In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  “So,” I say, pulling myself off her and sliding the bright coin across the table, “let’s talk about La Draga.”

  She is away so long I wonder if she might not have taken the ducat and fled. But even the threat of my rat fangs would not persuade her to let me accompany her. This healer, it seems, will come only by means of a message and even then only to people she has met or knows about. It is nearly dusk when they finally arrive. By which time my lady is asleep again, so they come first to me in the kitchen.

  I have spent most of my life watching people’s reactions to me as I walk into a room. I have grown so familiar with them that I can tell fear from disgust, or even assumed pity, before the expressions have fully settled on their faces. So it is a novelty for me now to find myself the viewer rather than the viewed.

  At first glance she seems so small that she might almost be a child, though it is clear soon enough that this is partly the fault of her spine, which is twisted to the left so that she has to bend to compensate, keeping one shoulder higher than the other. As for her age, well, it is hard to tell, for incessant pain does more damage to a person than wild pleasure, particularly the young. In her case, the impact is more on her body. In fact, the very sight of her face, caught as it is between beauty and horror, almost stops your heart. The skin is ghostly pale and smooth, rising full and high enough over the bones to make the shape almost lovely. Until she looks up at you. For she has eyes that are pulled from the grave: pits of white death, wide, fierce, open, with a coating of milky blindness.

  Even I, who am familiarized with the shock of ugliness, feel myself assaulted by the madness I fear inside the stare. Unlike me, however, La Draga does not have to suffer the sight of the world gaping back at her deformity. Indeed, it does not appear to bother her. Certainly if she senses anything, she does not show it. I rise to greet her and offer her the chair, but she declines. “I have come for the lady Fiammetta. Where is she?” And she stands stock-still in front of me, tense and alert to the room around her as if she can see it anyway.

  “She—she is upstairs.”

  She nods sharply. “Then I will go to her right away. You are…her servant, yes?”

  “Well, er…yes.”

  And now her head tilts, as if to catch my voice better, and her forehead puckers slightly. “How small are you?”

  “How small am I?” And I am so taken aback by the directness that I react before I think. “Why—how blind are you?”

  In the doorway, I see Meragosa smirking. Damn it. Of course.

  “I already know you’re a dwarf, sir.” She seems to smile now, though it looks crooked on her face. “But even if I did not, it is easy enough to work out. The chair moved as you stood up, but your voice still comes from here.” And she puts out her hand, palm down, its height exactly measuring my own.

  Despite my pique, I am impressed. “Then you already know how small I am.”

  “But it is your limbs that are small, yes? Your body is a man’s size.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your head is big in the front? As if the round of an eggplant is pushing out from it?”

  An eggplant? In my prouder moments I like to think of it more as the dome of a warrior’s helmet. However, I daresay eggplant would describe it well enough. “Excuse me. I am not the patient,” I say crossly, for I will not give Meragosa the pleasure of a list of my deformities.

  “Bucino?” My lady’s voice comes down the stairs. “Is that her? Is she arrived?”

  She tilts her head again, more sharply this time, as if to locate the sound exactly, and for that second she looks like a bird latching on to a song nearby. As she turns, I am already forgotten.

  Upstairs, I watch from the door as the two of them greet each other with an almost childish glee, my lady clambering off the bed and putting out her hands toward the healer. While La Draga may be older, they would still have been girls when they last met. My God, what events would have taken place between then and now. Whatever my lady hears she will no doubt tell me later. As for La Draga, well, her fingers are her eyes, as she moves her hands over my lady’s body and face and then up onto her scalp, playing along the scarred ridges and scabs, immediately finding the line of the ill-healed wound that runs from inside the stubble onto the forehead. It lasts a long time, this examination, and the atmosphere in the room changes with it. We are all silent now; even Meragosa is tense by my side, waiting for what La Draga might say.

  Eventually, she drops her hands. “You should have come to me sooner.”

  Her voice is quiet, and I see the fear spark in my lady’s eyes.

  “We would have, only we were busy saving our lives,” I say firmly. “Does that mean you can’t help us?”

  “No,” she says, turning toward me with that sharp little move of the head that I already recognize. “What it means is that the remedies will take longer.”

  From that night on, my lady sleeps in clean sheets, warmed by Meragosa’s lies (told with the same gusto with which she delivered me the truth) and tended by a crippled, blind sparrow of a woman whose unctions and pastes smell so rancid that every time she arrives I can hardly wait to get out into the sour air of the city.

  And thus do we come to live in Venice.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As my lady’s health and hair grow, so does my knowledge of the city.

  I begin with what I know: the alleyways that lead from our house; the first to the second, the second over a bridge, the third into the campo. Its huddled buildings, its small stone well, its church, the baker’s oven, from where the smell of fresh bread draws a small crowd every morning; all this feels more like a village than a great city. But every city has to start somewhere, and my old man tells me that when Venice was born out of the lagoon, at first there were only dozens and dozens of tiny islands formed from clumps of houses sunk randomly into marsh water and that everyone moved everywhere by boat. But as each community grew bigger, with its own church and campo and freshwater well, gradually they joined together as best they could by way of more buildings and bridges, until there was a city where the main thoroughfares were liquid and the meaning of life was the sea.

