The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  With renewed energy she ran through the chill night – the doctor’s window leading her like the North Star. She rapped on the wooden door, once, twice, but there was no reply. Taking a breath of cold night she lifted the latch and walked in.

  A young man sat there, hunched over the fire. His tumble of dark curls fell forward, partly hiding his face, the firelight finding the copper filaments in his hair. He was staring into the flames so intently he hadn’t heard her knock. But when she entered he jumped up so suddenly that his chair fell over.

  ‘Where is the doctor?’ Feyra demanded.

  The young man put a hand to his cheek involuntarily, as if he had been caught naked. Comprehension dawned. ‘I am the doctor,’ he said.

  Feyra took a step back. His voice was the same, but softer, less abrasive; as if peeled to softness without the hard shell of the mask. ‘You are the doctor? But you look –’ she did not know how to finish the sentence. Young? Handsome? Surprised? Guilty? And, she thought, cornered.

  His hand twitched towards the beak mask where it hung on his fire hook and she wondered if he hid behind his mask as she hid behind hers.

  ‘What do you want? What’s amiss?’ he asked, and she knew him then for her Birdman: rude, abrasive, abrupt.

  ‘It is Valentina Trianni,’ she said. ‘She is come to the time with her child, but the babe will not be born.’

  Without another word he reached for his cloak; and the mask.

  Feyra watched him as he examined Valentina, curving over the girl with his beak as if she were his prey. But Feyra did not see the mask any more, only his unforgettable face, burned into her consciousness like a candle flame. She knew what he would say.

  ‘The babe must be cut free.’

  She had been right. But she also acknowledged that that was why she had fetched him. ‘Bindusara,’ she said at once, like a reflex.

  ‘Emperor of the Indies, cut from his mother’s womb,’ finished the Birdman, and their eyes met across the heaving belly. ‘And Saint Raymond Nonnatus – the procedure gave him his name. And in both cases …’ he said, and stopped abruptly. Again, she knew what he would not say.

  In both cases, the mother did not survive.

  But there was no choice. The Trianni babe was breech, and would not turn. Valentina might well die; but if they did not act she would die anyway, and the babe too. Annibale barked at the mother to leave the room, but she would not leave her daughter until Feyra assured her that she would look after Valentina, and that just by being in the room during the procedure she was endangering her daughter. Once the old lady had gone the Birdman removed his mask.

  For once Feyra was happy just to assist. She gave Valentina as much juice of the poppy as she dared, but the poor girl was in such agony she could not be still to take the draught, and the black decoction ran down her cheeks. Feyra cleaned the distended belly with rosewater steeped with mint and borage, but stood back as the Birdman made the wide incision just above the pubis, dark blood springing up in an admirably straight line. The babe spewed forth almost at once, and as Feyra lifted it two little eyes opened and a mouth formed to cry as the Birdman sliced through the cord. Feyra cleaned the babe with linen, and placed her finger between the tiny lips to clear the mouth. The babe suckled instantly. Valentina had lost consciousness at the cut. Feyra laid the bundle by the dark head, and continued her work. She cleaned the wound and took up the wine-soaked thread for the sutures. She bent her head over her task and sewed as neatly as she could by the light of the candle. Remembering Palladio, she set the glass bowl that held the rosewater before the candle flame, and the light spread through the makeshift lens. As she sewed, she looped the thread under each stitch to anchor it as Haji Musa had taught her. She could feel the Birdman watching her. She then laid a poultice of cinnabar and rosemary above the wound to draw infection and laid the coverlet tenderly over the girl. Then there was nothing to do but wait.

  The babe, as if exhausted by his violent entry into the world, slept by his mother’s head. Feyra expected the Birdman to go, but he stayed and watched with her, his shadow joining hers on the wall. She knew he did not seek her company, but was waiting, dispassionately, for the medical outcome. They did not have to wait long. On the stroke of Matins, Valentina opened her eyes, and, as if prompted by some indefinable bond, her baby woke too.

