by S. D. Sykes
Now free of the flooding cesspit, we struggled back toward the courtyard, where we fell onto the steps of the exterior staircase, as the rain beat down on our faces. We had escaped death, and now we felt the elation of being alive. Filomena took my head in her hands, and she kissed me. She kissed me as if she loved me.
I would tell you that this was the end of my story, but there is a little more to relate. For, just as we had gathered the strength to leave Ca’ Bearpark, we heard voices. Someone was shouting my name, and before we had a chance to run up the stairs and hide, they had found us. It was a company of guards from the doge’s palace, and at its head, holding a lantern aloft, was my mother.
“Oswald! Thanks be to God!” She ran over and clasped me to her chest. “You’re still alive. The boy told me you were here.”
“Which boy?”
“Sandro, of course.”
“He betrayed me, Mother.”
“Yes, yes I know all about that,” she said, as if this were a minor misdemeanor, “but he heartily regrets it.” Mother moved aside, and in the gloom, I could see Sandro’s dirty, trembling face. “He came to see me, Oswald, and he told me the whole story.” She clasped me again. “And now, you mustn’t be angry, but there’s somebody else who wants to speak to you.”
“Who?”
“I couldn’t come here alone to save you, could I? So I went to the doge’s palace and raised my old friend.”
I froze in alarm, as a pair of red boots and a fur-lined cape rounded the corner.
“You brought Ballio here, Mother?” I said.
“Oh, don’t worry, Oswald,” she said, squeezing my arm tightly. “Really. You have no reason to be afraid of the man. Not in the least.” She leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “I have explained everything.”
Epilogue
It was late April 1358, and the lagoon was a gentle, chalky blue as I stood beside Mother at the Molo, waiting to bid the pilgrims farewell. Today the Jaffa galleys were setting sail in their first flotilla toward the Holy Land since the war with Hungary had ended, and it seemed as if the whole of Venice had turned out to watch them leave. The doge himself had blessed their journey from the loggia of his palace, and the city could not have been a merrier place. Venice was open again. The pilgrims had returned to the city, they had spent a great deal of money here, and now they were departing on Venetian ships. It was a perfect piece of business.
When the blessing and the ceremonies were complete, the galleys set off from the quay to cheering crowds and the tumultuous cacophony of a band. There was a time when this music had tunneled through my head and driven me half mad—but now I was pleased to hear these tunes, even the humming whines of the bladder pipes. In the last few weeks I had become reacquainted with joy. She had fluttered into my heart and reawakened my soul, and I had Venice to thank for this miracle.
Tomorrow we would set off on our own journey. A return to England. A return to my son. And I would leave this city as a citizen of Venice—a hero, no less. The Englishman who had unmasked a network of spies, saved a beautiful Venetian woman from certain death in a flooding cell, and then led the doge’s guard in an intrepid chase across the lagoon in order to apprehend three traitors who were escaping in a cargo ship.
I was now famous, and I had even come to the attention of the doge himself, who had decided that I should be rewarded handsomely for my exploits. I did not receive any money from Venice herself, of course. Instead the doge demanded that Vittore cancel my debts, repay my forty ducats, and then double it. The porcine crook had refused this order at first, but when the Signori di Notte had threatened to investigate his gambling activities, the man had handed over the money quickly enough—though not without a show of bitter and vengeful umbrage. Vittore would always be my enemy, but he was a Venetian, and I was bound for home. I saw no reason for our paths to cross in the future.
Mother lifted her ancient dog into her arms, and we made our way into the crowds on the Riva degli Schiavoni, so that we might wave to the pilgrims as they sailed into the distance toward the Lido, and then out into the Adriatic sea. When Mother was finally tired of this sight, she passed her dog to Sandro. The boy was now my valet and most faithful servant, and I must say he looked rather smart, with his new cotehardie, woolen cloak, and washed hair. You might ask how I could have forgiven Sandro—but I say this: he had been a starving, homeless orphan when I had first met him; he had deceived me for money, but he had redeemed himself by seeking out my mother and telling her the truth. In turn, she had understood enough of the boy’s Venetian to rouse her ‘great friend’ Signor Ballio from the doge’s palace. I would tell you that I had felt some obligation to give Sandro a second chance because of this, but I did so because it pleased me and because I cared about the boy.
