The Vault of bones bp-2

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  Beyond the door stretched a wide, damp hallway, sequestered in mouldy gloom. I knew it would be there, for the Captain had drawn it for me in words. The walls were of wooden panelling, simply painted, with many doors leading off on either side. It was very dark, but I could make out huge, ungainly chairs and benches standing between the doors. The floor over which our shoes clicked was a simple chequerboard of white and red marble flagstones. At the far end was another door, which was not locked. We stepped through it and back into sunlight, into a small courtyard with high walls on all sides. In the centre stood a marble wellhead carved with spiky leaves and birds. Big pots of red clay lined the walls, and from them grew trees, some of which I recognised – there were lemons and oranges rotting upon the branches, and lying in green and mouldy heaps upon the ground, a fig and a small olive tree – and some I did not, strange plants with thick, hairy trunks and glossy leaves like huge ferns. Everything was dry and neglected and near death. Vines festooned the outer walls, and a tall rose-briar was scrambling up towards the sky. Odd carvings in many kinds of stone were set into the brickwork, seemingly at random, so that faces of birds and beasts, shields with noble devices, and swirling knots of carved greenery peered from among the leaves. A stone staircase with an ornate, though worn, rail of marble led up the side of the palace. It should have been beautiful here, for the Captain had described it as his refuge, his Eden. But old cobwebs cloaked the leaves and branches in grey and refuse-mottled tents and all was silent save for the rustle of a wren somewhere. It suddenly began to screech and scold us with its tiny voice. I shivered, and beckoned to Letice, who was peering down the well.

  'No one there’ she said with a grin, but I knew she had not been jesting. Silently we climbed the stair and stepped into another long hallway paved with smooth, worn brick and lined with long benches strewn with plump silk cushions, silvery with dust. At the end was a long gallery that formed another loggia with the windows I had seen from the canal. There were tapestries on the walls, and old shields and lances. Strangely, the windows at both ends of the hallway held no glass, and an icy draught was flowing down towards us. As below, the hallway was lined with doors, and I opened one at random. Beyond it lay a large, white-walled room hung with far richer tapestries and strange, barbarous-looking weavings. Candles stood ready in tall, gilt candle-holders. There were wide, high-backed chairs brightly painted and stacked with pillows. A round table stood empty. Dust lay everywhere, criss-crossed with the roadways of mice and spiders.

  'No one has been here’ I said. No one had come to this house since Gilles had left, two or more months ago. That meant that Querini had not yet thought to search the place – or perhaps, hope against hope, he had not even arrived in the city, and we had overtaken him somewhere upon the ocean. But that thought, tempting though it was, could not be clung to.

  We might stay here, but it is not safe’ I whispered, so that the dust could not collect upon the words. 'Querini will come here sooner or later. It is less safe than if he had already ransacked it. Where shall we go, then?'

  She said nothing. I turned to find her gazing into an enormous mirror. I had seen such things before, but they had been little discs of burnished silver that gave one a reflection little better than could be had from a puddle of water. This one was almost as big as my head, and I could see that it was curved like the face of a soap-bubble. Curious, I went to her side. In the mirror the room was duplicated as if through a window. Another Letice stood there, fey and dishevelled, looking out at me with mocking eyes. And next to her another man stood uncertainly. He was sunburnt and his thick brown hair was in need of trimming, and had not seen a comb for many a windblown day. There was a rutted track of newly healed scars across his face, pink and livid, and his clothes were rough and salt-stained. His nose was somewhat askew, and his eyes were at once suspicious and resigned. The only thing bright and lively about him was the sheathed knife at his belt with its hilt of green stone set with rubies. I swore under my breath and stepped back hurriedly. Letice's eyes watched me from the mirror. Then she shook her head, and for a moment the glass was a blur of whirling golden threads. Then it was empty save for the empty room.

  We can go somewhere very near’ she said at last, after a long silence.

