‘I’ll stay at home,’ Isolde said rapidly, almost as if she wanted to avoid the confessional at church. Almost, as if she wanted to avoid Luca. ‘I’ll wait for you to return.’
‘You’ll wait for me?’ Luca said, so quietly that only she could hear him.
The glance she directed at him was very cool. ‘I only meant I would wait for Ishraq to come back with the gondola,’ she said with a sweet smile that told him nothing.
‘In the name of all the saints, what have I done? Have I offended her?’ Luca demanded of Ishraq as they sat side by side in the gondola double seat, Freize with his back to the prow was in the seat before them.
‘No, why?’ Ishraq asked blandly.
‘Because I thought . . . last night . . . she was so beautiful.’
‘At the party?’ Ishraq prompted him.
‘On our way there, yes. I thought that she was so light-hearted and so warm, she smiled at me and wished me good luck as we were in the gondola – and her eyes were shining through her blue mask and I thought that perhaps after the party we might meet . . . And then after the party I thought . . . and then today she hardly speaks to me.’
‘Lasses.’ Freize leaned forwards to make his own contribution to the low-voiced conversation. ‘Like the little donkey. Easily set on one course, hard to disturb once they have chosen their own wilful path.’
‘Oh nonsense!’ Luca said. To Ishraq he said more pressingly: ‘Has she said nothing about me? Did she say nothing to you about last night?’
‘About the party?’ Ishraq said again.
‘After the party?’ Luca hinted tentatively. ‘After . . . ?’
Ishraq shook her head, her face utterly blank. ‘She has said nothing, for there is nothing to say. It was an ordinary party and we came home early. We walked for a few minutes and then we went to bed. We had nothing to say.’ She paused, lowered her voice and looked directly at Luca. ‘And you had better say nothing too.’
He looked astounded. ‘I should say nothing?’
She looked at him and nodded her head. ‘Nothing.’
Left in the quiet house, Brother Peter had the breakfast things cleared and put his writing desk on the table to start the long task of preparing the coded report to the Lord of the Order, to tell him that the forgers had been discovered, that they would be reported to the authorities at once, and asking for instructions for their next mission. Their work would go on: the Lord would command them to go to another town, another city, to discover more signs of the unknown world, of the end of days.
They would go on, Brother Peter thought, a little wearied, on and on until the Second Coming, when they would at last understand all things, instead of as now – glimpsing uncertain truths. The world was going to end, that at least was certain, and it would happen soon: perhaps in this year, perhaps in this very month. A man in Holy Orders must keep watch, be ready, and his companions, his funny endearing travel companions, must be gathered in, supported, taken with him as they went together on their journey from now to death, from here to the end of everything.
Isolde went up the stairs to the girls’ floor and watched the house gondola with Luca, Ishraq and Freize pull out of the palace watergate and join the traffic on the Grand Canal. She put her hands to her lips and sent a kiss after the boat. But she made sure she was far back from the window so that even if Luca looked up, he would not see her.
Her attention was taken by another gondola that seemed to be coming directly to their house, and she went to the head of the stairs to listen. She could hear the housekeeper send the maid down to the watergate to greet the visitor, and then, looking down the well of the stairs, she saw a slim heavily ringed hand on the bannister coming up the stairs. ‘Lady Carintha,’ Isolde said with distaste.
For a moment she wondered if she could say that she was not at home, but the impossibility of getting Brother Peter to condone such a lie, or the housekeeper to make her excuses, convinced her that she would have to face her ladyship. She glanced around their room, straightened a chair, closed the doors to their bedrooms and seated herself, with as much dignity as she could manage, on the window seat.
The door opened. ‘Lady Carintha!’ the housekeeper exclaimed.
Isolde rose to her feet and curtseyed. ‘Your ladyship!’
‘My dear!’ the woman replied.
‘Please do sit.’ Isolde indicated the hard chair by the fireside, where a little blaze warmed the room, but Lady Carintha took the window seat, with the bright light behind her, and smiled, showing her sharp white teeth.
‘A glass of wine?’ Isolde offered, moving towards the sideboard. ‘Some cakes?’
