The Venetian Contract (35 page)

Elsewhere, too, Columbina Cason wore a mask. She
called on every family bringing charity in the name of her son; pots of stew or fresh lemons, or comfits for the children. She sewed mattresses with the nuns. She even hoisted her gowns and dug in the garden. She attended daily mass, charming the sisters with her pitiful life and her penitence, and went to confess her sins to the Badessa almost daily, finding in her constant shrivings yet another opportunity to talk about herself.

Columbina had noticed the strange, shrouded girl who worked so closely with her son, so silent and industrious and competent. Jealous, she attempted to flatter the girl, but the foreign chit was the one person on the island that seemed immune to her charms, save, perhaps, the simple dwarf. Columbina had caught the freak watching her once or twice and had stooped to slap his ugly face for him. The silent girl had come to the midget’s side immediately and given him a salve to soothe the graze Columbina’s ring had caused. The older woman had the uncomfortable feeling that the girl’s amber eyes could see right through her.

From then on, instead of ignoring the
Muselmana
, she’d begun to cross herself whenever she saw her and spit in her path, as was just and right behaviour from a good Christian woman, although she was careful not to do this in the presence of her son. Some of the younger nuns began to follow her lead and the increasing isolation of the infidel girl satisfied Columbina that she was doing God’s work.

The Badessa of the sisterhood of the Miracoli was a good judge of character and she had not been convinced by Columbina Cason.

The Abbess knew real faith when she was in the presence
of it – Bocca the gatekeeper, for example, was truly devout – but she had learned much in those endless shrivings and the doctor’s mother, to her ears, had no more devotion than her son. And seeing the graceful and dignified way Feyra bore Columbina Cason’s insults made her ever more well disposed towards the infidel girl.

So when Feyra had appeared a week or so after Columbina Cason’s arrival, hovering at the church door, she had greeted her warmly. The girl looked terrible. ‘Is something amiss?’

‘Nothing,’ Feyra said, lightly, her looks giving the lie to her words. ‘Only that you must tell the Triannis that they may not move to the tied house just now. I will need it a while longer.’ She turned to go, but not before the Badessa had seen something glint in her eyes.

The Badessa called her back. The girl would not cross the threshold, nor would the Badessa allow her to, so the older woman came outside. ‘Are you well?’

The girl had composed herself by now. ‘Quite.’

The Badessa was not usually one to interfere, but she meant what she had said to the doctor. ‘If I may … I divine that something has prevented you from sharing a roof with our doctor, and I am bound to say that this may be a blessing.’

The heretic turned her great eyes upon her. ‘Would it have been so bad when there is love in the case?’

The Badessa looked at her with pity, but spoke firmly. ‘What you are speaking of is
sin
, sin against the Christian law.’ She relented, as they walked together to the lychgate. ‘You are of different faiths; but there may be a way to bring you closer together. If you read and study the Christian Bible, the Book of Books, you could, in time, become part
of the family of God. Then, and only then, would it be possible for the doctor to formalize his arrangement with you.’

The girl’s strange yellow eyes opened wider. She looked as if the thought were terrible to her, and yet, in a heartbeat, a change came across her gaze like the breeze rilling the lagoon. ‘Yes,’ she said. The words came in a rush. ‘Yes. If you permit it, I would like to borrow a … Bible.’

Feyra had no intention of entering the family of the Christian god and his shepherd prophet. She knew her mother had made just such a change the other way about, but the idea was loathsome to her.

And yet, when the Badessa had mentioned the Bible something her mother had said chimed in her memory – the Bible was the Book of Books, and in there she would find what she needed to know about the Four Horsemen. Now her evenings were her own, she had been thinking more and more about the mystery, trying to remember her mother’s long forgotten words. Now she needed occupation; she decided to solve the riddle of the four horses.

Before her own fire, a poor cousin to Annibale’s cosy hearth, she looked at the book where it lay in her lap. It was bound in crimson velvet with silver clasps, and the edges of the pages were exquisitely burnished to a smooth gilded sheen.

Feyra laid open the book as if it burned her hands. The vellum was as smooth and milky as could be rendered by the parchmenter’s art and the quires beautifully stitched at the spine. It was obviously a book of great value, and it was no little thing for the Badessa to place it in her hands.
The calligraphy was close and black, the text illuminated in jewel colours, the naïve pictures depicting angels and demons, promising glory and damnation. This book had legitimized violence against her people and atrocities against her faith and yet she leafed through the pages determinedly. She struggled with the Latin, but it brought her closer to Annibale, however fleetingly, for she was reading in the language that he had taught her. Odd, she thought, that the language of Western medicine was also the language of the Christian faith, when sometimes, according to Annibale, the two were set in opposition to each other. He had told her once of the objections of the Curia of Padua to the various treatments for the inoculation of the pox developed at the medical school there, on the grounds that they were ungodly.

