The Venetian Contract (22 page)

Annibale sent some of the sisters to purchase good linen from the market across the water on the mainland in Treporti where the sickness had not yet reached. Bocca and Salve were directed to draw clean water from the well each morning, and to fish the lagoon every day, as well as
stocking the pools with trout and cultivating clusters of oysters on great knobbly ropes. One of the nuns, a beefy woman named Sister Ana who was skilled in rearing fowl, bought a brace of broody hens and a cock and rowed them back in a little coracle, wearing the live birds slung over her shoulder like a squawking stole. Annibale believed that if food could be freshly grown or fished it could not be infected with bad air.

One of the families included a schoolmaster who began a schoolhouse in the little church for the boys, while the nuns, in rotation, kept their rule with masses sung at the canonical hours, and a daily service for the families at which Bocca was never absent, and Annibale rarely present. Bocca had donated to the Badessa, with great pride, the chalice that Annibale had given him, as a vessel for the Host. Thus a humble bronze cup from a disused wine cellar became San Bartolomeo’s finest relic.

Annibale oversaw every detail of his little utopia. The nuns began to dig a herb garden in the good drained soil beyond the well, and Annibale made drawings for them of the Botanical Gardens of Padua, so his medicines could be grown and his unguents prepared on site.

The wives sewed mattresses for their loved ones, stuffed with rue and heather for their medicinal properties at Annibale’s direction, with which he lined the hospital floor in neat ranks. The afflicted were to be kept in the Tezon, their families in the almshouses, and never the twain should meet. No one could pass from the Tezon to the almshouses save Annibale, in his protective clothes. All was financed by the Cason treasure, which was gradually emptying from its hiding place by the well, as the stone lion stood sentinel.

Every day, Annibale would pause in his work, climb the
torresin
in the south-eastern corner of the wall, and look across the water to Venice. When the wind was in the right direction he could hear the city’s plague bells ringing incessantly, tolling the passing souls. The six doctors of the
sestieri
were losing their battle. Through his glasses Venice looked like it was on fire.

Annibale was aware of the precariousness of his position. He was aware that he had commandeered an island that was the property of the Republic, and he could only hope that when his methods were proven, the Council would let him be. Valnetti did not like to be crossed, and he suspected that the doctor had already been to the
Consiglio della Sanita
to report Annibale’s conduct. And, every day, looking out to the roseate sea through his red smoked lenses, he expected someone to come and stop him.

Chapter 18

C
ecilia Zabatini settled quickly into her new life as a maid in the house of the gold callipers.

In a very short time she got to know the long tall house with its myriad of connecting stairwells and passageways. She became used to the darkness of the back rooms and the blinding brightness of the front salons, where the arches and rounds of the glazed windows let in sunbursts of light, refracting into dazzling rainbows. At the side of the house was a quiet square with a well in the centre, where the main entrance for visitors was marked by the callipers over the door. At the front, facing the shining canal and its bustling traffic, there was a watergate; at the rear, a tiny, dingy courtyard overlooked by three other great houses. The courtyard was the trash pit for all the slops of all the houses – human and kitchen waste ended up there, to be swept into dung carts once a week by the midden-men. It had a foul smell and the new maid, considering the place insanitary, avoided it as best she could.

The household accepted the tall, quiet girl; she was intelligent and helpful, she did not need to be told what to do but anticipated the need for a task to be done before she was asked. They were kind to Feyra partly for her own sake, partly because she had an affliction of her speech, and partly
because she was under the protection of her uncle Zabato, a man they liked and respected, who was, moreover, their master’s dearest friend. The two footmen were kind to the new maid for an additional reason – any fool could see that she was beautiful, however much she tried to hide it.

The cook, who went by the name Corona Cucina for she was, as she boasted, Queen of the Kitchen, missed very little that went on in her kingdom. She quickly noticed the footmen’s glances and decided to act. She chucked Feyra kindly under the chin on the first morning she came down and tutted. ‘
Gesumaria
, dearie, you look like you’re fit to work the
ponte delle tette
, flashing your bubbies for the gentlemen! Let me give you some lace fillings for that neckline, and a longer petticoat too.’

The cook hauled Feyra off to a chamber in the cellars, not unlike Feyra’s own, and looked around in her cupboards. She found the girl a longer underskirt which fell, thankfully, near to her ankles. ‘And here –’ Corona Cucina tied a scarf of lace about Feyra’s shoulders. Holding the knot with one meaty hand she rootled in a little drawer with another. ‘I’m sure I have an old pin somewhere – ah, here – it will serve to fasten it.’

The kindly cook pinned the brooch through the knot to hold the collar fast to the dress. Feyra looked down at her bosom. The brooch was a little tin cross, with a tiny figure hanging from it.

Wearing the sign of the shepherd prophet was not the only adjustment Feyra had to make. Without her veil the smells of the house assailed her; the fish bones boiling down to stock on the kitchen stove, the beeswax polish of the pantry and the rancid mutton tallow of candles in the
studiolo
. The choking, tarry scent of the coals she had to carry
made her cough; even the musty leather and paper of the books in the little library, set on a high mezzanine all around the study walls, made her sneeze.