Her ladyship nodded, and the half nobles in her ears winked and danced. Isolde noticed that now she had a necklace of big fat nobles wound around her white neck, the gold very bright against her pale skin, the weighty coins hanging heavily on the gold chain. Isolde poured the wine and handed Lady Carintha a plate of little cakes.
‘I must repay you for our gambling debts,’ Isolde said pleasantly. ‘You were so kind to lend us the money.’ She went into her bedroom and came out with a purse of gold coins. ‘I am grateful to you. And thank you so much for inviting us to your lovely party.’
‘Nobles?’ Lady Carintha asked, weighing the purse in her hand.
Isolde was glad that Ishraq had converted the rubies into nobles, and that she had these to repay Lady Carintha. ‘Of course,’ she said quietly.
‘Aha, then I will have made money!’ Lady Carintha said gleefully. ‘For they are worth more this morning than they were last night. I have stolen from you by just lending them to you for a night. You are repaying me with the same coins but they are of greater value. Isn’t it like magic?’
‘You’re very welcome to your profit,’ Isolde said through her gritted teeth. ‘Clearly, you are as skilled as any Venetian banker.’
‘Actually, you have another treasure that I want,’ Lady Carintha said sweetly.
Isolde’s expression was beautifully blank. ‘Surely, I can have nothing that your ladyship desires! Surely, you have only to ask your husband for anything that takes your fancy.’
Her ladyship laughed, throwing her head back and showing her long white throat and the twists of the laden gold chain. ‘My husband allows me some of my treats, but he can’t provide them all,’ she said meaningfully. ‘I am sure that you understand me?’
Isolde shook her head. ‘Alas, your ladyship. I have been brought up in the country. I am not accustomed to your city ways. I can’t imagine what agreement you have with your husband, except to honour and obey him.’
Her ladyship laughed shortly. ‘Then you are more of a novelty than I even thought!’ she said. ‘I will be plain with you then, country girl. If you want to walk about Venice as you were walking last night, or meet someone, or be absent from your house for a night, I will help you. You can say that you are visiting me, you can borrow my gondola, you can borrow my cape and my mask, even my gowns. If you concoct a story, you can rely on me to support it. You can say that you spent the night with me, and I will tell everyone that we sat up and played cards. You can lie your pretty head off and I will back you up, no questions asked. Whatever it is that you want to do, however . . . unusual. Do you see?’
‘I think I see,’ Isolde said. ‘You will cover up lies for me.’
‘Exactly!’ Lady Carintha smiled.
‘And if I wanted to lie, and go out of the house in secret then this would be very useful to me,’ Isolde said crushingly. ‘But since I don’t, it is largely irrelevant.’
‘I know what I know,’ Lady Carintha remarked.
‘That would be the very nature and essence of knowledge,’ Isolde replied smartly. ‘Everyone knows what they know.’
‘I know what I saw,’ her ladyship persisted.
‘You saw me, or perhaps Ishraq, go into our garden. Or perhaps we saw you go into our garden. Perhaps we would swear to it. What of it? Your ladyship, this is meaningless. You had better be plain. What do
you want of me?’
‘I will tell you simply then, country girl. Tonight you will open your watergate to my gondola, you will lead me up the stairs to your brother’s room, you will let me out again at dawn. And you will say nothing of this to anyone, and even deny it, if you are ever asked.’ She put a hand on Isolde’s knee. ‘No one will ever ask,’ she promised. ‘I am always beautifully discreet.’
‘But what if my brother does not want you brought to his room?’ Isolde was a little breathless, she could feel her temper rising beyond her control. ‘What if he thinks you too old, or too well-worn? What if he does not desire you, and wishes you far away?’
Lady Carintha laughed and smoothed her blue gown over her hips, as if she were remembering Luca’s caress from last night. ‘He won’t be the first young man who has woken up to find me in his bed. He won’t be the first young man to be glad of it.’
‘He is not an ordinary young man,’ Isolde warned her. ‘He is not like any other young men that you have met before.’
