Dark Tides Page 41

  “The ships’ masters fear the island worse than the plague itself. If your ship is suspected of disease you have to moor up, and go ashore and live there until the doctor clears you.”

  “The doctor?”

  “Now the doctor is your uncle Roberto.”

  “But how long do you have to stay in quarantine?”

  “For forty days—more than a month.”

  “Then Rob will be able to leave?”

  “No, it is the foreign crew that can leave; but Roberto is appointed as doctor, permanent doctor. He will have to stay there, checking the food, checking for disease.”

  “For how long?” she asked. “How long does he have to stay?”

  He looked at her with sympathy and he paused in his reply as if he could not think how to tell her. “This is a death sentence,” he said gently. “Though they don’t strangle him as a murderer, he will stay there for the rest of his life, till he takes the plague and dies. You must think of him as a dead man now. He may be dead already.”

  He watched her curiously. First, she took in the shock of the news, that the terrible risk they had taken—entering the Doge’s Palace and confessing a deceit—had been for nothing, that her uncle would die on a tiny island, within sight of the shore. He saw her color come and go, and then he saw her eyes slide out of focus and she looked dreamy, as if she were listening to music from far away or thinking intently of something else. When her dark gaze returned to his face, it was as if she had returned from the other world to this one.

  “No,” she said with sudden clarity. “No, he’s not dead.”

  He took her arm and led her down the stairs, thinking she was too shocked by the news to speak sense. “You’re upset,” he said. “But this is the truth. I’ve withdrawn my evidence but they won’t change the sentence. There’s nothing we can do for Rob, now he’s been sent there. No one escapes. And if he gets the plague”—he corrected himself—“when he gets it, or cholera, or yellow fever, or whatever the sailors happen to have, they will send him to the Lazzaretto Vecchio—the old death island—and he will die there.”

  “I can’t believe it,” she repeated.

  He guided her out of the gate and nodded to Captain Shore, who followed them back down the quay to his ship, walking a few paces behind them as if he was indifferent to the Italian’s scowl and the girl’s tranced blankness. The three halted on the quayside under the prow of the ship, sheltering from the icy wind that was ripping down the Grand Canal.

  “Not good news, I take it?” Captain Shore asked, his eyes on the ashen-faced girl.

  “He’s been appointed doctor at the Lazzaretto Nuovo,” Felipe said quietly.

  “Ah, God bless him and take him to His own,” Captain Shore said. “Well, he’s lost to you, maid. I’m sorry for it. You can’t go there, and he can’t get away.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “You’ve taken it hard,” the Captain said quietly to Sarah. “Bound to. Will you come on board?”

  “I’ll take her back to my house,” Felipe said. “She’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll load her goods in plenty of time.”

  “The Nobildonna’s furniture?” Captain Shore inquired. “That’s still to go ahead?”

  “Of course. It’s business,” Felipe said. “Nothing to do with this… this…”

  “This what?” Captain Shore asked him. “This little play you have put on for her? For reasons of your own? For what reason of your own, exactly?”

  “This tragedy,” Felipe corrected him. “A niece has lost an uncle. A mother has lost her son. It’s very sad.”

  “But business is still business,” the Captain said, looking at the handsome Italian from under his sandy eyebrows.

  Felipe bowed, and tucked Sarah’s hand in his arm. “Business is still business,” he repeated. “Will you take another passenger? I wish to travel with the Nobildonna’s antiquities to London?”

  “You?” the Captain was surprised. “Small beer for you, I should have thought?”

  “Small beer?” the Italian repeated.

  “Nothing compared to the shipments… the other shipments you’ve made.”

  “Ah, I see. No, it is beer of an appropriate size. I wish to accompany the young lady, and the Nobildonna’s goods are my concern. I wish to visit the Nobildonna and see how she is in London.” He paused. “Bearing up under her grief,” he said with a smile.

  DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

  Sir James and Lady Eliot struggled to make conversation over dinner. Livia’s laughter tinkled out, but nothing seemed to amuse her companions. More than once, Lady Eliot looked puzzled at her vivacity, and James made a little embarrassed grimace. The ladies withdrew after dinner to the parlor and sat there for only a few minutes before Sir James joined them. It was as if he did not dare to leave them alone.

  “Have the ladies from the warehouse moved into their new home?” Sir James asked his fiancée.

  She shrugged. “Not yet, I am looking for them.”

  “They’re still in that cramped cold warehouse! Through this weather?”

  “I am still there,” she pointed out. “Nobody feels the cold worse than me.”

  “You won’t like Yorkshire then.” Lady Eliot smiled.

  “And Sarah is still away?” James pursued.

  Livia spread her hands in a pretty gesture of bafflement. “Apparently English girls may go away from home with whoever they like and return when they wish. No Italian girl would dare. It’s hardly respectable. I have spoken to her mother, but she says nothing more than that Sarah can be trusted.”

  “Where is she?” Sir James asked.

  “Staying with a friend in the country. She said she would be a few days but she has stayed on, and on. I think there must be a young man in the question. Don’t you? But her mamma does not order her home. I cannot understand it.”

  “Young girls have far more freedom than when I was a girl.” The Dowager finally found something on which they could agree. “Quite shocking.”

  “But they are quite poor,” Livia explained, “so it does not matter so much. The girl is a milliner and the ladies—I call them that—but they are nothing but very small merchants with a little warehouse. They are workingwomen.”

  James was irritated by this exchange. “I left you with money to get them a better house!”

  “And I have it still,” Livia said limpidly. “But Mrs. Reekie will not move until Sarah comes back from the country, and they insist on a warehouse upriver, where they could sell things as well as import them… At least I achieved one thing: the boy Johnnie will join the East India Company at Easter. Your letter was introduction enough.”

  “Yes, yes?” James said, distracted.

  Livia turned to the Dowager with a little laugh. “I wish to help them, though I am afraid they have grown greedy since I shared my dower with them.”

  The Dowager nodded. “It’s an unfortunate address for you,” she said. “That side of the river, and so far out of town. I couldn’t call on you there.”

  Livia flushed. “Exactly, and I cannot be married from there, I was telling Sir James. We need to call the banns in the north, in Yorkshire, do we not?”

  “You can’t live in Northside before your wedding,” the Dowager ruled. “It looks so odd. As if you have no address of your own.”

  “I thought so myself,” Livia said smoothly. “So would it be better if we were married in London? In this parish?”

  James glanced from his aunt, to the exquisite face of his mistress. “Yes, I suppose so. You can only have met with Mr. Rogers—what? A dozen times?”

  “Oh yes!” she said. “I have studied with him twice a week, and I have attended his church twice a week as well. Crossing the river in all weathers! I am completely prepared; he agrees that I am completely ready.”

  “You must have at least four months’ instruction.”

  “Yes, yes, I can do that, of course. I can complete my instruction while they are calling the banns.”

  “But
the baby must be baptized after you,” James said. “You have to bring him to the church.”

  Livia threw up her hands, laughing prettily. “Allora! I agree! I agree! Don’t make me press for my own wedding day before your aunt, she will think me shameless.”

  Lady Eliot raised an eyebrow but said nothing, as if this was exactly what she thought.

  “Matteo and I can be baptized into your church together, when I have completed my instruction,” Livia offered. “We can be married. It will be…” She counted on her long fingers in the black lace mittens. “The end of February. How will that suit you?”

  Sir James tried to laugh at her pretty challenge. “Very well,” he said.

  “Alas no,” Lady Eliot said in quiet triumph. She leaned forward. “Lent. You can’t get married in Lent.”

  The look that Livia flashed at her was far from daughterly. “Why not? It’s not as if you are of the tru… the Roman Catholic Church?”

  “Yes, but even so. You cannot marry in Lent. Can she, James?”

  “No,” he was forced to agree. “It will have to be after Easter, my dear.”

  Livia tried to smile. “No, no, I can take extra instruction next week, and we can marry before Lent. In early February.”