Bernard and Tamas were never seen again after the guards boarded their cargo boat and found the pair hiding beneath the waxed tarpaulin. I heard that they named many other spies and clandestine associates under torture, admitting that they would sell information about the Venetian Arsenale to the highest bidder. I believe, once all their secrets had been squeezed, pulled, and mangled from their mouths, they were then beheaded and thrown into the lagoon. Perhaps their headless, mutilated bodies will wash up one day in the Assassin’s Canal, stranded by the high tide and left to rot in the mud of that particular dead end.
Bearpark suffered a different fate from his associates, however. He had been a citizen of Venice, and therefore he needed to be publicly tried and executed. Even though he was an old man, the Venetians had hung him turpissime, upside-down, between the two Columns of Justice in the Piazzetta. I watched him die myself. You might wonder that I could stand to witness such an execution, but this old man was responsible for the death of three young men, one of whom was his own grandson. He had disowned his infant daughter, and he had abandoned his wife to drown. I had no pity for him, and I could not forgive his wickedness. So yes, I stood in the front row, and I watched his execution, and when our eyes met, I did not look away.
I do not know the fate of Giovanni. After locking the door to the cesspit, he had disappeared from Venice. At first I hated him, but now I like to imagine that he has become a monk somewhere in a faraway abbey—a Benedictine brotherhood that is wealthy enough to afford his taste in clothes. I imagine him as a sacristan, in charge of the relics and treasures of the monastery, locking these riches away each night with a ring of heavy, clinking keys, before he retires to his room and spends his nights with a collection of rosaries and diptychs.
As the pilgrim galleys disappeared on the horizon, the music died away and the crowds began to disperse. It was then that I saw her, standing on the Riva degli Schiavoni with a child in her arms. She called out to me, though at first I could not hear her words—and suddenly I panicked, thinking that we might miss each other. But then she waved to me, before she blew me a kiss. It was the sweetest of kisses.
Filomena had survived the flooding chamber. She had survived the disgrace and execution of her husband, and now she would return to England with me. As my wife.
Author’s Note
My first visit to Venice was in 1982, and I will admit that it was not necessarily love at first sight. My father had driven across Europe from our home in South London, and we were all in a fairly bad mood by the time we arrived in northern Italy after three days in a car. I vaguely remember that we parked somewhere near the long bridge that now links Venice to the mainland, and then made our way along narrow, crowded streets to the Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square) until we sat down on the steps of the Basilica only for a pigeon to do something unpleasant on my head. I was a teenager so perhaps I can be forgiven for not seeing past these small annoyances, but I wasn’t overly impressed with Venice. It was only many years later that I discovered the true wonder of this city—I could even say that I fell in love with her. Yes, I was a lot older and wiser, but I also believe that Venice really impressed me this time because of our arrival by ship. It was then that she truly
made sense to me—as a city of the sea.
I should start by saying a little about the geography and history of this unique place. For those of you who are not familiar with Venice, she is an island-city located in the midst of a large lagoon on the north-east coast of Italy. The lagoon itself is a large and shallow expanse of water and marshy islets covering approximately 200 square miles, and is protected from the Adriatic Sea by the barrier islands of the Lido and Pellestrina. Within the lagoon there are something like fifty islands, most of which are uninhabited. Venice is the most populous of the inhabited islands, but other islands, such as Murano, Burano and Sant’ Erasmo also have communities that continue to make a living from the lagoon—not only from tourism, but also from other industries such as fishing, glass-making, boat-building and market gardening.
