The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  The thought of his benefactor jolted him out of his reverie with a start.

  Where was Feyra?

  She had come to him two days ago, resplendent and Venetian to the seams in her green dress, to insist that she meet Venice’s duke on a matter of death and life. She would not tell him the meat of the subject, saying it was a great matter for the Doge’s ears alone, but he felt he owed so much to her that he had told her to meet him on the steps of the church this very morning. At the close of the service he was to be presented with the order of La Proto della Serenissima, Chief Architect of the Republic. He foresaw no difficulties in presenting Feyra to the Doge for in that green gown she could stand up with any monarch alive, but he was worried that she had not turned up as she had promised.

  There would be ample time to get to the hospital island and back in time for his investiture. Palladio began to shove his way through the crowds down to the waterfront to hail a boat. The church door was jammed open by the press of people who crowded the steps outside so that he could barely pass. They crammed the foreshore and lined the banks all the way to the Venier Palace and back.

  These were not just simple peasants. More than once he saw the wig of a lawyer, the beak of a doctor, the ruff of a teacher. Mothers brought their children. Grown men brought their aged parents. These were Venetians from all walks of life. The only thing they had in common was the look in their eyes: humble, observant, calm, a strange peace coupled with a peculiar determination.

  Crafts of every sort crowded the canal, sailing to the church from every direction. One enterprising fellow had even built a raft, which he paddled from Zattere where the less adventurous citizens stood on the bank to get as near as they could to the church and the blessed ceremony. Palladio was astonished, flattered, until he realized that they were not there for him, or even for his church. As he sailed away from his own church’s consecration, he realized what it was he was witnessing.

  It was faith.

  Chapter 43

  Feyra had got her wish.

  She had indeed shared Annibale’s bed on the first night that they were alone. But God had played a terrible trick on her, a just punishment. For she was merely trying to keep the man she loved alive.

  She would never know whether the smoke of the fire had corrupted his lungs and let the pestilence in, or whether, having lost his mask, he had breathed in the infected miasma of the Tezon. The truth was that it was she who had brought him into harm’s way. Once he began to care for her, his own life and health became important to him for the first time, and when she asked him to put it at risk, and go into the city unmasked, he had done it without question.

  All her intimate ministrations hurt her. The first time she touched Annibale was to smooth the curls back from his hectic forehead in a terrible parody of a lover’s caress. She first held his hand to check his fluttering pulse. She unbuttoned his chemise, as she had so long dreamed, only to expose the dreadful swellings in his armpits. She moistened his lips, not with her kisses, but with a sponge soaked in vinegar and water. She would go for long walks in the blackthorn wilderness, not to sigh and moan as lovers do, but to seek, desperately, any new root she had missed, any new flower whose juice might make a remedy.

  As with her father before, she tried everything: all the herbs in her medicine belt and all the concoctions in her cabinet. She even leeched him, as she had never done with any of her patients, watching in disgust as the grey undulating creatures fed upon Annibale’s dear flesh. But if he believed in these measures, then she owed it to him to try. She lanced the buboes too, but the surgery was no more effective here than it had been on her father. From Annibale’s grey pallor she seemed to have merely weakened him further. His eyes were closed, his pulse weak and fluttering in his throat as if he had swallowed a moth.

  Then she tried everything of which he would not have approved. She sang the Venetian folk songs she had learned in the Tezon, in the hope that his feckless mother might have sung him at least one such at her knee. She even read a passage from the fractured Bible, pulling the crumpled pages she had stowed in her wall, tangling her tongue around the Latin in the hope that his god was listening.

  The only thing she did not try was her Teriaca, knowing that it was far too late for her remedy. She remembered how he had scorned her methods, how he had oft debunked the theories on which her physic was built. What she would give to hear one word from him now, even uttered in anger! He seemed pale, so pale; his face now alabaster, flecked with beads of moisture like a statue in the rain.

  She unhooked her face veil to feel his last shallow breaths on her cheek. She would have torn it off for ever, there and then, if it were only for herself; but she would not endanger him further with the miasma of her breath, so she replaced it again. Then, exhausted, she curled up beside him, praying to the God she had neglected, that if he did not wake, neither would she. But her prayers were not answered. At dawn she woke curled into Annibale’s back, just as she had with her father.

  And it was there that Palladio found her. She was lying with the doctor. They nestled together like the chisels in his pack. They could have been any couple, handsome, well-matched, lying in their marital bed.

  But he’d known something was wrong as soon as he’d landed on the abandoned island, walked across the deserted green, peered into the great empty barn-like building at the centre, and peeked into almshouse after vacant almshouse. And now in the last house, he had climbed the stairs and found them.

  He knelt carefully on his good knee and lightly touched Feyra’s cheek. She turned to him, almost as if she’d expected him. ‘I could not save him,’ she whispered, as if she did not want to wake the still form. Her eyes were brimming, her veil soaked with tears. ‘I tried everything.’

  Palladio thought of his church, his dome and the people crowding the banks. ‘Not everything,’ he said. ‘There is yet one more thing to try.’

