The Venetian Contract (24 page)

Annibale looked at the Tezon, and thought of the stricken within. It was a preposterous notion, that he should make a daily visit to a man who was hale, when his patients already manifested the black fingers and boils of the pestilence. He stood, suddenly impatient.

‘Regretfully – and I am sensible of the great honour you do me – I must decline. I cannot waste my time on a man who is well.’

The Camerlengo craned up at him, squinting his blue eyes against the sun. He did not argue, but merely asked one more question.

‘What am I going to say now?’

Annibale looked towards the gateway at the phalanx of guards. The
Leoni
had not moved at all during the course of the entire interview. He looked back at the Camerlengo, sitting placidly on the mossy pillar, still as his stone seat. Annibale sat down again, defeated. ‘You are going to say that my rights to the island have been revoked, that I must clear the place of myself, my patients and their families, and that I must be taken by your guards.’

‘And if you agree to doctor the architect?’

‘That I may keep the island as a hospital, and go in peace for as long as I am tending Signor Palladio.’

‘Precisely. I congratulate you on taking the point so quickly.’ The Camerlengo felt in his leather glove and drew out a metal plaque. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the seal of my Lord Doge. You may produce this at any time in your dealings in the city, and it will be as if your word is his.’

Annibale looked at the seal in his palm; an exquisitely cast brass roundel bearing the Doge’s image and the winged lion, finished with a tab of wine-coloured ribbon. He weighed the seal in his hand. The Camerlengo had known that Annibale would agree to his offer. Now the chamberlain stood.

‘That’s settled then. You’ll come with me?’ It was not really a question.

‘I will have to instruct my deputies,’ said Annibale carefully. He did not name the sisters of the Miracoli; he was not entirely sure of the legality of their defection from the city.

‘Do it then.’

Annibale found the Badessa and told her he would be back by the end of the day and then followed the Camerlengo to the great barge. As the guards dipped their oars he watched his island recede with a qualm that clenched his stomach. He could not identify the feeling, for he had never had it before; but as the barge speeded away he thought it might be something akin to homesickness.

Chapter 20

I
t was a whole week before Feyra even saw her master.

She saw evidence of him – the drawings grew and spread and changed in both composition and position. His platters and cups were emptied and left to clear. But her first encounter with him was not a chance glimpse in a corridor, or a retreating back in a doorway, but altogether more dramatic.

Light was a crucial commodity in the house of the gold callipers. Feyra was charged with filling the sconces with fresh candles, setting the bobeches below to catch the wax lest it drip on the precious drawings, restocking the tallow cabinets, and trimming the numerous lamps. The master wished to draw at all hours, and even in the dark of night the rooms must be as bright as day. Her last task before retiring was always to carry a great white bubble of blown glass full to the brim with water, known as the fishbowl, to the architect’s
studiolo
. She understood its function, and admired the science of it; if a candle was placed behind the glass bowl the water acted as a lens; the flame was magnified, the light augmented as it passed through the water, and the drawing table completely illuminated.

Late to bed one night, she was carrying the great bowl from the kitchens to her master’s room, when in the inky
hallway she was halted by a thin rectangular frame of gold, as tall as a man, suspended in the blackness.

She walked towards it, still carrying the brimming bowl and saw the outline flicker. She knew then that what she was seeing was not a cosy hearth blaze but a conflagration.

She forced the door open and was almost beaten back by the heat. The great table, for the first time ever, was empty of drawings; they were all crowding the fireplace, curling and burning in the inferno, fiery ashes rushing up the chimney. Without thinking, Feyra poured the contents of the bowl over the long plan table, then pulled the whole fabric from the board and threw it over the fire, dousing the blaze at once, stamping on any stray embers with her leather boots.

Coughing from the black smoke, Feyra turned in the sudden dark to grope her way to the casement and threw it open. Then sticking her head out of the window, she gulped down a mouthful of clean air under the spangled stars.

