‘Too late!’ Isolde whispered. ‘We’ll have to go inside.’
They slipped back into the hall, closing the front door behind them.
‘Out through the garden,’ Ishraq hissed. ‘Quickly, or they’ll see us as they come in.’
She drew Isolde through the house as Freize bolted the door to the street.
‘My God, what is that smell?’ Isolde hesitated and put her hand over her mouth as they went past the open door to the storeroom. ‘It’s like death.’
‘Quick,’ Ishraq said, closing the door and leading the two of them through the living quarters and out through the door into the little courtyard garden.
‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll lock up behind you and come out through the bedroom window.’
‘I’ll go!’ Freize volunteered. ‘You get out.’
He was too late. Ishraq was already racing up the stairs to the upper room. Freize turned to Isolde. ‘We’ll have to get over the wall,’ he whispered. ‘The garden door is locked and they have the key.’ He cupped his hand for Isolde’s shoe. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Like getting up on a horse!’ Isolde stepped up and he threw her upwards so that she caught the branch of the tree and heaved herself up to the top of the wall. Arduously, Freize hauled himself up beside her, and then paused. They both clung to the top of the wall, and watched horrified, as below them, the Nacaris, father and daughter walked to the garden door, produced a key and let themselves in. They opened the door to the house, and went inside.
‘What can we do?’ Isolde whispered. ‘We have to get her out!’
‘Wait,’ Freize advised.
Ishraq, in the house, went swift-footed silently up the stairs. She heard the garden door open and the Nacaris come in. She heard Jacinta remark on the coldness of the day and then she heard, frighteningly clear, Drago say: ‘What’s that noise?’
Silently, Ishraq slid across the treacherous floorboards to the bedroom window and eased herself out. She flung herself down the spiral stone staircase to the garden and saw her two friends, poised on the top of the wall.
‘Get down!’ she hissed. ‘They’re in the house. They’ll see us if they look out of the window!’
Freize jumped down into the street and reached up for Isolde, who dropped down into his arms as Ishraq stretched for a low bending bough, and swarmed her way upwards. As soon as she was at the top of the wall she too lowered herself down and then jumped clear.
They were facing a small tributary canal and further down the water was a little swing wooden bridge.
‘This way,’ Isolde said, pulling up the hood of her robe over her blonde hair, and leading the way at a brisk walk. She wiped her face with her sleeve. ‘I haven’t run so fast since we left Lucretili,’ she remarked to Ishraq.
‘You always were fast,’ her friend said. ‘Faster than me. Now I should teach you to fight.’
Isolde shook her head in a smiling denial.
‘She doesn’t like the thought of hurting people,’ Ishraq explained to Freize.
The three of them crossed the bridge and started along the quay on the far side.
‘I don’t think I will ever have the stomach for fighting,’ Isolde remarked. ‘I can’t bear it. Even that scramble has left me trembling. And now, I’d better walk home on my own.’
‘Will you be all right?’ Freize asked, torn between his desire to escort her to safety and maintaining the deception of being Ishraq’s servant.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I tremble very easily, but I’m not a coward.’
‘I should go with you,’ he hesitated.
Ishraq laughed. ‘If there’s any trouble she can run,’ she said. ‘She can certainly run faster than you.’
Isolde smiled. ‘I’ll go on ahead and see you at home.’
Freize and Ishraq strolled home together, along the Grand Canal, Ishraq careful to swagger ahead of Freize like a young prince, right until the moment when they came to the quay which ran to the side door of their house. Then she glanced to left and right, checked that there was no one at the windows and no one on the canal, and slipped down the street and scurried into the side door.
Isolde leaped up from where she had been sitting at the door and hugged her friend. ‘Good! I was waiting for you. The others are home too.’ She called across the stone hall. ‘They’re back!’ as Freize came through the side door and Luca and Brother Peter opened the door to their rooms.
‘Come in,’ Luca said. ‘How did you get on?’
Brother Peter recoiled in horror from Ishraq’s young prince costume. ‘She should change her clothes,’ he said, covering his eyes. ‘It’s heresy for a woman to dress as a man.’