  He held out his hand to her and she rose reluctantly from the bed, looking back at the body she’d left, as if it were the other half of her, loath to leave him. ‘Come and see.’

  He saw her react to the words as if she’d heard them before. Hope flared in her eyes.

  She fingered her veil. ‘Should I don the green dress?’

  He looked at her – her headdress, her breeches, her face veil. She looked unmistakably Ottoman.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’ll do very well as you are.’

  Chapter 44

  Feyra stood and looked up at the great church, tears starting to her eyes. Palladio had not taken her back home, he had brought her home to her.

  The incredible dome, the sentinel minarets, the façade of a temple; she was back in Constantinople and yet in Venice. A church that looked like this, she could enter with impunity. As if in a dream, she began to climb the fifteen steps, past the guards posted at the doors, guards who wore the emblazon of the lion, guards exactly like the ones who had thrown her from the doors of the Doge’s palace, then admitted her in her doctor’s weeds. Like that latter time, they uncrossed their halberds before her face, this time at the behest of the architect who accompanied her. Unlike that time, both men recognized her at once.

  Feyra crossed the threshold of a Christian church for the first time.

  The interior was dim after the sunlight, candlelit and smoky with incense. New candles, waxy and white, stood in serried ranks waiting to be lit, while banks of older candles still burned in thanks for the delivery of a city. The candlelight gave the church a warm glow and Feyra was grateful for its welcome, for it was a daunting place for her.

  She walked on, to the centre of the cruciform. Below her feet was a black marble star, denoting the centre of the dome, and she imagined the well beneath where her father lay. She sent a blessing down to Timurhan in her own tongue and his.

  Then she looked up.

  She turned around and around below the dome. It was a vast and perfect hemisphere, undecorated but painted with a nacreous sheen, like the inside of a s
hell. She recalled all the mosques she visited in the East, the Harem, Palladio’s house, the Tezon, Annibale’s house, everywhere she had ever stood until now.

  She knelt, and put her hands together as she had seen the sisters do as they prayed for their miracles. She looked up at the altar; at the cross she’d once worn, the cross she’d once cast down a well.

  ‘Please,’ she said, in her own language.

  Then she said it in Venetian, in case this god did not understand her. ‘Save him. Bring him back to me.’ If all gods were one god, would not he answer?

  But the cross was silent, and she felt a fool. She got up from her aching knees. She should not have come to this place. There was no god, in this church or any other. The temples of Sinan and Palladio were empty.

  As she got to her feet, she realized she was not alone. A man was kneeling in a niche, his eyes closed. She recognized him from his corno hat, the hat that she had seen depicted in the pamphlets that burned on the streets of Constantinople, the hat that featured on the ducat she wore in her bodice.

  She was so muddled by grief that she almost let the Doge be, but a few more moments would not make a difference to Annibale now, and he had always lived for the saving of lives. If she could halt the white horse, it would be a fitting legacy for her love. She went and stood over the Doge until he felt her presence and turned.

  ‘Who are you? How dare you interrupt my private devotions?’

  As he stood, furious, she recognized the tall, old hermit who had taken charge of the citizens on the night of the fire. She had been cheek by jowl with him for that whole night.

  She had waited for this moment for so long. She looked at the old man, into his bearded face and was reminded of her father. Both men of the sea, they had the horizon in their eyes.

  Feyra opened her mouth, but before she could speak, the church doors burst open and a black-clad figure with cropped golden hair strode down the aisle, followed by the sentinel guards. ‘Stand aside!’ he commanded. And Feyra’s arms were seized by the guards. She twisted desperately to the Doge, who took a step back.

  ‘What’s amiss?’ he asked his chamberlain.

  ‘This,’ said the Camerlengo, breathing heavily, ‘is the infidel woman we have sought all this time. She arrived at the same time as the pestilence. She well may be an assassin, sent by the Sultan.’

  ‘This … child?’ The Doge walked over to Feyra, as the guards began to march her roughly down the aisle in the wake of the Camerlengo, who kicked open the great doors to the light.

  With a last desperate effort, she twisted from their grip and turned in the aisle to face the Doge. Reaching into her bodice, she held up the crystal ring her mother had given her. With her other hand she tore the veil from her face.

  The Doge’s voice rang out around the stones. ‘Stop!’

  The Camerlengo turned too in the doorway, unsure. He voiced the first question he had ever asked of his master. ‘But … why?’

  ‘Because,’ said the Doge, ‘she is a Venier.’ He did not even glance at the Camerlengo and the two guards. ‘Leave us,’ he said.

  The great doors boomed closed. The Doge lifted a hand to Feyra’s cheek, and let it drop.

  ‘Cecilia?’ he said.

  ‘I am her daughter.’

