The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  The Camerlengo paused for a second, as if he would say more; then he strode from the room. He did not look at the Birdman again but his gaze found Feyra in his shadow and he favoured her with a final, blue stare.

  ‘He knew.’

  ‘Of course he knew.’ The Birdman answered the architect scornfully. ‘He knows everything.’

  Zabato paced, shaking, his hands fluttering like clipped wings.

  ‘Can you stop him doing that?’ the Birdman asked Palladio, as if Zabato could not hear.

  ‘Leave him be,’ said Palladio. ‘The Doge may be pious and gentle, but his guard dog is not. Little wonder he is feared. And he’ll be back.’

  Feyra, shaking, leaned weakly against the wall, trying to make sense of what had happened. She would have bet the Sultan’s dagger to a hen’s egg that it was the doctor who had denounced her, but he had saved her instead.

  ‘Now we must hide Feyra,’ said Zabato Zabatini.

  Palladio was still seated, dazed. ‘Who is Feyra?’

  Zabato pointed to the shadows. ‘She is. The maid you know as Cecilia Zabatini.’

  Palladio looked at her, with a chastened expression. She saw then in that one glance that he cared for her, that he was aware how much he owed her, and that he was ashamed he had never troubled to find out anything about her. ‘Of course we will hide her,’ he said.

  ‘But where?’ Zabato’s teeth were chattering with fear. ‘This house has many nooks, but the Camerlengo would find her in a heartbeat. And there are some in the household who would not shelter her, knowing she is a Turk. Even Corona Cucina; as you know, her husband was killed at Lepanto.’

  Feyra swallowed. Even Corona Cucina, her friend and advocate?

  ‘I could get her to Vicenza, perhaps.’ This from Palladio.

  ‘No,’ countered Zabato. ‘She now has a connection to you. If she is found in your house her presence would endanger your family there.’

  The Birdman let a small silence fall. He had taken no part in the discussion; it was nothing to do with him. ‘Well – I must away to my island.’

  Both of the older men turned their heads as one to look at the masked man.

  The Birdman retreated a pace, gloved hands outspread. ‘I cannot take her. I have a hospital to run.’

  ‘A hospital on a Plague island, where no one dares to come.’

  ‘What would I do with a maid?’

  ‘She is skilled in physic. You owned it yourself.’

  The Birdman was insistent. ‘I absolutely refuse. I must be gone. I will see you in a week.’

  Palladio rose. ‘In a week,’ he said slowly, measuring the syllables. He came right up to the Birdman, until his nose almost touched the beak. ‘In the Camerlengo’s presence,’ Palladio observed evenly, ‘you said you had been here every day. But you have not. You have visited weekly.’

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  ‘How would he like to know this?’ wondered Palladio aloud. ‘How would he punish you?’

  The doctor had gone incredibly still.

  ‘And yet,’ went on Palladio, ‘if you take Feyra –’ he used her name with care ‘– then you may come here at each new moon, just once in every four weeks and the Doge will not be the wiser from me.’

  The Birdman moved suddenly, snatching up his cane. ‘Very well,’ he barked. ‘But she must come now.’

  ‘The house will be watched,’ warned Palladio.

  ‘The watergate,’ suggested Zabato. ‘I will find a gondola with a felze such as my master normally uses.’ He turned to Feyra. ‘Fetch what you will from your rooms.’

  Feyra ran to the attic, her mind spinning like a windlass. But there was nothing for it – she must go. She had little to pack: she had only the clothes she stood up in, the ring around her neck, the coin in her bosom and the yellow slipper beneath the bed, with the sequins she had so far earned jingling in the toe. In a trice she was downstairs again.

  Following Zabato Zabatini, silent but for the hissing torch, Palladio, the Birdman and Feyra made their way down a dark and winding stair that led to a place that Feyra had never been, as she had never left the house by boat.

  She stood on a damp dais. Beyond the stone stage was a wet dock; a green limpid square of canal water, where in former centuries the family’s gondolas and barges would have been moored.