Venice is not a city of antiquity, as the lagoon was hardly inhabited at all until the fall of Rome in the fifth century. It was then that this backwater became a place of refuge for people escaping sporadic raids from the more northern tribes of the Huns, Goths and Visigoths. At first these refugees would return to their homes on the mainland as soon as danger had passed—after all the Venetian lagoon was a malarial swamp—but over time they discovered that the lagoon had more to offer than just being a place of sanctuary.
The Venetians started by trading salt that was produced in the shallow waters, finding that sea trading was easier from their waterside homes; but soon they established trade routes that reached far into the East, purchasing spices, silks, furs, fabric dyes, precious stones, carpets and even slaves and then selling these goods to markets in the West. Thus the wealth of Venice was not built upon the old model of owning territory, instead it was built upon their unsurpassed skills in sea navigation and trade.
Population growth followed this success, but the inhabitable land mass of the lagoon was soon too small to cope with the influx of peoples. The Venetians solved this problem by building their own land—sinking long timber piles into the bed of the lagoon, in order to create platform-like structures upon which they could then build their houses. The channels between these structures were dredged to a form ditches that were deep enough to allow the fishermen and traders to berth their boats beside their homes, even at low tide. Over time these individual habitations grew closer and closer until they formed sestieres (or parishes) Eventually these sestieres joined together to form Venice, whilst the ditches between them became the famous canals of the city.
The mentality that drove the early Venetians to build a city in a marsh is the key to understanding the spirit of the place. In his book Francesco’s Venice, Francesco da Mosto, a Venetian himself, tells us that Venice “was created from nothing by free people, on islands in an empty wilderness. This is the essence of the city’s unwillingness to be subject to anything or anybody.” Whilst the surrounding city states of Verona, Modena, Padua and Milan were subject to the dictatorship of princes and lords, Venice held fast to her Republic, headed by an elected leader—the Doge—until she was defeated by Napoleon in 1797.
However, we should not run away with the idea that Venice was a paragon of democracy. Instead it is better to describe her as an oligarchy, controlled by a core of rich and powerful families, who were careful to prevent one family from gaining dominion over the others. These families had representatives on the Great Council of Venice, a body that met in the enormous and impressive assembly hall in the Doge’s Palace—a chamber that you can still visit today. This Council elected the smaller Council of Forty, who in turn elected the Council of Ten on a yearly basis.
This smallest Council had two important purposes. The first was the gathering of intelligence via a prodigious network of spies and informers, and the second was to make quick decisions in conjunction with the Doge, especially if the Republic came under threat. These threats were two-fold—either from enemies within Venice herself, or from the many neighbouring states who were jealous of her wealth and position in the world. Venice did not want to be ruled by a foreign dynasty, nor would she tolerate any attempts by an ambitious Venetian to create his own dictatorship. In 1355, just three years before City of Masks is set, the city had suffered a coup, orchestrated by Doge Marin Falier. The plot failed and Falier was executed with the doors of the Doge’s Palace open to the public, so that his death could be witnessed by all of Venice. Even now Falier’s portrait can be seen in the assembly hall of the Great Council, covered with a black shroud and accompanied by the inscription, “this is the space reserved for Marin Falier, beheaded for his crimes.”
There was no room for newcomers into the ranks of the Great Council, no matter how rich or successful you might become. In 1296 a law known as the Serrata was passed. Translated literally as “the locking,” this law meant that only men from certain aristocratic families were eligible for membership to the Great Council. The names of these families were listed in a book that was known as the Libro d’Oro, or the “Golden Book.” The historian John Julius Norwich tells us, in his book A History of Venice, that the Serrata “created, at a stroke, a closed caste in the society of the Republic.” This barrier to political advancement for those not named in the Golden Book caused much resentment and dissention, but such was the power and control of Venice’s Council of Ten, that the Serrata was never over-turned.
