The Venetian Contract (26 page)

Sometimes Palladio would ask about Sinan himself, and she tried to recall as much as she could about the turbanned, quiet little man. And there were similarities between Mimar Sinan and Andrea Palladio: bearded, kindly, utterly obsessed with their creation, the two could have been brothers-over-the-sea. Yet as often as Palladio would ask about the new build, he would ask about the old.

Again and again Palladio asked Feyra to tell him of the Mosque of Ey
ü
p, where the standard bearer of her Prophet lay enshrined. He seemed captivated by immortality through building, the notion of pilgrims streaming to worship centuries after the architect was dead and gone. He did not seem to make a distinction between his god and hers, and Feyra began to wonder if he had a point. If Sinan and Palladio were two sides of the same coin, like the coin that she wore in her bodice, perhaps the god of the West and the god of the East were likewise. Perhaps Palladio’s Almighty and her Allah were looking-glass gods.

She chided herself for the impure thought, and would climb the stairs each night and pray loud enough to drown out the constant bells. She’d learned the canonical hours from Corona Cucina and those alien times now measured her days – Matins, Prime, Tierce, Sext and Nones. The cook was forever telling her rosary beads and Corona Cucina’s unswerving faith reminded Feyra of the Salaah, her own rule of prayer. She swore to keep it in her heart and head
even if she could not wash and kneel at the five required times, the Eastern reflections of the canonical hours; but the demands of her tasks and the hours of the household’s meals did not accommodate her, and she soon forgot.

When she did remember, she prayed fervently and hopelessly, clutching her yellow slipper. She would have prayed even harder had she known that one evening, in a dark corner of the Doge’s palace, an unseen hand had slipped a piece of paper into a letterbox. The box itself was a mere slit in the wall, but it was set into a great stone relief of a lion’s face and positioned where the creature’s mouth would have been. Behind the stone mask was a strong box in the office of the Camerlengo, a coffer opened only by the chamberlain’s hand. On this occasion, the denunciation that the lion consumed contained just a few lines written in an awkward hand: directions to the house of the gold callipers, and the name of Feyra Adalet bint Timurhan Murad.

Chapter 24

A
s time passed Feyra reflected more and more on the concept of
Mizan
– the balance.

She’d always believed that the sickness of the mind was as detrimental to the human spirit as sickness of the body, and Palladio was a case in point. Feyra had cured Palladio’s malaise, and unlocked his passions. She still spent her mornings with him, talking of the great edifices of the East, but his afternoons and evenings were spent drawing new plans for his domed church with Zabato Zabatini.

Tradesmen came from the scriveners with reams of new-smelling paper and pots of ink, sticks of dusky charcoal and blotting sawdust smelling of wick wood. And the draughtsman drew until he dropped, well into the night, with Palladio peering over him or pacing behind him, talking and waving his hands to describe the arches and pillars in the air. And, on the paper, a miracle began to rise, an earthly twin of Palladio’s ethereal vision, set down in black and white, each dimension perfectly to scale, each measurement exquisitely described, exact plans to be given to the masons and committed to stone.

For the first time Feyra appreciated Zabato’s skill. While Palladio’s drawings were a caprice, a fantasy, Zabato tethered them to the earth, drew them with no passion but exactitude, made the fantastic possible.

Feyra no longer worried for Palladio’s mind, but she was now worried for his earthly shell. She would listen to the music of his chest as he leaned over the plans and knew that if the Plague entered this house now, he would be taken. She thought about the visit of the Birdman physician. She could hardly believe that the doctors in Venice went about so garbed, like they were wild shamans of the savages, and she was astonished to discover from his conversation with Palladio that he was known as the best plague doctor in Venice. She had only agreed with some of what he’d said – what he said about housing certainly chimed with her conception of
Mizan
, and a face mask may well protect her master from the miasma of the streets – but she found his dismissal of Palladio’s peril a little too glib. Preventative medicine for the well was as important as curative medicine for the sick, especially for one whose malady of the lungs might make him more susceptible to airborne diseases. Very well, if the Birdman doctor would not care for her master, she would.

One morning Feyra took courage and went to Zabato Zabatini and told him what she wanted done. She found him in the
cabinetto
cutting the alabaster sheets of fresh paper to size. He listened to the long, long list in silence, then took off his eye-glasses and rubbed his shock of hair. ‘Feyra,’ he said. ‘What you ask is impossible.’ He set his glasses back on his nose. ‘Our master is in full flow with his church, and will not tolerate any upheaval in this house.’

Feyra set her chin. ‘How are your hands?’

Zabato Zabatini spread his fingers before him and looked at them as if he saw them for the first time. The scaling and
soreness had completely gone – the flesh was supple and clean.

Feyra raised her brows.

He sighed. ‘Very well.’

Feyra did not go to Palladio that morning. Instead she set Corona Cucina to make a great crock of potash and goose-fat, which she used to fill in the cracks about each window, and she tied each casement closed with twine. Winter was coming, and there was no argument from the household. Once Palladio began to visit the site on Giudecca Feyra directed Zabato to take him there in a gondola with a
felze
, a black tented cover, so that he would not be exposed to the air. In the great chamber she had her master’s bedding washed and smoked and the curtains rubbed with camphor. Feyra made a firepowder of equal parts of wood aloes, storax and calamite. She mixed the components in a mortar with rosewater of Damascus, and fashioned the paste into small, oblong briquettes to set on the household fires.