‘I’ll be one moment,’ Ishraq promised.
She raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, just like a boy, and they could hear her hurling her clothes into a chest and scrabbling into a gown. She came running downstairs with her dark hair tumbling down, and only at Brother Peter’s scandalised glare did she twist it into a casual knot and pin it at the nape of her neck. Luca smiled at her. Anyone but the old clerk would have been struck by her agile grace in boys’ clothes and her careless beauty when she was dressed once again as a girl in a conventional gown. ‘I like you in costume,’ he said.
‘It’s against God’s will and the teaching of the church,’ Brother Peter said. ‘And certainly a doorway to sin.’
‘Well, it was useful,’ Ishraq defended herself. ‘So tell me about the square, was everything all right?’
‘Everything,’ Luca said shortly. ‘We gambled, she won as usual, took a small purse of silver coins for the morning’s work and gave them to her father. We spoke to the money changer and he said he would have enough nobles for us when the ship comes in. He says he has made an arrangement and has about a thousand gold nobles to hand. We saw Father Pietro in church. He’s had no reply yet. Then it was dreadful when we came out of church and saw that they had left early. And then Isolde was gone too! But I see you’re safe. How did you get on? Did you have to break into the house?’
‘I got in through an open window,’ Ishraq said. ‘And then I let Freize in. They may have suspicions, they might have thought that they heard something; but they can’t be sure that anyone was ever inside.’
‘They don’t have a servant – well, they can’t have one. They daren’t have one. The storeroom is completely devoted to alchemy. It reeks of magic and decay. Any servant would report them at once. In the main room, where they study, there were more pages like the one they brought to us. There were about ten pages that I could see, I couldn’t read any of them. Plants that are unknown, language that you can’t even spell out. And I copied this,’ she put the piece of paper in front of Luca. ‘I thought it was odd that they should have such a seal.’
He scrutinised it. ‘I wouldn’t know whose seal it is,’ he said.
They both turned to Isolde, whose family had their own crest. She recognised it at once. ‘Oh! That’s the seal of one of my godparents,’ she exclaimed.
‘Count Wladislaw? Of Wallachia?’ Brother Peter asked respectfully.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Another one. My godmother.’
‘How many do you have?’ asked Freize. ‘How many does a girl need?’
She shrugged with a smile. ‘My father was very very well connected. This godmother was very grand indeed. She was the wife of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France. She was Jacquetta, the Dowager Duchess.’
‘Who?’ Freize asked.
‘Her husband was brother to the great king of England, Henry V, who conquered France for England. John the Duke was regent in France when the little prince of England came to the throne,’ she said. ‘When the French rose up under their king Charles VII, he fought them, and he captured their leader, Joan of Arc.’
‘Yes,’ Luca said, recognising a part of the story that he knew. ‘I know who you mean, I’ve heard of him. He burned Joan of Arc as a witch.’
‘The Church judged that she was guilty of witchcraft and heresy,??
? Isolde remarked. ‘But I never met the duke, he died when I was still a baby. They say that he ruled France like an emperor. He maintained a huge army, he had magnificent palaces in Paris and Rouen, he made the laws, he issued coins. After he died, his widow, my godmother, remarried. She lives in England now, at the court of Henry VI.’
‘But why would these street gamblers have the duke’s seal?’ Brother Peter asked. ‘They have forged it, presumably, but why would they want it?’
‘Would it be to seal the chests of gold?’ Isolde asked. ‘That they say is English gold? Chests from the English mint would have the regent’s seal on them, wouldn’t they?’
Everyone was silent, and then Luca reached across to her and grasped both her hands. Ishraq rescued the paper with the copied seal as it slipped from Isolde’s grip.
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘That’s so brilliant. They seal it with his crest so that it gives credence to the forged gold being genuine English nobles. Because the Duke would have been in charge of the mint at Calais. He would have commanded them to make gold, he would have shipped the gold out to the soldiers. If a chest or even a hundred chests went astray, they would all have had his seal on them. Then, years later, if someone forges gold and wants to pretend that it came from the mint, they mark each coin with the mark of the mint at Calais, and they sell it in boxes sealed with the regent’s seal.’
