The Venetian Contract (14 page)

For the next hours she crouched in the dank dark, her back against the cold stone.

She was colder than she had ever been; and however she sat the sharp flints stuck into her back. Twice in those hours she heard the citizens of the island pass, and peered through the stones to see two fat laundresses who held their baskets above their heads against the rain, and later a fisherman with a dog. She held her breath as the little cur actually trotted into the gatehouse and even sniffed at Timurhan’s motionless foot, until she shooed him away and he bounded off at a whistle from his master. The scent of fish reached her through the derelict wall, transporting her back to the fish market in the Balik Pazari. She peered through the stones to see their silver scales glowing in the twilight as they lolled on the fisherman’s shoulder. Her stomach growled afresh. She could have devoured both of them; eyes, guts, bones and all.

By nightfall she knew the truth. Takat Turan was not coming back.

She rose now, for it was too dark to be seen, and walked all the way through the old building to the other shore of the island. She looked up at the moon, and then down at the crystal ring on her finger. The tiny black horse was uppermost and she turned him till he faced away, below her fingers, so the red horse showed. She had failed to stop the black horse riding forth, and would never, now, find a man called Saturday, go to a house with golden callipers over the door, nor meet the Doge himself who was, incredibly, her great-uncle. It all seemed like an Ottoman legend, as ancient as it was improbable.

She watched the strange city across the water, windows illuminating one by one, pricked out like a constellation of stars as the citizens lit their candles and lamps. She knew that as the people lit their tapers and rush dips to light them to bed, somewhere in those houses a husband would notice the hectic colour of his wife’s countenance, or a mother would note the unnatural heat of her son’s cheek as she kissed him goodnight, and the dawn would bring the horror of the pestilence.

PART II

The Birdman

Chapter 12

D
octor Annibale Cason took extra care with his appearance that morning.

Newly qualified as the
medico
for the
quartiere
of the Miracoli in his home city of Venice, he had gained, with his new status, a manservant to dress him; but he could not stay still and let the man work. It was still strange to him to be dressed as if he were a babe, and he twitched and fidgeted, retied and rebuttoned, and at length dismissed his servant to be alone before his full-length Murano looking-glass. Today his garments were not merely a symbol of his status, but had to actually do the job for which they were designed. They were medical clothes and he wished to don them himself, for they could save his life.

Over his ordinary suit of clothes he pulled on long, supple leather breeches. As long as those worn by the fishermen in the lagoon, these were not to keep out seawater but other more noxious fluids. Worn beneath his cloak they would protect his legs and groin from infection.

Next Annibale swung a long, black overcoat about his shoulders with a sweeping flourish. He tied it tight about his neck, then flicked out the longer curls of hair that tumbled about his nape. He kept his curls long for a reason; his teachers at Padua advised that skin exposure was to be kept
to a minimum in infected wards, for it was the air that carried disease. He turned up the high collar of the coat, so that his neck and throat were completely covered by the cloth and the join by his hair. The cape extended to his feet, and was coated head to toe in mutton suet and tallow. The suet drew the pestilence away and trapped it in the folds of the cloak, which was then smoked nightly in juniper smoke. The wax served as protection against droplet contamination, to prevent sputum or other bodily fluids from clinging to the cloak, for it was acknowledged that coughing carried the plague.

Then came the symbol of Annibale’s profession, an ugly mask to cover his handsome features. A dreadful construction in the shape of a bird’s beak, it was a mask that he had studied for seven years to be allowed to wear. Annibale knew the shape of the mask originated from the old-fashioned notion that disease was carried by birds and that by dressing in a bird-like mask the wearer could draw infection away from the patient and on to the clothes that the doctor wore. Annibale snorted behind the mask at this kind of ignorant assumption that now held no sway in the quadrangles of Padua, breathing in as he did so the heady scent of cinnamon and potash stuffed in the nose. The beak of the mask was filled with strongly aromatic herbs to overpower the miasma and dull the smell of unburied corpses, sputum, ruptured buboes and the other delights that he could expect today. The mask also included red glass eyepieces, which were thought to make the wearer impervious to evil.

