The Venetian Contract (28 page)

‘He knew.’

‘Of
course
he knew.’ The Birdman answered the architect scornfully. ‘He knows everything.’

Zabato paced, shaking, his hands fluttering like clipped wings.

‘Can you stop him doing that?’ the Birdman asked Palladio, as if Zabato could not hear.

‘Leave him be,’ said Palladio. ‘The Doge may be pious
and gentle, but his guard dog is not. Little wonder he is feared. And he’ll be back.’

Feyra, shaking, leaned weakly against the wall, trying to make sense of what had happened. She would have bet the Sultan’s dagger to a hen’s egg that it was the doctor who had denounced her, but he had saved her instead.

‘Now we must hide Feyra,’ said Zabato Zabatini.

Palladio was still seated, dazed. ‘Who is Feyra?’

Zabato pointed to the shadows. ‘She is. The maid you know as Cecilia Zabatini.’

Palladio looked at her, with a chastened expression. She saw then in that one glance that he cared for her, that he was aware how much he owed her, and that he was ashamed he had never troubled to find out anything about her. ‘Of course we will hide her,’ he said.

‘But where?’ Zabato’s teeth were chattering with fear. ‘This house has many nooks, but the Camerlengo would find her in a heartbeat. And there are some in the household who would not shelter her, knowing she is a Turk. Even Corona Cucina; as you know, her husband was killed at Lepanto.’

Feyra swallowed. Even Corona Cucina, her friend and advocate?

‘I could get her to Vicenza, perhaps.’ This from Palladio.

‘No,’ countered Zabato. ‘She now has a connection to you. If she is found in your house her presence would endanger your family there.’

The Birdman let a small silence fall. He had taken no part in the discussion; it was nothing to do with him. ‘Well – I must away to my island.’

Both of the older men turned their heads as one to look at the masked man.

The Birdman retreated a pace, gloved hands outspread. ‘
I
cannot take her. I have a hospital to run.’

‘A hospital on a Plague island, where no one dares to come.’

‘What would I do with a maid?’

‘She is skilled in physic. You owned it yourself.’

The Birdman was insistent. ‘I absolutely refuse. I must be gone. I will see you in a week.’

Palladio rose. ‘In a
week
,’ he said slowly, measuring the syllables. He came right up to the Birdman, until his nose almost touched the beak. ‘In the Camerlengo’s presence,’ Palladio observed evenly, ‘you said you had been here every
day
. But you have not. You have visited
weekly
.’

There was an uncomfortable pause.

‘How would he like to know this?’ wondered Palladio aloud. ‘How would he punish you?’

The doctor had gone incredibly still.

‘And yet,’ went on Palladio, ‘if you take
Feyra
–’ he used her name with care ‘– then you may come here at each new moon, just once in every
four
weeks and the Doge will not be the wiser from me.’

The Birdman moved suddenly, snatching up his cane. ‘Very well,’ he barked. ‘But she must come now.’

‘The house will be watched,’ warned Palladio.

‘The watergate,’ suggested Zabato. ‘I will find a gondola with a
felze
such as my master normally uses.’ He turned to Feyra. ‘Fetch what you will from your rooms.’

Feyra ran to the attic, her mind spinning like a windlass. But there was nothing for it – she must go. She had little to pack: she had only the clothes she stood up in, the ring around her neck, the coin in her bosom and the yellow slipper beneath the bed, with the sequins she had so far
earned jingling in the toe. In a trice she was downstairs again.

Following Zabato Zabatini, silent but for the hissing torch, Palladio, the Birdman and Feyra made their way down a dark and winding stair that led to a place that Feyra had never been, as she had never left the house by boat.

She stood on a damp dais. Beyond the stone stage was a wet dock; a green limpid square of canal water, where in former centuries the family’s gondolas and barges would have been moored.

Zabato opened the doors to the dock with a pulley and handle, and they watched as an ink-black gondola with a tented black cover came towards them, negotiating the everyday traffic of gondolas and
traghetti
criss-crossing the sparkling canal. A burly man at the tiller raised a hand and drew in to collect his passengers. The doctor stepped into the craft first, looking left and right for spies on the water with a lateral sweep of his beak.

Zabato smiled at Feyra wanly, twitching as ever, and she could see he would be sorry to see her go. Palladio drew her aside and tenderly took her hand.

‘I hope I will see you again, and that you will see my church one day, for it sprang from your brain as much as mine.’ As he handed her into the gondola his eyes looked dull as stone.

Then the curtains swung closed and she was alone in the blackness, the Birdman’s beak curving towards her, glowing out of the dark, the colour of bone.

PART III

The Lion

Chapter 27

A
nnibale did not speak for the whole of the gondola ride to the Fondamenta Nuove.

He did not say a word as he handed Feyra into a bigger rowboat at the seaboard, and only spoke to the boatman to give him directions to the island. He was silent with the fury of being outsmarted twice in one week. It was a sensation he was not used to, and did not enjoy.

He wondered what on earth he was going to do with this girl; but by the time he’d reached the Lazzaretto he had calmed down a little. She did not chatter – she conducted herself with decorum, sitting there in the bow of the boat like a
Maria di Legno
, one of the wooden Virgin Marys common to every church in Venice.