‘I agree, he is quite extraordinarily handsome,’ Lady Carintha said. ‘And I have a quite extraordinary desire for him. I think I am going to have a quite extraordinary love affair.’
Isolde jumped to her feet, as if she could not sit still for a moment longer. ‘On my honour: you will not!’ she swore.
‘Why should you mind? If I help you in turn? Or if you don’t want an alibi for your own love affair, shall I help you meet young men? Or shall I just give you gifts?’ Her ladyship put her hand to the dancing coins in her ears. ‘D’you want these? You can have them! But be very sure that I am going to have your brother. I shall take him as if he were my toy, and I shall leave him besotted with me. That’s how it is. I shall leave him like an addict for a drug. He will spend the rest of his life longing for me. I shall teach him everything he needs to know about women, and he will never find a better lover than me. He will spend the rest of his life searching. I will have spoiled him for any ordinary woman.’
‘No,’ Isolde said flatly. ‘He will not long for you. And don’t offer me your disgusting money or your repellent cast-offs, for I don’t want them. I must ask you to leave. You won’t come back.’
‘Indeed I will come back,’ the woman swore. ‘In secret, with or without your help. You can wake in the night and know that he is with me, in the room just below yours. Or he will come to me. D’you think he doesn’t want me? D’you think I would be here without his explicit invitation? Last night he asked me to come home with him. Last night after the party. He wanted to meet me in the garden. He is in love with me, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.’
‘He is not!’ Isolde’s voice quavered as she realised that Lady Carintha was probably speaking the truth and that Luca might well have arranged to meet her. He might have been waiting for her in the garden when the gate opened. ‘He is not, and I would never let you into his room. Even if I did not—’ she broke off remembering the lie that they must tell. ‘Even if he were not my brother I would not condone it. You are an evil disgusting woman. Never mind Luca, I would not take you to Freize’s bedroom, for he is too good for you!’
‘Your servant!’ the woman half screamed.
‘General factotum!’ Isolde shouted at her. ‘He is a general factotum! And worth ten of you! For he is a great general factotum and you are an old whore!’
Lady Carintha launched herself at Isolde, slapped her face and pulled her hair. Isolde, furious, clenched her fist as she had seen Ishraq do when readying for a fight and punched the older woman – smack – on the jaw. Carintha reeled back at the blow, fell against the table, recovered and then came forward again, her hands outstretched, her fingernails like claws, aiming for Isolde’s eyes. She raked Isolde’s cheek with her right hand before Isolde grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her. With Carintha screaming with pain and trying to kick backwards with her high-heeled shoes, Isolde pushed her, slowly gaining ground, through the open doorway to the top of the stairs just as Brother Peter, at his most hospitable and dignified, was mounting the steps and saying: ‘I was told that Lady Carintha had honoured our house with a visit . . . Good God! What is this?’’
‘She’s leaving!’ Isolde panted, her cheeks scarlet from rage, her face streaked with blood. ‘The old whore is on her way out.’
Recklessly, she pushed Lady Carintha towards the stairs, and the woman almost fell into Brother Peter’s arms, grabbed him to steady herself and then thrust him away and tore down the steps. ‘A plague on you!’ the scream rang up the stairwell. ‘A plague on you, you prissy girl, and your pretty-boy brother. You will be sorry for insulting me.’
Her ladyship paused at the bottom of the well of the stair and looked back up at them – Isolde with her blonde hair tumbling down where her ladyship had pulled it, her right cheek scratched and bleeding, Brother Peter utterly stunned.
‘And who are you, anyway?’ Carintha demanded, suddenly swinging from rage to cunning. ‘For you are like no family that I have ever met before. And why do you keep your brother as closely guarded as a priest? What sister gambles for time with her brother? What game are you playing? Who knows you? What business do you have? Where does your money come from? You’ll have to answer to me!’
‘Oh! No game! I assure you, your ladyship . . .’ Brother Peter started down the stairs after her but she turned and was gone, and then they heard her shouting for her gondolier, and the sound of the watergate sliding open as her gondola went quickly away.