She shut off the tradesmen’s door which was reached by a tramp through the foul courtyard, and insisted instead that every visitor to the house, great or lowly, should enter by the principal door in the square, under the sign of the gold callipers. The great door led into a small atrium that housed coats, hats and canes, before another pair of doors which were kept open. Feyra had the little coat room cleared, the stone flags swept and covered with rushes steeped in rue and potash, then sprinkled them with cassia, vinegar and rosewater. In the wall sconces she set candles she had made herself, from wood ash, mutton tallow and water, each one impregnated with woody shreds of frankincense from her belt. Each visitor had to pass through the smoky hallway, and clean their feet on the rushes and herbs.
Feyra directed sternly that when the door to the street was open, the doors to the household were closed; when the household doors were open the door to the street was shut.

Palladio, if he noticed these measures, did not comment. He was not troubled by anything so long as it did not interfere with his work.

And nothing did, until the night it seemed the Plague had indeed come for him.

Chapter 25

I
t was the dead of night, and Feyra was birthed from some nameless nightmare at the sound of a sharp knock on her door.

Bleary-eyed, she opened it to find Zabato Zabatini, dressed in a nightshirt, blinking in the light of his candle. ‘
Come and see
,’ he said.

She flinched at the phrase, unable at this hour to place it, but she came without question and followed him down through the crazy shadows of the candle-lit staircase.

Zabato whispered to her fiercely as they descended. ‘My master is in a fever, and there is a swelling protruding from his flesh as big as a medlar.’

Feyra stumbled a little, numb with foreboding. She steeled herself. ‘His fingertips – are they black?’

The wild head of grey hair before and below her shook from side to side. ‘I do not know.’

Two floors down from her own attic room was her master’s chamber, a place where she laid and cleared the fire each day, with a great bed and four posts. She drew aside the heavy camphor-impregnated curtains of the bed. There he was in his nightcap and gown, twisted and fevered on his bed, his beard and hair damp with perspiration. But she was encouraged. His complexion had flushed and reddened, not
become dark or sallow as a Plague-drained visage; his fingers, when she took them up, were pink and when she pressed their stone-hardened tips the blood rushed back into the white bruise with his heartbeat. Instructing Zabato to hold the candle still she examined his armpits. Although damp with sweat, they were unblemished.

Without a thought for propriety she was about to raise his gown to check the groin, when she saw the swelling that Zabato had mentioned. It protruded from the side of his Palladio’s left knee, yellow and firm as a quince. She was instantly relieved. This was not Plague. But the relief was short-lived, for her master was old, and in the grip of a grave fever.

Corona Cucina, who had entered with some grappa for the master, set down her tray with a clatter by the bedside, and took to crossing herself so fast that her hand was a blur at her bosom. ‘Is it Plague? Is it the end?’ she wailed.

‘No,’ said Feyra shortly, and handed her back the grappa. ‘Take this – it is no good to him. Boil it till it bubbles then bring it back.’ She thought she knew the cause of the swelling. Palladio had gout. She had recognized his malady the very first time she had seen him limping around the ruin on Giudecca the day her father had died. This swelling of the knee, from the fluid that had accrued at the joint, was infected and must be lanced. She sighed as she took off her medicine belt and laid out what she needed. If she had had the care of this man she could have managed the gout and Palladio need never have reached this pass.

She heated her silver scalpel in the blue heart of the candle, then laid it by to cool. Then she brought out a little of her precious wood betony, and some of the lemon balm
for healing. She tore a strip of the master’s linen and powdered it with lime. All was ready.

With a dreadful sense of repetition she lanced the gouty swelling and watched the greenish pus drain off. She waited and dabbed it once with Corona Cucina’s steaming grappa. Then she took her needle and thread and drew it through the liquor to wet it. ‘Mercy!’ said the cook, watching closely. ‘You are never going to sew our master like a cushion?’

‘Hold his leg,’ said Feyra in answer, ‘and pour the rest of the grappa down his throat if he wakes.’

In Ottoman society alcohol was forbidden, but it was permitted in hospitals to be used as medicine. In the Topkapi palace the imperial pages of the third court used to pretend to be ill in order to be admitted to the hospital and drink the wine. Feyra smiled grimly at the memory and heated the needle in the flame, this time without cooling it the heat would better cauterize the flesh – then she began to sew the wound, neatly, stitch by stitch. As Haji Musa had taught her, she looped the wine-soaked thread beneath each stitch to anchor it. Once the thread was tied and cut, she opened a leather capsa from her medicine belt and poured a little ground glass over the wound, laid betony over the whole and tied the leg with the limed linen. Palladio did not seem sensible of any of it.

‘I will stay here the night,’ Feyra said to Zabato, and he nodded, escorting Corona Cucina, protesting loudly, from the room.

In the grey hours Feyra’s head bumped the footboard as she dropped at last into sleep and she woke with the Matins bells to find her patient sleeping too, cool to the touch, breathing evenly, his cheeks rosy, not hectic.

Relieved, she crept downstairs again, to be shooed back
to her attic by Corona Cucina, who, alone of the household, knew how she’d passed the night.