  The Birdman and Feyra walked back across the green in companionable silence in the pitchy dark. Across the lagoon the dawn was a white line on the horizon, the spring grass dewy underfoot. As they passed the Tezon she turned to him in the dark. The wards of their hospital were the lists where she and Annibale jousted every day, and she could not resist a sortie. Valentina’s father lay within, recovering from his own battle with the Plague, so she said mischievously, ‘And perhaps you will now agree with me that old Gianluca Trianni should be told about the birth of his burly grandson? That the news will do him more good than any potions we may give him?’

  The Birdman regarded her down his beak. ‘And perhaps you will agree with me that the morning will be soon enough? For even you must own that Doctor Goodtidings is an inferior physician to Doctor Sleep?’

  Feyra smiled and inclined her head. She saw his window ahead, golden with firelight, as she’d seen it a hundred times. Her own house was dark. She did not want to go home, not yet. At his door they stopped by tacit consent.

  ‘Would you like to come in?’

  This time he took off the mask as if it were a relief to him. She revised her earlier opinion – he did not love to hide, he found it onerous. She looked at him anew. This was him, her Birdman. No; Annibale – for tonight she had learned his name; and only then because Luca Trianni had wanted to thank the Dottore by naming his new son after him. She found it difficult to adjust. Annibale. She would be surprised if he was older than she. When they stood together they were exactly the same height, and she looked at him eye to eye. He looked tired, but elated.

  ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘I suppose you don’t drink?’

  She shook her head.

  He poured the wine. He gestured to the chair on the other side of the fire and she fell into it, exhausted.

  He raised his glass – to himself as much as the babe. ‘To Annibale,’ he said.

  When Feyra had burst on upon him he had been staring morosely into the coals, feeling for the first time in his life that he had bitten off more than he could comfortably chew. He had been so sure that his hospital would be a success, but the Plague was gaining pace. There had been more deaths lately than the little cemetery could hold, and he felt that he was losing his grip. In the long-fought battle with death he felt that death was gaining on him. Then he had been handed this surgical triumph by this extraordinary girl.

  Of course, the danger was not over for Valentina Trianni. The surgery was a major procedure, and the risk of secondary infection was great; but he, Annibale Cason, had performed a non natus procedure, and, for now at least, both mother and child had lived. He acknowledged that he was not concerned overmuch for the young mother. He was more interested in Feyra. He studied her across the firelight. Tonight she had given him back his belief in medicine, his belief in himself. He wanted to give her something in return.

  He noted her skin, the colour of cinnamon, the amber of her eyes, the tiny reflected fire burning in each. She looked at him directly, and he felt, again, the power of her gaze. Tonight, it seemed, she admired him, and that warmed him even more than the fire.

  ‘So you are Annibale.’

  ‘Yes, Annibale. Annibale Cason, Dottore della Peste.’

  She inclined her head a little. ‘What does your name mean?’

  ‘I have no notion,’ he snapped, annoyed with himself for using his full title.

  ‘Mine means “justice drops from my mouth”,’ she said.

  She was well named, thought Annibale, for her mouth was particularly beautiful – it was full and rose-coloured and the top lip was slightly bigger than the bottom.

  She looked into the fire agai
n. ‘In my country the meaning of your name is everything. We never name a child without very careful consideration. It is very important in my faith. I am surprised you Venetians do not know the significance of yours.’

  Annibale stretched his legs out before him until his boots were nearly in the fire. ‘There is little to know. We are mostly named for saints and days.’

  Saints and days. Then she remembered, as she looked at the lightening sky. ‘It is Valentina’s birthday. The feast, she told me, of Saint Valentine. And,’ she said, ‘there is Zabato Zabatini, named for a lucky day.’ She wondered about her old friend and his master, and the church that grew around her father’s grave. ‘And your Saint Nonnatus, we now know why he was called so.’ She looked at him. ‘So you see, some of your names have meaning, even if yours does not.’

  He was silent for a time. ‘I did not speak truly,’ he said, with difficulty. ‘I know why I am called Annibale.’

  She waited.

  ‘Annibale was a general from Carthage, and in the second Punic campaign he rode war elephants across the Alps into Italy against the might of Rome. When he set off, he had no idea what he was riding into, or if he would ever reach his destination.’

