The Venetian Contract (34 page)

‘Forgive me,
Dottore
. I had forgotten it was Friday. You find us debating what to do with this well.’

Annibale poked his beak down the crumbling shaft. It looked ancient. ‘What is your dilemma? Fill it in, surely.’

‘That was my feeling also,’ said the architect, but he still rubbed his beard indecisively. ‘And yet it is still a focus of the faithful – my masons turn pilgrims away daily, who come in search of a Plague remedy. I thought I might still incorporate it in the design and yet Zabato tells me that the well would be directly below the centre of the dome. Of course, nothing must detract from its glory, so I fear it must go.’ Palladio looked down, looking where Annibale looked, laughed a little. ‘You are my physician. Should I drink some of the water? Benefit from the panacea before the well is buried for ever?’

Annibale laughed. ‘Please yourself, my dear fellow, for it will neither kill nor cure you. When do you begin the dome?’

‘Today.’

Annibale looked up to the sky. It was the blue of a duck’s egg, dotted with tiny clouds with a darker indigo beneath their feathery bellies. It seemed impossible to span that sky, to enclose a sphere of it, but today Annibale believed anything could be done. Palladio could do it.

He studied the old man – perhaps it was the outdoors, but the architect had never looked better to him – his colour
was even, his wind sound, his eyes bright. He opened his mouth to ask after Palladio’s health but ended up asking something entirely different.

‘What does your name mean?’

‘Forgive me?’ The old man seemed perplexed.

‘Your name. Palladio. What does it mean?’

‘It was given me by my first master, Gian Giorgio Trissino,’ said Palladio. ‘It refers to the wisdom of Pallas Athena.’

Annibale smiled. Everything amused him now. ‘I thought it would be something like that. So what is your real name?’

‘Andrea di Pietro della Gondola. But Palladio is easier for people to remember. And I want to be remembered; for this church in particular.’ He seemed to shiver.

‘You will be,’ Annibale assured him. ‘You will finish it with ease. You have been wise enough to keep yourself in good health.’ Annibale was well disposed to Palladio, well disposed to the world. He even responded politely when the draughtsman with the wild hair asked after Feyra. It was a joy to hear her name, a joy to talk of her. ‘She is well,’ he said, ‘and sends you both greetings.’

Now he had spoken of her, he wanted to go on talking; to say her name over and over, to recount every little utterance she had ever spoken to him. He had to leave before he gave himself away. He made his excuses and ran for the
traghetto
as if the Devil were after him.

As he was rowed across the lagoon, Annibale watched with pleasure as the shadows elongated in the late afternoon, each increment of length bringing him closer to the night and to Feyra. He barely even waited for the boatman to tie his boat at the little jetty before he jumped out, overpaying him handsomely, and marched past the gatehouse
greeting not just Bocca but the dwarf, too. He gave a little shiver as he passed the hospital building; he knew she would be within, about some task. So close.

For once he did not enter the Tezon but went straight home. He did not want to see her with the patients before tonight, to be by her side but not touch her. He had set a little bed in the corner by the fire, so the dying embers would warm her in the night. He had laid out his best coverlet to cosset her body, and his best palliasse stuffed with straw to cushion her flesh. He ran his hand over the smooth sheet where tonight they would both lie.

Unwanted, the voice of the Badessa of the Miracoli came to his mind. When he’d told her airily that the cot by the church would be free for the growing Trianni family, she was stern with him.

‘What do you want with that girl?’ she asked him. ‘She is orphaned, unmarried, far from home. You are unmarried. All of this is to say nothing of the difference in your faiths. She is bound for eternal damnation, but
you
may still be saved. There is no question, therefore, of your offering proper suit to her; and if you share your hearth with her you are placing your immortal soul in peril. Let her be.’

‘There is no question of such a relationship,’ he lied. ‘She will room downstairs by the fire. Would you deny me a maidservant?’

‘And yet she is
not
your maidservant,’ the Badessa reminded him firmly.

Annibale lost his head and began to shout. ‘No. She is not.’ His voice rang around his own head within the beak. Too loud. ‘She is my fellow. She is a
doctor
.’ It was the first time he had said it and he surprised himself.

Now, in his house, he twitched and fiddled, pottered and
paced the rest of the day away. He thought of Feyra with the patients, veiled and industrious, and wanted her here, now. He knew exactly how he would take her in his arms, how he would kiss her strange and wonderful mouth. Annibale, who never prayed, prayed for the light to fade.

When night had fallen at last and her knock came, he nearly shot out of his chair. He opened the door so swiftly the fire belched smoke. As it cleared, it revealed a dreadful apparition.

It was as if Feyra had aged a century’s half; her dark curls dyed too-black by some artifice, crow’s feet spreading about the eyes that were dulled from the amber of flame to sludge green, her cheeks brightened by two spots of too-red rouge high on the sunken cheekbones. She was wearing a gown of raggedy red velvet and so cut down to the nipples that it would never have been deemed decent. He stared in horror. He could not move.

‘Annibale,’ she said. ‘Will you not let me in?’

It was Columbina Cason, his mother.