When she drew in her head a voice spoke from a chair in the corner and she nearly jumped from her skin. As her eyes adjusted to the moonlight she could see the white-edged outline of a figure. ‘What are you doing?’ it said.

‘What am I doing? What are
you
doing?’

In shock Feyra forgot to speak Venetian, and railed against the seated figure in Turkish. ‘You must be crazy! How can you build a fire that way? The chimney was not even drawing the flame! How can you sit there and watch it burn like that? The entire house could have burned down! Don’t you know that if the tapestry above the mantel had caught, the whole house would have burned to the ground?
And it’s such a tall, silly spindle of a house that the servants in the attics would have been trapped! Do you not care?’ She stopped for breath and there was a silence from the chair. She could not make the figure out at all apart from the glow of a winter-white beard.

‘Who
are
you?’

Realizing her mistake, Feyra matched his silence with her own. Heart pounding, she reverted to Venetian. ‘I am Cecilia Zabatini, the new maid.’

‘Really?’ The voice from the dark sounded amused. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I like you better than the old one already. Light the lamps, then,’ Andrea Palladio told her. ‘If we are to exchange pleasantries, it is better that we may see each other.’

Feyra snorted, still angry. ‘How can I light them? I can’t see them.’

Palladio’s voice had a wheeze of a squeezebox, and a gravel in it. It rumbled out of the dark. ‘There is one in a sconce between the pilaster of the principal door and the orlo. There are two on the architrave of the mantel. Another in the void between the secondary and tertiary window, and three above the frieze and under the cornice. Light one and you will see the rest.’

Here were words that Nur Banu had never taught her. ‘I don’t understand what you say.’

‘Find me a taper. I’ll do it.’ Feyra found a leaf of paper that had been spared the flames and screwed it into a stick. Her master rose from the chair and shuffled past her. He took a light from the smouldering fire, and went about the room touching the paper to each candle. As the room warmed into light she recognized him at once – he was the very old man who had come to the ruin on Giudecca, just
after her father had died; pacing and peering and prodding and writing in his tables.

She watched him return to his chair with his shuffling, gouty gait. He sat heavily as if the weight of the world were upon him. She went to the fire and prodded the ashy part-charred parchments. They were covered with drawings and diagrams and every one was destroyed. She peered closer and picked up a glowing shred of paper. The drawings had been torn across and across before they’d been burned, as if he’d wanted to obliterate his work entirely. She looked up, a fragment still dangling from her hand. ‘Why did you burn all this?’

He sighed, so heavily that his breath stirred the ashes. ‘I cannot do it.’

‘What cannot you do?’

‘Build a church.’

She froze with the shred of paper in her hand. Something Zabato Zabatini said to her wakened in her mind. As casually as she could she asked: ‘For the Doge?’

‘Not for him. If it were only Sebastiano Venier I had to please, I could do it well. No, for a more exacting master. For God.’

Feyra dropped the fragment and straightened up, brushing her cindered fingers on her skirt. She was not entirely sure whether she should leave him to himself, but she’d revealed herself and shouted at him and now there was no way back. Besides he seemed inclined to talk and he was her only route to the Doge. She took a deep breath. ‘What have you done so far?’ she asked.

‘I have measured the site –’ he waved his hand towards the fireplace ‘– scribbled enough lines to reach Jerusalem if you laid them end to end. And had my poor draughtsman
draw enough to come home again. Every one of them but a worthless scratch.’

Feyra thought about the draughtsman named Saturday and those inkstained fingers which he’d scratched raw. ‘And what will he think about what you’ve done?’ she asked sternly.

‘He knows me well enough by now. You are acquainted with Zabato Zabatini?’

‘I am his niece,’ Feyra said carefully.

He looked straight at her and she saw tiny candles burning merrily in both his eyes. ‘You most certainly are not. For one thing his sister is unmarried. For another, you just gabbled like an infidel. Are you a Moor? Or a Roosian?’

He did not seem angry, more amused. Feyra steeled herself to tell the truth. ‘I am from Constantinopoli.’ She prepared herself, wearily, to recount her story.