  She too was silent. She remembered the reciprocal tradition of storytelling, and how she had exchanged stories with Death. ‘In the Ottoman Empire,’ she began, ‘the camel traders have stopping places along their trade routes called caravanserai. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles apart, over desert or mountain range, but they travel safe in the knowledge that there will be a place where they can shelter and find succour at the end of their journey. Even if they have never been that way before, they are sure that there will be such a place; that sooner or later, they will find a caravanserai.’

  Annibale sat forward, interested. ‘How do they know?’

  ‘They do not know. They have faith.’

  He sat back again. ‘I think Annibale did too. That is why my mother named me so.’ She could see that it cost him to talk of her. ‘She liked the story. She said no one could know what lay beyond today, but you had to hope, and be brave, and trust that all would be well.’

  The Camerlengo eyed the man before him. He was wearing the slashed doublet and red hat of a gondolier, and they were never the most honest of men. But the fellow’s eyes were wide, his speech clear. The Camerlengo knew a liar when he heard one, and did not think he heard one now.

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Sure as I’m standing here, your honour. Cosimo, his name is, and he works the Tre Archi bridge. Thursday last it was – he said he picked up a woman from the address you were asking about. He remembered the fare because the fellow that called for him particularly asked for a felze.’ The man eyed the Camerlengo and felt moved to explain. ‘A covered gondola.’

  The Camerlengo was accustomed to being taken for a foreigner. ‘Was there anyone travelling with her?’

  The gondolier shrugged. ‘He didn’t say.’

  The Camerlengo raised his pale brows. ‘Yet he told you this much?’

  ‘He was boasting about it in the locanda. Said he was going to be rich.’

  The Camerlengo steepled his hands. Gondoliers were notoriously greedy and venal; moreover, they had no sense of collective loyalty. He knew once a bounty had been offered it would not be long before one of their number came knocking on his door. Yet something did not quite add up.

  ‘Why, do you suppose, has he not come to claim the bounty himself?’

  ‘That I don’t know, your honour.’ The gondolier shuffled his feet. ‘Can I have my ducats now?’

  The Camerlengo eyed him, then rose. ‘Why don’t you take me to him first?’

  The Camerlengo could have taken a consort of Leoni, but he did not. He chose instead the two guards who had first let the girl go. He chose them deliberately, for he knew and they knew that they owed him their lives. He did not wait for his cap or cloak, but walked straight down the stone stairs as he was, in his black leather garb, with the guards at his heels and the gondolier trotting before.

  The gondolier nosed his boat through secret and unknown canals, stagnant waterways so narrow that the sun would only strike them at midday. The way he took was a considerable shortcut but the Camerlengo, seated in the prow, was silent with impatience.

  At Tre Archi he strode after the boatman without saying a word, the plague smoke swirling about his heels. Under a small sotoportego in a poor part of the quartiere, he watched the gondolier count the doors to his colleague’s house. twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …’

  The man’s voice died. Number fifteen was barred with a rough plank of wood, and on the door was painted a red and ragged cross.

  The Camerlengo said nothing for a moment. Then, in a voice of absolute calm, he commanded the guards: ‘Enquire of the neighbours. You –’ he turned to the first guard ‘– take sixteen. And you –’ he turned to the second ‘– take fourteen.’

  In a moment they were back.

  ‘He died,’ said one.

  ‘Last night,’ said the other.

  The gondolier began to back away from the fury that leapt in the chamberlain’s eyes, but the Camerlengo thrust out his glove and caught the man by the scruff of the neck. With one fluid motion he lifted the bar, kicked the door open and thrust the man inside the pestilent house, bolting the door behind him.

  Chapter 29

  From that day onwards Annibale and Feyra were friends.

  In the evenings after their last rounds of the patients the two of them would cleanse themselves, leave the Tezon and go back to Annibale’s house.