  Zabato opened the doors to the dock with a pulley and handle, and they watched as an ink-black gondola with a tented black cover came towards them, negotiating the everyday traffic of gondolas and traghetti criss-crossing the sparkling canal. A burly man at the tiller raised a hand and drew in to collect his passengers. The doctor stepped into the craft first, looking left and right for spies on the water with a lateral sweep of his beak.

  Zabato smiled at Feyra wanly, twitching as ever, and she could see he would be sorry to see her go. Palladio drew her aside and tenderly took her hand.

  ‘I hope I will see you again, and that you will see my church one day, for it sprang from your brain as much as mine.’ As he handed her into the gondola his eyes looked dull as stone.

  Then the curtains swung closed and she was alone in the blackness, the Birdman’s beak curving towards her, glowing out of the dark, the colour of bone.

  PART III

  The Lion

  Chapter 27

  Annibale did not speak for the whole of the gondola ride to the Fondamenta Nuove.

  He did not say a word as he handed Feyra into a bigger rowboat at the seaboard, and only spoke to the boatman to give him directions to the island. He was silent with the fury of being outsmarted twice in one week. It was a sensation he was not used to, and did not enjoy.

  He wondered what on earth he was going to do with this girl; but by the time he’d reached the Lazzaretto he had calmed down a little. She did not chatter – she conducted herself with decorum, sitting there in the bow of the boat like a Maria di Legno, one of the wooden Virgin Marys common to every church in Venice.

  Annibale had not been used to womenfolk since the last of his aunts had died. His mother had been an occasional, unreliable presence in his life, but he never spoke of her. The one function of a mother was, surely, to be a mother, and in abandoning him she had failed even in that. After her defection her history had become so shameful he could not bring himself to utter her name. The Badessa and the sisters on the island were his only female company, but they were practical and devout, most of them elderly and none of them handsome. Feyra’s appearance, on the contrary, was distinctly disturbing.

  He handed her out at the jetty, then stalked ahead, not waiting for the girl until they reached the great gate and the trench of potash. ‘Walk through this, carefully,’ he directed curtly, knowing he did not have to explain himself.

  Bocca stood sentinel at the gatehouse as the doctor entered. Annibale did not even slow his pace. ‘Do not say a word,’ he said through his teeth, knowing how broad the gatekeeper’s humour could be. ‘She is my maid, nothing more.’

  He walked purposefully to the very middle of the green lawn, then stopped and turned so rapidly that his beak nearly knocked out Feyra’s teeth.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Feyra Adalet Bint Timurhan Murad.’

  ‘Where did you learn your doctoring?’

  ‘From Haji Musa, chief physician at the Topkapi palace in Constantinople.’

  ‘You were his assistant?’

  ‘I was a doctor,’ she corrected gravely.

  He was silent, amazed, for besides the goodwives and cellar wenches that would rid a woman of a unwanted babe, or provide a vial of poison for an unwanted husband, women and medicine did not marry in these lands. ‘How did you come to Palladio’s house?’

  The girl appeared to consider her reply. ‘On shipboard,’ she said carefully. ‘My father was a sea captain and he … took sick with the Plague.’ She spoke good Venetian, but with a thick and not unattractive accent. ‘Then I nursed him when we reached Venice, but he died. I sought employ at the architect’s
house, and he took me in.’

  He expressed no sympathy, but went right to the meat of the medical matter. ‘And you were not infected?’

  ‘I nearly died from the Plague aboard ship, but my boils burst and I lived.’

  ‘So you had the pestilence and survived.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yet your father did not.’

  She was silent for so long that he felt obliged to speak. ‘I will show you the island,’ he said stiffly. ‘It is a work in progress, but it runs quite effectively.’ He was not quite sure why he felt obliged to excuse his work to her, and pointed curtly to the great, roofed building in the middle of the island.

