The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  Whether his mother went or stayed, he knew he could never again ask of Feyra what he’d asked that last happy night by the fireside. He could not dishonour her by taking her as his mistress any more than he could offer her marriage. The Badessa had been right: the gulf between them was too wide. He would have her for a year, two years, perhaps, until the pestilence had gone and then what? He could not have her passed from man to man until she fell down the abyss that had swallowed Columbina Cason.

  He had become accustomed to his mother’s presence in the evening, to the constant invasion of his person, to her incessant chatter, her selfish, self-obsessed stories of woe. He would sit silently staring into the fire, trying to conjure the face he missed so much: her upside-down mouth, and the topaz of her eyes. He had resigned himself to an eternity of such evenings and was surprised to get back to his house to find his mother gone. His first thought was that she would have relieved him of some of his medical valuables, but there was nothing missing except her cape and gloves and the eerie, white-faced mask no longer hanging from the fire hook.

  He hurried out in the night and went back to the gatehouse, where Bocca and his son were breaking bread over their meagre fire. ‘Has a boatman come?’ he demanded.

  The tone of the doctor’s voice was enough to bring Bocca to his feet. ‘Yes, Signor Dottore. I lit the brazier at Sext, and fetched your lady mother from your house when the bark came. I assumed you knew of her departure.’

  For a fraction of a heartbeat Annibale felt like an eight-year-old again, abandoned and bereft, but he nodded, glad of the mask. ‘Of course I knew of it,’ he snapped. ‘I just wished to know that she was safely dispatched.’ He left abruptly, discomfited by the scowling face of the dwarf staring at him from his customary shadow.

  As he crossed the green he felt an enormous relief. He could never be intimate with Feyra in the way he had planned; but was it too much to hope that they might, in time, be once more friends? He convinced himself that if he could only sit with her again, look upon that face, and talk of the things that mattered to them both, he would be happy. Halfway across the green he stopped. He would go to her house now, knock on the door and beg her to come with him to his fireside.

  Then he saw the well, its pale stone glowing from the dark. The lion, with the closed book held close in his paws, gazed back at him with blank stony eyes. With a sudden jolt of panic, he turned and ran not to Feyra’s house, but to his own.

  He burst through the door and raced up the stairs, tearing off his mask as he went. He scrabbled under the bed and lifted the loose floorboard that hid the Cason treasure. The board came up easily, as if it had not long been laid in place. The cavity below was empty, the casket gone.

  Annibale’s head drooped in despair until his forehead touched the floorboards, the useless golden key hanging redundantly from his neck.

  Chapter 33

  Annibale was at his wits’ end.

  Paradoxically, with his mother gone, the gulf between Feyra and he had widened.

  There was nothing left of his fortune. The coin in his pockets would last no more than a few days. Now, because of his mother’s theft, San Bartolomeo’s hospital, and his utopian island, could not survive beyond the end of a week.

  The families would have to go home, the dead and dying would remain here, and the sisters would return to the Miracoli. He did not know what would happen to Feyra – he supposed that he must get her to the mainland and find a ship to Turkey, perhaps from Ancona or Ravenna. He cursed himself for believing in his mother, for believing that she could change.

  Left with no choice, he asked Feyra if she would visit his house that evening, praying that his own resolve would not weaken at the sight of her lovely face.

  She came as she was asked, but did not sit in her long-accustomed chair, for she knew who had been filling it in her absence. Instead she stood, noting sadly that for the first time since they were alone in this house he had not removed his mask. And nor did she.

  ‘First of all,’ said the Birdman in subdued tones, ‘let me set your mind at rest. I must tell you that I will not be renewing the offer that I made to you lately.’

  Feyra swallowed. She had known this, but to hear it was as if he had made an incision in her heart. She felt her eyes pricking with tears and was silent, lest her voice give her away.

  ‘Secondly, I am sorry to have to tell you that the Cason treasure is all gone.’

  He did not tell tales, but he had forgotten how well she knew him.

  ‘And your mother?’

