boat alongside the quay. ‘Shall I wait?’

  ‘Yes,’ Luca said as he stepped ashore.

  ‘The ladies will not need the gondola?’

  ‘The ladies will not go out,’ Brother Peter ruled. ‘They could only go to church in our absence, and they can walk to San Marco.’

  The gondolier bowed in obedience, as the men went up the quay steps to the busy square. Freize looked around at once for the pretty girl who gambled with the cups and ball. She was kneeling before the game, a square of pavement sprinkled with white sand, the three cups tipped upside down before her. Her taciturn father was standing nearby, as always.

  ‘I’ll just be a moment,’ Freize excused himself to Luca and Brother Peter, and went over to her. ‘Good morning, Jacinta,’ he said and was rewarded by a bright smile. ‘Good morning, Drago Nacari,’ he said to her father. ‘Are you busy today?’

  ‘Busy as always,’ she said, smoothing the sand and setting out the cups. Freize watched as she put the cloudy marble under one cup and then swopped them round and round, swirling them quickly until they came to rest. He watched for a few times and then he could resist temptation no longer.

  ‘That one,’ Freize said with certainty. ‘That one, I would put my life on it.’

  ‘Just put your pennies on it,’ she said with a quick upwards flash of her brown eyes. ‘I don’t want your life.’

  ‘It’s the right-hand one,’ Luca said quietly beside him. ‘I was watching. I am certain.’

  ‘Whatever you think,’ the girl said. ‘Why don’t you both bet?’

  Luca put down a handful of small coins on the right-hand cup but Freize put down all the contents of his purse on the centre cup.

  She laughed as if a customer’s winning gave her real pleasure, and she said to Freize: ‘Your friend has quicker eyes than you! He is right.’ She scooped up all the money before the central cup that Freize, and most of the crowd, had chosen, and to Luca she counted up his piccoli and handed him a quarter English noble. ‘Your winnings,’ she said. ‘You get your stake back three times over.’

  ‘It’s a good game to win,’ he said, taken aback to have one of the English coins passed into his hand as if it were ordinary currency.

  She misunderstood his hesitation. ‘That’s a quarter English noble. It’s as good as a half ducat,’ she said. ‘It’s a good coin.’

  ‘I hope you’re not questioning the gold coins?’ someone asked from the crowd.

  ‘Not at all. I’m just surprised by my good fortune,’ Luca said.

  ‘It’s a rare game to win,’ Freize grumbled. ‘But a clever game, and a pleasure to watch you, Jacinta.’

  ‘Have you come to see Father Pietro again?’ she asked. ‘For he doesn’t come till the afternoon.’

  ‘No, my master here is a trader. He is arranging to sell a great cargo that will come in any day now,’ Freize said glibly. ‘Silks. Wouldn’t you love a silk dress, Jacinta? Or ribbons for your shiny brown hair?’

  She smiled. ‘Oh very much! Shall you gamble them on my cups and ball? A dress for me if you lose three times over?’

  Freize grinned at her. ‘No I shall not! You would get a wardrobe full of dresses, I am sure, a ship full!’

  She laughed. ‘It’s just luck.’

  ‘It’s a very great skill,’ Luca told her. He lowered his voice: ‘But I will tell you a secret.’

  She leaned forwards to listen.

  ‘I did not see that the marble was under the right-hand cup – your hands move too swiftly for me to see. I should think you are too quick for almost anyone. But I guessed that it would be the right-hand cup.’

  Her eyes narrowed, she looked at him. ‘A lucky guess?

  ‘No. A guess based on what I could see.’

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘You’re right-handed,’ he told her. ‘And the strongest move is to push away, not pull towards. When you move the cups around, you favour the cup with the hidden ma
rble, and you favour the movement to your right. Three times out of the seven that I watched, you sent the cup with the marble to your right. And at the end of the day, when you’re a little tired, I should imagine that you favour your right even more often.’

  She sat back on her heels. ‘You counted where the cup ended up? And remembered?’

  Luca frowned. ‘I didn’t set out to count,’ he explained. ‘But I couldn’t help but notice. I notice things like patterns and numbers.’

  She smiled. ‘Do you play cards?’

  Luca laughed. ‘You think I could count cards?’

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ she said. ‘If you can count cards and remember them you would win at Karnõffel. You could play here, on the square. There is a fortune to be won – everyone here has money in their pockets, everyone believes that they might be lucky.’

