Order of Darkness

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Nothing, it’s too dark,’ she replied, coming back out again.

  He turned to the chimney and lifted down a rushlight, lit it at the fire, and handed it to her. Ishraq thrust it into the dark opening, wriggled her shoulders through and looked down. Freize held her feet.

  ‘Don’t fall,’ he warned her. ‘And don’t for pity’s sake leave me here.’

  Fitfully, the flame flickered, illuminating the dark moving water at the end of the stone quay, immediately below her, and on the stones a glint here, a blaze of reflected light there, and then finally a cold draught of air blew the light out altogether and left her in damp blackness with nothing but the eerie slap of the dark waters to warn her of the edge of the quay.

  ‘What can you see?’ Freize’s voice whispered from the room behind her. ‘Come back! What can you see?’

  ‘Gold,’ Ishraq said, her voice quiet with awe. ‘An absolute fortune in sacks and sacks of gold nobles.’

  Brother Peter and Luca watched the gamblers at their place and then went into San Giacomo Church. As they had expected, Father Pietro was kneeling at a side chapel before the flickering flame of a candle placed at the feet of an exquisite statue of the Madonna and Child. Both men bent their knee and crossed themselves. Luca went to kneel in silence beside the priest.

  ‘You do not disturb me, because I was praying for you,’ Father Pietro said quietly, hardly opening his eyes.

  ‘I suppose that it’s too soon for any news?’

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow, or the next day. You can come to me on the Rialto or I can send you a message.’

  ‘I’ll come to you,’ Luca promised. ‘I hardly dare to pray for the safety of my father. I hardly dare to think that he might come home to me.’

  The priest turned and made the sign of a cross over Luca’s bowed head. ‘God is merciful,’ he said quietly. ‘He is always merciful. Perhaps He will be merciful to you and your father and your mother.’

  ‘Amen,’ Luca whispered.

  Father Pietro looked up at the serene face of the Madonna. He smiled at her, as a man who knows that his work is blessed. Luca thought that a more superstitious man would have thought that the beautiful statue smiled back.

  ‘Thank you, Father Pietro,’ he said. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

  ‘Thank me when your father holds you in his arms, my son,’ the priest replied.

  Luca and Brother Peter completed their prayers and went to the back of the church and quietly opened the great wooden door and slipped out together.

  Luca squinted at the brightness of the sunlight on the square, looked in one direction, and then another, and then quietly said: ‘Oh no.’

  The place where Jacinta had laid out her game earlier was empty. Drago and his daughter were missing.

  And Isolde, their lookout, had vanished into thin air.

  Isolde, her long skirt bunched into her hand, was running as fast as she could, through the narrow alleyway, her feet pounding on the damp cobblestones of the poorer streets, speeding up as she crossed a square paved with flagstones. She had watched Jacinta play for a crowd of people and Nacari stand over her and then suddenly, without a word of warning, far ahead of their usual time, they had packed up the game, stepped to the quayside and hailed a passing gondola.

  Isolde, her breath coming short, hammered over the little wooden bridges, hailed the ferry boats in a panting shout, and then raced down the road from the bridge to where the Nacari’s tall house stood, trying to beat them by running the short cut which Freize had described to her, while the gondola went round the long way on the little canals.

  She recognised the house at once from Ishraq’s drawing and hammered on the door. ‘Freize! Ishraq!’ she shouted. ‘Come away!’

  In the quiet house, the hammering on the door was shockingly loud. In the storeroom, Ishraq and Freize, locking up the hatch, both jumped in fear at the explosion of noise. Freize’s first terrified thought was that the mysterious golem had come for them, as Ishraq started for the hall. ‘It’s Isolde,’ she said.

  ‘Open the door, quick,’ Freize said. ‘She’ll turn out the watch in a moment.’

  Ishraq raced along the narrow hall and slid the bolts to throw open the door.

  ‘They’ve left the square, they could be coming here!’ Isolde gasped. ‘I don’t know where they’re going, they took a gondola. I ran as fast as I could.’ Her nun’s hood had fallen from her head, and her blonde hair was tumbling down around her shoulders. She was panting from her run.

  Ishraq at once put her arm around her friend’s shoulders as if to leave at once. ‘Come on,’ she said to Freize. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Not out of the front door, they left it bolted from the inside,’ Freize reminded her.

  As she hesitated, Isolde glanced down the narrow canal and saw the frightening silhouette of the shadow of the prow of a gondola on the canal wall, just as it was about to turn the corner and see them, on the doorstep of the house. They heard the gondolier cry a warning: ‘Gondola! Gondola! Gondola!’

  ‘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 drily. ‘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.<
br />
  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.