The Venetian Contract (40 page)

Feyra’s boatman rowed back to Venice with the speed and satisfaction of someone who had been paid twice for his labour. He went straight back to the Fondamenta Nuove and from there walked the short distance to
Dottore
Valnetti’s house, there to give up the whereabouts of the woman in the green dress.

PART IV

The Red Horse

Chapter 36

D
octor Annibale Cason walked through San Marco at sundown.

His beak mask went almost unnoticed among the revellers preparing for tonight’s celebration for the feast of Saint Mark. By his side was his assistant, a young man of exactly the doctor’s height, carrying his master’s bag. He was dressed simply in a dark frock coat and breeches and a cambric shirt with no cravat, and he wore no hat on his curls, but women still turned to look at him, for in these times he was a sight for sore eyes.

Today, Saint Mark’s day, was also known as the
Festa del Bocolo
, the feast of the rose buds, for on this day men gave long-stemmed red roses to the maids who caught their fancy. It seemed that the tradition had not halted for the Plague, but the Venetian maids and wives too, even the ones who had already been given a tribute, looked at Annibale with the coquettish glances of the young or the hungry eyes of the more experienced. It reminded him of why he’d donned the beak in the first place. As he passed, the roses they had been given were dropped and trodden, unnoticed, underfoot.

They’d been up late into the night, and Feyra had told him everything, from the day her mother and father met at
Paros, to her mother’s deathbed confession, to the day that she’d buried her father. She told him of the ring of the four horses and her mission to see the Doge. She told him of Takat Turan, who had vanished from Giudecca and reappeared like a spectre earlier that night. He’d been stunned by the story, humbled by the burden she had carried alone. She had told him of her father’s part in the tale shamefacedly, and he had wanted, very much, to take her in his arms and tell her that her father’s crime, and the blight upon the city, was not her fault. She had done nothing but try to atone since she had come to Venice, and now, when she appealed to him to prevent further bloodshed, he could do nothing but aid her.

Feyra trod carefully, disorientated by the doctor’s beak and her view of the world through the eyepieces. She was seeing the city as Annibale saw it, and it was unsettling. The distance that the beak placed between a doctor and the outside world seemed a very great gulf indeed; little wonder that compassion rarely passed beyond the mask.

They neared the campanile. At the foot of the great red bell tower was a gilded cage as big as a barge. Within the cage, pacing back and forth, was a huge lion, the emblem of Venice made real. Feyra stopped and looked closer at the monster. The fur was patchy brindle, not burnished gold, and the shaggy mane looked fleabitten and bald in patches. Only the dull eyes had lustre, lent by the dying sun which turned them as amber as her own, but nothing could disguise the animal’s misery.

‘It is the Lion of Saint Mark; the
real
one,’ said Annibale. ‘The
Consiglio
keeps a live beast caged here in perpetuity.
When this one dies they will get another. He is supposed,’ he said with heavy irony, ‘to be the luck of the city.’

Feyra had not expected to feel sorry for her nemesis, but she had not known a lion could look like this. He already looked defeated. She left him pacing, and they crossed the broad thoroughfare to the Doge’s palace.

Together Annibale and Feyra reached the broad white stairs, with the great alabaster giants standing sentinel and gazing down at them from blank marble eyes. As they ascended, Feyra’s knees shook a little as she remembered the first time she had climbed these stairs, and recognized the same two guards who had chased her that night.

At the head of the stairs Annibale touched his forelock and addressed the two impassive guards who crossed their pikes in his face. ‘
Dottore
Annibale Cason,’ he said humbly, ‘to see the Doge’.

The guards looked not at him, but at Feyra in the beak mask. ‘Your token,
Signor Dottore
?’ asked one.

Feyra held out the Doge’s seal, shining on the palm of her black glove. The guard reached out and turned it over. She examined the metal roundel with him; the Doge and Saint Mark on one side and the shepherd prophet alone on the other. Just like the design of the ducat she wore in her banded bosom beneath her doctor’s cloak.

She waited. She couldn’t believe that she was finally going to see the Doge. Sebastiano Venier, Admiral of Lepanto and Duke of Venice: her great-uncle.

To Feyra’s surprise the token was enough, the halberds parted and they were ushered through. One of the guards beckoned a servant liveried in wine and gold to lead them. She felt a nudge at her back and walked forward,
remembering that Annibale, as her servant, would follow at her heels. As she walked she rehearsed the story of her mother’s death, the sarcophagus on the ship, her father and Takat Turan, and the coming of the fire.