In City of Masks we meet a further arm of government—a group who were perhaps even more secretive and sinister than the Council of Ten. This group, the Signori di Notte, (“Lords of the Night”) were noblemen who set themselves up as the supposed guardians of Venice’s morality. When I first started researching for this novel I was under the mistaken impression that Venice had always been a permissive, decadent city, based largely on my knowledge of Venice in the 17th and 18th centuries. But things were different in the 14th century, when gambling, prostitution and especially homosexuality were often brutally suppressed. In his book Homosexuality and Civilization, the writer Louis Crompton tells us this: “The medieval columns of Justice, dramatically visible from the lagoon, stand where they stood six hundred years ago, one surmounted by the winged lion of Saint Mark, and the other by Saint Theodore and his crocodile. In all likelihood more homosexuals died on this spot than anywhere else in Europe before Hitler.” So you can see that this is a different, darker, crueler, more oppressive city than we sometimes meet.
How then might we characterize the Venice of City of Masks? Whereas we tend to think of Venice as a romantic city, rich in art and history, she was actually considered to be a modern industrial power in this age. In the years before the Black Death of 1348, she was arguably at her commercial peak, and was one of the pre-eminent powers in Europe, controlling trade from Constantinople and selling her goods as far afield as Flanders and Southampton. In the next century, Venice was to lose this pre-eminence, following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, and the discovery of the sea route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1497—thus by-passing Venice in the East/West trade routes. These two events prompted Venice’s slow decline into the city we often find depicted in art and literature—a city of decadence and pleasure-seeking. I’m thinking of Casanova, the flamboyant carnivals, courtesans, gambling and open prostitution, whereas the Venice I’m writing about was altogether a more serious place, concerned first and foremost with making money.
Not that she was completely solemn and lacking in diversion of course! In City of Masks, Oswald visits an island known as the convent of Santa Lucia—a convent that also doubles as a brothel. This might seem father rather far-fetched, but is based upon an actual Venetian convent of the early 1400s—the island convent of Sant’ Angelo di Contorta. The Abbess of this convent, a woman named Clara Sanuto, notoriously ruled over a nunnery where the sisters had little regard for their vows, and were regularly visited by the men of Venice, some of whom were paying for sex. In those times, convents were often the repositories for young women of wealthier families, whose parents had, for some reason or other, been unable to arrange a suitable marriage for their daughters.
The sisters of Sant’ Angelo di Contorta did not necessarily have a religious vocation, nor did they have a taste for celibacy. In fact many of them ended up giving birth to children whom they then disguised as abandoned foundlings. The activities of Sant’ Angelo did not go unnoticed by the authorities however, and after sporadic raids, the convent was eventually closed on papal orders in 1474. Michael Prestwich, in his book Medieval People, tells us that there “was no indication that the nuns of Sant’ Angelo were forced to do what they did in order to make money; they were not running a commercial brothel. Rather, they appear to have provided a service of which the young men of Venice were only too eager to take advantage.”
I should also point out here that the island of Lazaretto is also my invention, though it is based upon a real place—not the island of Lazaretto Vecchia or Lazzaretto Nuove, which were both used as quarantines during times of plague, but rather the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni. Chosen as a suitable location for lepers because of its distance from Venice, it was established as a leper’s colony in 1182. This island is now a monastery run by Benedictine monks of the Armenian Catholic church, and can still be visited.
Venice was one of the first cities in Europe to suffer the devastation of the Black Death of 1348–50—mainly due to her position as a hub for trade from the East, which is where the disease originated. The bacteria that causes the Bubonic Plague, Yersinia pestis, originated in the Mongolian Steppe and travelled west in the digestive tracts of rat flees, forming an unwelcome and deadly stowaway amongst the many other goods being transported into Venice. Venice was badly affected by this epidemic, and by the time that the Plague had abated, it is estimated that she had lost three-fifths of her population, with something like fifty noble families wiped out completely. But it was not just the devastation of so many deaths that caused such anguish in those years, it was also the very practical problem of how to deal with the dead—especially in a city where land was at a premium. At first barges were used to transport the corpses for burial on outlying islands of the lagoon, but very soon these mass graves were themselves overflowing.