  ‘There’s my hospital, known as the Tezon.’ He could not suppress a tiny timbre of pride in his voice, and went on to show her the rest of his kingdom. He did not know why he was guiding her himself, using his precious time when he could have turned her over to the Badessa at once, which had always been his intention. For some reason, too, he hurried past the cemetery. Pride again, he supposed, for there had been more deaths lately, enough to give him midnight misgivings about his methods. ‘These are the almshouses, where dwell the families of the afflicted.’ He looked at her sideways but she did not comment, she just studied the houses with a considering eye and smiled at some of the children playing on their step. Her smile suddenly made him forgot what he’d been going to say.

  She walked on ahead of him. ‘And this?’

  Annibale shrugged and hurried on through the botanical garden, pleased with the geometric rows and the nuns busy at their horticulture, and stopped at the well. He explained the rain cistern and the seven filtrations of mineral salts and sand that made Venetian water the purest urban water in the world. But he could see the girl was looking at the stone lion with his closed book, with keen interest. ‘And these sisters, in the black habits, are the sisters of the Miracoli.’

  ‘They give succour to the patients?’

  ‘No. Only I enter the Tezon. They give aid to the families, and help me run the island. They run the gardens and stock the trout ponds and the eel leets, do laundry. They row to the mainland for supplies, tend the chickens and goats, and maintain the garden. I will leave you in the care of the Badessa. You may board with the sisters and you will help them in their daily tasks.’ He looked at her through his mask, at the exposed flesh of her throat. It mattered nothing to him that she was a Turk, but he knew that the womenfolk of her culture went about veiled, and wondered what it cost her to be so exposed. It would be a relief to have that face hidden – to him as well as her. ‘You may cover your face if you like,’ he said curtly.

  Feyra looked into the blank red glass eyes, trying to fathom what lay beneath.

  In Turkey great store was set by the notion of feraset, physiognomy. The human body was the clothing for the soul, and therefore it followed that by studying physical traits it was possible to deduce character and temperament. But the Birdman who had made this place was covered head to foot, even more swathed than she herself was used to being, and his face was a dreadful beak. She could only judge him on his speech and actions and the Birdman had offered her sanctuary – not just geographical, but a deeper retreat too. Here, it seemed, she would be allowed to cover her face. It was the first kindness he had shown.

  Feyra looked at the nearest nun, busy, bending over the herbs, digging. A simple string of wooden beads fell before her face as she dug, and on the end of the string hung a little tin cross, winking in the sun. It was just like the one Corona Cucina had given her, the one she still wore at her bodice, with the miniature shepherd prophet dangling from the cross. She unpinned the little brooch from her lace shawl, and dropped it down the well. Then she wound the lace around her head and turned to him.

  ‘I will not help them,’ she said. She pointed to the Tezon. ‘I will help you.’

  It only took the Birdman the space of one hour to know what a gift he had in Feyra. By the time four bells had rung he called her to him. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Henceforth you will be my nurse.’

  Feyra said nothing. It was a demotion from her role at the Harem, but a promotion from being a maid.

  ‘What did the architect pay you?’

  ‘One sequin a week.’

  ‘Then I will pay you the same.’

  If Feyra thought she’d been promoted, she was wrong.

  Her tasks were far more onerous than those she’d carried out in Palladio’s house. She spent her first day changing the soiled mattresses of the afflicted, giving them all food and water, changing the dressings and poultices of the numerous suture wounds that she found on each patient. She was impressed with some aspects of the organization of the Tezon, but found it far from a model hospital. True, the Birdman had isolated the patients admirably, the smoke cabinet at the great doors fumigated the doctor as he entered and left, and he kept the afflicted tolerably comfortable on their pallets. His medicine cabinets were well stocked, his botanical gardens fruitful. Supplies of food and water were left outside by the gatekeeper. But the patients were laid together as close as herrings in a crate, and no one, it seemed, had the care of their minds.

  From the conversations she had with them, it was clear that some were even unaware that their families were hard by. As she found her feet Feyra resolved to implement changes as she went along. And this was as good a place as any to earn more sequins to fill her yellow slipper. Once the pestilence was passed and the shipping began again, she would have enough to take her home to Turkey.