  Whether this is his fancy or fact I do not know, but it suits me well, for now I see Venice as a series of bigger and smaller circles, coalescing and overlapping, each one a filigree of land and water, like the lace pieces that the nuns produce as presents for their relatives. Each day I trace a new one until I have most of the great north island mapped in my head. Like a modern-day Theseus, I spin out threads of memory to help me: the façade of a certain house with a gold mosaic, the shrine with a decapitated Madonna on a corner, the broken ramp of an old wooden bridge, the arch of a new stone one, the particular smells that come from an alleyway that leads only to dank water. In this way I can move from the Jewish Ghetto in the west, around the market streets of the Merceria, across the piazza of San Marco, above the convent of San Zaccaria, and over a dozen small canals as far as the great walls of the Arsenale shipyard, without getting my feet wet—though it’s a fragile enough confidence, for there are still parts of the city in which even a compass would become confused, where the alleys are as bent as used nails and the canals as gnarled as the veins in an old woman’s hand.

  My senses are acclimatizing too. I understand my old man’s Venetian tongue better, for my vocabulary is as foreign as his now and I can make my own mouth go crooked so that my accent makes sense to others. As for the smell? Well, either it has cauterized my nostrils or the arrival of colder weather with storms and rains has washed the city cleaner. In the summer I ran to stay ahead of the stink, now I run to keep myself from the cold.

  Meanwhile, La Draga’s seeing fingers are healing my lady’s scalp, and her company is massaging her spirit. The inside of our house, while it is as poor as ever, is colored now by laughter, the kind that only women’s voices can bring, so that even Meragosa has lost her sour edge. My lady’s hair is the length of a rebel nun’s, the new growth thick and with suff
icient sun and honey in its color to form a wild gold halo around her sweetening face, while what was once the forked lightning of a wound is now the palest ghost of a scar. A diet of good food has filled her body, so her breasts push against the lacing of her bodice, and though the dresses she wears still carry the scent of other women, she is fiercely critical of their bad stitching and failings of style. Indeed, her wit has returned sharp enough to have her fretting at her inactivity, so that last week, after our black-eyed Jew changed another ruby, I bought her a lute, an inferior thing of pine and sandalwood, but strung with five courses and enough tone to get her fingers and voice working again.

  Maybe she can smell opportunity in the air. For in recent weeks the city has gone mad with business as the first ships have arrived from the Levant, brought in early by good winds.

  While I have tried not to show it in her presence, these last months I have suffered heartache for Rome, its solidity as well as its familiar corruption. But even I am excited now. From above the great bridge down to the wharves on the southern island, everywhere is a chaos of trade. The Rialto drawbridge opens for so many tall-masted ships that it is almost impossible for people to cross, while other boats are so crammed together in the canal that they form their own bridges, an army of seamen and laborers forming human chains to move the bales and crates onto land. There are no beggars now; even the most professional cripples can find enough agility to earn a day’s wage. You could furnish a life from the contents of these ships: silk, wool, fur, wood, ivory, spices, sugars, dyes, raw metals, precious stones. You feel rich looking at it. Whereas Rome made her money selling forgiveness for sins, Venice grows fat on feeding them. Gluttony, vanity, envy, avarice—the raw material for all of them is here, and for each and every box or bale that moves into or out of the city, there is a duty to be paid to the government.

  You would think the rulers of this state must be the richest men in Christendom. Of course, there is no king or the tyranny of a single family to squander the profits. The doge, who looks regal enough when they wheel him out in his white-and-gold plumage, is a figure more of ceremony than of power, picked by means of a series of secret ballots so convoluted that even my old man cannot properly explain the process. When he dies—as this one will soon enough, I think, for he looks as wizened as an old bat already—his family will be excluded from the next ballot. In this way Venice prides herself on being a true republic. A fact that everyone knows because she never stops talking about it. In Rome, when Venetian visitors would begin extolling the virtues and wonders of their city, most people would fall asleep under the weight of the hyperbole. While other cities are wealthy, Venice is priceless…while other states are secure, Venice is impenetrable. Venice: the greatest, the loveliest, the oldest, the most just, the most peaceful. Venice—La Serenissima.

  Given such monstrous pride, I had expected more ostentation. Yet the truth is that the men who run this state look more like priests than like rulers. You see them everywhere, in the great Piazza of San Marco and all over the Rialto, in their uniform of long, dark coats, cloths like togas thrown over one shoulder, and the simplest of black caps on their heads. Gathered together every Saturday morning, when the Great Council meets, they resemble nothing so much as a great flock of well-kept crows. My lady can decode subtle gradations of power in the trim of ermine over sable or fox fur and the varying shades of darker velvets, but to understand the rules fully, you have to have been born into them, your name at birth, marriage, and death entered into a golden book held in the Doge’s Palace and checked by officials to ensure the bloodline is not corrupted by commoners.