  Luca glanced back to Brother Peter, who was waiting for them with an air of wearied patience. ‘I don’t gamble, my brother would not like it. But it is true that I would be able to remember the hands.’

  ‘If you learned a set of numbers, how many would you be able to remember?’ she asked.

  He closed his eyes and imagined that he was a boy running down a portico with colonnades of numbers flicking past him. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried. Thousands, I think.’

  ‘Sir, do you see numbers in colours?’

  It was such an extraordinary question that he hesitated and laughed. ‘Yes, I do,’ he confessed. ‘But I think it is a rare illusion. An odd trick of the eye, or perhaps of the mind. Who knows? Of no use, as far as I know. Do you see numbers as colours?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not I. But I know that some people who can understand numbers see them in colours or as pictures. Can you understand languages at first hearing?’

  He hesitated, shy of boasting, remembering the bullying he suffered when he was a child for being a boy of exceptional abilities. ‘Yes,’ he said shortly. ‘But I don’t regard it.’

  She turned and summoned her father to come closer with a toss of her head. Drago Nacari came over and shook Luca’s hand in greeting. ‘This is my father,’ Jacinta introduced him. To her father she spoke in rapid French: ‘This young man has a gift for numbers and for languages. And he is a stranger new-come to Venice, and he came to us today.’

  Drago’s grip on Luca’s hand suddenly tightened. ‘What chance! I have been hoping and praying that such a man like you might come along,’ he said.

  ‘Last night I had a dream,’ the girl said quietly to Luca. ‘I dreamed that a deer with eyes as brown and bright as yours came into the San Giacomo Square, stepping so that its hard little hooves echoed on the Rialto Bridge, and the square was a meadow and it was all green.’

  ‘He’s a wealthy trader,’ Freize interrupted. ‘Just playing the game for fun. Not a gambler. Not likely to be any help to you in your line of work. Not like a deer, not like a deer at all.’

  ‘Do you understand me?’ Drago asked Luca in Latin.

  ‘I speak and read Latin,’ Luca confirmed. ‘I learned it when I was in my monastery.’

  ‘Do you understand me?’ Drago asked him in Arabic.

  Luca frowned. ‘I think that is the same question,’ he said tentatively. ‘But I don’t speak Arabic. I’m just guessing.’

  ‘Well, you won’t understand this,’ Drago said in Romany, the language of the travelling Egyptians. ‘Not one word of what I say!’

  Luca laughed. ‘Now this is just lucky, but some gypsies came to my village when I was a child,’ he said. ‘I heard them speak and understood at once.’

  ‘Do you know the language of birds?’ Drago asked him very quietly, in Italian.

  Luca shook his head. ‘No. I’ve never heard of it. What is that?’

  ‘I am studying some manuscripts which puzzle me,’ Drago Nacari remarked without answering the question. ‘There are numbers and strange words and something that looks like code. I said – only last night – that I must pray that God sends me someone who can understand numbers and languages, for without some help I will never make head nor tail of them. And then my daughter dreamed of a deer, walking over the Rialto Bridge. And today you come to us.’

  ‘Why would the dream mean me?’ Luca asked.

  Jacinta smiled at him. ‘Because you are as handsome as a young buck,’ she said boldly. ‘And the deer walked like you do, proudly and gracefully with his head up, looking round.’

  Freize leaned forwards. ‘I too am a young buck,’ he said quietly to her. ‘Perhaps it was me that you dreamed of? A buck, or at least a horse? Or a handsome ox. Steady, and well-made. When he was a boy I nicknamed him Sparrow because he was so slight, long-legged and half-starved.’

  ‘You do indeed resemble a handsome horse,’ she said with a sweet smile. ‘And I liked you the moment we met.’

  ‘What sort of manuscripts?’ Luca could not hide his interest.

  ‘This is like a book with pictures and writing. But the pictures are of no plant or person that I have ever seen, and I cannot understand the language of the writing around them.’

  ‘Have you taken them to the university here, or in Padua?’

  The man spread his hands. ‘I am afraid to do so,’ he admitted. ‘If these manuscripts contain secrets and are profitable, then I should like to be the one who profits from them. If they are heretical then I don’t want to be the one to bring them to the Church and be punished for it. They will ask me where I got them, they will ask me what they mean. They may accuse me of forbidden knowledge, when I know nothing. You see my dilemma?’