Isolde glowed as he held her hands, the two of them standing, quite still, as if they had forgotten the others in the room.
‘But are they really making gold?’ Brother Peter asked dryly. ‘Before we get so excited about these imaginary chests? Sealed so cleverly with this imaginary seal? And this brilliant guess as to why they have the seal. Is there any gold there?’
‘Oh yes,’ Freize said smugly. ‘Don’t you worry about that. There’s sackfuls of the stuff. Sackfuls of it. And Ishraq found it.’
‘You did?’ Luca turned to her.
‘We went to the storeroom. The whole place is used for alchemy,’ Ishraq said. ‘The fireplace is like a forge. We saw silver still in the fire. It had been heated so hot that the chimney was cracked.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Isolde asked. Nobody could answer.
‘And we found moulds for English nobles,’ Freize said. ‘It looks like they pour liquid gold into the moulds.’
‘And then we found a cellar doorway and the sacks of gold,’ Ishraq said, lowering her voice. ‘The door is a little hatch from the storeroom, like you’d find leading to a cellar. But instead of a cellar the half-door leads down to the quay. The sacks of gold are on a quay. Beyond is the canal, and a water-door. I should think that they drop the sacks from the storeroom, through the hatch, onto the quayside and then a boatman comes and loads the gold onto a boat.’
‘How much gold?’ Brother Peter asked. ‘How much did you see?’
‘I saw two sacks that were open and perhaps four behind them that had been sewn up. A fortune,’ Ishraq said.
Luca dropped into a seat at the window. ‘Great work,’ he said to Ishraq and Freize. ‘Great work.’
He turned to Brother Peter. ‘So is our mission complete?’ he asked doubtfully. ‘We were told to find the source of the gold and answer whether it was a theft or gold mined from a new source. We can tell Milord it is a forger, and that we have found the forge.’
‘But we don’t know how they actually make the nobles,’ Freize pointed out. ‘We saw the moulds. But we didn’t see any gold ore.’
‘D’you think that it’s possible that they have found a way to refine it from silver?’ Isolde asked. ‘From the silver they had in the forge? She wins a lot of silver every day. Every day they go home with pursefulls of little silver coins.’
‘The coins in the fire!’ Ishraq nodded at Freize.
‘We must write our report,’ Brother Peter decided. ‘And we will have to turn them in to the authorities. Milord was clear to me that we must inform the Doge’s officials as soon as we had identified the forger.’
Awkwardly, he turned to Ishraq. ‘I was ungracious about your disguise,’ he said. ‘You have done great work for the Order, you were brave and enterprising.’ He hesitated. ‘And you make a very neat young man,’ he conceded. ‘You don’t look heretical at all.’
‘Bonny,’ Freize said admiringly. ‘She looks good enough to eat.’ He was rewarded by Ishraq’s surprised giggle. ‘And she climbs like a clever little monkey,’ he said. ‘If you wanted a burglar for a wife she would be the very one.’
‘But it does not mean that you can dress up and go out every day,’ Brother Peter continued. ‘This was an exception. And tonight, in any case, the two of you will go out as modest and elegant young ladies. Our reputation as a wealthy young family all depends on your behaviour.’
‘Oh the party!’ Isolde exclaimed. ‘With all this, I had completely forgotten about it.’
‘Keep your ears open for any mention of gold,’ Brother Peter ordered. ‘And remember that you are young ladies of good family, kept very strictly at home.’ He looked at Isolde as if he had more confidence in her playing the part of a well-behaved young lady than Ishraq. ‘I am looking to you, Lady Isolde, to set an example,’ he said.
Isolde curtseyed modestly and shot a hidden laughing glance at Luca. ‘Of course,’ she said.
The five of them set out all together in the gondola. Freize would wait for them with the other servants in the servants’ room. The gondola would wait at the quay beside the house for them, bring back Ishraq and Isolde from their visit, and then go out again for Luca and Brother Peter. The men thought they would be out till late, perhaps past midnight.
