One morning Feyra took courage and went to Zabato Zabatini and told him what she wanted done. She found him in the cabinetto cutting the alabaster sheets of fresh paper to size. He listened to the long, long list in silence, then took off his eye-glasses and rubbed his shock of hair. ‘Feyra,’ he said. ‘What you ask is impossible.’ He set his glasses back on his nose. ‘Our master is in full flow with his church, and will not tolerate any upheaval in this house.’
Feyra set her chin. ‘How are your hands?’
Zabato Zabatini spread his fingers before him and looked at them as if he saw them for the first time. The scaling and soreness had completely gone – the flesh was supple and clean.
Feyra raised her brows.
He sighed. ‘Very well.’
Feyra did not go to Palladio that morning. Instead she set Corona Cucina to make a great crock of potash and goose-fat, which she used to fill in the cracks about each window, and she tied each casement closed with twine. Winter was coming, and there was no argument from the household. Once Palladio began to visit the site on Giudecca Feyra directed Zabato to take him there in a gondola with a felze, a black tented cover, so that he would not be exposed to the air. In the great chamber she had her master’s bedding washed and smoked and the curtains rubbed with camphor. Feyra made a firepowder of equal parts of wood aloes, storax and calamite. She mixed the components in a mortar with rosewater of Damascus, and fashioned the paste into small, oblong briquettes to set on the household fires.
She shut off the tradesmen’s door which was reached by a tramp through the foul courtyard, and insisted instead that every visitor to the house, great or lowly, should enter by the principal door in the square, under the sign of the gold callipers. The great door led into a small atrium that housed coats, hats and canes, before another pair of doors which were kept open. Feyra had the little coat room cleared, the stone flags swept and covered with rushes steeped in rue and potash, then sprinkled them with cassia, vinegar and rosewater. In the wall sconces she set candles she had made herself, from wood ash, mutton tallow and water, each one impregnated with woody shreds of frankincense from her belt. Each visitor had to pass through the smoky hallway, and clean their feet on the rushes and herbs. Feyra directed sternly that when the door to the street was open, the doors to the household were closed; when the household doors were open the door to the street was shut.
Palladio, if he noticed these measures, did not comment. He was not troubled by anything so long as it did not interfere with his work.
And nothing did, until the night it seemed the Plague had indeed come for him.
Chapter 25
It was the dead of night, and Feyra was birthed from some nameless nightmare at the sound of a sharp knock on her door.
Bleary-eyed, she opened it to find Zabato Zabatini, dressed in a nightshirt, blinking in the light of his candle. ‘Come and see,’ he said.
She flinched at the phrase, unable at this hour to place it, but she came without question and followed him down through the crazy shadows of the candle-lit staircase.
Zabato whispered to her fiercely as they descended. ‘My master is in a fever, and there is a swelling protruding from his flesh as big as a medlar.’
Feyra stumbled a little, numb with foreboding. She steeled herself. ‘His fingertips – are they black?’
The wild head of grey hair before and below her shook from side to side. ‘I do not know.’
Two floors down from her own attic room was her master’s chamber, a place where she laid and cleared the fire each day, with a great bed and four posts. She drew aside the heavy camphor-impregnated curtains of the bed. There he was in his nightcap and gown, twisted and fevered on his bed, his beard and hair damp with perspiration. But she was encouraged. His complexion had flushed and reddened, not become dark or sallow as a Plague-drained visage; his fingers, when she took them up, were pink and when she pressed their stone-hardened tips the blood rushed back into the white bruise with his heartbeat. Instructing Zabato to hold the candle still she examined his armpits. Although damp with sweat, they were unblemished.
Without a thought for propriety she was about to raise his gown to check the groin, when she saw the swelling that Zabato had mentioned. It protruded from the side of his Palladio’s left knee, yellow and firm as a quince. She was instantly relieved. This was not Plague. But the relief was short-lived, for her master was old, and in the grip of a grave fever.
