The Venetian Contract (42 page)

He turned without a word and went out. Once he had gone Salve came from his corner.

‘What happened?’ Feyra asked him again, gently.

‘Doctor not here.’ Salve struggled to form the words. He pointed to his ailing father. ‘He drew water. Took to Tezon.’

One of Bocca’s daily duties was to draw a barrel of water
from the well of the lion and book, and take it to the Tezon and leave it on the stoop.

Feyra chilled suddenly. ‘And then what?’

‘Took it within.’

Feyra’s heart sank. Instead of leaving the water at the door as was his daily commission, Bocca had taken it beyond the smoke chamber and the doors, to dip the cups for the patients. An act of vanity or an act of kindness – it mattered not, for it had been enough to infect him. Feyra turned over the gatekeeper’s fingers. They were black. She went to wake Annibale.

Feyra felt terrible that in her zeal to protect the islanders with her Teriaca she had, somehow, neglected to dose father and son in the relatively distant gatehouse. When Bocca had been stretchered to the Tezon and made as comfortable as he could be, she went straight back to the gatehouse. Salve was watching the fire from his shadow, as if he did not know what to do. Her heart went out to him, seeing him as he was: a child without a mother, his father perhaps to be taken from him too. She sat on the settle on the other side of the fire, the seat that was Bocca’s.

‘Well?’ said the shadow.

‘Well enough,’ said Feyra carefully for she did not want to lie. Bocca’s fever raged, and he might not last the night. She felt a responsibility for the boy, left without a working wage. She reached into her bodice.

The coin was still warm from where it had nestled by her heart so long. Word had spread before they had left the charred city that the Doge was alive, and would address the people at sunset once he had taken his rest. She had helped to foil the second part of the Sultans’s plan and turned back the red horse. Now she would do all she could to save Bocca
and his sorry son. She held the ducat to the light and looked at the likeness of the Doge. Odd, she thought, that her great-uncle had been next to her heart all the time, and she had never got to meet him.

She gave the coin to Salve. ‘This is for you, for you will not have your father to provide until he is well. Do not worry.’

He took the ducat across the fire into his misshapen hand. It barely fit in his palm. His eyes grew as round as the coin.

‘Why … give … this?’

‘I want to look after you. Come to me tonight, I will make a special decoction for you, to keep you safe.’

In the gatehouse, now alone, Salve turned over the ducat in his hand. He held it to his lips, her words ringing in his malformed skull.

When Feyra opened the door of her house that night, she was expecting Annibale. She had quite forgotten that she had invited Salve and had to look down to see her visitor.

She invited him inside warmly. He had not been to her house since the days when he had mended it for her, when she’d first come to the island. He looked about him with an appraising eye to see how his work had held and she felt, suddenly, that she had been a poor friend to him since then. She invited him to sit. He did not.

‘You said … look after me.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Take this.’ She took up the bottle from the decoction table that she had made up that afternoon, with especial guilty care. She held out the vial, confidently in her hand. ‘It will save you from your father’s contagion.’

He took the little bottle and their fingers touched for an instant. The vial was huge in his hands, and he turned it nervously, as if screwing his courage. ‘
You
look after
me
,’ he said, as if repeating his catechism.

She nodded slowly. ‘I look after you.’

‘What if …
I
look after
you
?’

She looked at him, and he looked back, his hooded, uneven eyes unwavering. For the first time she noticed that his eyes were a muddy blue, like lagoon water after a storm. Slowly, slowly, it dawned on her that she was receiving a proposal.

She took a breath, heart thudding, giving herself time. ‘I thank you, Salve, but … that is to say … I mean, are you even …?’

‘Seventeen.’ The warped palate of his mouth had trouble forming the word. Feyra tried to mask her surprise. She could not have pinpointed his age at all. His deformity made his appearance juvenile but at other times their conversation and his skill at joinery suggested he was a much older man.

She felt a surge of sympathy for him so strong that tears started to her eyes. She had been wrong that morning. He was not a child. He was a man, a man trapped in this attenuated form. She thought of the thousand little cruelties he had probably endured daily at her hands, times when she’d been offhand, times when she’d been so caught up in her misery about Annibale that she had slighted or ignored him. She’d sometimes noted Salve’s preference for her, but thought he’d been showing her gratitude for her defence of him from the cruel blows of Columbina Cason.

But now she knew he’d felt something deeper. She had thought once that Salve’s hatred of Annibale proceeded
from what he’d suffered at the hands of the doctor’s mother, but now knew that she had been wrong about this too. She did not want to laugh at him, or to dismiss his suit; perhaps if she confided in him his feelings might be salved.

‘I am sorry, Salve, I cannot. I love another.’

He knew it already. ‘You love doctor.’

She admitted the truth for the first time. ‘Yes.’

