Fools' Gold (13 page)

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 apprenticed 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.

‘I am an honest man of business,’ the money changer said a little nervously. ‘Your servant will confirm that I gave him a fair exchange for his coins when he came the day before yesterday. And actually, the value has risen already. I would buy the English nobles back from him and give him a profit.’

Freize nodded, and smiled his open-faced beam. ‘I have no complaint,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m hanging on to them and hoping they will rise in value again.’

‘I have a share in a ship coming in from the East, carrying Russian goods,’ Luca said, leaning towards the money changer so that no-one else could hear. ‘I want to prepare for the sale of the cargo, as soon as it comes into port.’

‘You have borrowed against it?’ the money changer asked acutely.

‘No!’ Brother Peter exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ Luca said speaking simultaneously.

They exchanged an embarrassed look. ‘My brother denies it, for he hates debt,’ Luca explained quickly. ‘But yes, I have borrowed against it and that is why I want to sell it quickly, as soon as it enters port, and for gold nobles.’

‘Of course,’ the man said. ‘I would be interested in buying a share but I don’t carry that many nobles to hand. I keep my fortune in different values. You would accept a payment in silver? In rubies?’

‘No, I only want gold,’ Luca said. ‘My preference would be gold coins. These English nobles, for instance?’

‘Oh, everyone wants English nobles, they are driving up the price! It’s ridiculous.’

‘Perhaps. But that makes them better for me. I want to get them while they are rising in price. The value of my cargo would be perhaps a thousand English nobles?’

The merchant lowered his eyes to the table before him. ‘A very great sum, Milord!’

‘It is easily worth that.’ Luca lowered his voice. ‘Almost all furs.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Squirrel, fox, and beaver. I told my agent to only buy the very best. And some silks, and amber, and ivory.’ Luca spread the cargo manifest on the trader’s table, letting him see the goods that had been ordered.

The trader nodded. ‘So. If your cargo is as good as you describe . . . ’

‘But I will only sell for the English nobles.’

‘It would take me a few days to get that sum together,’ the money changer said.

‘You could get the full amount?’

‘I could. When would your ship come in?’

‘It’s due next week,’ Luca said. ‘But of course, it could be delayed.’

‘If it is very late you will find the gold nobles have risen in value and I will only be able to pay for the cargo at the current value of the nobles. But I will offer you a fair price for the furs, and I am very interested in the amber. I will pay you a deposit now if you would let me have first look at the goods, and first offer?’

‘You perhaps want a pound of flesh as well?’ Brother Peter demanded irritably.

The merchant bent his head, ignoring the insult. ‘I will offer in English nobles.’

‘But where will you get so many coins?’ Brother Peter asked. ‘From these other money changers?’

The trader looked along the row of little tables. ‘They don’t like to work with me except for an extreme profit,’ he said. ‘And it is not always good for a man of my religion to do business with Christians.’

‘Why not?’ Brother Peter asked, bristling.

The Jewish money changer gave him a rueful smile. ‘Because, alas, if they decide to deny a debt I cannot get justice.’

‘Even in Venice?’ Luca asked, shocked. He knew that all of Christendom was against the Jews, who only survived the regular riots against them because they lived in their own areas under the protection of the local lord; but he had thought that in Venice the only god was profit, and the laws protecting trade were rigidly enforced by the ruler of Venice, the Doge.

‘It is better for people of my faith in Venice than elsewhere,’ the merchant conceded. ‘We are protected by the laws and by the Doge himself. But here, like everywhere, we prefer to work only with men that we can trust. And anyway, I can get all the gold nobles I need without going to the Christian money changers.’

‘You will go to the Arab bankers?’ Brother Peter was suspicious. ‘You will go to gold merchants? We don’t want the whole of Venice knowing our business.’

‘I will say nothing. And it does not matter to you where I get the nobles as long as they are good. I go to my own merchant. Only one. And he is discreet.’

‘And the English nobles are the best currency, aren’t they?’ Luca confirmed. ‘Though it is surprising that there are so many of them on the market at once.’

The man shrugged. ‘The English are losing the war against France,’ he said. ‘They have been pouring gold into France to pay for their army in Bordeaux. When they lost Bordeaux last summer, the city was sacked and the campaign funds disappeared. As it happens, the money chests all came here. These things happen in wartime. That’s their sorrow and our gain, for the coins are good. I have tested them myself, and I can get them at a good price.’

‘And who is your supplier?’ Brother Peter asked bluntly.

The merchant smiled. ‘He would prefer Venice not to know
his
business,’ he said. ‘You will find me discreet, just as you asked me to be.’

‘When will you get them?’ Luca asked.

No one but Luca would have noticed the swift, almost invisible glance that went from the money changer towards the street-gambling girl’s father, who was helping her pack up her game, quite unaware of the money changers. But Luca was watching the Jew as closely as he had watched Jacinta playing the cups and ball game.