The Venetian Contract (37 page)

Now Feyra placed the bottles neatly into a leather case, the sides cured stiff and rigid, so the bottles would stand. He noted the concoction within – her secret antidote, for she had not shared its constituents even with him – was exactly the same colour as her dress.

She straightened up when Annibale entered.

‘I have been thinking,’ he said without preamble. ‘You need a story, something like Valnetti’s Four Thieves – a holy tree or a magic well, or some such. Some legend to make the people believe in your cure. People don’t understand medicine, but they do understand folklore.’

‘Very well,’ she said, in agreement at once. ‘How about the well of the lion with the closed book – it’s true I drew the water for the potion there.’ She actually smiled. ‘And I will tell you no more.’

His heart leapt at her smile but he merely shrugged. ‘Our concern at this point is not what is true, for the whole business is a tissue of lies and I do not like it.’

She came so close to him then that he could almost feel her warmth. ‘I would not sell this concoction if I did not truly believe it in my heart to be effective.’

‘Very well. The Lion’s Well is good enough – the emblem of the lion should appeal to Venetian ears. Besides, holy wells are good fodder for the gullible – there’s one on Giudecca, precisely where Palladio builds his church. Pilgrims swear the water protects them from the Plague.’

Feyra made no reply to this, but before long they were seated, and unmasked, and talking as they used to, speaking over each other and gesticulating and arguing their points as they concocted the legend of the potion she called Teriaca.

‘I was walking by the well one day, and I saw the lion and the book—’

‘No, the lion
spoke
to you.’

‘Yes, that is better. The lion spoke to me and said: “I am the symbol of Venice. Within my well is a water that will cure my people; water blessed by …”’ She tailed off.

‘Saint Mark,’ finished Annibale.

Feyra remembered the story of the unfortunate Saint wrapped in pork like a Christian feastday dish. ‘Saint Mark when he came from the East—’

‘The Holy Land. It is
always
the Holy Land,’ interjected Annibale.

‘Saint Mark when he came from the Holy Land. He wrote his blessing in my book with his bolt from heaven—’

‘Celestial lightning?’ Annibale suggested. ‘With his celestial lightning, and then bid me close my book for ever—’

‘To keep the secret!’ Feyra finished in triumph.

Annibale made her tell the story over and over again, to perfect her Venetian accent. She was clearly immune to the Plague as she had walked among the sick all these months not protected by a mask as he had been, but she would be in great danger if she was discovered to be a Turk. Feyra, remembering too well her flight from the Doge’s palace, listened carefully to his instruction and bent her tongue around her tale with a Venetian twang.

Mamma Trianni walked to the blanket box beneath the little window and opened the lid with great ceremony. Silk folds of an incredible green tumbled out like a waterfall. The colour was exactly the green of the lagoon on an
overcast day, an iridescent, verdant hue of shifting waters. The old woman pulled the dress free with the help of her daughter Valentina, and held it up so that Feyra could admire the exquisite workmanship of the bodice and sleeves. She took it from Mamma Trianni reverently – it was incredibly heavy – and saw that the real artistry was in the green stomacher, sewn with more tiny crowded crystals in amazing curlicues which mimicked the waves of the Adriatic.

Feyra undressed quickly, and the green silk dress slipped over her easily, cool and heavy against her warm skin.

Mother and daughter stopped chattering as Feyra walked to the window. ‘Is it all right?’ she asked tentatively. There was no looking-glass so she could not see what they could see. But just at that moment Annibale walked in, and her doubts vanished.

Annibale stood, mouth agape. His Feyra was transformed as completely as caterpillar to butterfly or cygnet to swan. She had crossed an ocean from Byzantium to Venice and been reborn as a Venus of the West. The green gown fell to the floor, accentuating her height, and her golden shoulders rose from the crystal bodice. Her waist, nipped in by clever invisible tailoring, seemed tiny. The dress was all one colour and the single, strong hue made the warm tones of her skin glow, and gave heat to her amber eyes. Mamma Trianni clucked around her, making tiny, unnecessary adjustments to the perfection.

‘It is my turn now,’ said Valentina, standing. ‘She’ll not be long,
Dottore
.’

Annibale leaned at the doorframe, rapt.

‘Now: hair. First, let us get it all down.’ The veil was snatched away and Annibale saw Feyra’s hair for the first time, falling, whispering, loose on to her shoulders. He’d
tried to guess at its colour from the small curls escaping from her veils, but those tiny clues were so confusing – sometimes the filaments were the colour of copper, sometimes dark as squid’s ink, sometimes burnished like cherrywood. Now he could see the full spectrum of the amazing golds and browns in her hair.

‘
Esumaria
, so much of it! And all those colours!’ exclaimed Mamma Trianni, echoing his thoughts. Annibale watched as Valentina bundled the shining mass loosely into a net to sit at the nape of Feyra’s neck, bounded in a coif of seed pearls, with a few curls escaping around the ears.

For the first time he could see that the plain ribbon Feyra wore around her neck held a ring. For a moment he worried that it was some token of a former love, but however she had come by it, its simplicity with the green dress and the bundled hair was stunning.

