The Venetian Contract (32 page)

She inclined her head a little. ‘What does your name mean?’

‘I have no notion,’ he snapped, annoyed with himself for using his full title.

‘Mine means “justice drops from my mouth”,’ she said.

She was well named, thought Annibale, for her mouth was particularly beautiful – it was full and rose-coloured and the top lip was slightly bigger than the bottom.

She looked into the fire again. ‘In my country the meaning of your name is everything. We never name a child
without very careful consideration. It is very important in my faith. I am surprised you Venetians do not know the significance of yours.’

Annibale stretched his legs out before him until his boots were nearly in the fire. ‘There is little to know. We are mostly named for saints and days.’

Saints and days. Then she remembered, as she looked at the lightening sky. ‘It is Valentina’s birthday. The feast, she told me, of Saint Valentine. And,’ she said, ‘there is Zabato Zabatini, named for a lucky day.’ She wondered about her old friend and his master, and the church that grew around her father’s grave. ‘And your Saint Nonnatus, we now know why he was called so.’ She looked at him. ‘So you see, some of your names have meaning, even if yours does not.’

He was silent for a time. ‘I did not speak truly,’ he said, with difficulty. ‘I know why I am called Annibale.’

She waited.

‘Annibale was a general from Carthage, and in the second Punic campaign he rode war elephants across the Alps into Italy against the might of Rome. When he set off, he had no idea what he was riding into, or if he would ever reach his destination.’

She too was silent. She remembered the reciprocal tradition of storytelling, and how she had exchanged stories with Death. ‘In the Ottoman Empire,’ she began, ‘the camel traders have stopping places along their trade routes called caravanserai. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles apart, over desert or mountain range, but they travel safe in the knowledge that there will be a place where they can shelter and find succour at the end of their journey. Even if they have never been that way before, they are sure that there
will be such a place; that sooner or later, they will find a caravanserai.’

Annibale sat forward, interested. ‘
How
do they know?’

‘They do not know. They have faith.’

He sat back again. ‘I think Annibale did too. That is why my mother named me so.’ She could see that it cost him to talk of her. ‘She liked the story. She said no one could know what lay beyond today, but you had to hope, and be brave, and trust that all would be well.’

The Camerlengo eyed the man before him. He was wearing the slashed doublet and red hat of a gondolier, and they were never the most honest of men. But the fellow’s eyes were wide, his speech clear. The Camerlengo knew a liar when he heard one, and did not think he heard one now.

‘You are sure?’

‘Sure as I’m standing here, your honour. Cosimo, his name is, and he works the Tre Archi bridge. Thursday last it was – he said he picked up a woman from the address you were asking about. He remembered the fare because the fellow that called for him particularly asked for a
felze
.’ The man eyed the Camerlengo and felt moved to explain. ‘A covered gondola.’

The Camerlengo was accustomed to being taken for a foreigner. ‘Was there anyone travelling with her?’

The gondolier shrugged. ‘He didn’t say.’

The Camerlengo raised his pale brows. ‘Yet he told you this much?’

‘He was boasting about it in the locanda. Said he was going to be rich.’

The Camerlengo steepled his hands. Gondoliers were
notoriously greedy and venal; moreover, they had no sense of collective loyalty. He knew once a bounty had been offered it would not be long before one of their number came knocking on his door. Yet something did not quite add up.

‘Why, do you suppose, has he not come to claim the bounty himself?’

‘That I don’t know, your honour.’ The gondolier shuffled his feet. ‘Can I have my ducats now?’

The Camerlengo eyed him, then rose. ‘Why don’t you take me to him first?’

The Camerlengo could have taken a consort of
Leoni
, but he did not. He chose instead the two guards who had first let the girl go. He chose them deliberately, for he knew and they knew that they owed him their lives. He did not wait for his cap or cloak, but walked straight down the stone stairs as he was, in his black leather garb, with the guards at his heels and the gondolier trotting before.

The gondolier nosed his boat through secret and unknown canals, stagnant waterways so narrow that the sun would only strike them at midday. The way he took was a considerable shortcut but the Camerlengo, seated in the prow, was silent with impatience.

At Tre Archi he strode after the boatman without saying a word, the plague smoke swirling about his heels. Under a small
sotoportego
in a poor part of the
quartiere
, he watched the gondolier count the doors to his colleague’s house. twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …’

The man’s voice died. Number fifteen was barred with a rough plank of wood, and on the door was painted a red and ragged cross.

The Camerlengo said nothing for a moment. Then, in a
voice of absolute calm, he commanded the guards: ‘Enquire of the neighbours. You –’ he turned to the first guard ‘– take sixteen. And you –’ he turned to the second ‘– take fourteen.’

In a moment they were back.

‘He died,’ said one.

‘Last night,’ said the other.

The gondolier began to back away from the fury that leapt in the chamberlain’s eyes, but the Camerlengo thrust out his glove and caught the man by the scruff of the neck. With one fluid motion he lifted the bar, kicked the door open and thrust the man inside the pestilent house, bolting the door behind him.

Chapter 29

F
rom that day onwards Annibale and Feyra were friends.

In the evenings after their last rounds of the patients the two of them would cleanse themselves, leave the Tezon and go back to Annibale’s house.

