The Venetian Contract (30 page)

Feyra was at his shoulder, by the great medicine cabinet at the back wall of the Tezon. She asked the question with no preamble.

Annibale thought of the Camerlengo, who had asked the same question. ‘Because they may have been infected by the miasma of their relations. You see, if you cut out a canker …’

She was not interested in his metaphor. ‘Do they get word of them?’

‘What?’

‘Do the
families
–’ she spoke as he did to the dwarf ‘– get word of their
loved ones
?’

‘No, of course not.’

She looked at him.

Annibale had thought that having her face covered would be a relief to him; but he still had to endure what he called to himself ‘the look’. Her amber eyes would gaze at him, not with censure, nor with pity, but with something of the flavour of both and ‘the look’ always left him with an overlying notion that he had in some way disappointed her. He felt moved to defend himself. ‘You think I have time to—’

‘I do. And the sisters of the Miracoli do.’

Within a week she had made arrangements.

She had shown great interest in a letter Bocca had brought him from the
Consiglio della Sanita
. The content, that all new medicines developed to fight the Plague must be registered, and their constituents listed with the
Consiglio
, was of no importance to her. She did however peer at the paper itself over his shoulder, making him uncomfortable with her closeness.

‘Why is it discoloured?’ She pointed. ‘And why is there this white slab, here?’

He looked where she pointed. The letter was in a close hand, written by an official secretary, and the paper brown as a speckled hen, except in one long rectangle, in a diagonal across the script, where the paper retained its original alabaster, and the ink showed black as pitch. ‘It has been smoked,’ he replied. ‘This is commonplace at times of
Plague, so that the pestilence is not passed from one
sestiere
to the other with the mail. See, here are two seals –’ he turned the letter over ‘– one from the sender, the red one, and the orange one from the Council of Health.’ He showed her the two circles of wax.

She was interested. ‘And the white place?’

‘Where tongs have been used to hold the letter above a smoking cabinet.’

Within a week she had instituted a similar system whereby she would smoke letters between the families, and hand them to the patients herself. Annibale watched as she stood over the afflicted while they read the notes, or read them aloud to the sicklier ones in her accented Veneto. To his amazement they smiled, even the dying, and he could see, by the way her amber eyes narrowed above her veil, that she smiled too.

Annibale discovered she knew all of the patients by name. ‘Number one needs a poultice,’ he had told her in passing.

She had stood in his path and given him ‘the look’. ‘Which one is number one?’

‘The fellow at the very end.’

‘That is Stefano. He is Tommaso’s brother.’

‘Tommaso?

She gave him the look. ‘Number fifteen.’ He was genuinely surprised.

‘It might be a kindness to lie them together.’

She made other changes too – more often than not without asking. He knew she thought he was too keen on surgery and cut the patients for no reason. She would never pick up the knife, unless she had to. He told her to leech the patients daily, for he bred leeches in one of the leets by
the salt flats and had an endless supply. But she looked at the slivers of liver grey undulating in their jar with distaste and he never once saw her bleed anyone.

Instead she began to isolate the patients, not just from their families but from each other. She hung curtains between them for greater privacy, great squares of linen steeped in camphor. She washed the patients daily and encouraged the families themselves to do likewise. When Annibale questioned her, she quoted at him the saying of Mohammed. ‘Clean yourself,’ she intoned sternly, ‘and God will purify you all.’ The extraordinary girl even had the nuns lining up by a deep little pool beyond the blackthorn to take their plunge. Annibale, shocked to catch a glimpse of holy alabaster thigh as he stood on the
torresin
one day, was perplexed by the relationship between the Badessa and Feyra. The two women thought each other infidels, but the Badessa not only lent her support to the postal service Feyra had instigated, but laid down the daily ablutions as the rule of law. Annibale tolerated Feyra’s caprice until she turned her topaz eyes on him and uttered the outrageous words, ‘You could do with a wash yourself.’

Feyra also set great store by what she called
diata
– diet. She encouraged the nuns to grow as much produce as they could and marked off a little field beyond the gardens expressly for growing vegetables. She ploughed it with a handshare, with only the little dwarf to help her, and tilled it herself. She cleaned out the ovens below the customs house where the nuns had made their dormitory, and had them baking bread day and night, stoking the ovens with mulberry wood and nutshells. ‘In Constantinople,’ she told Annibale seriously, ‘if you drop a piece of bread in the
street, somebody picks it up. Bread is sacred, it supports life and health.’ The Badessa, who had to be persuaded to let Feyra into the customs house beyond the lychgate and light the ovens, was heard to comment gratefully that for the first time in weeks, the sisters were warm at night.

The Badessa was complicit in another of the changes that Feyra had brought to his island. Feyra told Annibale that in the hospitals of Constantinople, it was commonplace to have music played day and night. Some of the hospitals, she told him, even had their own band. With her usual dispatch, within a day of imparting this information, she had the sisters of the Miracoli intoning psalms, motets and hymns upon the green, whenever they were not about their observances.

And the music was not always sacred. Feyra would find out the patients’ favourite songs. She would winkle out their favourite folk ditties, or rhymes from the nursery if they were not long out of the schoolroom, or sailors’ macaroons if they were old seagoers, and have the families sing outside the walls, at a safe distance. She even sang to the patients herself as she took their pulses, a strange, melodious drone, the rhythm of which became progressively slower and slower. She maintained, when asked, that such chants regulated the heartbeat of the afflicted.

