The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  The door opened and a woman stood there, in a travelling cloak with a mask in her hand as if she had only just herself arrived. Feyra stood, stunned to silence, and the woman raised her chin with the poise of a lady. ‘Yes?’ she said haughtily.

  ‘I am here to see the doctor.’ Feyra could see Annibale hovering in the background, and she looked to him with entreaty.

  The woman registered her accent, and narrowed her green and cat-like eyes. ‘And you are?’

  Annibale came forward hurriedly. ‘Feyra is my nurse at the hospital.’

  ‘Well –’ the woman shifted her weight from hip to hip in a way that was both provocative and proprietorial. ‘My son does not need a nurse. His Mamma is home.’ And she shut the door in Feyra’s face.

  ‘I have changed.’

  His mother had sat, unbidden, in the fireside chair that he thought of as Feyra’s. He said nothing, but she must have sensed his disbelief.

  ‘I have, Annibale. That old life, I’ve said goodbye to it now. I want to be here with you. I want to be a mother at last. I know I’ve wronged you – abandoned you more than once—’

  ‘How did you find me?’ he cut in sharply.

  She lowered her cat’s eyes. ‘I had gone to Treporti with a merchant … companion. There I heard that a doctor called Cason had a hospital on this island. My companion took sick and I didn’t know what to do. But I knew that if I came to my son he would save me. Oh, my sweeting! You did all this; you brought all these good people here, you rescued them.’ She sank to her knees before him, kissing his hands. ‘I knew you could rescue me too!’

  He found he could not take his hands away but waited, sick at heart, until she sat again, sniffing prettily at the pomade that hung from her wrist, and arranging her skirts. Her eyes were completely dry.

  ‘I think you and I should start again, dearest. I have not had an easy life, you know. Your father—’

  Annibale went suddenly cold. ‘You were married to my father, were you not?’ He thought of everything he’d ever known, his name, his nobility, the Cason treasure hidden in the floorboards beneath his bed.

  ‘Of course! But the thing you must know is that I was a courtesan, not just afterwards, but before.’

  He blinked, his eyes dry from the fire, trying to understand. ‘You mean, when my father met you …’

  ‘Yes. I used to ply my trade near the Campo d’Oro. You were conceived in a gondola at Carnevale. When I knew I was gravelled with you, Carlo said he’d marry me. I was beautiful then, Annibale, you cannot imagine.’

  He could not. Only one woman was beautiful to him, and besides beauty for him was not the mask but the person within. He looked at his mother’s mask, where it hung next to his beak on the fire hook, in an unholy union of courtesan and bird. A flawless, painted face; gazing at him from his mother’s past.

  He learned that when she’d left him and his father she had gone to live with her new lover in one of the great Villas in the Veneto. When she’d found her patron bedding both the kitchen maids at once she’d moved on, leaving for Rome with an artist who had been painting the frescoes of the villa. There she’d become the mistress of a priest, before running away to Messina with one of his acolytes.

  After a while Annibale stopped listening and constructed, instead, an alternate truth. In her youth she was stunningly beautiful, beautiful enough to snare a minor Venetian nobleman despite her low birth. He suspected her last lover, the merchant, was no more than a cloth hawker, with a pitch in Treporti market. Her clientele had declined with her beauty, and all that remained was a flawed character unable to attract a companion for the autumn of her life. Eventually, sick of the sorry tale, he slept where he sat, his slumbering brain crowded with unhappy dreams. In the morning his bottles of fine wine were empty and rolled beneath his stumbling feet, the fire was dead and his mother was snoring on the fireside cot he had readied so tenderly for Feyra.

  He left her there.