Lastly Annibale donned the distinctive wide-brimmed black hat worn close to the head, and arranged it to cover the white domed forehead of the mask. He was not afraid of contagion for his own sake, but if he became ill, he would
no longer be able to heal, and Annibale had no intention of stopping before he had even started.

Just before he left the glass he took up a wooden cane propped against the wall. The cane was used to both direct family members to attend or adjust the patient, and sometimes to examine the patient with directly. Besides, in wards of infection a
medico
could describe a circle about himself with a sweep of the cane that none would dare to enter. Annibale flourished it now, like a rapier, for the benefit of his reflection. But what he saw did not convince him. The ensemble looked too pristine and untried, fresh as it was from the tailors and maskerers, the bills of sale still attached to the folds.

For a moment he saw himself as others would see him, a harbinger of death. The plague doctor’s clothing had a secondary use: to frighten and warn onlookers, and to communicate that something very, very wrong was nearby. The beaked mask in particular looked incredibly macabre.

Even on an ordinary day he was glad of the mask, for it covered his extraordinarily fine features. Annibale saw himself, as he saw everything, in scientific terms like a creature in a jar at the
Scuola Medica
in Padua. Of four cats pickled in a jar he could easily see which had the sharpest teeth and the leanest back and the longest leg. As a specimen he knew he was a fine example of
homo sapiens
, tall for a Venetian, with well-muscled, long, lean limbs, and a tumble of dark hair. His own face, though, was a mystery to him. He acknowledged he had regular features; but to him they seemed unremarkable, these dark eyes and the arched brows over them, and this straight nose with finely flared nostrils and the full lips beneath. However, they had a strange alchemy he did not understand, which acted on
women in a way he did not welcome. Annibale liked order, and because he could not control the effect his features had he preferred to cover them up.

In truth, even when not wearing the beak, Annibale had cultivated a mask of his own; he adopted a brusque manner that gave him the impression of being proud and haughty, solely to keep women – and some men too – at a distance. When he spoke it was with ill-concealed irritation; he did not suffer fools and was known for being short-tempered.

The brutal truth was that Doctor Annibale Cason was a good doctor because he didn’t really care who lived or died. After his mother had abandoned him as a babe, and the parade of numerous aunts that had raised him in succession had all died, he had no emotional attachments; and despite frequent proposals he had never married. He saw illness as a personal intellectual challenge, which almost had more to do with him than the afflicted, and was therefore extremely successful at treatment. He was known at university as a basilisk of a man, who could watch a babe die without pity.

In this his fellows did not give him enough credit. Annibale was not entirely heartless, but he kept a little circle of distance around him even without his cane. He had few friends and this suited him. Those he held close to his heart knew the real Annibale; they were few in number, and he had no need of more.

Padua was a wealthy city and, in his final year when the young doctors were released on the general populace, he had had to attend many rich women. There, in the city where he’d trained, the dreadful mask had served to keep him from the importunities of these bored matrons who were so taken with his comely face, that they would demand that he try their breath on his cheek or that he press
his ear to their heaving bosoms to check their throbbing hearts. Today, back in his home city, the mask would serve its true medical purpose.

Annibale could not believe his luck. Born and raised in Venice, christened in the Church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli, the very church that now sounded the pestilence bell, he had been but one day back from Padua, had spent one night in his old bed in the family home, before the Lord had smitten the city. Now, at last, he would have the chance to put his seven years of learning at the University Medical School, where he had been one of the finest minds of his year, into practice. All the herbals he had read in the libraries, all those mornings spent in the botanical gardens, all those afternoons in the tiered wooden theatre watching his beloved mentor dissecting the cadavers of unlamented criminals, would now be put to use.

Ready now, he dismissed his reflection as he’d dismissed his man, barked instructions at his cook for that evening, and left the house, almost with a light step. He felt like a knight of old riding to battle and fate had provided him with the most deadly adversary of all to try his lance upon. He,
Doctor
Annibale Cason, was ready to take on the Plague.