In the sudden silence, Brother Peter turned and looked at Isolde. ‘What on earth is this all about?’ he asked. ‘What were you doing fighting with her like a street urchin? Lady Isolde! Look at you! What were you thinking of?’
Isolde, tried for one sentence, tried for another, and then could say nothing but: ‘I hate her! And I hate Luca too!’ and ran into her room and slammed the door.
Luca, Freize and Ishraq waited at the quayside outside the alchemist’s house until the bell for Nones rang and they saw Drago Nacari and Jacinta coming towards them from the direction of the Rialto Bridge.
Freize went forwards to greet the girl and to bow to her father, and then they came towards the front door, Jacinta producing a giant key from the purse under her outer robe.
‘This is a surprise and a pleasure,’ the alchemist said warily.
Luca nodded. ‘I wanted to return to you the page of manuscript. I can’t see how to make any progress with it. I was hoping that there would be a code that I could understand, but whatever I try, it doesn’t come out.’
The man nodded. ‘Would you discover more if you had the entire book?’
‘I might,’ Luca said cautiously. ‘But I couldn’t be sure of it. The more words you had to compare, the more likely to discover their meaning. And some might recur which would tell you they were commonly used words, but I couldn’t promise it. I’ve made no headway, I don’t have enough skill—’ He broke off as the alchemist opened the door and ushered them inside.
‘Come into my study.’ The alchemist showed them into the large room where the table was heaped with papers. Quickly, Jacinta closed the big double doors to the storeroom but the guests could smell the strange sweet smell of rotting vegetation, and beneath the smell of decay, something more foul like excrement.
‘That’s the smell of dark matter,’ the alchemist said, matter-of-factly. ‘We get used to it; but for strangers it’s a disturbing scent.’
‘You refine dark matter?’ Luca asked.
The man nodded. ‘I have the recipe for refining . . . ’ He paused. ‘To the ultimate point. I am guessing that is why you have really come today? You could have sent the page back by a messenger. I am assuming that really, you wanted to see our work.’
The girl stood with her back to the storeroom door as if she would bar them from entering, she looked at her father as if she would stop him speaking. The alchemist glanced at her and smiled, returning his attention to Luca. ‘Jacinta is anxious for me, for our safety,’ he said. ‘But I too have had
a dream about you, and it prompts me to trust you. Shall I tell you what it was?’
Luca nodded. ‘Tell me.’
‘I dreamed that you were a babe in arms. You were somehow shining. Your mother brought you to me, and told me that she had found you. You were not a child born of man,’ he said quietly. ‘Does that make any sense to you?’
Ishraq drew a quick breath and glanced at Freize. Luca’s unhappy childhood, when his whole village had called him a changeling, was known only to Freize, and the travelling companions, but they would never speak of it outside the group.
‘I have spent my life denying that I was a changeling,’ Luca said with quiet honesty. ‘My mother told me that it was only ignorant frightened people who would say such a thing, and that I should deny it. I have always denied it. I will always deny it, for her sake, for her honour as well as my own.’
‘Your mother would have her reasons,’ Drago Nacari said gently. ‘But in my dream you were faerie-born, and to be faerie-born is a great privilege.’
Jacinta stepped forwards from the door and put her hand on Luca’s arm. ‘I knew that you could see the cups move,’ she said gently. ‘Then you told me that you could calculate where they would stop. No ordinary man can see them move, it’s too fast. And nobody could calculate the odds of them stopping in one place or another. You are gifted. Perhaps you are gifted in a way that is not of this world. Dr Nacari too is a gifted seer. He is speaking a truth from his dream. Perhaps even a truth that cannot be understood in this world.’
‘Doctor?’ Ishraq asked.
Jacinta turned to her. ‘This is not my real father,’ she said. ‘We are partners in this venture. He is a great alchemist, I am his equal. In the world we pass as father and daughter because the world likes to place women in the care of a man, and the world likes a woman to have an owner. But in the real world, the world beyond this one, we are equal seekers after truth, and we have come together to work together.’
‘Not his daughter?’ Freize said bluntly, grasping the one fact he could be certain of, in this talk of one world and another.