  I took the trouble of locking the doors behind us, scraping away with my crude tools while Letice kept watch. We had left through the street door, and had found ourselves in a little square. There were unfinished brick walls on three sides, their windows boarded up with weathered planks. The Ca Kanzir formed the fourth side. A low marble well-head stood in the middle, its carvings softened by years of rain. Ahead of us a low tunnel led under the sagging, abandoned building. The Calle Morto, the Captain had called it: the Alley of the Dead. Inside the tunnel, the stench of cat was almost solid in the air. White stalactites dripped like livid toadstools from the roof. It was narrow enough that I could easily touch both sides as I walked, and shadows lurked here as thick as soot, or ashes. Letice seemed as oppressed by the tunnel as I was, and hurried along, pausing only when she reached the end and looked out into a wider alley.

  ‘I thought so!' she hissed triumphantly. 'The Calle dei Morti. We are only just around the corner’ 'From what?' I whispered back.

  You will see,' she crowed, stepping out into the street. There were a few people about, but no one gave us a second look, and I followed Letice, who turned left and began to bustle along. We passed over a little bridge and into the square beyond.

  It was a small square and one side of it was a church. But the other three sides were all high walls of brick with many pointed windows. And in those windows, in each one, stood a woman, sometimes two or more; women with painted faces, with curled hair of every unnatural hue and -I stopped dead in my tracks as I took this in – all of them with clothing pulled up or down, or no clothing at all, shaking their breasts, offering them, caressing their bellies, even flicking aside their tunics to give a glimpse of bush. And down below, men, scores of them, some furtive, some strutting with stirred-up lust. Every one of them had his head thrown back and his mouth hanging slack, gawping up at the tarts…

  'Oi, fishface,' Letice said loudly in my ear. You can do that later’ She grabbed my hand and led me through the throng, my nose wrinkling at the acrid, hog-house scent of rutting men, trying not to look up at the festoons of juddering pink flesh above me. And then I saw: Letice was leading me into one of the houses. I tried to protest, but too late, for she had rapped out some signal upon the door, and in another instant we were inside, and a grave man with a monkish face and a humped back was closing the door behind us.

  This was not my first time in a brothel, I must confess, but if I had intended to make some pretence of virtue I need not have bothered, for no one was paying the slightest attention to me. Instead, a gang of women had leaped up, leaving assorted men behind them in various stages of arousal and indignation, and had surrounded Letice like bees about their queen. They poked and stroked her, laughing, scolding and gabbing, and her voice rose above them in happy protest, until an older woman, her grey hair gathered under a sort of starched wimple and dressed in a sombre robe of shimmering, lead-hued silk, emerged from the shadows and began to belabour the tarts none too gently with a silver-tipped staff. They squealed and did not seem to mind, but when the blows continued to fall they trotted back, chattering and swearing cheerfully at each other, to their impatient customers.

  'Magpie!' said the madam, for so she must be. She did not smile, but held her arms out stiffly from her sides. Letice embraced her around the neck and hung there, as if embracing a crucifix. The woman patted her upon the head and pushed her away gently with the head of her staff.

  'My little London Magpie’ said the woman. 'Or rather, Signorina Querini, eh? What are you doing here, Letice?' There was affection in her voice, but a palpable edge as well. Letice bowed her head.

  'Messer Nicholas has let me go’ she said. 'He gave me away to Dardi Boldu.' Something appeared for a moment in the
madam's face, but vanished as quickly as it had come. It was a lean visage, planed and chiselled and sanded, lips thinned by time but still full, eyelids thin and sagging but beneath them, eyes of startling green. She had probably never been beautiful, but no doubt she had always terrified and bewitched.

  'Oh, dear’ she said, emotionlessly. 'But you have found yourself a new benefactor, I see. My, he looks important. Welcome to II Bisato Beccato, Signor’ She gave me a flat, scouring look. I thought of bowing, and thought again. 'No, Mother, this is Petroc. He is a friend. We are..’

  'Not fucking’ finished the woman bluntly. That is plain. Why are you here, little one?'