  The modesty of the men, however, is nothing compared with the invisibility of the women. And here my wanderings have taken on a keener edge, for if we are to make our living, it is my job to smell out the competition. By the end of the first month, I was in despair. While there isn’t a city in Christendom without laws to keep the modest and wealthy whores, as well as the richest ones, off the streets, in Venice they actually seem to work. On market days, you might catch sight of the occasional matron in full regalia tottering on high shoes from one side of a campo to the other, her hands paddling jewels and attended by twittering servants and yapping dogs. But for the most part, rich women travel by water in covered boats or stay sequestered in their houses. The young do what they can to get attention, the girls preening themselves noisily at the windows, but you’d have to be twice my size to gain anything more than a crick in your neck, and when youngbloods in tunics and multicolored tights throw longing sighs upward (if the adults are crows, the young are gaudy parrots, all strut and plumage), the girls become instantly silly, flapping their arms and giggling, pulled hurriedly out of sight by some lurking protector.

  However, every man needs to scratch the itch sometimes, and wherever there is public virtue, there is always private vice. The main brothel is near the market and the great residential hotel where the German merchants live. With the ships in, business is roaring, but the whores work strict hours, their day dictated like that of every other Venetian by the tolling of the Marangona bell, and to keep the peace on the streets, they are locked in for the night. If a man needs relief after closing time, he has to risk the labyrinth.

  My old well man pretended to be shocked when I first asked him where to go, but he gave the answer fast enough. Once inside the alleys, vice grows like fungus, and if he wasn’t so concerned with the state of his soul, I might show him the latest variety: the street of the tits, where the women perch on the sills of the upper-story windows, like some gross parody of the rich, stripped to the waist and dangling their feet for all to see under their skirts. Even here, though, there is strategy in vulgarity; for, as Meragosa tells it through her gappy grin, it’s the government’s own idea, because the state is in rising panic over the numbers of young men to be found in dark alleyways pleasing one another rather than sinning in the way God intended.

  But Venice has more than sodomites to challenge her purity. During those dark, long nights when we were holed up outside Rome, my lady would lift my spirits by painting pictures of the wealth to be made from her native city, and I learned then that the city offers the right kind of women rich pickings when it comes to nobility. It is a simple case of mathematics over morality. If the rulers in the golden book are to keep their wealth intact, they have to limit marriages. Too many daughters with fat dowries and too many sons with slices of the family fortune spell disaster. So, to keep the lineages intact, the nunneries of Venice are bursting with wellborn women, and the family palazzi are home to a host of bachelors, men born into fine living in search of women with equally fine taste, but suitably compromised morals, to keep them serviced and entertained.

  Enter the courtesan.

  And in this, Venice being the most successful commercial city in Christendom, supply and demand are powerfully tuned. Just as the Doge’s Palace holds the Golden Book of Lineage, there is another book—a rather more scurrilous one—that gives details of another set of citizens. A book so infamous that even I, who was ignorant of Venice—save for the fact that it is a great republic sunk into water that had fought the Turks to rule the eastern sea—had heard of it before we came. This is the Register of Courtesans: a list of the names of the city’s most beautiful, most cultured, and most desirable women, with a space next to every entry where clients can write or read descriptions, prices, even assessments of value for money.

  The only question is how to gain an entry. How does a courtesan eager to make her mark announce herself in a city where public ostentation is seen as a sign of vulgarity rather than success? The answer is simple. Since no trader worth his salt buys sight unseen, there are public places where sellers can go to advertise their wares. And in this, for all her protestations of purity, Venice turns out to be no more virtuous or more imaginative than the Holy City itself.

  For courtesans, like everyone else, go to church.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We have taken our places—separately—in the
middle, where it is crowded and where, while we can see those in front, they cannot see us. For we are not here to be seen. On the contrary, until we have better cloth and a house furnished for hospitality, we must keep to the shadows. I would not have her here at all if I had my way. I am noticeable enough on my own, and if spotted together in public, we will be remembered. At least her head and face are well covered, though thanks to the ministrations of La Draga, my lady is nearly enough restored to her former self to hold the gaze of any man she might choose to look upon, and because she knows it now, she will find it harder to resist the challenge. I am done arguing with her, though. There is a limit to how long she can sit in a room with the rancid smell of magic in her hair, and as her confidence has returned, she has become more impatient with my secondhand reports.

  “You are the nearest thing to a woman I have found in a man, Bucino, but you cannot judge the competition as well as I can. Anyway, you are too small to see properly over the pews and will therefore certainly miss some of the theater. It is time for me to be there now. When you go next, we go together.”

  The church we have picked is Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which the Venetians call San Zanipolo—they have more names for their buildings than old women have endearments for their lapdogs. It has less gold and fewer relics than San Marco, and its interior cannot make your heart soar in the same way as the great vaulted nave of Santa Maria dei Frari, but it is big—one of the biggest in the city—and powerful, with the tombs of more than a dozen doges, and it brings the great and the wealthy flocking to Mass, not least because it has a fine and spacious campo outside, where after worship the faithful can mingle, showing off the cut of their new cloth along with their piety.