  Annibale’s evenings were much changed. Instead of his medical discussions with Feyra, discussions that made him feel as if he could vanquish death and cure the world, he had to listen to his mother’s tales of disgrace and decline, to her mourning for her youth. Annibale was suddenly, horribly lonely and yet was constantly in his mother’s company. He was isolated and yet he had never been so touched physically since his mother had left him as a child. Her intimacies were stuck in that time, preserved in amber – she touched him as if he were still an eight-year-old boy. She ruffled his hair and pinched his cheeks, nibbled his neck and rubbed his middle back as she might have done if she had been there when he’d been ill as a child. He found himself unable to repel these embraces but her importunities sickened him for they were a dreadful mockery of the intimacy he’d hoped to have with another. He had given his mother his own bed in the chamber upstairs, so he had the added torment of sleeping each night in the bed that he’d made for Feyra.

  Annibale advised Columbina to go about masked and the mask she had with her, a full-faced model that tied about the head, was the one that he thought he remembered from childhood. It was of a beautiful, made-up courtesan’s face, white as lead paste with a pearlized sheen, complete with painted cherry lips and patches upon the cheeks. It gave her an eerie, blank look of a beauty she no longer possessed. Her clothes fitted badly, and their bright colours would have better complemented a more youthful complexion. Even her name now seemed too young for her. Columbina Cason was a name for a cocotte, or a precocious, capricious beauty. She had long outgrown it.

  Elsewhere, too, Columbina Cason wore a mask. She called on every family bringing charity in the name of her son; pots of stew or fresh lemons, or comfits for the children. She sewed mattresses with the nuns. She even hoisted her gowns and dug in the garden. She attended daily mass, charming the sisters with her pitiful life and her penitence, and went to confess her sins to the Badessa almost daily, finding in her constant shrivings yet another opportunity to talk about herself.

  Columbina had noticed the strange, shrouded girl who worked so closely with her son, so silent and industrious and competent. Jealous, she attempted to flatter the girl, but the foreign chit was the one person on the island that seemed immune to her charms, save, perhaps, the simple dwarf. Columbina had caught the freak watching her once or twice and had stooped to slap his ugly face for him. The silent girl had come to the midget’s side immediately and given him a salve to soothe the graze Columbina’s ring had caused. The older woman had the uncomfortable feeling that the girl’s amber eyes could see right through her.

  From then on, instead of ignoring the Muselmana, she’d begun to cross herself whenever she saw her and spit in her path, as was just and right behaviour from a good Christian woman, although she was careful not to do this in the presence of her son. Some of the younger nuns began to follow her lead and the increasing isolation of the infidel girl satisfied Columbina that she was doing God’s work.

  The Badessa of the sisterhood of the Miracoli was a good judge of character and she had not been convinced by Columbina Cason.

  The Abbess knew real faith when she was in the presence of it – Bocca the gatekeeper, for example, was truly devout – but she had learned much in those endless shrivings and the doctor’s mother, to her ears, had no more devotion than her son. And seeing the graceful and dignified way Feyra bore Columbina Cason’s insults made her ever more well disposed towards the infidel girl.

  So when Feyra had appeared a week or so after Columbina Cason’s arrival, hovering at the church door, she had greeted her warmly. The girl looked terrible. ‘Is something amiss?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Feyra said, lightly, her looks giving the lie to her words. ‘Only that you must tell the Triannis that they may not move to the tied house just now. I will need it a while longer.’ She turned to go, but not before the Badessa had seen something glint in her eyes.

  The Badessa called her back. The girl would not cross the threshold, nor would the Badessa allow her to, so the older woman came outs
ide. ‘Are you well?’

  The girl had composed herself by now. ‘Quite.’

  The Badessa was not usually one to interfere, but she meant what she had said to the doctor. ‘If I may … I divine that something has prevented you from sharing a roof with our doctor, and I am bound to say that this may be a blessing.’

  The heretic turned her great eyes upon her. ‘Would it have been so bad when there is love in the case?’

  The Badessa looked at her with pity, but spoke firmly. ‘What you are speaking of is sin, sin against the Christian law.’ She relented, as they walked together to the lychgate. ‘You are of different faiths; but there may be a way to bring you closer together. If you read and study the Christian Bible, the Book of Books, you could, in time, become part of the family of God. Then, and only then, would it be possible for the doctor to formalize his arrangement with you.’