  Feyra noticed more about him, the way his voice rose when he was excited, and his nostrils flared a little when he spoke. She noticed too that he wore something about his neck upon a chain, just as she wore the ribbon that held her mother’s ring about her own neck and wondered if he wore a remembrance of his mother too. In the morning Feyra was often dead-eyed in the Tezon, yawning behind her veil, for each night she went back to her own house later and later, crossing the green sometimes as the water-white line of dawn showed on the horizon, unseen except for one pair of eyes – the old eyes of the Badessa, opening the church for Matins.

  It did not occur to Annibale that their meetings compromised Feyra. To him their evenings were a professional arrangement; so when the Badessa warned him about the propriety of spending time alone together he was short with her. ‘We work in the evenings. We speak of medical matters. We prepare our potions and ointments. When else are we to do such things, in the hours of the day? There is no difference than if she were a man.’ But he believed it no more than the Badessa did. The truth was his evenings with Feyra were the best part of his day.

  Feyra would cook a simple supper. The ingredients were only what could be bought in Treporti or grown on the island, but the way she put them together and the flavours she brought out were new to Annibale. Afterwards he would take a glass of wine and they would sit by the fire. By tacit consent neither of them would wear their masks; Feyra left off her veil, as she had done in her father’s house, and Annibale hung his beak by the door. Then they would broach medical topics or talk of herbs. Feyra would teach Annibale how to make the syrupy serbets and juleps, or the doughy paste known as a ma’cun. Sometimes they would prepare a posset of unguent on the big butcher’s block Annibale had bought for the purpose.

  They would pore over medical texts together, Annibale helping Feyra as she stumbled over the Latin. She was interested to note that one book of incredibly detailed anatomical drawings that Annibale showed her, was by the same Leonardo da Vinci who had drawn the Vitruvian Man. In return she would tell him about the work of the great Ottoman physician Serafeddin Sabuncuoğlu, and the aqrabadhin medical formularies in the libraries of Topkapi. When she mentioned the most treasured manuscript of the Sultan’s palace – Al-manhaj al-sawi, Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti’s masterful discussion of medicine as expressed in the sayings of the Prophet – she was delighted to hear that the volume was not unknown
to him. Padua, it seemed, had a world view of medicine.

  Feyra told Annibale of the six non-naturals that made up the balance of Mizan in human life: ‘Light and air,’ she said, counting these building blocks of health upon her fingers, ‘food and drink, work and rest, sleep and waking, excretions and secretions, including –’ she coughed a little ‘– baths and sexual intercourse, and lastly dispositions and the states of the soul.’

  In reply, Annibale told Feyra of the balance of the four humours; a subject on which they found some agreement – the black bile, red blood, white bile and pale phlegm representing the sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments. For a moment she thought she saw a connection of enormous significance between the humours and the four horses her mother had described. They were black, red, white and pale, too. She asked Annibale if he had ever heard of four horses of these colours, ever read of them in one of his many books. He shrugged. ‘In church as a child, perhaps. But I have had little to do with scripture since. I remember they were said to carry Death.’ The conversation left her feeling uneasy. She touched the ring at her bosom, almost as a charm to ward off evil.

  As they grew closer, they would broach other subjects. Soon they were exchanging histories. Feyra did not break her mother’s confidence, but she told Annibale about her parents and slowly Annibale began to talk about the mother who had abandoned him. She was a woman who, it seemed, had hurt him so much that, although his outward shell was healthy and handsome, his soul was more damaged than any occupant of the Tezon. Feyra soon perceived the reason for his discomfiture.

  ‘She was a courtesan?’

  ‘No,’ he said savagely, ‘not at first. My father was a gentleman of Venice, and when he died she left me – just a boy – in the arms of my aunts. And I scarcely saw her between the ages of five and twenty. She would appear for only a day or two in all those years. Clean, sober, her carriage correct and her manners impeccable, she would suffocate me with love. And then in another day, when she’d found some new patron or drunk all the wine in the house, she would be gone. More often than not we would only know she had gone because one of my aunts would miss some coin or a jewelled pin or pearl comb. She’d sigh and say, “Well, Columbina has gone again,” and I would search the house for her, and sure enough, she would have gone without a word.’ Annibale was silent too for a moment, the firelight playing on his stern face.