The Venetian Contract (17 page)

Feyra watched the water below bubble and flatten again. She fingered the ring on her finger and she thought for a moment of throwing it after him, so her father could have something of her mother. But her father was in Jannah and she was here, and it was all she had left that connected her to her family, to her mother, and, most extraordinarily of all, to the Doge.

It was all suddenly clear to her. This ring was her safe passage. She would go to the Doge. She had failed in her mission to keep the Plague from his door, but she could invoke the ring, awaken memories of his beloved lost niece Cecilia Baffo, and beg for safe passage back to Turkey.

She tied a
yemine
veil across her face again, suddenly ready to leave this place where she had shared her father’s
last hours, where she had passed her hands through the dewy grass, where she had found the betony and the coin. But just as she looked around for one last time, she heard a clunk and splash against the pier outside.

Feyra ran to the gate and peered through the little arch of the wheelhouse. A coracle had bumped up against the dock and a man in long robes stepped ashore, tying his painter to the sea-pole.

She hid in the gatehouse, breathless, and watched him through the great arched doorway. He was hobbling a little and on closer inspection, from his age and weight, she guessed he was gouty. As he drew within an armspan of her she could hear that he breathed with a slight wheeze – he’d either suffered from lung fever as a babe, or worked in a place where he breathed ill air. She did not think the latter was likely for she could see that his robes were made of vair and velvet. He wore, too, a black soft four-cornered hat. In Constantinople the wearing of a hat denoted status. And he wore it as if it were the same here. His face was kindly, his eyes benign, his beard grey. She was tempted to reveal herself and appeal to him in his own tongue, but something made her hold back, so she watched instead, while the man walked around the ruin. She held her breath, praying that he would stay away from the well. Her prayers were answered; he seemed to have no interest in it. He busied himself, instead, pacing one way and the other. He seemed to be counting under his breath, and every now and again he would stop, and take out a tablet and stylus, and mark his findings down. She heard an utterance clearly once, but it made no sense to her. He said, ‘Sixteen by forty
passi
.’

For more than an hour he walked his strange measure, and once stooped to dig up a little soil, as if he too sought a cure. He placed the sample in his satchel, and before he left he lifted a small brick that he found on the sward to the light, tapped it once, and placed it in his bag too.

Feyra watched as the man returned to his boat. She considered, once again, asking him to row her to the city, but again something prevented her. As he rowed away, she breathed a sigh of relief and regret.

She had not been discovered, but now, for the first time since she’d left her home, she was truly alone.

Chapter 14

O
n his second day back in his home city of Venice Annibale Cason did not dress carefully in front of the mirror. He left the beak mask hanging over the looking-glass, and it watched him leave the chamber.

He did not march out of the house, nor did he go to meet Valnetti at daybreak in the Campo Santa Maria Nova, as he had been specifically instructed after his insubordination of yesterday evening. Instead he padded downstairs in his nightshirt, pulling from beneath it a little key that he’d worn round his neck for seven years.

The little gold key on the gold chain was warm from his sleeping skin. He’d worn it next to his chest since just before he went to Padua, a boy of fourteen, when the last of his many aunts died. Then and only then did the family notary give him the key to the Cason coffer, a bequest from the father he’d never known.

Annibale took his candle down to the wine cellar, his bare feet chilling on the stones. The wine barrels groaned and shifted as they fermented, and reacted to the changes in temperature that Annibale’s presence brought to the room. When he was a boy and had come down here he had thought the cellar was haunted. He could hear then, as he could now, the canal lapping against the stones outside, for
the cellar where the Cason family had kept their wine and salt for centuries was underwater.

The Cason family, of which Annibale was now the only scion.

He would be safe and secret here, and just as well; for it would not do for the servants to see the casket.

Annibale had been careful with the family fortune for all these years, not squandering the gold and roistering around town as his fellows did, but paying merely for his tuition, bed and board; and at the end of his seven years, his suit of doctor’s clothes. So, when he rolled out the fourth barrel of Valpolicella from the left, the small coffer hidden behind it was almost full.

He set down the candle on the floor, dripping a pool of tallow to stand the taper in, the wax hissing like a cat at the damp stones. Then Annibale leaned forward to unlock the box without taking the key from around his neck; he had once sworn never to take it off. He inserted it into the lock and opened the lid of the oak strongbox. The brass bounding bands of the coffer fell back with a clang.

The box was stuffed with a shoal of the little gold coins known as sequins, dozens upon dozens of them. They sat in a little tray which formed a false bottom to the casket. Below the tray was greater treasure; a layer of golden ducats. He picked out one of the ducats and looked carefully at both faces, the Doge in his distinctive
corno
hat kneeling before Saint Mark on one side and the Christ on the other. He clasped the coin for a moment until it grew warm in his hand before dropping it back with its fellows and replacing the tray. There would be enough – more than enough for his purpose.

He took a mouseskin purse from the lid of the strongbox
and counted four gold ducats into it. He distributed a handful of sequins about his pockets then locked the coffer again. Then he found an old brass goblet that had rolled beneath the wine barrels and polished it on his cambric nightshirt until it gave off a dull gilt gleam in the candlelight. Annibale brought that along too. It was always advisable, in Venice, to have a bribe in your pocket.

He went back upstairs and dressed in half the time he’d taken yesterday. He left the house with the Cason casket, once again with a spring in his step, but for a different reason. Annibale may have lost the first sortie against Death, but the battle wasn’t over.