  The bird mask looked down at the floor. ‘Gone too.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Consequently, the island must be closed and returned to the Republic. The hospital will be shut within seven days. I will pay you to the end of the week, and do my best to find you a passage back East.’

  There it was. The moment she had worked for, all those little golden sequins that she had collected in her yellow slipper, whispering as they tinkled together with the promise of home. In the last lonely month she had begun to think of the life she could have if she returned to Turkey. Not to Constantinople, of course, but to some outpost far from the Sultan’s eye like Antioch or Tarsus; she could perhaps set up a physician’s practice of her own. She wanted to sail away and never look West again. But instead she said, ‘It does not have to be that way. I have made a concoction – an antidote – which I have named Teriaca. Let me sell it, to fund the hospital.’

  The Birdman drove his fist into his palm, but spoke calmly. ‘I have told you, many times, that I will not advocate preying on the minds and purses of the sick with useless charlatan remedies.’

  ‘And each time we have discussed the subject I have told you that, if by controlled sale of a remedy a doctor can better the facilities for his patients, or fund further researches, then it may be permissible. I am not speaking of exploitation – I am speaking of legitimate sale, for my potion is far from useless.’

  ‘How can you possibly know?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Over the last month of Fridays I have been conducting trials. My linctus has proved most efficacious.’

  ‘You’ve been interfering with the prescriptions of my patients?’ he spoke harshly, the beak amplifying his rage.

  She lifted her chin, glad of her own anger. ‘Yes. To great effect.’ She held up her hands. Here they were, arguing again, just as they used to. ‘If you let me, you will be able to carry on here as ever. For ever. Do you really want to give all that up for the sake of this game of bones you’re playing with me?’

  The Birdman was breathing hard. His eyes seemed to be raking her up and down behind their prisms of smoked glass. She followed his gaze. In the year she’d been here, she’d completely reverted to her Ottoman style of dress, gradually covering herself, month by month, with loose breeches and a long shift, a loose ferace gown of cinnabar red thrown over all, a most practical colour for her work in the Tezon.

  ‘Well,’ he said after a time, sounding at last like the Annibale she knew, ‘you can’t go like that.’

  Annibale jumped ashore at Treporti, already weighing his last few coins in his pockets. As he swept through the crowded market people made way for the doctor. He glanced at the townspeople professionally – there did not seem to be any pestilence among them yet, and the doors of the little white sunbaked houses were unadorned by crosses. This was not a commission he wanted to entrust to anyone else, but for a while he hovered between the pitches, not entirely sure what he was looking for.

  Mamma Trianni had told him to get samite or silk, of whatever colour pleased him, and she would do the rest. He did not know the differences between these materials, but had not admitted as much. He made his way to a brightly coloured stall where reams of fabric ruffled and streamed in the wind like pennants. Without knowing it, he picked a bale of cloth exactly the green of his eyes, the hue of bottle glass, which had a watery sheen to it as he turned it to the sunlight.

  The clothier appeared at h
is elbow. ‘A fine choice, Dottore, the emerald. Indigofera from the Indies for the blue, fine English weld for the yellow, mixed together and fixed with good Venetian piss to make green.’

  Annibale took a step back, still clutching the bale. ‘Would this stuff do for a gown?’ he barked.

  ‘Yes, Dottore.’

  ‘How much would I … would my seamstress need?’

  ‘That depends.’ The fellow scratched his chin, and readjusted the tape measure draped around his neck. ‘Is she a large dame?’

  ‘What? No, no, she’s as slim as a greyhound. About this around …’ Annibale put his hands together as though they clasped Feyra’s waist.

  ‘And will you be wanting stuff for a bodice? Petticoats? Stomacher? How about some crystal beads for the embroidery?’

  The clothier could be speaking another tongue. Annibale, flustered, said yes to everything, and came away with a very large parcel and very little money.