Corona Cucina, who had entered with some grappa for the master, set down her tray with a clatter by the bedside, and took to crossing herself so fast that her hand was a blur at her bosom. ‘Is it Plague? Is it the end?’ she wailed.
‘No,’ said Feyra shortly, and handed her back the grappa. ‘Take this – it is no good to him. Boil it till it bubbles then bring it back.’ She thought she knew the cause of the swelling. Palladio had gout. She had recognized his malady the very first time she had seen him limping around the ruin on Giudecca the day her father had died. This swelling of the knee, from the fluid that had accrued at the joint, was infected and must be lanced. She sighed as she took off her medicine belt and laid out what she needed. If she had had the care of this man she could have managed the gout and Palladio need never have reached this pass.
She heated her silver scalpel in the blue heart of the candle, then laid it by to cool. Then she brought out a little of her precious wood betony, and some of the lemon balm for healing. She tore a strip of the master’s linen and powdered it with lime. All was ready.
With a dreadful sense of repetition she lanced the gouty swelling and watched the greenish pus drain off. She waited and dabbed it once with Corona Cucina’s steaming grappa. Then she took her needle and thread and drew it through the liquor to wet it. ‘Mercy!’ said the cook, watching closely. ‘You are never going to sew our master like a cushion?’
‘Hold his leg,’ said Feyra in answer, ‘and pour the rest of the grappa down his throat if he wakes.’
In Ottoman society alcohol was forbidden, but it was permitted in hospitals to be used as medicine. In the Topkapi palace the imperial pages of the third court used to pretend to be ill in order to be admitted to the hospital and drink the wine. Feyra smiled grimly at the memory and heated the needle in the flame, this time without cooling it the heat would better cauterize the flesh – then she began to sew the wound, neatly, stitch by stitch. As Haji Musa had taught her, she looped the wine-soaked thread beneath each stitch to anchor it. Once the thread was tied and cut, she opened a leather capsa from her medicine belt and poured a little ground glass over the wound, laid betony over the whole and tied the leg with the limed linen. Palladio did not seem sensible of any of it.
‘I will stay here the night,’ Feyra said to Zabato, and he nodded, escorting Corona Cucina, protesting loudly, from the room.
In the grey hours Feyra’s head bumped the footboard as she dropped at last into sleep and she woke with the Matins bells to find her patient sleeping too, cool to the touch, breathing evenly, his cheeks rosy, not hectic.
Relieved, she crept downstairs again, to be shooed back to her attic by Corona Cucina, who, alone of the household, knew how she’d passed the night.
Feyra was woken by raised voices.
The sun was high in the sky so it must be the hour of noon. She huddled into the well of the stair and recognized the clipped, arrogant tones of the Birdman.
She crept down two floors and listened at the door of her master’s solar. She had learned that as a servant she was invisible to company, so she laid her hand on the door’s handle and entered the room.
Sure enough, the physician was there in attendance. At her entrance the Birdman did not look round, but curved over her master on the bed like a scavenger that expects carrion and is frustrated to discover that his prey is still alive. Feyra stood close by, making small and unnecessary adjustments to Palladio’s bedclothes, listening.
‘Who has done this? Are you retaining another doctor? Is it Valnetti?’
Annibale was incensed, and his anger had made him irrational. It could not be Valnetti. He had only seen sutures like this once before, with a loop to each stitch, when a doctor from Persia had visited Padua. He got as close to the wound as his mask would allow. Even through the beak the bitter smell of grappa reached his nose; the physician had treated the thread, prepared a betony poultice, then sewn Palladio up as neatly as a Burano lacemaker. The wound seemed to have been cauterized too. Not Valnetti, then, for he had no more skill than a butcher. ‘If you are retaining another physician I cannot keep you safe.’
And if Palladio had admitted another doctor, what of Annibale’s deal with the Camerlengo? If he did not have the care of the architect, would he have to give back his island? He had noticed as he entered, the smoke of frankincense in the small hall, the cleansing herbs underfoot, and that the windows were sealed with fat and ashes; exactly the measures that he should have put in place here himself. Guilt fuelled his anger even more.