Chapter 31

F
eyra’s hand shook as she raised it to knock at Annibale’s door that night. This was the beginning of their new lives.

The door opened and a woman stood there, in a travelling cloak with a mask in her hand as if she had only just herself arrived. Feyra stood, stunned to silence, and the woman raised her chin with the poise of a lady. ‘Yes?’ she said haughtily.

‘I am here to see the doctor.’ Feyra could see Annibale hovering in the background, and she looked to him with entreaty.

The woman registered her accent, and narrowed her green and cat-like eyes. ‘And
you
are?’

Annibale came forward hurriedly. ‘Feyra is my nurse at the hospital.’

‘Well –’ the woman shifted her weight from hip to hip in a way that was both provocative and proprietorial. ‘My son does not need a nurse. His
Mamma
is home.’ And she shut the door in Feyra’s face.

‘I have changed.’

His mother had sat, unbidden, in the fireside chair that he
thought of as Feyra’s. He said nothing, but she must have sensed his disbelief.

‘I
have
, Annibale. That old life, I’ve said goodbye to it now. I want to be here with you. I want to be a mother at last. I know I’ve wronged you – abandoned you more than once—’

‘How did you find me?’ he cut in sharply.

She lowered her cat’s eyes. ‘I had gone to Treporti with a merchant … companion. There I heard that a doctor called Cason had a hospital on this island. My companion took sick and I didn’t know what to do. But I knew that if I came to my son he would save me. Oh, my sweeting!
You
did all this; you brought all these good people here, you rescued them.’ She sank to her knees before him, kissing his hands. ‘I knew you could rescue me too!’

He found he could not take his hands away but waited, sick at heart, until she sat again, sniffing prettily at the pomade that hung from her wrist, and arranging her skirts. Her eyes were completely dry.

‘I think you and I should start again, dearest. I have not had an easy life, you know. Your father—’

Annibale went suddenly cold. ‘You
were
married to my father, were you not?’ He thought of everything he’d ever known, his name, his nobility, the Cason treasure hidden in the floorboards beneath his bed.

‘Of course! But the thing you must know is that I was a courtesan, not just afterwards, but before.’

He blinked, his eyes dry from the fire, trying to understand. ‘You mean, when my father met you …’

‘Yes. I used to ply my trade near the Campo d’Oro. You were conceived in a gondola at Carnevale. When I knew I
was gravelled with you, Carlo said he’d marry me. I was beautiful then, Annibale, you cannot imagine.’

He could not. Only one woman was beautiful to him, and besides beauty for him was not the mask but the person within. He looked at his mother’s mask, where it hung next to his beak on the fire hook, in an unholy union of courtesan and bird. A flawless, painted face; gazing at him from his mother’s past.

He learned that when she’d left him and his father she had gone to live with her new lover in one of the great Villas in the Veneto. When she’d found her patron bedding both the kitchen maids at once she’d moved on, leaving for Rome with an artist who had been painting the frescoes of the villa. There she’d become the mistress of a priest, before running away to Messina with one of his acolytes.

After a while Annibale stopped listening and constructed, instead, an alternate truth. In her youth she was stunningly beautiful, beautiful enough to snare a minor Venetian nobleman despite her low birth. He suspected her last lover, the merchant, was no more than a cloth hawker, with a pitch in Treporti market. Her clientele had declined with her beauty, and all that remained was a flawed character unable to attract a companion for the autumn of her life. Eventually, sick of the sorry tale, he slept where he sat, his slumbering brain crowded with unhappy dreams. In the morning his bottles of fine wine were empty and rolled beneath his stumbling feet, the fire was dead and his mother was snoring on the fireside cot he had readied so tenderly for Feyra.

He left her there.

Annibale’s evenings were much changed. Instead of his medical discussions with Feyra, discussions that made him feel as if he could vanquish death and cure the world, he had to listen to his mother’s tales of disgrace and decline, to her mourning for her youth. Annibale was suddenly, horribly lonely and yet was constantly in his mother’s company. He was isolated and yet he had never been so touched physically since his mother had left him as a child. Her intimacies were stuck in that time, preserved in amber – she touched him as if he were still an eight-year-old boy. She ruffled his hair and pinched his cheeks, nibbled his neck and rubbed his middle back as she might have done if she had been there when he’d been ill as a child. He found himself unable to repel these embraces but her importunities sickened him for they were a dreadful mockery of the intimacy he’d hoped to have with another. He had given his mother his own bed in the chamber upstairs, so he had the added torment of sleeping each night in the bed that he’d made for Feyra.

Annibale advised Columbina to go about masked and the mask she had with her, a full-faced model that tied about the head, was the one that he thought he remembered from childhood. It was of a beautiful, made-up courtesan’s face, white as lead paste with a pearlized sheen, complete with painted cherry lips and patches upon the cheeks. It gave her an eerie, blank look of a beauty she no longer possessed. Her clothes fitted badly, and their bright colours would have better complemented a more youthful complexion. Even her name now seemed too young for her.
Columbina Cason
was a name for a cocotte, or a precocious, capricious beauty. She had long outgrown it.