Order of Darkness

by Philippa Gregory

  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 canal door opening 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.

  She smiled at him. ‘And not a young woman either,’ she said. ‘I am sorry to have deceived you. Dr Nacari and I have worked together for many many years, and we have discovered many things together. Among them, an elixir which prolongs life itself. I am an old, old soul in a young body. You, Freize, make this heart beat faster; but it’s only fair that I should tell you, that it is a very old heart. I’m an old woman behind this young face.’

  Freize glanced at Luca and raised his shoulders. ‘This is beyond me, Sparrow,’ he said. ‘Someone is mad here, it might be me or them.’

  But it was Ishraq who spoke next. ‘It’s about the gold,’ she said frankly. ‘We have come about the gold. We have come to warn you.’

  The alchemist smiled. ‘Was it you that broke into our house, Daughter?’

  Freize shook his head in instant denial, but Ishraq met the older man’s eyes fearlessly, and nodded. ‘I am sorry. We are commanded to find the source of the gold nobles. Our master demanded that we pretend to be a wealthy young family and investigate. We followed Israel the money changer and he came to your door. So we knew you had a store of gold nobles.’

  ‘We knew as soon as we came home, that someone had been into the inner room. And the things . . . the dark matter, the mouse in the jar, the coins in the fire, they were all disturbed, just a little, by your presence. Things are not the same when they are watched. Something changes when it has been seen.’

  ‘You knew we had been in the room?’ Freize asked sceptically.

  Luca stirred at the suggestion that an object might sense an observer; but Ishraq simply answered: ‘Yes, I thought you might know. And we took a print of the Duke of Bedford’s seal and a piece of glass from the writing table.’

  ‘The rainbow glass,’ Luca said. ‘The glass that makes a rainbow when the light falls on it. I have been interested in rainbows since I saw the mosaic at Ravenna. Do you know how they are made in the sky? How does the glass do it on the earth?’

  ‘The glass splits the light into its true colours,’ the alchemist told Luca, understanding his longing for knowledge. ‘Everyone thinks that light is the colour of sunshine. But it is not. It is made of many colours. You can see this when it goes through the glass.’

  ‘Is it always the same colours?’ Luca asked him. ‘I saw a mosaic of a rainbow, an ancient mosaic, centuries old, and it was the same colours that we see today. The ancients must have somehow known that light made a rainbow.’

  ‘Always the same colours,’ Jacinta confirmed. ‘And always following the
same order. Light appears as clear brightness when all the colours flow together, but if you allow a beam of light to fall on a piece of glass, cut in the right way, it will split the light into its colours and you can see them. Put another piece of glass on the rainbow and you can make them meld together again and become invisible once more. One piece of glass can split the light, and then another makes it whole again.’

  ‘So what makes a rainbow in the sky?’ Ishraq asked.

  Jacinta turned to her. ‘I believe that the drops of water of the rain split the light, just like the glass splits it. You often see the rainbow against rain clouds, or against mist.’

  Luca nodded. ‘That’s true, you do.’

  ‘But the interesting question to me . . .’ Jacinta went on. ‘The interesting question is: why is it curved?’

  ‘Curved?’ Freize asked, utterly baffled, but wanting to join in.

  The alchemist smiled at him. ‘Why would the bow of the rainbow be curved?’ he asked. ‘Why would it not run straight across the sky?’

  Freize shook his head, even Luca was blank.

  ‘Because it follows the line of the earth. It proves that the earth is not flat but shaped like a ball. And the great length of the rainbow proves that the ball is far greater than philosophers think, and round, not humped. It tells us that the earth is round but bigger than we thought. Much bigger than we thought.’

  Freize put his hands down and held on to the table, as if to steady himself. ‘Why would you think such a thing?’ he said, complaining of their imaginations which made the ground heave beneath his feet. ‘Why would you repeat such a disturbing thing? And obviously untrue. Why would you say such a thing, even if you are mad enough to think it? It makes my head spin.’