  We need a… a bed’ said Letice. It was the first time I had seen her ruffled. 'Not for that! I mean, we need a place to stay, not for long, just a few days’ 'And why should I let you stay here, in trouble as you plainly are?' said the woman. Nothing showed in her face. Letice nodded to me, and I pulled out my purse.

  We will pay what we would at the finest hostelry in Venice’ I said, fumbling out a gold piece. At the sight of the coin one of the woman's eyebrows lifted fractionally. She tapped Letice upon a breast with her cane and treated us both to a frosty smile.

  Well, my dears, sentiment is my weakness’ she said, her voice showing not a glimmer of any weakness whatsoever. ‘You may stay five days. Any longer and I shall put you to work – both of you’ I felt the tip of the cane brush my crotch and cleared my throat noisily. ‘You may have your old quarters, Magpie. The girl who was using them died last week.'

  'Thank you, Mother Zaneta’ said Letice fervently, dropping a deep curtsey. Now I did bow, but Mother Zanetas cane caught me under the chin. 'Do not put that purse away, young man’ she said. 'The terms of my house are very explicit. Payment in advance, for any and.. ‘ the cane found the coin and there was a chink of silver upon gold,'… all services’

  Our room was up at the top of the house. It was a square, cramped box, and faced, not the seething square, but a decorous canal.

  'Not a prime spot,' said Letice indifferently. 'Good enough for a dying girl, though, I expect’

  There was a bed, a linen chest, and nothing else: no adornment of any kind. I thought of the last occupant and shuddered. Had they kept her working, the poor wretch? I pictured the girl and her rough, oblivious customers, and felt a breath of desolation pass through the close, stuffy air.

  Tell me about Mother Zaneta’ I said, to drive the ghost away.

  ‘I broke her heart’ she replied, inspecting the sheets suspiciously. Well, they did change the linen. Now then, Mother… I told you about her. She took a shine to me – let me learn things. Made me learn. Perhaps I was going to be Mother one day – I'll never know, will I?' 'She didn't like Dardi, did she?'

  'Oh, you are sharp. Dislike might be the wrong word, though. Remember I told you about the girl he killed? Well, that happened here. Not in this room’ she added, seeing my horror. 'Her name was Amelia. I don't think Mother thought she was special, but no whore-mistress likes it when the customers fuck the girls to death, do they?' Her voice was light, belied by the hardness of her words. She flicked a feather from the bolster. What does "II Bisato Beccato" mean?' I asked.

  '"The Trapped Eel,"' she said, flatly, and went over to the window, where she propped her elbows on the sill and slumped wearily. 'Now what?' she said. 'Now we find Querini’ I told her.

  'Easy enough. Come over here’ She pointed out across the rooftops, south-west. I saw a forest of tall chimneys, each topped with an odd inverted cone, and here and there a taller belltower. Pigeons strutted and wheeled everywhere. Further east was nothing but a blurred confusion of land, sea and sky.

  The Querini Palace is just over there’ she said. 'See those chimneys there, the bright ones, next to the dragon weathercock?' I saw: the place seemed within pissing distance’We can walk there in the time it takes to eat an apple’

  'Let's not’ I said quickly. We can't very well march in and demand to see Baldwin, and by the bye, would they mind giving back the Crown? You know the building. Is there a postern door, a…'

  'A thief s way in?' she finished. 'No: there's a front door and a back door, like all Venetian houses. One on the square, one on the canal. And really they're both front doors, if you take my meaning. You could swim up the canal, climb the wall and get in through the pantry window, but you'd freeze to death in the water, and the wall's sheer.'. She leaned upon the sill and gazed out over the city, eyes, I guessed, seeing nothing; or perhaps seeing what her younger self had once beheld. I turned back to the room. I knew now what was troubling me: it was Anna. The first night we had spent together as lovers had been in a brothel. It was as clear to me in all its strange, mortifyingly wonderful detail as if I were seeing it painted upon the walls: a summer night in Bordeaux, the candlelight, the rutting in the room next door, the terrible mural with its fat little people who bulged their eyes at us as we played.

  'I am going to have a look anyway’ I said, to break the spell. You can take me there.'