  On the way back to the boat he had a sudden thought: Feyra should have a mask, not for anonymity but for sanitation. He swerved to the maskerer’s stall and quickly chose a horse’s head in pearlized white. He was halfway back to the island before he recalled why the horse’s head had leapt out at him – he vaguely remembered a question she’d asked him once.

  Leaving his parcel at the seamstress’s house, he kept the uncomfortable exchange as short as possible. ‘Do your best, for she must look like a noblewoman.’

  Mamma Trianni laughed a wheezy laugh through her few teeth. He noted that when he had recommended that the families took up the pipe to keep the miasma at bay, this old dame had obeyed with alacrity. ‘Don’t fret, Dottore,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what I’m about. She shall look like a Dogaressa before I’m done.’

  Extricating himself as quickly as he could, he hurried to Feyra’s house, where he found her packing her bottles for the next day.

  He’d spent the last of his remaining ducats at Murano on a boatful of virgin bottles – purified in the fires and never used before, they would preserve the integrity of the ingredients of her mysterious linctus, whatever they might be. He’d noticed with interest that the burly, firetanned glassblowers had put in place their own safeguards to protect them from the Plague that had not yet reached their isle – the bottles were pushed out to him in a little coracle and he was directed to throw his coin in the salt sea, to be purified by the brine before being fished out by one of their number.

  Now Feyra placed the bottles neatly into a leather case, the sides cured stiff and rigid, so the bottles would stand. He noted the concoction within – her secret antidote, for she had not shared its constituents even with him – was exactly the same colour as her dress.

  She straightened up when Annibale entered.

  ‘I have been thinking,’ he said without preamble. ‘You need a story, something like Valnetti’s Four Thieves – a holy tree or a magic well, or some such. Some legend to make the people believe in your cure. People don’t understand medicine, but they do understand folklore.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said, in agreement at once. ‘How about the well of the lion with the closed book – it’s true I drew the water for the potion there.’ She actually smiled. ‘And I will tell you no more.’

  His heart leapt at her smile but he merely shrugged. ‘Our concern at this point is not what is true, for the whole business is a tissue of lies and I do not like it.’

  She came so close to him then that he could almost feel her warmth. ‘I would not sell this concoction if I did not truly believe it in my heart to be effective.’

  ‘Very well. The Lion’s Well is good enough – the emblem of the lion should appeal to Venetian ears. Besides, holy wells are good fodder for the gullible – there’s one on Giudecca, precisely where Palladio builds his church. Pilgrims swear the water protects them from the Plague.’

  Feyra made no reply to this, but before long they were seated, and unmasked, and talking as they used to, speaking over each other and gesticulating and arguing their points as they concocted the legend of the potion she called Teriaca.

  ‘I was walking by the well one day, and I saw the lion and the book—’

  ‘No, the lion spoke to you.’

  ‘Yes, that is better. The lion spoke to me and said: “I am the symbol of Venice. Within my well is a water that will cure my people; water blessed by …”’ She tailed off.

  ‘Saint Mark,’ finished Annibale.

  Feyra remembered the story of the unfortunate Saint wrapped in pork like a Christian feastday dish. ‘Saint Mark when he came from the East—’

  ‘The Holy Land. It is always the Holy Land,’ interjected Annibale.

  ‘Saint Mark when he came from the Holy Land. He wrote his blessing in my book with his bolt from heaven—’

  ‘Celestial lightning?’ Annibale suggested. ‘With his celestial lightning, and then bid me close my book for ever—’

  ‘To keep the secret!’ Feyra finished in triumph.

  Annibale made her tell the story over and over again, to perfect her Venetian accent. She was clearly immune to the Plague as she had walked among the sick all these months not protected by a mask as he had been, but she would be in great danger if she was discovered to be a Turk. Feyra, remembering too well her flight from the Doge’s palace, listened carefully to his instruction and bent her tongue around her tale with a Venetian twang.