Feyra noticed more about him, the way his voice rose when he was excited, and his nostrils flared a little when he spoke. She noticed too that he wore something about his neck upon a chain, just as she wore the ribbon that held her mother’s ring about her own neck and wondered if he wore a remembrance of his mother too. In the morning Feyra was often dead-eyed in the Tezon, yawning behind her veil, for each night she went back to her own house later and later, crossing the green sometimes as the water-white line of dawn showed on the horizon, unseen except for one pair of eyes – the old eyes of the Badessa, opening the church for Matins.

It did not occur to Annibale that their meetings compromised Feyra. To him their evenings were a professional arrangement; so when the Badessa warned him about the propriety of spending time alone together he was short with her. ‘We
work
in the evenings. We speak of medical matters. We prepare our potions and ointments. When else are we to do such things, in the hours of the day? There is no
difference than if she were a man.’ But he believed it no more than the Badessa did. The truth was his evenings with Feyra were the best part of his day.

Feyra would cook a simple supper. The ingredients were only what could be bought in Treporti or grown on the island, but the way she put them together and the flavours she brought out were new to Annibale. Afterwards he would take a glass of wine and they would sit by the fire. By tacit consent neither of them would wear their masks; Feyra left off her veil, as she had done in her father’s house, and Annibale hung his beak by the door. Then they would broach medical topics or talk of herbs. Feyra would teach Annibale how to make the syrupy
serbets
and juleps, or the doughy paste known as a
ma’cun
. Sometimes they would prepare a posset of unguent on the big butcher’s block Annibale had bought for the purpose.

They would pore over medical texts together, Annibale helping Feyra as she stumbled over the Latin. She was interested to note that one book of incredibly detailed anatomical drawings that Annibale showed her, was by the same Leonardo da Vinci who had drawn the Vitruvian Man. In return she would tell him about the work of the great Ottoman physician Serafeddin Sabuncuo
ğ
lu, and the
aqrabadhin
medical formularies in the libraries of Topkapi. When she mentioned the most treasured manuscript of the Sultan’s palace –
Al-manhaj al-sawi
, Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti’s masterful discussion of medicine as expressed in the sayings of the Prophet – she was delighted to hear that the volume was not unknown to him. Padua, it seemed, had a world view of medicine.

Feyra told Annibale of the six non-naturals that made up the balance of
Mizan
in human life: ‘Light and air,’ she said,
counting these building blocks of health upon her fingers, ‘food and drink, work and rest, sleep and waking, excretions and secretions, including –’ she coughed a little ‘– baths and sexual intercourse, and lastly dispositions and the states of the soul.’

In reply, Annibale told Feyra of the balance of the four humours; a subject on which they found some agreement – the black bile, red blood, white bile and pale phlegm representing the sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments. For a moment she thought she saw a connection of enormous significance between the humours and the four horses her mother had described. They were black, red, white and pale, too. She asked Annibale if he had ever heard of four horses of these colours, ever read of them in one of his many books. He shrugged. ‘In church as a child, perhaps. But I have had little to do with scripture since. I remember they were said to carry Death.’ The conversation left her feeling uneasy. She touched the ring at her bosom, almost as a charm to ward off evil.

As they grew closer, they would broach other subjects. Soon they were exchanging histories. Feyra did not break her mother’s confidence, but she told Annibale about her parents and slowly Annibale began to talk about the mother who had abandoned him. She was a woman who, it seemed, had hurt him so much that, although his outward shell was healthy and handsome, his soul was more damaged than any occupant of the Tezon. Feyra soon perceived the reason for his discomfiture.

‘She was a courtesan?’

‘No,’ he said savagely, ‘not at first. My father was a gentleman of Venice, and when he died she left me – just a boy – in the arms of my aunts. And I scarcely saw her
between the ages of five and twenty. She would appear for only a day or two in all those years. Clean, sober, her carriage correct and her manners impeccable, she would suffocate me with love. And then in another day, when she’d found some new patron or drunk all the wine in the house, she would be gone. More often than not we would only know she had gone because one of my aunts would miss some coin or a jewelled pin or pearl comb. She’d sigh and say, “Well, Columbina has gone again,” and I would search the house for her, and sure enough, she would have gone without a word.’ Annibale was silent too for a moment, the firelight playing on his stern face.

‘When I was a boy,’ he went on, ‘I would cry for days. I would never understand how someone who showered me with kisses and comfits could just go away again. I used to smell her perfume; it would stay in the house for days after she had gone.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘It lingered longer than she did.’

‘So you did miss her?’ Feyra prompted gently.

‘When I was a boy, yes. When I grew to a man I ceased to care.’

Feyra said nothing, but wondered if this was true. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘In my first year at Padua. She came to my rooms and told me how proud she was – pressed me to her bosom, charmed my fellows. She apologized for her long absences, promised that we would start anew, that all would be different, that she would be the very model of a mother.’

‘And what happened?’

‘She was gone the next day. And my silver scalpels too.’

Feyra’s mother had been elevated to queen and empress, whereas Annibale’s mother had found herself back in the
gutter, but she knew that the distance from the concubine who was her mother to the courtesan who was his was not so great a step. ‘My mother was no better.’ Feyra admitted the truth to him and herself at the same time.

He let out a hissing sigh, to rival the crackling fire. ‘Born of sin, children of whores,’ he said viciously.