But it seemed that Palladio, caught up in his own conundrum, was not interested in her history. Instead he said, musingly, ‘Ah.
Constantinopoli
. There are many wondrous temples there, I’m told.’

He could have said nothing more certain to secure her regard than this. She came eagerly right up to his chair. ‘Oh, there are! There are many mosques. Besides the wonders of the Hagia Sophia, there is the S
ü
leymaniye which stands on a hilltop over the Golden Horn; it is the largest mosque of Istanbul with four minarets. Then there’s the Fatih mosque which includes medreses, hospices, baths, a hospital and a library.’ She was suddenly back there, wandering the pavings warm from the sun. The Fatih, more than any other building, exemplified to Feyra the concept of
Mizan
, for it dealt with the soul as well as the mind and body.

‘Then there’s the Beyazit Mosque at the centre of a huge complex. It has a great dome supported by four pillars.’ She described the dome with her hands, reaching high in the candlelight. ‘Such workmanship!’ She could not stop, consumed suddenly by an overwhelming nostalgia. ‘Then there’s Ey
ü
p, the oldest of all. It lies outside the city walls near the Golden Horn, at the supposed place where the standard bearer of the Prophet Mohammed is buried. It is so magnificent that the faithful have flocked there for centuries.’ The great Sinan would not sit about wallowing in self-pity, burning his drawings, Feyra thought. ‘In Constantinople the architects are obsessed by their vision,’ she declared. ‘I have known one who does not eat from dawn to sundown. Once the light has gone and he cannot build more,
then
he breaks his fast.’

‘Would that I had his passion – for mine has quite gone, it seems,’ Palladio mused, with the self-absorption of unhappiness. He rose and began to fiddle with a casement catch. ‘For all of those temples you named I can match them with churches of my own. See –’ suddenly spurred, he began pulling out the drawers beneath the long map table, and pulling reams of plans from their depths. ‘Here,’ he read the notations, ‘Portal for the Church of Santa Maria dei Servi. And here: Façade for the Basilica of San Pietro di Castello. And here: the Refettorio of the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. The Convento della Carità. The façade for the Church of San Francesco della Vigna. I could go on. And now,
now
, I get my very first commission from the Republic of Venice, and I cannot draw a meaningful line.’ He drove one fist into his palm with frustration.

Feyra looked at the scattered plans. ‘Why must this one be any different?’

Palladio threw up his arms and put his hands behind his white head. ‘Because it is an offering. I am caught in a contract, the seals have been set and the papers signed, and there is to be no breach of it.’ He sat again, heavily, letting his hands drop. ‘The Doge thinks that if I build a miracle of architecture worthy of His glory, God will spare our city. He thinks that the Venetian people have sinned and God has smitten them for it.’

Feyra, much interested by this new perspective on the disaster, did not reveal that the disease had come to Venice through the dreadful design of one mortal man sitting in the Topkapi palace. She thought of her former profession. ‘What of the doctors? There must be some here.’

‘The Doge sends one such to me tomorrow, to keep me well. He thinks a doctor may save
me
, but only God may save
us
.’ Palladio clasped his rough hands, as if in prayer. ‘Oh, it matters not, I have my contract, and I must complete it. Only I cannot.’ He looked at her. ‘What do you do when you cannot get something right?’

Feyra thought of the many times in the Harem when her remedies had not worked. ‘I go back to the beginning,’ she said simply. ‘I think you have to find your beginning.’

‘
Find my beginning
,’ he mused, and sat still for so long that Feyra wondered if she should go. She began to look about her. Her eyes lighted on a single drawing, pinned on the wall, untouched by fire. She rose and went over to it.

It was a drawing of a man, with wild hair and fiery eyes. She felt herself blushing. He was unclothed, a man in his prime, with eyes of fire and hair like sunrays. He had twice as many limbs as other men – all outstretched like a spider, one set delimited by a circle, the other by a square.