The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  Annibale patted his robe for his mouseskin purse, but before he could find it, Feyra had reached in her bodice and pulled out a coin, which she laid down on the table where it winked in the light.

  Annibale never knew where she got it, but it was a single gold ducat.

  EPILOGUE

  Constantinople

  Three Years Later

  In the silent precincts of the Topkapi Palace, Doctor Haji Musa regarded the casket that had been sent to him.

  He knew it was from Venice because of the seal of the lion and the reek of myrtle smoke. They were most assiduous in the Republic, he knew, about quarantine and the rules about disinfecting packages.

  Still, to be on the safe side, the doctor summoned a slave to open the package for him, and instructed the eunuch to carry the package gingerly, well away from the Sultan’s quarters. The Venetians had been known to send gunpowder with a clasp that sparked when opened to cause an explosion, or poisonous serpents, or even scorpions to the palace. It was midday and the palace was shimmering with heat, so the eunuch carried the box to the Garden of the Lilies, where fountains played and it was shady and cool.

  Once in the gardens the eunuch set down the box on the pavings, opened the clasps and gently eased back the lid. There was a long silence, during which Haji Musa could only hear the plashing of the fountains. ‘What is it?’ the doctor called from his safe distance.

  The eunuch was bewildered. ‘It is bones,’ he said.

  The doctor came closer and peered into the casket. He dismissed the slave and unwrapped the bones himself, kneeling there in his cinnabar robes. It was the complete skeleton of a young male, each bone painstakingly numbered and catalogued, each wrapped about with a tiny scroll of inscribed vellum. Every bone was there, over two hundred in all, from each phalange of the toes to each vertebra of the spine all the way up to the skull. It must have been done by a medical hand.

  Haji Musa laid the skeleton out in the courtyard, piecing it together on the warm pavings while the kites screeched overhead, cheated of their carrion for the fellow was long dead. When he was done the old doctor stood up with difficulty and regarded the man. The skull eyed him back from dark hollows. The doctor, perplexed, looked in the box, and there among sprinklings of Venetian soil was a note, written in Ottoman script.

  Here are the bones of Takat Turan.

  He is to be buried in the garden of the Janissaries, for he was of their number.

  I am well.

  Your pupil, Feyra Adelet bint Timurhan Murad

  Haji Musa crumpled the note to his heart with gladness, and bent again to collect the bones. The skull was full of earth; he knocked it irreverently on the pavings and something fell out with a tinkle. He cleaned it off and held it to the light, for his eyes were not what they used to be. He peered at it, puzzled, not knowing what the meaning might be.

  For it was a Christian cross.

  VENICE

  Palladio had dozed for most of the afternoon, as he was wont to do these days. He had taken to slumbering on the couch downstairs in his studiolo, as he no longer had the wind to manage the stairs. Besides, he liked to lie where he could see his drawings.

  Sometimes his gaze would settle on the Leonardo, The Vitruvian Man, and remember when he himself had been in his prime, reaching out with outstretched fingertips to test the very limits of his own geometry. Sometimes he would look at the drawings he had made for the new Rialto, painstakingly set down, every angle beautifully rendered and duly submitted to the Council of Ten. But the bridge was destined to live only in his mind and on his wall, for the contract for the new Rialto had been given to another. His namesake Andrea da Ponte was a younger man than he, and, to add bitterness to the pill, had once been his pupil.

  Palladio would comfort himself with the thoughts of his great church. He remembered, dimly, a story he had been told once about a temple in the East, where pilgrims had flocked to worship for hundreds of years at the grave of a prophet’s standard bearer. But he could neither remember the name of the temple, nor the teller.

  On better days, he would raise himself on his elbow and talk to Zabato Zabatini as he drew, directing him to set down his latest ideas. Sometimes his notions took flight into fancy, fantasies that could never be built, only supported by dreams, not by bricks or mortar. When he babbled out these caprices from his couch he could see that Zabato stopped drawing. The draughtsman would take off his glasses and lay them down, wiping his eyes; and Palladio would wonder why he wept.