And then she saw her terrible mistake. What she had done was not to salve his pride but to break his heart. Instead of just refusing him, she had held to his face a dreadful looking-glass that showed him what he could have been if the shepherd prophet had favoured him. It was worse, so much worse now, since the fire when the beak mask had been burned. Now he could see Annibale’s face, see what he could have been, what he could not ever be.

Salve turned, but too late for her to miss the hurt in his eyes, and left her house, still clutching the little bottle of Teriaca.

As Salve passed the well of the lion and the book he dropped the Teriaca down the shaft. Then he strode to the Tezon as fast as his short legs would carry him.

If he thought about the words Feyra had spoken to him, they would curl about his heart like a serpent and squeeze it till it burst; and then he would bleed to death. He must concentrate on his purpose. He wanted the one man who had ever been a constant to him, because despite his father’s blaming and belittling of him, Bocca had cared for his freakish son, he had put meat in the misshapen mouth and clothes on the warped back. He had not left as Salve’s mother had left.

Salve had to stand on tiptoe to reach the door of the hospital. There were only three patients left in the long room, lit by a brazier burning cinnabar and myrrh. The second curtain he drew revealed Bocca.

Salve stood over the body, and it was only then that he let the tears fall. Bocca could not hear him now so he might as well speak. He uttered the first word he had ever said to his father. ‘
Papa
,’ he said, listening to the word unfurling in the darkness.

Then he lay down beside the still-warm corpse, holding his father close, waiting for death.

Chapter 38

F
eyra wept bitterly over Salve as she had never wept for a patient before.

She had neglected and belittled Salve more than anyone else in his life, by befriending him and then taking her friendship away when she’d replaced it with another. It would have been much better to have let him alone, to have never forged a friendship she had not the care to keep. She said his name over and over. She cried until her veil was soaked, and then prepared him herself for his laying out beside his father. She kissed his misshapen cheek, and the rigor of death relaxed and unfurled his hand. In it was her ducat. She kissed the coin too, and slipped it back into her bodice, where it had lain so long.

Having slain the gatekeeper and his son, the Plague seemed to abruptly quit the island.

News from Venice had it that four of the six
sestieri
were now clear of Plague. Feyra suspected that the purifying fire that Takat had spoken of had turned against his purpose, purifying the miasma left by the dead.

As the Tezon emptied as the last cases died or healed, Feyra began to wonder what the future held for her and Annibale. He did not once renew his proposals to her, but she thought she could be happy if she was just here as
his colleague and friend. But a hospital could not run without patients. Nowadays she was more often prescribing bark for toothache, or borage for moon-cramps, than her Teriaca.

One spring day when she climbed the Murada, she saw a tall ship pass, cleaving the sunlit waters. She identified it as a Cypriot vessel. A cloud came over her sun, and fear settled in her stomach like a stone. Trade was recommencing between Venice and the wide world. She craned into the far distance and imagined Palladio’s church, on its distant island, growing into the sky. She knew that, one day soon, the church would be completed, the Doge would have no further need of Annibale, and the Republic would want their island back.

The following day the Badessa came to them in the herb garden, where Feyra and Annibale were reseeding the botanical beds; a task that they had created for the Tezon was all but empty. Feyra straightened up, hand on her lower back, as the Badessa, followed by her nuns, circled the beds.

Annibale stuck his spade savagely into the ground and did not look at the Badessa. ‘You’re going back,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied gently. ‘Sister Immaculata went back to the Miracoli yesterday. The
sestiere
is clear of contagion. They are appointing a new priest to replace Father Orlando. A good man, I believe.’

Annibale sniffed. ‘I’ll arrange a dory for you. Bocca …’ he let his voice trail off.

The Badessa nodded. ‘We said masses for his soul, and that of his son. And Sister Ana has already lit the brazier for a boat.’

Annibale nodded in turn, curtly. ‘We’ll see you off.’

Feyra hesitated, unsure of whether to follow, but found herself invited by the Badessa’s beckoning hand.

She walked with the older woman, arm in arm across the sunny green to the gatehouse, and at the gate the Badessa stood back to watch the sisters file though. She reached into her sleeve and handed Feyra a heavy book wrapped in canvas. ‘In case you need it,’ she said, and walked through the gate before Feyra could refuse. Feyra did not unwrap the book; there was no need. She knew what it was.

At the jetty the nuns got into the strong-bottomed dory one by one, the Badessa too. She turned in the boat.

‘Before I go,
Dottore
Cason, there is one more thing. Sister Immaculata visited some of the houses of our island families. Some are empty still, and sound, but some are rotting, and some being taken over by vagrant villeins. If your little community does not go home soon, the Republic will billet families on the dwellings. Many people have lost their houses in the fire.’

Annibale’s expression, even without his mask, was unreadable. ‘And you have told the families so?

The Abbess’s brows nearly vanished into her wimple. ‘Of course. They cannot live here always. Even if you can part the waters, you cannot hold back the sea for ever,’ she said gently. ‘One day it will rush back in.’