The Venetian Contract (25 page)

A man within a circle within a square.

‘Why did you keep this?’

The architect broke out of his reverie and looked up slowly. ‘Because it is not mine. It is by a fellow called Leonardo, from Vinci, near Florence. This is the drawing that started it all for me. This –’ he rose, his voice full of realization ‘–
this
is my beginning.’

Suddenly animated, Palladio snatched a candle from the nearest sconce and limped up the tiny winding stair to the mezzanine. The circle of saffron light spread across the spines of the books, illuminating the letters just as the ink of his own drawings had gilded in the flames. He pulled one ancient tome out of the stack and blew the dust from its pages. ‘There’s my old friend,’ he said, and brought the book down to her, flinging it on the table with a thud and an accompanying cloud of dust. She spelled out the long word across the front. She thought at first it said ‘Venice’, but concentrated hard on the other characters and spelled ‘VITRUVIUS’.

‘You read Latin?’

Feyra had pored over some monastic herbals in the Topkapi library but could only make out but a few words. ‘No.’

‘He was the original master builder, when the Romans ruled all.’ He smiled a little. ‘When your country and mine were one empire.’

Feyra watched as he turned the pages – noticing his hands as he turned the leaves gently. They were as ink-stained as Zabato’s, heavy and square, with short stubby nails and hardened horny fingertips. They were the hands of a labourer not a nobleman; and yet she found his speech easier to understand than any one else in the house. She
suspected that he had not been born as a nobleman. She looked at the book over his shoulders. ‘Where does it begin?’

He rapped his forefinger on the first diagram. ‘With this, a circle within a square.’

She frowned. ‘Is it the answer?’

Her master sighed. ‘Vitruvius is my beginning and my end, my alpha and omega; his geometrical rules govern everything I do; not only that but the universe beyond.’ He swept his arm to the open casement, a gesture that embraced the cosmos, directing Feyra to the night outside, velvet and baubled with stars. ‘I have built my life upon Vitruvius’s shoulders. He is my inspiration.’

Feyra looked at the stars, the same stars that shone on Constantinople. She thought of the minarets and domes of Mimar Sinan. She remembered then Nur Banu working at the plans for her mosque with the earnest, turbanned man, making suggestions for a staircase here, a false arch, or an ornamental screen. Feyra looked at the book of Vitruvius again. The circle within a square. Now the shape was different, assuming three dimensions, transforming before her eyes. It was not meaningless. It was a dome.

‘Perhaps – your god does not want the same thing as before. Perhaps he wants something different.’ She spoke carefully. ‘The fellow I told you of. His name is Mimar Sinan.’

‘An infidel!’

She corrected him sternly. ‘An architect.’

Palladio inclined his head. ‘It is late. Come to me in the morning. I have that tiresome doctor attending me at noon but come to me before that. I would hear more of this Sinan.’

As she bowed and backed from the room she could see Palladio, in the candlelight, turning the pages with his stone-hardened fingers, rapt. He had taken a clean sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and was drawing, again and again, a circle within a square.

Chapter 21

W
hen Feyra went to Palladio’s
studiolo
the next morning, the room looked entirely different.

The walls were scrubbed, and the only evidence of the fire was a sooty stain on the tapestry that hung above the mantel. The plans were packed away again and the only drawn material in evidence was the book of Vitruvius, open at the circle and the square, and the picture of the man with many limbs pinned on the wall, staring down from his geometrical prison. The great chair had been shifted to the middle of the room. Palladio invited her to sit in it while he stood. Feyra duly settled herself, and their visit to Constantinople began.

The architect bid her sit still with her hands in her lap and close her eyes. Then he asked her to imagine herself back in Constantinople, and to walk from her house. He limped around her as she spoke, firing questions at her like an archer at a mark. Feyra, intrigued, acquiesced.

In her mind’s eye she crossed the threshold of the little house in Sultanamet that she’d shared with her father and set off down the worn, warm cobbles. ‘Take me somewhere,’ she heard Palladio’s distant, gravelly voice say; and she went left to the Bazaar Quarter and through the spice market. She was so immersed in her daydream that she
could smell the acrid leaves and feel the fallen herbs underfoot though her thin yellow slippers. She walked until she reached the Imaret gate. ‘Where are you?’ asked the voice.

‘I am at the S
ü
leymaniye Mosque, the greatest edifice Sinan ever built, for the tomb of S
ü
leymaniye.’ Now she passed under the vast shadow of the Muvakkithane Gateway, dwarfed by the massive ornamental marble postern. ‘And now I’m in the
avlu
, a great monumental courtyard on its west side. There’s a long row of continuous arches …’

‘A colonnaded peristyle. Go on.’

With the architect occasionally interrupting with questions, Feyra walked round the whole complex in her mind, describing its columns, courtyards, minarets in minute detail.

‘And what of the church itself?’ he asked.

‘The main dome is as high as heaven, and gilded within, as if someone has captured a lightning flash. The interior is almost a square.’

‘A circle in a square,’ breathed the voice, softer than before. ‘Go on.’

‘The two shapes together form a single vast space. The dome is flanked by semi-domes, and to the north and south arches there are windows with triangles over them, cemented with a rainbow of tiny tiles.’

‘And how are the domes supported?’

Feyra turned around beneath the dome. ‘There are supports built into the wall, but they are hidden by the arches of the galleries.’

‘He’s masked the buttresses, to give a more harmonious interior. Clever,’ said the voice, warm with admiration.

‘There is a single
serife
… gallery … inside the structure,
and a two-storey gallery outside. The inside is clad with subtle
Iznik
tiles and the woodwork inset with simple designs in ivory and mother-of-pearl. But the jewel in the casket – the tomb of S
ü
leymaniye – is clad in white marble.’