  Today was not a good day. The architect could barely raise his head. He felt as if a great weight were pressing on his chest. He knew the name of the weight. It was Death, and it got heavier each day.

  The low sun had begun to hurt his eyes; so when two figures appeared in front of the window, he felt relief from the glare. They seemed to be dressed exactly the same, turbanned and swathed in robes, but one was a man and one was a woman. He thought he dreamed, so there was no harm in smiling at them both, even if they were infidels. The weight on his chest lightened.

  The woman held out her hand to him, as he had once to her. ‘Come and see,’ she said.

  Once in the boat he could see them more clearly. Neither of them wore a face mask as you might expect of their kind. They were both handsome and dark haired, tanned of skin and exactly the same height. They could almost be brother and sister but for the fact that he could see, even with his old eyes, that they were in love. They never caressed each other, their sleeves did not even touch where they sat, but they were somehow as intimate as when he had seen them once twined together on a bed. He knew them now. They were both of them doctors, and they ran the hospital that he had built.

  They neared the Zattere sound and the island of Giudecca.

  ‘See,’ said the male doctor. ‘They have built a bridge.’

  Palladio watched the great procession as the boat drew closer. A bridge of wooden rafts had been lashed together so the citizens of Zattere could walk across the canal to his church.

  They were coming in their hundreds.

  Every man, woman and child carried a candle, and a serpent of shimmering fire wound across the island, over the canal and up the steps into the church.

  Palladio could hear a chant swelling, resolving itself into a word. The word echoed over the waters, but his ears were muffled with age. ‘What are they saying?’ he asked.

  ‘Redentore,’ said the male doctor. ‘It is what they call the church now. Just plain Redentore. The Redeemer.’ The doctor smiled at his partner, as if the word had a special significance for them. ‘They are giving thanks to whichever god it was that saved them from the Plague. They are set to do this every year.’

  ‘Every year? For how long?

  ‘For ever.’

  Palladio felt his eyes fill with tears.

  The three of them disembarked by the great steps and joined the procession. They walked up the fifteen stone stairs together, Palladio in the middle flanked by the doctors, who took one of his arms each to aid him. The architect went unmarked by the crowds. Nor did the two doctors raise comment despite their turbans. Now the Plague had passed, physicians had abandoned their beaks in favour of a biretta cloth twisted about their heads. And in a strange caprice of fashion, since the Ottoman conflict Turkish styles had become quite the thing among Venetians.

  At the threshold the doctors halted and Palladio turned to them, puzzled.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ he asked.

  Feyra smiled. ‘Just once was enough.’

  Annibale shook his head in turn. ‘This is your church, but it is not ours.’

  Palladio raised his brows.

  In reply Annibale opened his robe. He was wearing a trinket in the shape of a Muselmano crescent. Feyra did the same; she was wearing its twin. Palladio peered. On closer inspection the pendants were each half of a ring, a glass ring with some sort of decoration on it. Annibale wore the Eastern semicircle and Feyra the West. Palladio looked back to Annibale.

  ‘You co
nverted?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I did not love my god, but she loved hers.’

  ‘Be careful.’ Palladio did not need to explain what he meant.

  ‘Can you manage?’ asked Feyra solicitously, at the threshold of the great door.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the architect said. He took both their hands for a moment in a clasp of valediction, and passed into the church.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  As well as building some of the most important edifices of the Renaissance ANDREA PALLADIO gave his name to ‘Palladianism’, one of the most enduring and ubiquitous architectural styles in the world.

  He also had a thorough understanding of the geometry of battle, exemplified in his illustration of POLYBIUS’S Histories. Palladio corrected the manuscript himself, and among his corrections is the amendment of the copyist’s mistake ‘Hasdrubal’ to read ‘Hannibal’, as he felt the general should be correctly named.

  However, following the great fire of Venice, Palladio was not awarded the tender to rebuild any of the major features of the city, except the REDENTORE, a project which he had already begun.

  In the right-hand side aisle of this, Palladio’s last church, there is a large nautilus fossil set into the floor.