Palladio spoke in conciliatory tones. ‘I am not retaining another doctor,’ he said, but his eyes went past the physician to the servant girl standing by the bedpost.
Annibale spun round to face her and saw a telltale blush stain her cheeks. He covered the ground between them and pushed his beak into her face. ‘Who taught you to stitch flesh like this?’ He tipped the bird head to one side as he examined her features. ‘Where are you from?’
The maid began to back away.
‘Wait, wait!’
But the girl did not. She turned and fled.
Chapter 26
Palladio was at the house less and less.
He had engaged his masons, and a gang of builders, and his church was growing apace.
His and Feyra’s roles had now reversed. He would describe his church to her, how the foundations were laid, the pillars founded and the buttresses piled. He invited her to the site to see the walls growing from the ground, but she could not face visiting what would always be to her her father’s grave. She was further horrified to hear from Palladio that the builders’ gang were having trouble with hordes of visiting pilgrims who came in their droves with buckets and jurdens and other vessels to collect the water from the well, believing it to have miraculous healing powers. The legend had grown out of the story of Saint Sebastian the Doge had recounted and Palladio had been forced to hire guards for the site, to put an end to the nonsense.
Feyra caught his tone and looked at him sharply. ‘What will you do with the well?’ she asked.
‘Wall it in,’ answered Palladio briefly.
Feyra thought of her father’s bones, interred for ever at the heart of a Christian church. Her own heart a stone, she said instead, ‘Do you not believe in miracles?’
Palladio thought for a moment. ‘No.’
She thought of her mother, of her father. ‘Neither do I.’
The news of the fate of the well greatly depressed Feyra’s spirits. The danger and desperation of her escape from Giudecca had forced her to put aside her grief for her father, and it came upon her now, rushing in like acqua alta with a force to knock her off her feet. She felt the loss of him as an actual physical pain, located just below her heart. Her growing misery was compounded by apprehension. For as the week passed and the Birdman’s next visit neared, she began to fear the doctor’s retribution. With Palladio and Zabato away at the site, she felt even more fearful. And it was clear that the Birdman had the ear of the Doge.
Palladio stayed at the house every Friday for his appointment with his physician with an ill grace, for he was impatient to be at the site. When the next Friday dawned Feyra crept downstairs, dead-eyed as the mackerel Corona Cucina was preparing in the kitchen for breakfast. She breathed in a wobbly breath. Usually Friday – fish for every meal – provided a respite from the aromas of heathen flesh that the Venetians feasted upon. But today the sea-scent nauseated her. She skulked in the hallway at noon, hoping that someone else would open the door to the doctor and when she heard a rap at the door, and a commotion in the hallway as the Birdman came to roost at the house, she hid. Nearly doubled up with nerves, she tried to regulate her breathing, but her heart leapt to her mouth as she peered from the shadows of the hallway at the little party at the doorway.
For it was not the Birdman.
It was a stranger, with clipped tow-coloured hair, and he was not alone, but accompanied by a semicircle of guards in the half-armour she recognized from the Doge’s palace. The stranger had his back to her, and more terrifying than his escort was the insignia on his back, the winged lion, jaws agape, watching her. When the man turned, he smiled, but the smile did not reach the ice blue of his eyes, and he was scarcely less frightening than the lion. ‘Good Dama,’ he was saying to Corona Cucina who had answered the door, ‘would you be so kind as to gather all the persons in the household in your master’s room?’
It was not a question but an order.
Feyra was vastly relieved that she was not alone. Corona and she had to crowd into the studiolo behind all the other household staff, from the kitchen maids to the midden-men to the footboys.
In his customary oak chair sat her master, stroking his beard, Zabato standing fidgeting behind him. Palladio seemed outwardly calm, but Feyra knew that he was simmering with impatience. It was a measure of the man that had gathered them here that Palladio had received him at such a time, when his work was in full flow. Feyra was beginning to realize that everyone in this city bowed before the Lion.