  Mamma Trianni walked to the blanket box beneath the little window and opened the lid with great ceremony. Silk folds of an incredible green tumbled out like a waterfall. The colour was exactly the green of the lagoon on an overcast day, an iridescent, verdant hue of shifting waters. The old woman pulled the dress free with the help of her daughter Valentina, and held it up so that Feyra could admire the exquisite workmanship of the bodice and sleeves. She took it from Mamma Trianni reverently – it was incredibly heavy – and saw that the real artistry was in the green stomacher, sewn with more tiny crowded crystals in amazing curlicues which mimicked the waves of the Adriatic.

  Feyra undressed quickly, and the green silk dress slipped over her easily, cool and heavy against her warm skin.

  Mother and daughter stopped chattering as Feyra walked to the window. ‘Is it all right?’ she asked tentatively. There was no looking-glass so she could not see what they could see. But just at that moment Annibale walked in, and her doubts vanished.

  Annibale stood, mouth agape. His Feyra was transformed as completely as caterpillar to butterfly or cygnet to swan. She had crossed an ocean from Byzantium to Venice and been reborn as a Venus of the West. The green gown fell to the floor, accentuating her height, and her golden shoulders rose from the crystal bodice. Her waist, nipped in by clever invisible tailoring, seemed tiny. The dress was all one colour and the single, strong hue made the warm tones of her skin glow, and gave heat to her amber eyes. Mamma Trianni clucked around her, making tiny, unnecessary adjustments to the perfection.

  ‘It is my turn now,’ said Valentina, standing. ‘She’ll not be long, Dottore.’

  Annibale leaned at the doorframe, rapt.

  ‘Now: hair. First, let us get it all down.’ The veil was snatched away and Annibale saw Feyra’s hair for the first time, falling, whispering, loose on to her shoulders. He’d tried to guess at its colour from the small curls escaping from her veils, but those tiny clues were so confusing – sometimes the filaments were the colour of copper, sometimes dark as squid’s ink, sometimes burnished like cherrywood. Now he could see the full spectrum of the amazing golds and browns in her hair.

  ‘Esumaria, so much of it! And all those colours!’ exclaimed Mamma Trianni, echoing his thoughts. Annibale watched as Valentina bundled the shining mass loosely into a net to sit at the nape of Feyra’s neck, bounded in a coif of seed pearls, with a few curls escaping around the ears.

  For the first time he could see that the plain ribbon Feyra wore around her neck held a ring. For a moment he worried that it was some token of a former love, but however she had come by it, its s
implicity with the green dress and the bundled hair was stunning.

  Once Valentina had finished, Annibale handed Feyra the magnificent mask, pearlized white and shaped like a horse’s head. He had chosen it hoping to please her, but could not interpret the gasp she gave when she laid eyes upon it.

  Annibale thought how much she was once again changed when she held the mask in place: the visor erased all expression, but through it Feyra’s eyes glittered, still alluring. Her beauty frightened him; she was a creature now that would enslave any man, no longer the girl that had been his Feyra by his fireside. However, he said nothing of this, merely asking, ‘Ready?’

  Annibale gave Feyra his arm across the green and she took it as seemed fitting. He carried her case of bottles for her too, as far as the jetty, the bottles clinking in counterpoint to her nervous, pattering thoughts. The skirts dragged at her hips and she wondered how the Venetians managed all their Carnevale debauchery when so hampered. She looked at her escort and saw him eyeing her as if she were a stranger.

  ‘I do not like this. I do not like you going,’ he said.

  ‘Then you go.’

  ‘You know I cannot. I neither approve of the potion, nor will I take the credit for it. Moreover, as a doctor of the Republic I must register the ingredients of any cure with the Consiglio della Sanita, and to them would go the bulk of any profits.’

  She opened the gate and emerged from the shadow of the postern. ‘I will not place myself in any danger,’ she reassured him. ‘I am a harmless goodwife selling a homemade remedy. And you must own that I look Venetian enough, even for you.’ She thought of what the Badessa had said, of how she could change, accept God, become assimilated herself into the Christian West. Would she look like this if she was Annibale’s wife in truth? She bit her lip a little, making the rose of her mouth even deeper.