  The girl’s strange yellow eyes opened wider. She looked as if the thought were terrible to her, and yet, in a heartbeat, a change came across her gaze like the breeze rilling the lagoon. ‘Yes,’ she said. The words came in a rush. ‘Yes. If you permit it, I would like to borrow a … Bible.’

  Feyra had no intention of entering the family of the Christian god and his shepherd prophet. She knew her mother had made just such a change the other way about, but the idea was loathsome to her.

  And yet, when the Badessa had mentioned the Bible something her mother had said chimed in her memory – the Bible was the Book of Books, and in there she would find what she needed to know about the Four Horsemen. Now her evenings were her own, she had been thinking more and more about the mystery, trying to remember her mother’s long forgotten words. Now she needed occupation; she decided to solve the riddle of the four horses.

  Before her own fire, a poor cousin to Annibale’s cosy hearth, she looked at the book where it lay in her lap. It was bound in crimson velvet with silver clasps, and the edges of the pages were exquisitely burnished to a smooth gilded sheen.

  Feyra laid open the book as if it burned her hands. The vellum was as smooth and milky as could be rendered by the parchmenter’s art and the quires beautifully stitched at the spine. It was obviously a book of great value, and it was no little thing for the Badessa to place it in her hands. The calligraphy was close and black, the text illuminated in jewel colours, the naïve pictures depicting angels and demons, promising glory and damnation. This book had legitimized violence against her people and atrocities against her faith and yet she leafed through the pages determinedly. She struggled with the Latin, but it brought her closer to Annibale, however fleetingly, for she was reading in the language that he had taught her. Odd, she thought, that the language of Western medicine was also the language of the Christian faith, when sometimes, according to Annibale, the two were set in opposition to each other. He had told her once of the objections of the Curia of Padua to the various treatments for the inoculation of the pox developed at the medical school there, on the grounds that they were ungodly.

  Feyra leafed through the pages, peering at the letters until the black print swam before her eyes, and the gilded figures in the marginalia began to dance before her gaze as if they were animated. Finally she found what she was looking for; in a book called Revelations. There they rode, as if leaping from the pages – a black horse, red horse, white horse and pale horse, all mounted by grinning skeletons.

  The Four Horses of the Apocalypse.

  She found the Latin hard, and had got no further than the first phrase, when she was chilled by the memory of her mother’s final ravings.

  ‘“Come and see”!’ she read aloud, and was frightened by her own voice. ‘I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”’

  This made no more sense to Feyra than when her mother had choked out the words on her deathbed, but as she read on she swallowed painfully as she understood for the first time the gift that her father had conveyed to Venice. For the black horse brought pestilence. She read, with growing consternation, as the Great Tribulation her mother had warned of played out. Behind the black horse rode the red, harbinger of fire and bloodshed.

  ‘When the Lamb opened the second seal,’ read Feyra, ‘I heard the second living creature say, “Come and see!” Then another horse came out, a fiery red one.’

  Then came the white horse, bearing a conqueror with a bow and a crown, bent on War. And finally, the pale horse, the green of bile, bringing Death, despair and the End of Days.

  She closed the book, as if by pressing the covers together she could keep the horrors contained within. She closed her aching eyes too and struggled to remember what Nur Banu had said. She had said that four of the horses would come, not one. Four horses, like the quartet of bronze beasts with the flailing hooves she had seen on the Doge’s Basilica.

  In the Bible the pale horse followed the black but on her ring, when she examined the crystal band warm from her bodice, the little red horse was following hard upon the black, with the white next and the greeny-pale horse last.

  Feyra cursed herself for not remembering the signs her mother had taught her, for not repeating the message to the Doge as she had vowed. Once her friend Death had entered the city she’d assumed failure. The black horse had bolted from its stable and there had seemed no sense in closing the door. But now she began to wonder, with a hollow dread, whether there was more to come.