Hiding behind Corona’s bulk, Feyra was no longer afraid that this strange meeting had anything to do with her. The stranger waited for the door to close, before he spoke. ‘I believe that most of you know that I am the Camerlengo, the chamberlain of the Doge?’ No one answered the question, nor was expected to. ‘I have received information,’ he said in a low, musical voice, ‘that there is a fugitive among you.’
Feyra’s heart plummeted. ‘A Turk and an infidel was seen fleeing in this direction some time ago. A search proved fruitless, but in these last days we received a denunciation, posted through the Lion’s mouth, in an unknown hand, telling us the identity of the Turk that hides here.’
Feyra’s heart knocked against her ribs, and was met by an answering knock against the door outside. She darted her gaze around the room. All the household were here. The stranger must have posted another of his men outside the door. She was trapped.
‘I will not try your patience by questioning all of you here,’ stated the Camerlengo mildly. ‘All the menfolk may move to the fireplace.’
The crowd around Feyra thinned out as the men of the household moved to the left of the room. ‘And now every maid who has entered the household in the last month may stay where they are. The rest are to move to the fireplace.’
Feyra was rooted to the spot, unable to move as the others melted away from her. All the eyes of the household were upon her, but she only felt the single piercing blue gaze of the stranger. She could sense him appraising her amber eyes, her skin, the tawny curls escaping from her cap.
‘There’s no need to be afraid,’ he said gently, in a manner that implied the very opposite. ‘Just tell me your name, and where you come from.’
Feyra was dumbstruck. After her time in the house she could speak the Venetian dialect passably well, but in no way would her accent fool a native, and she was still careful to speak to no one save her master and Zabato, and a few words to Corona Cucina. She looked desperately at the two elderly men who had sheltered her – one who knew her history, one who did not, both of whom knew her provenance. Palladio was utterly still but his eyes held a warning; Zabato twitched, wringing his hands.
The Camerlengo moved closer. She could smell the sweet woodruff scent that he wore. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Won’t you speak?’
Zabato stumbled forward, tripping and then righting himself. ‘She is my niece!’ he piped in a high, panicked voice. ‘She joined the household lately for our maid left us, when the pestilence came.’
The Camerlengo did
not turn his light eyes from Feyra’s face for an instant. It was as if he had not marked Zabato at all, and yet he had clearly heard every word. ‘Is this true?’
Feyra had just opened her mouth to give herself away when she felt a painful shove at her back as the door opened and the Birdman came in.
He strode into the room with a force that almost equalled the Camerlengo. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded, his tone amplified by the dreadful beak mask.
‘Just an interrogation, Cason. Calm yourself.’
‘Calm myself!’ The Birdman fumbled in his black cloak and brought forth a round plaque, which winked in the sunlight as he held it high. It seemed to be wrought of some kind of yellow metal. ‘What is this?’
The Camerlengo smiled. ‘Come, Cason, you know very well. It’s the seal of the Doge. I gave it to you myself.’
The beak nodded in a tall sweep. ‘And why did you give me this?’
The Camerlengo was silent.
The Birdman answered his own question. ‘So I could protect this man here from pestilence.’ He pointed at Palladio with a black-gloved finger. ‘You came to my island, did you not, and told me that the Doge himself wished for me to visit this architect every day, and keep the pestilence from his door?’
The Camerlengo inclined his head.
‘Then how may I do my work when you have trailed half of the city into his studiolo, carrying the Lord knows what upon their breaths and clothes? The Lord Doge gave me leave to treat the architect. I choose to isolate him. I must ask you to all leave.’ The red glass eyes stared round. ‘Now.’
‘But …’
The Birdman held the seal high. The Camerlengo opened his mouth to respond, but in the end gave a jerk of his blond head that sent his Leoni guard scuttling from the room. The household followed, staring at Feyra as they passed, their eyes full of questions.
The Venetian Contract Page 18