  Jacinta put her small hand over his as he gripped the table. ‘Because we consider all possibilities,’ she answered. ‘And it is true about the world being round. But of course, people don’t like to think about it.’ She looked up and smiled at Luca. ‘Keep the glass piece,’ she said. ‘And see what light shines through it. Who knows what you will discover?’

  ‘And what about you?’ Ishraq asked. ‘You know, you can’t stay here, counterfeiting coins. This has to stop.’

  ‘You call us counterfeiters?’ The alchemist drew himself up to his full height. ‘You think I am a common criminal?’

  For the first time Ishraq felt uneasy. She looked from Jacinta to the man who had passed as her father and remembered that she, Luca and Freize were three, against the two of them. But there was something about these two that made her wonder if they were safe, even with those odds. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Doctor Nacari; but what else am I to think?’ she said carefully.

  ‘We saw the silver piccoli in the hearth,’ Freize said bluntly. ‘We saw the sacks of gold at your watergate. We know that you supply Israel, the money changer, with his gold coins. We assume that you supply others. You’ve got the seal of the Duke of Bedford, we know it’s his seal. Altogether, it looks very bad.’ He turned to Jacinta. ‘It looks as if you are counterfeiting gold. You may be as old as my great-grandmother and the world may be round – though I have to tell you that I doubt it – but I would not have any harm come to a lass with a smile like yours.’

  At once she beamed, as radiant as a girl. ‘Ah Freize,’ she said intimately. ‘You have a true heart. I can see that as clearly as I can see anything.’

  The alchemist sighed. ‘Come in here,’ he said. He opened the door to what had once been the storeroom in the house and the warm rotting smell intensified. He led the way into the inner room and Luca looked around in amazement from the vat of rotting garbage, to the bubbling, dripping glass vessels.

  ‘I won’t deny that we have started to make gold,’ the alchemist said to Freize. ‘There are the moulds for pouring the gold. Here . . .’ He pointed to a great round crock sealed and thrust into the deep heat of the fire. ‘Do you know what they call that?’

  Freize dumbly shook his head.

  ‘The philosophers’ egg,’ he said and smiled. ‘It absorbs an unbearable heat and inside it the metals, pure and impure, melt and blend. When we pour the molten mix into the moulds we make gold nobles.’

  ‘Pure gold?’ Luca confirmed, hardly able to believe it. ‘Because we tested some coins when we first arrived in Venice.’

  ‘Those would have been the first we ever had, from our patron. We didn’t make them. Those were real gold nobles, from the Calais mint. We sowed the market with them. At first we just sold the coins he provided, creating an interest in the market, watching the price rise, and then we started to make our own. We have only just started making our own, from mixed metals. They pass as gold, they are just one step away from being pure gold, they are close, very close to perfect. I need only a little time to make them pure. I have to work on them some more. One last stage of refinement.’

  ‘We can’t do it here, any more,’ Jacinta reminded him. ‘They are good to warn us. We’ll have to move on.’

  ‘Yes, I see we must be on our travels again. We will have to tell our patron that we have to find a new home.’

  Ishraq saw the young woman turn from the alchemist with regret, saw her glance at a bell jar on the table. Where the little brown mouse had been on their last visit, there was now another creature, a little like a lizard. Ishraq could not see more than the hairless back and the little outspread legs as the creature slept on its tiny belly at the bottom of the jar.

  ‘Who is your patron?’ Luca asked.

  The alchemist smiled at him. ‘He works in secret,’ he said. ‘He works in darkness. But we have done what he wanted us to do. He commanded us to come here and put the coins that he gave us into the market place, and then make our own, and now we are only one step from pure gold, only one step from eternal life.’

  ‘Wait a moment, you brought gold coins here?’ Freize asked. ‘You didn’t make them all here?’