  On that first day, sitting with her patients in the Tezon, she looked at the Ottoman script scrawled on the walls in the iron oxide. They were manifests only, just the words for silk or spices, copper or cotton, but they were like the greatest sagas of the poets to her. Similarly the cognizances of the ships, scrawled here and there, insignia she’d seen on her father’s ships and his order papers since she was a girl, were as beautiful to her as the tugra, the golden calligraphed signatures of the Sultans.

  There was even, fittingly, on the eastern wall of the Tezon, a wonderfully rendered drawing of a ship of the Ottoman type, just like the one her father used to take to sea. She remembered standing on Seraglio Point, when she was no more than eight, watching it hove in across the sound. She felt her homesickness like a blow to the stomach, and it was a great comfort to think of the yellow slipper of sequins; it would take her home again.

  By the end of the day Feyra knew the island well. Even the little cemetery in the wilderness beyond the well was not forbidden to her. In quiet moments she would dig graves alongside the sisters companiably enough, in silent respect for those that had gone, both faiths mouthing their parallel prayers. She drew water for the patients from the well where she had dropped her crucifix, impressed by the clarity of the water. She looked at the stone lion and he looked back at her but, strangely, she was not afraid of him here on this island. His mouth was as closed as his book. It was open jaws she feared; open jaws that might receive poisonous letters.

  She could not think who could possibly have denounced her. It was not the Birdman. And no other member of Palladio’s household had known her identity save Palladio and Zabato. Had Corona Cucina somehow discovered her from her medicines and her accent? It seemed too fantastic to be true. And just how long would it take for news of her presence on the island to filter back to the mainland? If the Camerlengo and his guard were determined to find her, how long would it be before they thought to look here?

  Feyra went about her work the rest of the day drawing as little attention to herself as she could manage. The one place she did not set foot in was the church. Saint Bartholomew was the Christian saint that gave his name to the Damascene tree, the tree whose spores poisoned her mother, and for this, as much as the other reason, she would not go in.

  But as much as Feyra would not enter the church, someone else was just as anxious to keep her out.

  ‘She cannot room with us.’

  The Badessa was waiting for Annibale at the end of Feyra’s f
irst day. He stuck out his beak belligerently, and shook the smoke of the atrium cabinet free from the folds of his coat.

  ‘Why?’ he demanded, already knowing the answer.

  ‘She is an infidel.’

  Annibale sighed. He had thought it such a neat solution. The nuns all roomed in the customs house behind the church which had a great upper room. ‘But she will not be living in the church itself. That was never suggested.’

  ‘It does not matter. The customs house is one of the church buildings. She cannot live among us.’ She touched his arm. ‘I will be her friend. I try to be a Samaritan, as our Lord taught. I have, if you have noticed, given her some cloths for her head, and sandals for her feet. But she may not bed in our dormitory, nor enter our church. If you asked her, she would probably say the same.’

  As the sun lowered Annibale showed Feyra the little cottage, next to the church but outside the retaining wall. It was the house that had suffered the cannon fire, the house that was so tumbledown that he had not deemed it fit for a family nor for himself. He was especially curt about it, telling her before he left that there was an idiot boy, a mute who would make the place good. Crossing the green he shouted for Salve, bellowing at him to get materials and tools and mend the roof. He saw Feyra watching their exchange from the doorway of her little ruin. She gave him a look, and said nothing.

  Feyra’s house reminded her sharply of the little gatehouse where she had lost her father. Upstairs there was a jagged blue rag of sky showing through the roof, and she knew she should set her bed in the lower room before night fell. She dragged the mattress downstairs; but the sight of the pallet beside the stone door jamb recalled her father’s deathbed to her even more. There was even a nest of starlings in the ruined eaves, and she lifted the nest carefully and took it to the blackthorn woods. She saw the Birdman watching her cross the green with the nest in her hands, but she studiously ignored him.