Once Valentina had finished, Annibale handed Feyra the magnificent mask, pearlized white and shaped like a horse’s head. He had chosen it hoping to please her, but could not interpret the gasp she gave when she laid eyes upon it.

Annibale thought how much she was once again changed when she held the mask in place: the visor erased all expression, but through it Feyra’s eyes glittered, still alluring. Her beauty frightened him; she was a creature now that would enslave any man, no longer the girl that had been his Feyra by his fireside. However, he said nothing of this, merely asking, ‘Ready?’

Annibale gave Feyra his arm across the green and she took it as seemed fitting. He carried her case of bottles for her
too, as far as the jetty, the bottles clinking in counterpoint to her nervous, pattering thoughts. The skirts dragged at her hips and she wondered how the Venetians managed all their Carnevale debauchery when so hampered. She looked at her escort and saw him eyeing her as if she were a stranger.

‘I do not like this. I do not like you going,’ he said.

‘Then you go.’

‘You know I cannot. I neither approve of the potion, nor will I take the credit for it. Moreover, as a doctor of the Republic I must register the ingredients of any cure with the
Consiglio della Sanita
, and to them would go the bulk of any profits.’

She opened the gate and emerged from the shadow of the postern. ‘I will not place myself in any danger,’ she reassured him. ‘I am a harmless goodwife selling a homemade remedy. And you must own that I look Venetian enough, even for you.’ She thought of what the Badessa had said, of how she could change, accept God, become assimilated herself into the Christian West. Would she look like this if she was Annibale’s wife in truth? She bit her lip a little, making the rose of her mouth even deeper.

He stopped walking, turned. ‘I
never
wished for you to look so,’ he protested vehemently, as if it were suddenly more important that she should know that about him than any of his instructions about safety in the city.

On the jetty she handed him her yellow slipper full of sequins. She gave it to him swiftly before she could change her mind, for the gift of her hard-earned wages represented her passage to Turkey. Now she would never go home.

‘For the hospital,’ she said, ‘until I come back with more.’ Then she got swiftly into the waiting bark, hampered by her
unaccustomed skirts, her green kirtle spreading to fill the boat like a single lily’s pad on the water.

Feyra watched Annibale standing there, getting smaller and smaller as the bark rowed away, expressionless in his beak mask, but wringing the yellow slipper in his telltale hands. She had been right to give it to him. She had thought that she could not leave her patients, but the truth was that, even though all hope was gone, it was him she could not leave.

Chapter 34

A
nnibale had sent Feyra forth in a strong-bottomed dory which could accommodate both her heavy case and the green dress, so as the boatman neared Venice he had to navigate carefully between the canal traffic.

A heavy mist of sea fog and Plague fires combined hung low over the water so the city’s spires poked above the gloom like swamp rushes, and Feyra had to peer through her mask to divine their direction. She saw that the dory was pulling into the city almost exactly where
Il Cavaliere
had dispatched its dreadful cargo all those months ago. There was the white filigree palace and the great twin pillars Death had walked between.

Now she was seeing his works.

The numerous barges were not crowded with pleasure trippers but filled with shrouded bodies, already powdered with snowy lime to begin their decay on their journey to their graves. Here and there a peevish wind lifted their shrouds to reveal a blackened hand, a rictus jawbone. Now the drift of yellow fog had risen to hang in a sickly pall over the city, pollarding the tops of spires and belltowers. The Plague had taken hold in Feyra’s six months’ absence, and the need for what she had to sell was great. She sat a little straighter, and held the horse mask to her face. Today she had a part to play.

She leaned forward, ‘Which is the
veduta della Sanita et Granari Pubblici
?’

The boatman pointed. ‘’Tis that big white building,
Dama
, with all the hawkers before it.’

Feyra peered though her mask holes at the long low building – she could barely see its pillars and porticoes for the massing crowds before it. There were pitches and stalls crowded on to every inch of the foreshore. ‘Who
are
they all?’ Feyra breathed.

The boatman laughed bitterly. ‘Sellers of dreams,
Dama
. Promises to keep the Plague Maiden from bedding with you. They’d tell you a rush dip was a moonbeam and charge you for it.’

Feyra kept her chin high as the boatman handed her out of the dory. There was nothing for it but to put her case down beside the rest, and set out her stall.

By noon she’d sold one bottle – to a gentleman who’d clearly thought she was selling something else besides – and given another away. Her story of the Lion and the Well went unheard and unheeded, drowned beneath the barkers and sellers shouting their own desperate slogans and pitches. One seller sold faggots of firewood; juniper, ash, vine and rosemary, guaranteed, he shouted, to raise a smoke hateful to the Plague. Another favoured a powder to be thrown into the flames made of mastic, laurel and cypress. A lady nearby in a dress almost as fine as Feyra’s sold smelling apples moulded from gum Arabic, fragranced with roses and camphor and artfully coloured with red and white sendal. There were cures for every budget – from a concoction of spikenard and rhubarb for the poor to a powder of real emeralds or an amethyst etched with a healthful symbol for the rich. Some remedies were downright bizarre;
one enterprising fellow, who seemed to be selling severed pigeon wings, was singing the virtues of his cure in a sweet baritone.