Once she had a shock; when sent to fetch salt from the little cellar under the house, she brushed against something bristly in the dark. When she raised her candle she saw a whole pig, hanging upside down by its trotters, flesh pale and tongue lolling as the blood dripped. Feyra dropped her candle with a clatter and ran, retching, to the little courtyard in the middle of the house. Corona Cucina bustled out to her and rubbed her back as she vomited, asking what was amiss. Forgetting herself, Feyra choked: ‘
Porco
.’

‘He’s nothing to fright you, dearie. Can’t hurt you in that state, can he?’ The cook stroked Feyra’s clammy cheek. ‘Fancy you running from a porker as if you were a
Muselmana
!’

Feyra froze. There was that word again.

Muselmana
.

The word that Nur Banu had left out of her lexicon, the word she had heard on the steps of the Doge’s palace, when she had left her slipper on the stair. She blinked, and looked at the cook’s concerned face. Corona Cucina was kind; now was her chance to learn. ‘
Muselmana
?’ she asked, making her intonation as Venetian as she could.

‘Ay – they hold pig’s flesh in horror. And that was how we Venetians could bring the body of the blessed Apostle Mark –’ Corona Cucina drew a cross on her ample bosom with her forefinger ‘– from the land of the heathens to rest here in Christian Venice in the Basilica. They placed the Saint’s corpse in a large basket covered with herbs and swine’s flesh, and the bearers were directed to cry
“Pork!
” to all who should approach to search. In this manner
they bamboozled the
Muselmani
and brought our Saint home.’

Feyra’s puzzlement must have been written on her face, for Corona Cucina raised her voice as though she was simple. ‘
Muselmani
! Those as goes to church on yellow shoes, and wears their heads bound in turbans!
Dio
, your uncle said as you were dumb, not simple.’ She pinched Feyra’s chin. ‘Well, they don’t know what they’re missing, for when that porker has hung for a week I’ll make pancetta and shred pie that’ll make your mouth water. You’ll like the pigling right enough then.’

From then on Feyra avoided the little courtyard whenever Corona Cucina was cooking pork. Even to breathe the aroma was a faithless act; almost worse than wearing the cross.

The prevalent smell in the whole house, though, was ink and paper. Her unseen master had reams of it all about the place, tumbling from his desks, spread upon the map chest and even the dining board. She peered at them once or twice. She did not understand the annotations, but the drawings held no mysteries for her. She had seen the like many times in the company of Mimar Sinan.

They were plans.

This Palladio, like Sinan, was an architect.

Feyra was beginning to tune her ear to the Venetian accent. Her fellow servants spoke a little differently to the pure and noble language that her mother had taught her. There were so many Zs in the dialect that they sounded all together like a hive of bees and waved their hands around so much that they sometimes hit each other in the narrow passages of the house, or knocked the candles from their sconces. But during the two meals the servants ate together
in the kitchen in the morning and evening, Feyra watched, and listened, and began to adjust.

She rarely left the little square, but when she went to the market she found that Venice by day was a different city to the one she had encountered at night. There was, it seemed, no plague yet in this ward; Zabato said it was raging worst in the district called Cannaregio so if she bought her goods at the Rialto and came straight back there would be no danger.

So Feyra got to know her sixth, or
sestiere
, of Castello, well. She noted the constant presence of the shepherd prophet on every corner, above every church door. In her faith it was not permitted to express God in art; it was considered not only impious but impossible. But here the Christians lived with their deity as though he was their neighbour and it was impossible to avoid him. He seemed only to have two manifestations: a babe in his mother’s arms or a near-corpse hanging on his cross like offal. The beginning and the end of his life; there was nothing in between. Even in the market, where butchered beasts were sold hanging from wooden gibbets, the shepherd prophet hung above them, higher than all.

Mostly Corona Cucina went to market, as she did not trust another soul with her precious ingredients, but now and again her legs and feet pained her so much that she had to sit in a chair and raise her legs. Feyra caught a look at them once – the feet were as big as eel-boats, misshapen about the toes with huge swellings on each side. Furthermore, the vessels on Corona’s lower calves stood forth like black and blue cords. Feyra had seen such veins
and pushes in the Harem, and wondered if she would ever have the courage to offer her remedies in return for the cook’s kindness.

She greatly missed the practice of medicine, not just for the status, but for the way in which her opinion had been sought, her skills utilized. Here she was the humblest of the servants and her duties were to clean, fetch and carry and set the fires in the master’s rooms.

After one day of work she ceased to wear the crystal ring of the four horses on her hand. Her work was hard and physical and she knew that at some point the ring would be cracked or damaged. She pulled a piece of ribbon from the hem of one of her many petticoats and hung the ring around her neck, tucked firmly in her bodice. Feyra thought of the Ottoman tradition of wearing amulets to preserve health – a verse from the Qur’an writ small and twisted into a little scroll, the name of God on a scrap of paper worn in a bag, or a pendant like the five-fingered hand of Fatima. Amulets were secret and personal; they were worn under the clothes and particular to their wearer. Well, the ring would be her amulet, the only thing about her person now that had come with her all the way from Constantinople. It struck her, too, how much she was learning about her mother since her death – it said something of her mother’s cosseted life that she could have worn a ring of glass for the whole of it.