  During the Plague years of the 1570s, the quarantine island known as the VIGNA MURADA became an isolation hospital known as the LAZZARETTO NOVO. Under the Austrian occupation of Venice in the eighteenth century, the island was billeted by soldiers, and, after their departure, fell into ruin.

  TERIACA became one of the most popular and profitable medicines in the Renaissance world. It was regulated by the Consiglio della Sanita, who taxed it heavily.

  The process of VARIOLATION, which later became known as INOCULATION, was common practice in Ottoman medicine well before it was known in the West. In modern times strong evidence has emerged for the efficacy of some Plague vaccines, and research into the production of an effective Plague serum continues to this day.

  SEBASTIANO VENIER, Chief Admiral of the Venetian fleet and Doge of Venice, is remembered not just for his naval leadership at the Battle of Lepanto, but for personally helping to fight the fire that damaged his palace. It is said he died of sorrow that the city had burned under his rule.

  ANTONIO DA PONTE’S RIALTO BRIDGE became one of the most famous bridges in the world, and perhaps the single piece of architecture that most defines Venice.

  AT LA CHIESA DEL SANTISSIMI DEL REDENTORE, every year on the third Sunday in July, the people of Venice cross on a raft from Zattere to Giudecca, and give thanks to God at Palladio’s church for saving the city from the Plague.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book began with a breakfast; not at Tiffany’s, but at Claridges.

  I was there with film producer Ileen Maisel, who asked me if I’d ever thought of writing about Palladio. I’d like to thank Ileen, first of all, for asking that question. This was back in 2008, the quincentenary of the architect’s death, and there happened to be an exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy that very day. I finished my breakfast and walked round the corner to the RA and spent the morning looking at every plan, picture and model. I was hooked. I bought the biggest book I could find in the museum shop and went home to devour it. This comprehensive volume, Palladio (2008) edited by Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns, and published in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, was invaluable to me in the writing of this book. Palladio lived in interesting times; in Venice – as in London – plague and fire visited the city close together, and the opportunity to write about this period, with the building of the church of the Redentore as the spine of the story, seemed too good to miss.

  Two other volumes, among the many excellent books that I read in the course of research for this book, deserve a full citation. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn’s Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions 1500–1700 (2009) provides an excellent overview of the development of Turkish medical practice. And Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death (2010) gave me a detailed insight into the more old-fashioned plague cures of earlier outbreaks of the pestilence.

  Some of the locations in this book, such as the magnificent Redentore on the island of Giudecca, are easily visited. But the most interesting trip I took in the name of research was to the Lazzaretto Novo itself – the mysterious plague island far out in the Venetian lagoon. Trips are infrequent and access limited, so I would like to thank Giorgia Fazzini for permission to visit such a fascinating place, and for the opportunity to peruse the small but incredibly valuable museum there. I must also acknowledge the voluntary organization Ekos Club, who so carefully maintain the archaeology and ecology of the island.

  Thank you also to two fantastic research assistants: Richard Brown who covered the Western aspects of the novel, and Yasemin Uğur who checked the Eastern sphere by verifying Turkish terms and spellings for me. Thanks also to my sister, archaeologist Veronica Fiorato, who gave me the benefit of her expertise on plague graves and skeletal remains.

  Thank you to my father Adelin Fiorato who, quite apart from being a fount of Renaissance knowledge, lent a great deal of his character to my portrait of Palladio.

  I’m grateful, once again, to costume designer Hayley Nebauer, who tirelessly perused her own archives and Renaissance paintings to check details of Venetian costume.

  Thanks to Caroline Westmore and the fantastic team at John Murray for all their dedicated work in the production of this book.

  And above all, thanks to my editor Kate Parkin and my agent Teresa Chris, who not only fulfilled their usual roles with their customary excellence, but were also there for me this time in the crucial planning stages of the story; fittingly, over a very long lunch at the Royal Institute of British Architects!

  Last, but by no means least, I have to thank the central characters in my own story: Sacha, Conrad and Ruby.