  James hesitated.

  “There is no reason for delay,” Livia told him.

  “Certainly,” he agreed. He took her hand and kissed it and glanced nervously at his aunt. “February, in St. Clement Danes.”

  “And do you have no family in England at all?” Lady Eliot pursued. “No one to stand as your godparent when you are baptized? No one to give you away when you are married? You are as solitary as… as an orphan?”

  “I have no one.” Livia blinked on a tear, daring Lady Eliot to challenge her any further. “I know nobody in England but my late husband’s family, women wharfingers with a little warehouse. I make no pretense! I married beneath myself when I engaged with him and his family. But with my dear Sir James I will return to people of my own sort—nobility.”

  “Oh, will you?” Lady Eliot said, with one eye on Sir James’s face. He was looking into the fire, downcast. He did not look like a joyful bridegroom only six weeks away from his wedding.

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  Felipe Russo and Sarah took a gondola from the Custom House; Sarah sat wrapped in her cape, in the middle seat, while Felipe took the seat in the prow.

  “A song?” the gondolier asked agreeably. “A song for young lovers?”

  “No,” Sarah said irritably, and hardly saw the beautiful houses, the white marble church, the pretty canals as they passed by.

  “Are we not lovers now?” Felipe asked her teasingly.

  Absently, she shook her head. “Do you have a chart of the lagoon?”

  “To see Roberto’s island?” he asked with ready sympathy. “Yes, I will get one out for you. But you know…”

  “I know I cannot send a ship for him,” she said.

  The gondolier spun the gondola to arrow them into the water gate of the Russo house, mooring beside the Russo gondola so they had to disembark on the warehouse side. Sarah shrank from the lower storehouse door, knowing what was behind it, and they walked around the quay and climbed the wide marble steps.

  Sarah hesitated in the hall at the top warehouse door. “Will you show me what was hers, from her palace, just the things she truly owns?”

  “That’s easy,” Felipe said. “Come on up to the dining room.”

  He led the way to the room where the cold watery light was playing on the painted ceiling. Sarah looked at the walls lined with the beautiful silent statues.

  “Not them,” he said, closing the door behind him.

  She glanced at the ornate chandelier.

  “Not that. Nothing. Nothing is left. As soon as she married the old Conte and entered the Palazzo Fiori she started smuggling pieces out for my workmen to copy. She was selling pieces that we had forged back to her husband. If he had a column and we could find something to put on top of it, we would blend them and polish them and sell them to him as a new thing. Once he took to his bed we were free to make copies of his collection, borrowing an original, making a mold from it, putting the copy back, and selling the original.”

  “Forgery,” Sarah said flatly. “And theft.”

  Gently he cupped his hand on the cold white calf of a statue of a nymph pouring water. Her sightless eyes looked out over the canal, the carved water fell, eternally, from the mouth of the vase. She smiled a little, as she had smiled for centuries—or perhaps for only a week. “To me there is a truth to beauty. I don’t really care who made it, or how, or when. If people are so foolish as to pay more for something that is old and was despised until I found it—then they may.”

  “But not if they are paying Livia for your work,” Sarah said astutely.

  He bowed with a smile. “Not then,” he agreed pleasantly. “Which is why I am going to come to England with the antiquities. I shall see for myself where she shows them and how much she is earning for them. I shall see this Sir James for myself.”

  “Very well,” Sarah agreed.

  “And in return for my help today and in the future, you will not denounce me: not for grave robbing, nor exporting without a license, nor covering up a murder, nor wrongful arrest, nor theft and fraud—” He broke off. “That’s all, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “That’s all I know of,” Sarah said cautiously. “But that’s not to say that’s all you’ve done.”

  He gave a crack of a laugh. “Ah, Miss Jolie—you are well to be cautious, but truly that is all that concerns you and me. So we shall be partners? Now that you know the truth of me? You are the only woman that has ever known the truth of me, which is—I admit—very bad indeed, but I did not kill the Milord my master, I did not hate Roberto, I did not denounce him myself, and I will not drown you in the water gate.”