The servant took them through a palatial stone passageway, which opened out into an enormous chamber. Feyra had seen many wonders in the Topkapi palace but never been in a room as vast as this: the single chamber was as massive as the belly of the Hagia Sophia. Every inch of the walls was covered with paintings of pastoral scenes and the ceiling had been transformed likewise to a cerulean heaven powdered with stars and studded with chubby angels. High in the clouds, roosting like starlings, nested a line of dozens of Doges with their dates of birth and death written on scrolls about their throats. Feyra shivered. If she could not get her message across to the Doge he might be depicted there with his date of death written down as today.

Footsteps sounded from an unseen inner chamber, the door opened and her heart leapt. Then hope flickered and died, as the Camerlengo entered the room.

‘
Dottore
Cason?’ he said. Feyra remembered his well-modulated tones from his inquisition of her in Palladio’s house: the man who spoke in questions. Her blood froze in her veins. She nodded, the beak slicing down in front of her face like an executioner’s axe.

‘Is it the architect? Is something amiss?’

She was silent, and Annibale could not speak either, for then the Camerlengo would know him for the true doctor. She shook her head, the beak sweeping from side to side this time, her heart beating so hard she could hear it within the mask. There was an awful moment of silence, as the Camerlengo shifted his feet impatiently. ‘As you know, I act
as a conduit, shall we say, between the larger world and His Excellency himself. My Lord Doge follows me hard upon, but first may I know of your purpose here?’

Feyra felt Annibale pull at her arm. She was torn between removing the beak and pushing past the Camerlengo, and running towards the footsteps she now heard approaching. But just then a commotion erupted from the left.

A small doorway, which led on to a tiny stone arch of a bridge, was suddenly filled with the bulk of a guard. He was pulling a prisoner who was shackled to him, followed by another guard behind. The Camerlengo turned his blond head in irritation. ‘Will you forgive me?’ he asked Feyra. ‘A prisoner for questioning. Take him to The Room and await me there,’ he ordered the guard, nothing in his voice suggesting what would lie ahead for the prisoner. ‘Is it not clear to you that my Lord Doge will have conference here? Do you think we have need of such a distraction?’

Feyra turned too. Annibale was tugging her arm again, desperate to take advantage of the diversion to make their escape.

The Doge’s footsteps came closer.

The prisoner came into view, his eyes aflame, and she knew.

As she watched, horrified, the fire in his eyes seemed to ignite at his heart and his jerkin exploded. The fire spread down his arms and the guard to whom he was shackled screamed as the naphtha consumed his body. The hapless man ran to the voluminous draperies at the window, dragging his burning captive behind him, tearing the velvet down and wrapping them both in it as the flames engulfed them. But the draperies caught too and the flame leapt from
them up to the painted ceiling, where the pigments ignited and burned merrily, crackling as they rained droplets of fire on those below.

As Annibale dragged her away, Feyra saw the Camerlengo run to the inner chamber and saw, beyond the door, a shadowy figure in a tall white hat before the billowing smoke hid them from view.

As they ran from the chamber, Feyra and Annibale forgot their pretence and shouted to all in their path to clear the palace. Annibale shoved her towards the great white stairway and they clattered down the stairs, matching each other step for step. Just as she reached the bottom, Feyra remembered the last time she’d been on this stair and the kitcheners bringing bread for the poor.

She grabbed Annibale’s arm. ‘The servants!’ she cried above the screams and the smoke. They doubled back into the palace’s cellars and kitchens, giving the alarm and clearing the legions of servants out into the square. Pigs and chickens reprieved from the chopping block scuttled out into the air between their legs. Outside they were met by a cacophony of screams and cries, the ringing of bells, the babble of prayers, all overlaid by the nightmarish roaring of Saint Mark’s Lion.

Feyra and Annibale turned back to look at the inferno; the traceries of the palace windows were now silhouettes of black lace against the topaz flames. The white and rose bricks were blackening rapidly. She had never known before how noisy fire could be: that flames could roar louder than a lion, that timber screamed as it warped and fell, that glass shrieked as it melted. Feyra watched, almost
hypnotized by this strangely beautiful, yet terrible sight, unable to look away although the floating cinders stung her eyes. There was nothing she could do to help the Doge although she had seen the Camerlengo run to save him; it was the city herself that was now at risk. She could turn and run through the square with Annibale and escape, but she knew she would not and neither would he. They were healers and savers of lives and the inferno screamed at them to stay. In unspoken agreement Annibale and Feyra jostled to the lagoon’s edge to help to fight the fire, joining the rapidly forming bucket chain.