  'I think I had better not’ said Letice. 'These streets are likely to be full of Querini's people. I might bump into Facio, or it might be Agneta the cook on her way to the fish market, which would be worse.'

  Instead, she drew me a map in the dust behind the bed, the way to the Palazzo Querini and a crude outline of the city and its various islands. I changed into my sadly abused but patched and clean Venetian clothes and left Letice alone at the window, her yellow hair bright against the blue sky and the darting grey of pigeon wings.

  I let myself out of the brothel, ignoring the curious stares of the whores. The square – the Campo San Cassiano, as I now understood it to be – was as busy as before, and I slipped unremarked through the slobbering, randy fools and, trying to remember the twists and turns that Letice had described, set off into the maze that is the city of Venice. My legs felt light and weak, for I had been a month at sea, but I followed my directions – left, second right, over the bridge, round the corner, sharp left, left again – and in no time I had reached the busy little square where the Palazzo Querini stood, its back to a wide canal. I held back in the shadowed mouth of the alley and took stock.

  It was far bigger than the Ca Kanzir, and far newer, a towering edifice of chestnut brick into which were set an exotic congeries of pointed, tracework windows, carved plaques and bosses, and even fragments of mosaic and ancient statuary. I suddenly understood where the glory of Constantinople had ended up: here, in the strongrooms and on the walls of Venice, for the people of that city have decorated their houses and churches with whatever they looted from their great and ancient rival, haphazardly, as a hedgehog in an orchard will roll over in the windfalls to see what will stick to its spines. A nation of thieves indeed, and they were by no means coy about it. But Letice was right. There was no way in save through the delicately pointed door, and although I took the trouble to skirt around and steal a look at the backside of the palace from across the canal, there was no way in that way, either.

  Crestfallen, I started back towards the brothel, but I could not face that desolate room again so soon, and so I wandered, and came to a teeming marketplace that ran along the bank of the canal. It was loud and bustling, and I wove my way between the stalls, gaping at what was on offer there: fish, and every kind of grotesque beast from the depths of the Lagoon. I would have marvelled at the things like pink spiders, the seething baskets of eels and the creatures that seemed to be nothing but eyes or spines, but before long I found myself at the Riva Alta and its bridge of boats: the Quartarolo Bridge, Letice had called it. I made my way across, enjoying the heave and sway of the boards beneath my feet, and fell in with the crowds on the other side, who all seemed to be heading either for the bridge or for, I guessed, the heart of the city: Saint Mark's Cathedral, and the palace of the Doges. I had intended to go there tomorrow, but I had the pope's letter and Andrew's, and the crowds and the strange luminous air of Venice had given me an unaccustomed feeling of confidence. I would try my hand
now, I decided, and let the crowd carry me forward.

  I was in a river of Venetians, chattering and squawking at each other like a flock of gaudy starlings. No part of Venice is ever empty save very late at night. Vacant space fills with people like a footprint in a mire fills with water. The pale morning sun was picking out marvels on every side, and I felt a surge of joy rising in my chest that seemed to lift each hair on my head and make it quiver. In a sort of daze I meandered along more streets, through squares thronged with people bedecked in the finest clothing I had ever seen, until I stepped through an archway into a wide square, at the far end of which stood the most extraordinary building I had ever seen.

  'San Marco’ I said out loud, as if that might be explanation enough, though it was not.

  The church – for so I realised it was – rose before me out of some fevered dream. Enough travellers have described it, and I will not enter the lists with pens more worthy than mine, save to say that it took several paces across the wide space of the square before I was sure that what I beheld was in truth a building and not a panoply of giants' armour or a wondrous spinney of trees whose leaves were gold and whose fruits were jewels. So intoxicated had I been rendered by the wonders I had already seen that I do not believe I even noticed the soaring tower of the campanile as I tottered towards the church across the herringbone bricks of the square, my sea-legs barely up to the task, and saw winged figures – humans and, it seemed, lions – swarming over the swoop and jut of the fa9ade. There were real people up there, too, and now I could see a filigree of scaffolding over the front and the four great domes.