  With Annibale beside her she might have shrugged the prediction off, but now she wondered what more ills could blow across the sea from Constantinople to this beleaguered city. Shipping was still forbidden, the crew of Il Cavaliere had sailed away, and she was the only person from that ship left alive in Venice. The mission had to be at an end. And yet she wished she had not seen that terrible vision written down in black and white. It had left her with a terrible feeling that perhaps it wasn’t over.

  Feyra did not go to bed that night. She sat, watching the book on the mantel as if the horsemen could escape from the pages and spring to life. When she heard the bells of Matins she went to the church, and left the book on the threshold.

  The Badessa, leaving the little church of San Bartolomeo before dawn to lead her sisters back to their dormitory, nearly trod on the Bible. She picked it up, her old bones creaking, and exhaled a long sigh of failure. Then she went to bed for the few precious hours before Prime, shaking her head over one lost sheep.

  Chapter 32

  Over the next few days Feyra tried to forget the Horsemen. She decided instead to make amends for the only one of their blights that she understood. She would collate all the information she had gathered from her own and Annibale’s knowledge and experience and discover a cure for the Plague.

  In Constantinople the most learned doctors had often made a potion known as a Theriac, a cure-all antidote that was one of the most complex forms of medicine in the canon of the apothecary. Theriacs had as many forms as they did purposes. They were often only available to the very wealthy due to the cost of the numerous constituents, and only the most competent physician would attempt a decoction.

  But Feyra was not afraid. She needed employment. She took out her medicine belt and examined the herbs and unguents and powders – some from Constantinople, some restocked and replenished from Venetian soil, and some new treasures gleaned from the darkest reaches of the blackthorn woods outside the walls here on the island, or from the strange plants that thrived on the salt soil of the flats.

  She had two aims: to heal those already afflicted and to prevent the well contracting the disease in the first place. Her potion must simultaneously lower fever and reduce boils, cleanse the blood, and overall it must give hope to the mind too: there must be that within each little bottle which made the taker believe, without question, that the liquid in this little prism of glass wo
uld give him back his life. She decided to name the medicine Teriaca, a Venetian version of the original word borrowed from the Greeks. She was well pleased with it, but all she had was a name.

  She began work.

  Her home became an alchemist’s den, crowded with bottles and limbecks and cauldrons and crucibles. Although she tried to concentrate, she would look up at every sound, every creak of the door, hoping that it would be him, lifting the latch to tell her that his terrible mother had gone.

  But days turned into weeks, and the weeks into a month; and she still did not see Annibale outside of the Tezon. As far as she knew, he visited Palladio each Friday and on those days she barely left the hospital, for it was then that the malign presence of the doctor’s mother made her life outside intolerable. She used the time wisely. Over those precious Fridays she conducted trials on the patients, asking permission of those that could speak, and administering to those that could not, suspecting that any chance of a cure would be welcome to those within the icy reach of death. She also offered the liquid to some of the families in the almshouses, who had had a member recently infected by Plague. Her findings interested her greatly.

  Knowing what she now had, she was ready to make the medicine in bulk. She collected a stack of vials from the Tezon, stuffing them with sea salt to rime overnight. The next day, a Friday, she took a satchel of the purified bottles to the well to fill them with the water she would need for her solution. When she hauled up the bucket, sparkling and dripping with the crystal water, she calibrated the bottles carefully, stoppered them and laid them in smoked linen, ready to take home for the addition of the secret ingredient. She heaved the clinking bundle on to her back. The stone lion with the closed book watched her.

  ‘Not a word,’ she said.

  It was almost dark by the time Annibale returned to the island. He had deliberately delayed his return from Venice on this particular Friday. On his way back to the island, he calculated that he had not seen Feyra’s face for a month now and it was agony to him to be near her and yet not to be able to be close to her. She had been quiet and reserved around the hospital, working harder than ever. She was civil to him, but he could see she was hurt and he found this so unbearable that he became even more abrupt. He was also forced to face the truth.