  ‘But you are …’

  ‘I am a Turk, yes.’ Feyra took refuge in urgency. ‘There is little time and you must know this. At this very moment Sultan Murad III of Constantinople is mustering a great fleet against you – he comes to take the city. It was one of his Janissaries who fired your palace; one of his sea captains who brought the Plague to you.’ She took an unsteady breath. ‘I am that sea captain’s daughter, and came on that very same ship. And my mother, Nur Banu, Valide Sultan, was once Cecilia Baffo of Paros.’ She paused for breath again. ‘She told me of her son the Sultan’s design on her deathbed, and charged me to warn you of the four horses that come to Venice bringing dire times. I failed to warn you of two of these tribulations, but if I may save you from war and then death, I will.’ She held the ring out to him again, untying it for the first time. ‘My mother couched the warning in these terms because of the ring she gave me as a surety. Do you see the design of the four horses? I think,’ she said, carefully, as she saw his expression, ‘that you know this ring?’

  The Doge took the thing from her, and touched the little horses with his fingertip. ‘Yes,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I gave it to her myself, one summer, long ago, in Paros.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘You have risked many dangers to bring me this warning,’ he said gently, ‘Now, how can I serve you?’

  ‘I just want to be allowed to go home.’

  ‘To Constantinople?’

  ‘No,’ she said violently. ‘No, that’s not my home!’ She began to back away, down the aisle.

  ‘The ring?’ The Doge held it out to her.

  She waved it away. ‘It is yours.’

  ‘No,’ he said, following her. ‘It is yours.’ And he placed it on her finger, right there in the aisle, as if they wed. ‘For you are a Venier.’

  She looked at the ring on her fourth finger, just as her mother had worn it.

  ‘Where is your home?’ asked the Doge gently.

  ‘On the Lazzaretto Novo.’

  ‘On the hospital island?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pushed open the great door to the outside world.

  The Doge shouted after her. ‘With the doctor?’

  Feyra stopped. Of course. The Doge had appointed Annibale in the first place. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I live alone.’

  Chapter 45

  Feyra did not know how long she sat and held Annibale’s blackened hand.

  On her return from the Redentore the sun had been high in the sky. Now it was low enough to gild his dead face like a reliquary.

  She had lived, in those hours, their life together as it might have been – living and healing together, perhaps travelling to the teaching hospitals of London, Bologna, Damascus; perhaps opening a hospital together. She did not, in that imagined span of years, speculate upon how their features might have combined in their daughters and sons. She did not want children, never had, she just wanted Annibale. To be with him, wed to him in whatever way their faiths allowed.

  She took the Venier ring from her finger, suddenly obsessed by the notion that they should be betrothed before Annibale was interred. It was a lady’s ring so she had to place it on his smallest finger and the crystal shone against the blackened skin. Black bile, red blood, white bile and pale phlegm. All had drained from him now; all humours equalized, all temperaments quieted, all balance gone. The spinning top had fallen.

  Even this did not bring tears to her dry eyes. Grimly she saw that the pale horse was uppermost on his finger, and then she understood. Now she knew that the final horse, the pale horse of Death, had not foretold Takat’s death or even the death of Venice, but the death of Annibale.

  The lowering sun shone directly in her face and the light brought tears to her dry eyes. She roused herself – the light was fading – she must wash the body and lay him out. Tonight she would watch him in vigil, and tomorrow she would bury him.

  She collected a batch of new white tallow candles from her cabinet and laid them by the bed. Then she went downstairs and out to the cemetery, the gnarled roots tripping her and the winding thorns tearing at her robes. She trod carefully around the graves, imagining the skeletons beneath.

  The ones she hadn’t saved.

  At the newest pile of earth swaddling Takat Turan’s grave, she stopped and planted her foot squarely in the fresh soil. She remembered her promise to him to send his bones home. She had no intention of keeping it. She regarded the mound of earth. ‘Rot there,’ she spat, and walked on.

  She collected the lime barrow from where it rested against the murada, and wheeled it to Annibale’s doorway. In the morning she would fold his body into it.

  Then she went to the well to draw water to cleanse Annibale’s body. The stone face of the lio
n watched her with his knowing glance. She was tired of him. ‘Is this what you meant all along?’ she asked the lion. ‘Was this your great secret? Well, well done, your prophecy has come to pass.’

  She sent down the bucket with a rattle. When she pulled it up again she saw in the last of the sun that something sparkled at the bottom of the pail. She put her wet hand to the silver gleam and drew out a little tin cross, set on a pin. It was the cross Corona Cucina had given her to pin her jabot across her chest, the brooch she had cast into the well on the first day on the island. She closed her fist round it, squeezing the metal. Hundreds, thousands of buckets had been drawn from here in the last year, yet the cross had chosen to surface for her, on this Sunday.

  Feyra opened her hand and looked down at the pathetic shepherd prophet hanging from his tin cross. What good could he do her now? He was just a mortal man who had died like Annibale. Then slowly, slowly she remembered his legend.

  He had been dead and risen again. The shepherd had risen.

  It was a miracle.

  Feyra dropped the bucket, spilling the water and cross over Takat Turan’s grave. She began to run, past the almshouses where she’d birthed the Trianni babies, past the Tezon where Salve had been the last to die, past the gatehouse where Bocca had once lived, past the church where the Badessa had given her a Bible and back to Annibale’s house. She dashed upstairs, her breath bursting in her chest, and stopped, winded, in the doorway.

  He had moved.