  ‘Are these on the list of banned books?’ Freize asked cautiously. ‘My master can’t read anything that might be heresy.’

  The man shrugged. ‘As I can’t even translate their titles. I don’t know what they are.’

  ‘Why would you trust me?’ Luca asked.

  Drago smiled. ‘If you translate them you will be translating a few pages of a very long book. They would make little sense to you. You’d have to be a philosopher to begin to understand them. You say you’re a trader. It’s a quicker way to a fortune than studying the wisdom of the ancients. But I would promise you a share in anything I discovered through your scholarship.’

  ‘I would certainly be most interested to see them,’ Luca said eagerly. ‘And we are travelling with a lady . . . ’

  ‘His sister’s companion,’ Freize added, trying to maintain the fiction of their identity. He leaned his shoulder heavily against Luca. ‘And see, your brother is waiting for us, and getting impatient.’

  Luca glanced over his shoulder to Brother Peter, who was looking frankly alarmed at the time they were spending with street gamblers. ‘Yes, just a moment. The lady that I mean is my sister’s companion. She is half Arab, and could help us with the Arabic. She studied in Spain at the Moorish universities and is very well-read. She was educated as a true scholar.’

  ‘An educated woman?’ Jacinta asked eagerly, as if it were not a contradiction in terms.

  ‘Shall I bring the manuscript to your house?’ Drago Nacari asked him.

  ‘Come,’ Luca invited him. ‘Come this afternoon. I should be most interested to see it.’

  ‘We will come as soon as we have finished here,’ Drago promised. ‘After Sext.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Luca said.

  The man bowed and Jacinta knelt once more and brushed the sand over the square of the paving stone. Freize dropped down to his knee to say a quiet goodbye to her. ‘So shall I see you this afternoon? Will you come with your father?’

  ‘If he asks me to come,’ she replied.

  ‘Then I shall see you again, at our house the Ca’ de Longhi.’

  She smiled. ‘Either there, or I am always here in the morning. Perhaps tomorrow you will come and place a bet and you will be lucky.’

  ‘I am very lucky,’ Freize assured her. ‘I was snatched by a terrible flood and I came home safe. I was in a nunnery where everyone was half mad and I came out unscathed, and before all of that I was app
renticed as a kitchen-lad in a country monastery and the only boy that I liked in the whole world was summoned to Rome and turned into a lord and he took me with him. That’s when I got my lucky penny.’

  ‘Show it to me again,’ she demanded, smiling.

  He produced it from a pocket in his shirt. ‘I keep it apart from my other money now, so I don’t spend it by accident. See? It is a penny minted by the Pope himself in the year of my birth. It survived a flood with me and I didn’t spend it as I found my way home. Lucky through and through.’

  ‘Will you not bet with it?’ she asked. ‘If it’s so lucky?’

  ‘No, for if it were to fail just once and I were to lose it, it would break my heart,’ Freize said. ‘And all my luck would be gone. But I would give it to you . . . for something in exchange.’

  ‘Lend it to me,’ she said smiling. ‘Lend it to me and I promise I will give it back to you. As good as before but a little better.’

  ‘A keepsake?’ he asked. ‘A sweetheart’s keepsake?’

  ‘I won’t keep it for very long,’ she said. ‘You’ll have it back, I promise.’

  At once he handed it over. ‘I shall want it returned with a kiss,’ he stipulated.

  Shyly, she kissed her fingertips and put them against his cheek.

  ‘See how lucky I am already!’ Freize beamed, and was rewarded by a flash of her eyes from under her dark eyelashes, as he jumped up and followed Luca.

  Luca led Brother Peter and Freize across the busy square to the line of money changers whose long trestle table was set back under the portico, each trader seated, with a young man with a stout cudgel or a menacing knife in his belt standing behind him.

  ‘That’s the one, on the left,’ Freize prompted him. Luca went towards the man whose little hat and yellow round badge showed him to be a Jewish money changer. He sat alone, at the end of the row, separated from the Christian moneymen by a little space, as if to indicate his inferior status.

  ‘I would talk business with you,’ Luca said pleasantly.

  The man gestured that Luca might sit, as his boy brought a second stool. Luca sat, and Brother Peter and Freize stood behind him.