Feyra was in the grip of her dream, revolving around under the jewel-studded roof. She felt as if she were in heaven. A sharp rapping sound brought her crashing down to earth.

‘
Damn
,’ cursed Palladio. ‘It is the doctor.’ Flustered, Feyra rose. ‘Come –’ her master opened a small door by the staircase. ‘Wait in the
cabinetto
.’

The little room held all Palladio’s supplies, his pens and inks, ramparts of charcoal and pillars of paper. Feyra held the door closed with her little finger curled in the keyhole, but her curiosity got the better of her and she let it open a crack and peered through.

The sight before her made her heart thump so hard she almost fell into the room. Her master was seated in the chair she had just left and over him arched a dreadful monster; clad in black, with a curving beak poised to strike.

Chapter 22

^‘
I
do not think you are even ill.’

Annibale looked the old man over. The architect was clearly wealthy by the quality of his velvets and the size of his rooms, and the chair he sat in was good oak. Although his beard was white, his eyes were bright as pebbles.

‘I’m not,’ admitted the old man. ‘Yet. But I cannot afford to become so, and the Doge claims that you are the best plague doctor in Venice.’

Annibale was without vanity; he’d been told by his mother that he was a beautiful baby, then by his aunts that he was a beautiful child, then by numerous women that he was a beautiful man. In Padua, the plaudits changed from the physical to the intellectual as his tutors told him repeatedly that he had the best medical mind in his year. Then the Camerlengo of the Republic himself had sought him out. So now he merely shrugged. He was irritated to be taken from his work; irritated to have been outplayed by the Camerlengo. He did not trouble to hide it. ‘And you,’ he said sarcastically, ‘are the most important man in Venice, because you are building a church.’

The old man sat a little straighter. ‘Not just any church. A church to beg the Lord to save us from the Plague.’

Annibale thought about the streets he had just passed
through. Valnetti and his colleagues were clearly failing to hold back the tide. In some
quartieri
there were crosses on every house now, lime boxes on every corner, myrtle smoke snaking from every chimney. ‘Beg hard,’ he snapped. He adjusted his mask, already preparing to go.

The old man gestured to the beak with his roughened hand. ‘Does that thing work?’

‘So far. And whether it does or it doesn’t, the people expect it, which is more.’ Annibale straightened up and told a lie to expedite his exit. ‘The truth is,
Maestro
, that if you have dodged the pestilence for these many days, you will, in all probability, not catch it now.’ He relented. ‘But this you may do. Get yourself a square of good linen – I mean with many close-woven threads, like good Egyptian cotton – smoke it on the fire each day and tie it over your nose and mouth if you should walk the streets.’ He glanced back at the old man. ‘In fact, if you are a mason, it would serve you well to do this anyway, for that cough will kill you before the Plague does. That, or keep away from stone.’

The fellow smiled into his white beard. ‘I can’t keep away from stone. It is my life.’

‘Then what was once your life will be your death,’ snapped Annibale.

Now, the old man chuckled. ‘So long as I can finish my church first, He may come and get me.’

Annibale snorted, and the old man looked at him keenly. ‘You don’t have faith? You don’t attend church?’

Annibale shot him a look. ‘I’m too busy in this world to concern myself with the next. In your profession too you would better serve God by serving mankind. Before you build your church you should build some better housing. The Plague has taken such a hold principally because of
cramped rooms, no sanitation and no ventilation. Health begins with the home.’

The old man’s eyes brightened and he looked at the doctor properly for the first time. ‘You are
absolutely
right,’ he said emphatically, as if he had found a kindred spirit. ‘Go on.’

Annibale opened his mouth to vent his fury at the Republic and its shoddy housing provision for the poor, but he closed it again. He needed to get back to his island; his island and his patients. ‘If you’ll forgive me, I must return to those who have
actual
need. I’ll see you in seven days,’ he said shortly, and swept from the room with a flourish of his coat.

Unfortunately the drama of his exit was ruined by the fact that he chose the wrong door. He found himself in a small antechamber in which a maid was fiddling about with some chores. She jumped a little, her cheeks burning, and shot him through with an amber glance before lowering her strange topaz eyes respectfully.

He automatically appraised her appearance as he did with everyone he met. Her skin was unblemished and her cheeks fairly glowing with health. She was a fine specimen; at least Palladio’s servants did not seem to be pestilent, and that was half the battle. ‘Your pardon,’ he barked at her, his manner rendered even ruder than usual by the farcical situation, before backing out and leaving, this time by the right way.

Chapter 23

F
eyra spent each morning in the
studiolo
with Palladio.

Her tasks were reassigned and Zabato Zabatini was directed to come to his master in the afternoons only. No one in the household made comment: the master was working again.

Feyra told him of the new mosque Sinan was building for her mother, a place that would be Nur Banu’s tomb. During these conversations, Zabato Zabatini would often loiter about the room and Feyra would feel his eyes upon her from behind the eye-glasses, as if her voice or her features brought Cecilia back to him.

She soon forgot Zabato, though, for now Palladio’s questions became more direct. As she’d seen the mosque being built, he asked her how the dome was constructed, how it was supported, even how the masons cut the stone. He became obsessed with the concept. How did one turn a circle within a square to a sphere within a cube? For to build a true dome, aesthetically pleasing and following all the geometrical precepts of Vitruvius, the dome must have an equal space beneath it, a void that the worshippers would fill with their faith.

Sometimes he drew, sweeping lines and marginalia crammed with detail. Sometimes she did, and found that
the pen answered in her hand for she been trained to draw anatomy. Again and again Feyra’s eye would be drawn to the Vitruvian man pinned upon the wall. His geometry informed every one of the drawings around him and his expression exemplified the meeting of Feyra’s discipline and Palladio’s architecture – anatomy and building.