  ‘Our first task was only to trade gold coins.’ Jacinta moved to the table and tossed a cloth over the bell jar. The little thing inside moved as the cloth fell down, hiding it from sight, and then lay still. ‘We found a trader we could trust – Israel, the man that you know – and then we put the gold nobles out into the market. We watched the traders bid for them and drive up the price. Everyone wanted them. We created a fashion for them, and we supplied them in thousands from our store. Our second task, once people were calling out for the coins, was to take enough silver to make our own gold. To refine it and work on it according to the recipe. You saw us collecting silver in the market square, with the cups and ball game. You saw the coins heating up in the forge. Then, when we had converted it into gold we sold our alchemical gold into the market we had created for the real gold nobles. But you have seen all this. You know how we do it?’

  Freize shook his head. ‘We were in a hurry,’ he said, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘We visited, as it were, like burglars.’

  The alchemist turned to Luca. ‘If I could have gone on here with my work I would have changed this vat of dirt into gold itself. Imagine it. The purest metal from the basest filth. But as it is, we have made a start, transforming the piccoli. We collected purses of silver and copper. Jacinta won it for us every day. Israel gave us more.’

  ‘But where did those first gold coins come from?’ Freize asked, clinging to the few facts that he thought he might be able to understand. ‘Your master’s gold that he gave you? The first gold that you didn’t make, but only sold on. Where did your master get it?’

  Jacinta lifted some of the glass jars off the table and put them up high, on the shelves. Ishraq glimpsed the desiccated bodies of a couple of mice, and one splayed specimen, pinned on a board, which looked like a dead cat. The young woman tidied them out of sight, and then turned to answer Freize.

  ‘They were true gold nobles,’ she said. ‘We cannot be accused of forging them, they were the real thing. Gold nobles created and stored by John, Duke of Bedford. A great alchemist. A great adept. They came in his caskets for
us to use, under his own seal.’

  ‘From the mint at Calais? He had them made from real gold and stored to pay the English troops? When he was regent?’ Luca asked.

  She laughed and wagged a finger at him as if it was a great joke. ‘Ah, don’t ask me!’ she said. ‘He commanded the mint, so they may be English gold. They might be the real thing. But he also owned the manuscript book that we showed you, he was translating it when he died. His is the recipe that we are using to turn dark matter into gold. He spent his life and his fortune trying to make the philosophers’ stone. Who knows whether the gold came from mines or from his alchemical forge? Who knows? Who cares? As long as it is good coin?’

  ‘Because if it’s alchemy gold, then he had found the secret of life, and you have it, even if you can’t read it yet!’ Ishraq exclaimed. ‘You are working towards it. In the pages of the manuscript, in your forge here, in your still, you have the secret of how to make gold from nothing, how to make eternal life!’

  Jacinta smiled. ‘Of course we do. But if we had stolen the gold and all that we have made is a clever forgery, then we are counterfeiters and we will confess it to no one,’ Jacinta replied steadily. ‘So don’t ask me which it is. Because I won’t say.’

  Freize sat down heavily on one of the stools. ‘It’s beyond me,’ he said. ‘But I know one thing . . .’

  There was silence in the room but for the gurgle in the vat of first matter, and the drip of a distilling pipe.

  ‘No, I know two things,’ Freize said, thinking furiously. ‘The world is flat, of course, for if not how could hell be below and heaven above? And that I was taught in the monastery and they even had a picture of it on the wall of the church that I saw several times a day and many times on Sunday so I am sure of that at least: hell below, earth in the middle and heaven above.

  ‘And the other thing is something that I know, but you do not. Something that you should know, and be warned. Our master, that is to say Luca’s master, Milord, has ordered that we find the counterfeiters and report them. Our travelling companion, Brother Peter, will obey him, whether we agree or not. If you want to save your skins, you had better pack and go. It doesn’t matter if you confess to alchemy or confess to counterfeiting, or deny them both, for Brother Peter will report you; and I, for one, would rather not see the Doge’s men come here and take you off to boil you in oil.’