It wasn’t hard to find a boat at the Fondamenta Nuove. Trade and travel alike had ground to a standstill and the boatmen and gondoliers that were well stood idle on the dock. He picked a stout fellow who looked like a good rower. The boatman raised an eyebrow at Annibale’s instruction, but a gold sequin shut him up.

As they headed for the islands he had seen the previous evening Annibale stood firm in the stern. His years in Padua had not robbed him of his sea legs; he had, still, that innate ability born to all Venetians of being able to stand, static and steady, in a boat. Masked once again, he stood like a figurehead, looking forward, only forward, and the affable boatman got no more conversation out of him than if he was a mammet.

Annibale watched the island of Murano slide past, where the glass furnaces now lay silent, then Burano where lacemakers no longer sat in the doorways of the coloured houses. On Torcello the bell of the cathedral tolled dolefully, numbering the dead; telling him that the Plague had reached its shore. But when the boats reached the lazarets,
there was peace. Annibale directed the boatman to the island of Vigna Murada, the quarantine island.

As they drew near, Annibale could see a dun wasteland fringed by trees and some sort of walled structure. There was a long jetty terminated by a wooden boathouse. What they saw there made the boatman ship his oars and pull the collar of his coat over his mouth. On the boathouse, as tall as a man, was painted a ragged red cross.

‘Wait here if you’d rather,’ snapped Annibale, noting the boatman’s reluctance to continue up the channel. The boatman tied up by three little steps, and Annibale, making sure that the mouseskin purse and the brass cup were still safely stowed in his sleeve, jumped out; concealing, still, the Cason treasure beneath his cloak. He flipped the boatman another sequin and ordered him, coldly, to wait.

At the head of a jetty was a gatehouse set into the great wall, with a door that looked very firmly closed. Just outside it sat two men, one old and one young, fishing in the lagoon. The greybeard was already watching the doctor’s approach, alert; but the young fellow was staring into space with eyes of glass, a thin silver line of drool hanging from lip to lap like a fishing line. The boy’s feet dangled well above the waterline; his arms were short and his torso abbreviated; only his head was the dimension of a man’s, and seemed oversized on the squat body. His skull was oddly shaped, the bones malformed from birth, Annibale guessed. He had seen such dwarves before – most were drowned on delivery; others were taken for actors in the
commedia
, for some had all the normal faculties and could speak and sing. Annibale had seen such a wight at the court of Padua, where the Duke had kept it in his cabinet of curiosities, and had taught it to tell rude histories. But this one was clearly a
simpleton. Annibale ignored the boy and greeted the elder instead.

‘I am Doctor Annibale Cason from the
Consiglio della Sanita
,’ he lied. ‘Are you the gatekeeper of this place?’

The old fellow shrugged. ‘I was,
Dottore
, till the plague maiden came. Then everyone took and gone. The
Consiglio di Marittima
decreed that no ships should come in and out of the city till we be clean again. Last one came past here Tuesday – in a terrible storm. A galleass called the
Cavaliere
. We shouted at it, waved torches, but it didn’t stop.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Annibale, attempting to stem the ceaseless flow. ‘So everyone has gone? The marshals, the fortymen? The
bastazi
and their families?’

‘Yes,
Dottore
. All gone and only one boat been by since excepting yourself,
signore
, which brought the letters from the
Consiglio
. They’re smoking the mail now, of course – I got a letter this morning and I could barely read it it was so yellowed—’

‘Of course,’ interjected Annibale. ‘So they’ve all gone then?’

‘Everyone,
Dottore
. They all picked up their sticks, and went to Treporti. All except me and the boy.’ The greybeard lifted his bestubbled chin. ‘I am the gatekeeper, and, by God, I’ll keep the gate. We live here,
Dottore
, my boy never known no different.’

Fled to the mainland
. Annibale nodded to himself, the beak of his mask describing a sweeping arc before his face. It made sense. The rich always fled to their villas in the Veneto, the poor to Treporti. He glanced at the dwarf who was still fishing doggedly, without apparently marking the conversation at all. ‘Can you let me see about the place?’

‘Certainly,
Dottore
. I’ll just let you through. Come on,’ he shouted to the boy. Father and son left their rods and together the odd little trio went to the gatehouse, the greybeard talking all the time, the boy trotting to keep up on his little legs. At the door the old man took out a ring of keys. The main gate led to a low arch, offering Annibale a tantalizing glance of what lay beyond. But there was business to attend to first. Annibale indicated a low door in the wall to their left.

‘And this is your dwelling?’

‘Such as it is,
Dottore
, such as it is.’ The old fellow invited him in with a flourish as if he bid him enter the Palazzo Ducale itself, yet there was not much in the gatehouse beside a table, chairs and a smoking hearth. ‘I got the job of gatekeeper of the Vigna Murada when I first married, San Matteo’s day it was; a score of years ago. I came here with my wife but when we had the boy she took one look at him and was gone. Left as soon as she was churched, she did.’

Annibale glanced at the boy, but the grey eyes were as calm as the lagoon. ‘What are your names?’

‘I’m Bocca Trapani, and this here is Salve.’ Bocca was not a Christian name, but Annibale suspected the gatekeeper was called so because he talked incessantly, almost enough to make up for his silent son. He could not have the fellow showing him around, he wanted to think. Salve was a name often given to the afflicted: literally, it meant ‘to heal’ or ‘to save’; the gatekeeper must be devout. Annibale had an idea.