Feyra leafed through the pages, peering at the letters until the black print swam before her eyes, and the gilded figures in the marginalia began to dance before her gaze as if they were animated. Finally she found what she was looking for; in a book called Revelations. There they rode, as if leaping from the pages – a black horse, red horse, white horse and pale horse, all mounted by grinning skeletons.

The Four Horses of the Apocalypse.

She found the Latin hard, and had got no further than the first phrase, when she was chilled by the memory of her mother’s final ravings.

‘
“Come and see”!
’ she read aloud, and was frightened by her own voice. ‘
I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of
barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!
”’

This made no more sense to Feyra than when her mother had choked out the words on her deathbed, but as she read on she swallowed painfully as she understood for the first time the gift that her father had conveyed to Venice. For the black horse brought pestilence. She read, with growing consternation, as the Great Tribulation her mother had warned of played out. Behind the black horse rode the red, harbinger of fire and bloodshed.

‘
When the Lamb opened the second seal
,’ read Feyra, ‘
I heard the second living creature say, “Come and see!” Then another horse came out, a fiery red one
.’

Then came the white horse, bearing a conqueror with a bow and a crown, bent on War. And finally, the pale horse, the green of bile, bringing Death, despair and the End of Days.

She closed the book, as if by pressing the covers together she could keep the horrors contained within. She closed her aching eyes too and struggled to remember what Nur Banu had said. She had said that
four
of the horses would come, not one. Four horses, like the quartet of bronze beasts with the flailing hooves she had seen on the Doge’s Basilica.

In the Bible the pale horse followed the black but on her ring, when she examined the crystal band warm from her bodice, the little red horse was following hard upon the black, with the white next and the greeny-pale horse last.

Feyra cursed herself for not remembering the signs her mother had taught her, for not repeating the message to the Doge as she had vowed. Once her friend Death had entered the city she’d assumed failure. The black horse had bolted from its stable and there had seemed no sense in closing the
door. But now she began to wonder, with a hollow dread, whether there was more to come.

With Annibale beside her she might have shrugged the prediction off, but now she wondered what more ills could blow across the sea from Constantinople to this beleaguered city. Shipping was still forbidden, the crew of
Il Cavaliere
had sailed away, and she was the only person from that ship left alive in Venice. The mission had to be at an end. And yet she wished she had not seen that terrible vision written down in black and white. It had left her with a terrible feeling that perhaps it wasn’t over.

Feyra did not go to bed that night. She sat, watching the book on the mantel as if the horsemen could escape from the pages and spring to life. When she heard the bells of Matins she went to the church, and left the book on the threshold.

The Badessa, leaving the little church of San Bartolomeo before dawn to lead her sisters back to their dormitory, nearly trod on the Bible. She picked it up, her old bones creaking, and exhaled a long sigh of failure. Then she went to bed for the few precious hours before Prime, shaking her head over one lost sheep.

Chapter 32

O
ver the next few days Feyra tried to forget the Horsemen. She decided instead to make amends for the only one of their blights that she understood. She would collate all the information she had gathered from her own and Annibale’s knowledge and experience and discover a cure for the Plague.

In Constantinople the most learned doctors had often made a potion known as a Theriac, a cure-all antidote that was one of the most complex forms of medicine in the canon of the apothecary. Theriacs had as many forms as they did purposes. They were often only available to the very wealthy due to the cost of the numerous constituents, and only the most competent physician would attempt a decoction.

But Feyra was not afraid. She needed employment. She took out her medicine belt and examined the herbs and unguents and powders – some from Constantinople, some restocked and replenished from Venetian soil, and some new treasures gleaned from the darkest reaches of the blackthorn woods outside the walls here on the island, or from the strange plants that thrived on the salt soil of the flats.

She had two aims: to heal those already afflicted and to
prevent the well contracting the disease in the first place. Her potion must simultaneously lower fever and reduce boils, cleanse the blood, and overall it must give hope to the mind too: there must be that within each little bottle which made the taker believe, without question, that the liquid in this little prism of glass would give him back his life. She decided to name the medicine
Teriaca
, a Venetian version of the original word borrowed from the Greeks. She was well pleased with it, but all she had was a name.

She began work.

Her home became an alchemist’s den, crowded with bottles and limbecks and cauldrons and crucibles. Although she tried to concentrate, she would look up at every sound, every creak of the door, hoping that it would be
him
, lifting the latch to tell her that his terrible mother had gone.

But days turned into weeks, and the weeks into a month; and she still did not see Annibale outside of the Tezon. As far as she knew, he visited Palladio each Friday and on those days she barely left the hospital, for it was then that the malign presence of the doctor’s mother made her life outside intolerable. She used the time wisely. Over those precious Fridays she conducted trials on the patients, asking permission of those that could speak, and administering to those that could not, suspecting that any chance of a cure would be welcome to those within the icy reach of death. She also offered the liquid to some of the families in the almshouses, who had had a member recently infected by Plague. Her findings interested her greatly.