Annibale thought it all nonsense, but even he had to admit that to hear the island ringing with song amidst all the death was lightening to the heart, and he would not wish her oddly beautiful voice silent in the Tezon. And he would have put a stop to the changes at once if he had found them medically detrimental. But if he would not admit it to Feyra, he had to be honest with himself: since she had come to the island, the Bills of Mortality, that he had to write in
his own hand in the evenings by his lonely fireside, had markedly diminished in number.

Among all the death there was life. Soon after Feyra’s arrival on the island Valentina, a newly married girl, had begun to puke and swoon. The Birdman did not concern himself with women’s troubles but Feyra, who had seen the signs many times before, knew that she was with child. The raven-haired Venetian girl was young to be a mother, with the waist of a weasel and narrow hips no wider, and Feyra saw trouble ahead for her when her time came, but that was in the future. Hope must always be good.

Sometimes Feyra wondered what the Birdman looked like for she never once saw him without his mask. Sometimes she saw the mask itself, lying outside the private dorters she had constructed in the Tezon, and then she knew he must be performing one of his many surgeries; close work which would be hampered by the beak.

It was on one of those occasions that she made one of the changes she did not consult the doctor about. She put her hand deep in the beak and pulled out the dusty, ancient, and – in her opinion – ineffectual herbs. She took off her medicine belt and reached in capsa and pocket and flap for the herbs she sought. Stealthily she placed them within the beak, with a good bunch of lemon balm near the nose, just as had been there before. It would neither make nor mar him, but would hopefully mask the scent of the other plants she had placed there. Then she put the mask back exactly as it had lain and fled.

Feyra presumed that he left the mask off inside his own house, which lay directly opposite hers across the square
lawn beyond the Tezon. Sometimes she could see his light on at night: a golden square suspended in the black velvet. She imagined the Birdman poring over medical texts and envied him; her hands itched to turn the pages of a book. She wondered if he slept in the beak, and the thought made her giggle. She wondered how old he was. Sometimes he spoke like a seasoned greybeard, but other things he said made her think he was quite young and not long out of medical school. He never conversed, only spoke to give curt orders and was not interested in her beyond her medical knowledge. In this way he reminded her very much of Palladio.

She wondered about the architect, and Zabato, and was anxious for news of them when the Birdman returned from the city at the end of each month. He had kept his contract with Palladio and visited the architect at each new moon, and told Feyra how he seemed when she asked, but said no more.

She wondered if they ever thought of her. Palladio had wanted her for her knowledge of Constantinople, and for Zabato she reminded him of the woman he had once loved. And now the Birdman wanted her for the physic she could give. So many Feyras, so many compartments of her being. She wondered if she would ever be in the company of someone who would want to know the whole Feyra.

Chapter 28

F
eyra tried to counsel herself against feeling safe.

She’d felt safe at home in Constantinople, and had been sent away from everything she’d known. Then she’d felt safe in Palladio’s house before being forced to flee. This island was the last place she’d expected to feel at home, but somehow, she did. She had her house, she had her tasks, and she had her Birdman.

The nuns had gone from tolerance to civility to friendliness. The Badessa had unbent so far as to talk about her girlhood in Otranto. The name of this Italian coastal town was well known to Feyra; all Turks knew it for it was a place where the Ottomans had once besieged and then massacred the entire population. Neither woman alluded to the massacre during their conversation, and it had happened years before the Badessa was even born; but Feyra, walking back to the Tezon after their brief conference, was left with the distinct impression that it was the Badessa was trying to apologize for something.

Salve the dwarf had also become a firm friend. The quiet, sensitive boy would come to her in the evenings sometimes and showed a wisdom that his limited speech belied. Little by little, she tried to teach him to express what he wanted to say. Some of the things he said jolted her; she’d been used to
speaking to him as a child, but a child he was not. She liked him – better than his father Bocca, who looked at her sometimes in a way she did not like. She knew the gatekeeper for a devout, and wondered if, while the nuns had the tolerance to ignore her faith, he had not.

Sometimes Feyra thought of the crew of
Il Cavaliere
, and of Takat Turan who had been her champion. He would be dead of the Plague by now, she thought, and mourned his bravery. But now they all, even her father, seemed to come from another life; insubstantial as ghosts or the silhouettes of the
Karagoz
shadow theatre that she used to attend in Beyoglu. She still saved her sequins in her yellow slipper every week, but thought less and less about Constantinople. And as the growing belly of Valentina Trianni, the young pregnant wife, marked the passing months, the people on the Lazzaretto Novo became her life.

Especially one.

The Birdman was her constant belligerent and her foil. He was the barb in her side and the fly in her liniment. But her discussions with him, and the battle between them for the rule of the Tezon among all the dead and dying, made her, conversely, feel more alive than she’d ever been. They laid siege to the hospital; she was Saladin, he was the Lionheart, and the Tezon was their Holy City. Neither East nor West could prevail, and the supremacy exchanged hands almost daily in a constant stalemate.

For months Feyra had argued with the Birdman about his methods. She knew that in Padua there was a fashion for surgery, and the skills of herbalism had receded, but she did not know how his incessant leeching and draining could help the patients. And he could not see how carrying letters between the almshouses and the Tezon, or singing a childhood
ditty, could lift the spirits of the sick. Feyra did not tell him how she knew for certain that the draining of the plague boils was ineffectual; she had tried it as a last resort to save her father, and it had failed. She knew that the Birdman based his entire medical philosophy on the principles of Galen, the Greek pagan; but she found it a house of cards. She had tried to point out to the doctor that the mortality rates of those he cut were significantly higher than those he let be, but he would not listen.