The men were wearing the hoods of their capes over their heads, and dark plain masks over their eyes. Isolde could see only Luca’s smiling lips as he looked at her strange beauty. She had a dark blue cape with a dark blue hood pulled over her fair hair. She wore a mask which covered her forehead, eyes and nose, so that her dark blue eyes gleamed at him through the slits of the mask. Blue feathers sprouted from the side of the mask and curled like a high question mark around her head. She looked exotic and strange and lovely. Beside her, Ishraq in black was like a beautiful sleek shadow, only her mouth showing below a black mask which was shaped like a dark moon and starred with silver.
Luca leaned towards Isolde and whispered to her, his mouth against her ear. ‘I have never in my life seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said.
Isolde, quite entranced, turned and smiled at him, her dark eyes gleamed through the slits in the mask.
‘Meet me,’ Luca whispered to her. ‘Meet me tonight. As soon as we can get away from this party.’
The city was in carnival mood, every window overlooking the Grand Canal bright with candlelight and every dark canal and quayside busy with bobbing gondolas. Sometimes they glimpsed a couple entwined in the double seat of a gondola, their hoods drawn forward to hide their kisses, their hidden hands seeking to touch. In some, a pair of lovers had gone into the cabin of the gondola and closed the doorway, leaving the gondolier to idle in the stern, keeping the ship steady in the water as the clandestine candlelight shone out of the slats of the cabin. Brother Peter turned his head away and crossed himself to prevent the infection of sin.
On the quayside, as their gondola approached the palace, they could see a huge crowd, beautifully dressed in the extraordinary costumes. Men dressed as monsters and angels, women in silks of every colour towering high as they stood on the chopines that were the mark of a fashionable lady. Some of them were dressed so brightly, and stood so proudly, that it was clear, even to the young travellers, that the women were showing themselves off for sale. They were the famous Venetian courtesans, and it would cost a man a small fortune to spend a night with any one of them, traded like everything else in this expensive city.
Everywhere people were mingling, talking, flirting behind their masks, sometimes pushing their masks on top of their heads to expose their lips for a stolen kiss, sometimes, turning away into a quiet garden or a darkene
d doorway. Isolde glimpsed the smiling face of a woman as a man took her hand and led her into the shadows. At the quayside she saw a man lightly step from one rocking boat into another, laughing like a child on stepping stones invited by the wave of a silver glove.
It was irresistibly exciting. Every gondola burned a torch at the stern, or carried a swinging lantern at the prow, and the young women could see that men and women were making assignations on the water, and then their gondolas would slip away together to the darker side canals, where they would drift side by side so that the women could flirt behind their painted fans, and the men make extravagant promises.
On the white stone quayside the wooden patten shoes of the women clattered like castanets as if they were inviting men to come and dance. Bursts of music came from one doorway and another and they could hear the bright laughter of men and women. Isolde exchanged one longing glance with Luca as if she wished that the two of them could go somewhere alone together and dance and laugh and kiss.
‘Isolde,’ Ishraq whispered a warning to her. ‘Your mask doesn’t hide what you are thinking. You look as if you are ready to sin like a Venetian.’
A ready flush rose from Isolde’s neck to her cheeks. ‘Ishraq,’ she said quietly. ‘I have to kiss him again. I think I will die if I don’t kiss him.’
Ishraq gasped. ‘But you said . . . ’
The great watergate to the palace stood open, the bright torches reflected in the glassy waters of the canal as the gondolas queued to enter the palace and leave the guests on the red carpet which stretched extravagantly, to the brink of the lapping dark water.
‘It is like a strange other world,’ Isolde marvelled. ‘So much wealth and so much beauty.’
‘So much sin!’ Brother Peter mourned quietly.
At last it was their turn and their gondola slid through the archway and drew up to the palace steps. Brightly costumed servants stepped forwards to steady the craft, but before they could get out, Isolde glanced back to the canal and saw a gondola with four beautiful women hesitate at the water entrance behind them, the women exquisitely painted and rouged, and wearing high headdresses and exotic masks. One of them waved a lazy hand to Luca and called out the name of her house. ‘On the Grand Canal,’ she said. ‘Come at midnight when you leave here!’