  “You want to be partners with me?” she asked cautiously.

  He took her hand to his lips. “Partners, and perhaps we will be lovers, since you tell the good Captain that I am ‘sweet on you.’ ”

  He watched the color rise into her cheeks, and turned her hand over to put a kiss into the palm. “It is nothing but the truth,” he said. “I am very sweet on you, Miss Pretty. You know, you will always be Bathsheba Jolie to me.”

  * * *

  Next morning, when Sarah came downstairs, she found the dining table covered by a huge map of the islands of Venice, and only a corner left free, for a pastry and a cup of chocolate for her breakfast. Felipe was standing at the window drinking a tiny cup of coffee, he turned and smiled as she came into the room, and he pulled a chair from the table for her to sit. “Did you sleep well, cara?”

  Sarah nodded. “Is this the map of the Venice lagoon?”

  “Yes.” He pointed on the map to where one tiny island was marked in green to show that it was above the level of high tide. “That’s where Roberto is imprisoned, that’s the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo.”

  Around it was a speckle of sandbanks, of reedbanks, of mudflats and wetlands and underwater shoals. It was a world that was never still, it was a coastline that could never be mapped. Every high tide the land became water. If there was a storm surge, even the islands with quays and stone seawalls would be inundated. But every day new houses and islands were created from stakes driven into the lagoon bed and built up with boulders. Old islands were eroded by the sea and were reborn as marsh. Venetians and the sea were in continual dialogue over what was land and what was water.

  “But this is just like his home.” Sarah pored over the map, seeing how the little island, crowned with a building like a castle, was surrounded by marsh, sandbars, reed beds, and deep channels. “The people who lived on land called Rob’s home ‘wandering haven’ because they never knew where the harbor channel was running, it changed every storm. Only my grandma and her two children, Rob and my ma, who lived right on the edge of the mire, knew the paths, knew the dry places, the sinking sands and the hushing well.
”

  “He always liked the lagoon,” Felipe said doubtfully. “We could not understand it. He was always out with a gun in a shallow boat, or in a skiff with a fishing line. When he was not studying, or with his patients, he would go out walking the margins: the shoreline between water and land. He liked that it was so uncertain underfoot. He liked that it was lonely. We thought it odd—we like a marble quay not a barena.”

  “Barena?”

  “As you say, land that is land for half the day and water for the other half.”

  “And he’s not free to walk or boat anymore. He’s kept on this tiny island?”

  “He’ll never leave it,” Felipe said quietly. “As the doctor, he will live in a small house inside the walled area, not in a cell like ordinary crew; but he will be guarded like a prisoner. He will have a small garden inside the walls perhaps, for his herbs. But a wall runs all around the warehouse, and there is only one entrance—a great bolted gate that faces the lagoon, towards Venice, with a quay where the ships are unloaded. The gate is locked at night, and even during the day unless there is a ship at the quay for unloading. There are guards with swords and pikes who watch, night and day, that no one escapes. In the west and southeast corner of the compound is a stone-built store for black gunpowder, which the Arsenale keep here for safety. It is a fort, as well as a prison.”

  “How big is the island?” Sarah said, nibbling on the pastry and drinking her hot chocolate, looking at the stipple of land and sandbanks in the blue of the map.

  “Hardly bigger than the outside walls,” he said. “You can walk around the perimeter in half an hour, though it’s all mud and drainage ditches.”

  “They never let him out?”

  Felipe shook his head. “Besides, where would he go? This is an island. And no ship would pick up anyone from a lazaretto—it would be like signing your own death warrant, you would not know what illness they carried. Everyone on the island is only there because they are suspected of breeding a fatal illness. Who would pick them up until their cargo has been sweetened and they have survived forty days?” He hesitated. “Darl… Miss Jolie, we don’t know that he is not sick already. He has been there for weeks, for months, nursing people with blood vomit, or cholera, or scarlatina, or plague. He might already be sick. You have to prepare yourself: he is probably dead.”