The Venetian Contract (29 page)

‘I will not help them,’ she said. She pointed to the Tezon. ‘I will help you.’

It only took the Birdman the space of one hour to know what a gift he had in Feyra. By the time four bells had rung he called her to him. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Henceforth you will be my nurse.’

Feyra said nothing. It was a demotion from her role at the Harem, but a promotion from being a maid.

‘What did the architect pay you?’

‘One sequin a week.’

‘Then I will pay you the same.’

If Feyra thought she’d been promoted, she was wrong.

Her tasks were far more onerous than those she’d carried out in Palladio’s house. She spent her first day changing the soiled mattresses of the afflicted, giving them all food and water, changing the dressings and poultices of the numerous suture wounds that she found on each patient. She was impressed with some aspects of the organization of the Tezon, but found it far from a model hospital. True, the Birdman had isolated the patients admirably, the smoke cabinet at the great doors fumigated the doctor as he
entered and left, and he kept the afflicted tolerably comfortable on their pallets. His medicine cabinets were well stocked, his botanical gardens fruitful. Supplies of food and water were left outside by the gatekeeper. But the patients were laid together as close as herrings in a crate, and no one, it seemed, had the care of their minds.

From the conversations she had with them, it was clear that some were even unaware that their families were hard by. As she found her feet Feyra resolved to implement changes as she went along. And this was as good a place as any to earn more sequins to fill her yellow slipper. Once the pestilence was passed and the shipping began again, she would have enough to take her home to Turkey.

On that first day, sitting with her patients in the Tezon, she looked at the Ottoman script scrawled on the walls in the iron oxide. They were manifests only, just the words for silk or spices, copper or cotton, but they were like the greatest sagas of the poets to her. Similarly the cognizances of the ships, scrawled here and there, insignia she’d seen on her father’s ships and his order papers since she was a girl, were as beautiful to her as the
tugra
, the golden calligraphed signatures of the Sultans.

There was even, fittingly, on the eastern wall of the Tezon, a wonderfully rendered drawing of a ship of the Ottoman type, just like the one her father used to take to sea. She remembered standing on Seraglio Point, when she was no more than eight, watching it hove in across the sound. She felt her homesickness like a blow to the stomach, and it was a great comfort to think of the yellow slipper of sequins; it would take her home again.

By the end of the day Feyra knew the island well. Even the little cemetery in the wilderness beyond the well was
not forbidden to her. In quiet moments she would dig graves alongside the sisters companiably enough, in silent respect for those that had gone, both faiths mouthing their parallel prayers. She drew water for the patients from the well where she had dropped her crucifix, impressed by the clarity of the water. She looked at the stone lion and he looked back at her but, strangely, she was not afraid of him here on this island. His mouth was as closed as his book. It was open jaws she feared; open jaws that might receive poisonous letters.

She could not think who could possibly have denounced her. It was not the Birdman. And no other member of Palladio’s household had known her identity save Palladio and Zabato. Had Corona Cucina somehow discovered her from her medicines and her accent? It seemed too fantastic to be true. And just how long would it take for news of her presence on the island to filter back to the mainland? If the Camerlengo and his guard were determined to find her, how long would it be before they thought to look here?

Feyra went about her work the rest of the day drawing as little attention to herself as she could manage. The one place she did not set foot in was the church. Saint Bartholomew was the Christian saint that gave his name to the Damascene tree, the tree whose spores poisoned her mother, and for this, as much as the other reason, she would not go in.

But as much as Feyra would not enter the church, someone else was just as anxious to keep her out.

‘She cannot room with us.’

The Badessa was waiting for Annibale at the end of
Feyra’s first day. He stuck out his beak belligerently, and shook the smoke of the atrium cabinet free from the folds of his coat.

‘Why?’ he demanded, already knowing the answer.

‘She is an infidel.’

Annibale sighed. He had thought it such a neat solution. The nuns all roomed in the customs house behind the church which had a great upper room. ‘But she will not be living in the church itself. That was never suggested.’

‘It does not matter. The customs house is one of the church buildings. She cannot live among us.’ She touched his arm. ‘I will be her friend. I try to be a Samaritan, as our Lord taught. I have, if you have noticed, given her some cloths for her head, and sandals for her feet. But she may not bed in our dormitory, nor enter our church. If you asked her, she would probably say the same.’

As the sun lowered Annibale showed Feyra the little cottage, next to the church but outside the retaining wall. It was the house that had suffered the cannon fire, the house that was so tumbledown that he had not deemed it fit for a family nor for himself. He was especially curt about it, telling her before he left that there was an idiot boy, a mute who would make the place good. Crossing the green he shouted for Salve, bellowing at him to get materials and tools and mend the roof. He saw Feyra watching their exchange from the doorway of her little ruin. She gave him a look, and said nothing.

Feyra’s house reminded her sharply of the little gatehouse where she had lost her father. Upstairs there was a jagged blue rag of sky showing through the roof, and she
knew she should set her bed in the lower room before night fell. She dragged the mattress downstairs; but the sight of the pallet beside the stone door jamb recalled her father’s deathbed to her even more. There was even a nest of starlings in the ruined eaves, and she lifted the nest carefully and took it to the blackthorn woods. She saw the Birdman watching her cross the green with the nest in her hands, but she studiously ignored him.

When she got back, her bed had been rearranged in the lower room, closer to the hearth, the coverlets neatly folded. A little fire had been set in the fireplace, the sticks placed neatly in a conical stack, and already smoking like a volcano. A broad piece of canvas had been placed across the unglazed window against draughts, and a little man, misshapen and warped in body, stood in the shadow of the chimney stack.

Feyra tried not to stare. His head seemed disproportionately large in relation to his body, like a giant babe. His limbs were malformed, but he was clearly agile, for he had achieved more in the brief moment that she had been in the woods than she had done in the whole of the preceding hour. She saw an expression of fear and diffidence in his eyes, and took his little twisted hand in hers and looked directly into his face. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

From then on, Feyra had a friend on the island. In quiet moments in the Tezon she would return to her little house and sit companiably with Salve while he did repairs. She spoke to him kindly over the following weeks, without a reply, and was astonished when one day he began to talk back.

‘Does the doctor know you can speak?’

‘No.’

She could tell that speech was not a custom with him – that he had some malady of the lantern jaw and tongue. ‘And your father?’ She had met the gatekeeper by the well; he had been friendly enough, but she had barely said one word to his thousand.

‘Never … gives … chance.’

Salve had few words indeed but was not as simple as the Birdman had decided. Feyra took trouble with him and he began to talk more. She noticed, though, in company even with his father he was as silent as ever, and from the doctor he simply hid.

It seemed that the Birdman had no time for the community on the island; his attitude to Salve exemplified his attitude to the little neighbourhood that occupied the almshouses. He had gone just so far as to recommend that everyone that could tolerate it take up the pipe, and so men and women went about in a personal cloud of smoke. But beyond this the doctor had no truck with the families at all, and the citizens of his island only gained his notice if they fell sick.

As time passed Feyra ceased to be afraid of the Birdman, so she felt brave enough to challenge him about it.

‘Why did you bring the families here?’