Annibale had not been used to womenfolk since the last of his aunts had died. His mother had been an occasional, unreliable presence in his life, but he never spoke of her. The one function of a mother was, surely, to be a mother, and in abandoning him she had failed even in that. After her defection her history had become so shameful he could not bring himself to utter her name. The Badessa and the sisters on the island were his only female company, but they were practical and devout, most of them elderly and none of them handsome.
Feyra’s appearance, on the contrary, was distinctly disturbing.

He handed her out at the jetty, then stalked ahead, not waiting for the girl until they reached the great gate and the trench of potash. ‘Walk through this,
carefully
,’ he directed curtly, knowing he did not have to explain himself.

Bocca stood sentinel at the gatehouse as the doctor entered. Annibale did not even slow his pace. ‘Do not say a
word
,’ he said through his teeth, knowing how broad the gatekeeper’s humour could be. ‘She is my maid, nothing more.’

He walked purposefully to the very middle of the green lawn, then stopped and turned so rapidly that his beak nearly knocked out Feyra’s teeth.

‘What is your name?’

‘Feyra Adalet Bint Timurhan Murad.’

‘Where did you learn your doctoring?’

‘From Haji Musa, chief physician at the Topkapi palace in Constantinople.’

‘You were his assistant?’

‘I was a doctor,’ she corrected gravely.

He was silent, amazed, for besides the goodwives and cellar wenches that would rid a woman of a unwanted babe, or provide a vial of poison for an unwanted husband, women and medicine did not marry in these lands. ‘How did you come to Palladio’s house?’

The girl appeared to consider her reply. ‘On shipboard,’ she said carefully. ‘My father was a sea captain and he … took sick with the Plague.’ She spoke good Venetian, but with a thick and not unattractive accent. ‘Then I nursed him when we reached Venice, but he died. I sought employ at the architect’s house, and he took me in.’

He expressed no sympathy, but went right to the meat of the medical matter. ‘And you were not infected?’

‘I nearly died from the Plague aboard ship, but my boils burst and I lived.’

‘So you had the pestilence and survived.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yet your father did not.’

She was silent for so long that he felt obliged to speak. ‘I will show you the island,’ he said stiffly. ‘It is a work in progress, but it runs quite effectively.’ He was not quite sure why he felt obliged to excuse his work to her, and pointed curtly to the great, roofed building in the middle of the island.

‘There’s my hospital, known as the Tezon.’ He could not suppress a tiny timbre of pride in his voice, and went on to show her the rest of his kingdom. He did not know why he was guiding her himself, using his precious time when he could have turned her over to the Badessa at once, which had always been his intention. For some reason, too, he hurried past the cemetery. Pride again, he supposed, for there had been more deaths lately, enough to give him midnight misgivings about his methods. ‘These are the almshouses, where dwell the families of the afflicted.’ He looked at her sideways but she did not comment, she just studied the houses with a considering eye and smiled at some of the children playing on their step. Her smile suddenly made him forgot what he’d been going to say.

She walked on ahead of him. ‘And this?’

Annibale shrugged and hurried on through the botanical garden, pleased with the geometric rows and the nuns busy at their horticulture, and stopped at the well. He explained the rain cistern and the seven filtrations of mineral salts and sand that made Venetian water the purest urban water in
the world. But he could see the girl was looking at the stone lion with his closed book, with keen interest. ‘And these sisters, in the black habits, are the sisters of the Miracoli.’

‘They give succour to the patients?’

‘No. Only I enter the Tezon. They give aid to the families, and help me run the island. They run the gardens and stock the trout ponds and the eel leets, do laundry. They row to the mainland for supplies, tend the chickens and goats, and maintain the garden. I will leave you in the care of the Badessa. You may board with the sisters and you will help them in their daily tasks.’ He looked at her through his mask, at the exposed flesh of her throat. It mattered nothing to him that she was a Turk, but he knew that the womenfolk of her culture went about veiled, and wondered what it cost her to be so exposed. It would be a relief to have that face hidden – to him as well as her. ‘You may cover your face if you like,’ he said curtly.

Feyra looked into the blank red glass eyes, trying to fathom what lay beneath.

In Turkey great store was set by the notion of
feraset
, physiognomy. The human body was the clothing for the soul, and therefore it followed that by studying physical traits it was possible to deduce character and temperament. But the Birdman who had made this place was covered head to foot, even more swathed than she herself was used to being, and his face was a dreadful beak. She could only judge him on his speech and actions and the Birdman had offered her sanctuary – not just geographical, but a deeper retreat too. Here, it seemed, she would be allowed to cover her face. It was the first kindness he had shown.

Feyra looked at the nearest nun, busy, bending over the herbs, digging. A simple string of wooden beads fell before
her face as she dug, and on the end of the string hung a little tin cross, winking in the sun. It was just like the one Corona Cucina had given her, the one she still wore at her bodice, with the miniature shepherd prophet dangling from the cross. She unpinned the little brooch from her lace shawl, and dropped it down the well. Then she wound the lace around her head and turned to him.