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.”
She shook her head with silent conviction.
“Ah, you think you are like the old grandma—that you would know by magic?”
“We never speak of magic,” she said quickly. “But my grandma would have said prayers for her son’s soul if she had felt his death in her heart.”
His dark eyes were filled with sympathy. “Cara, perhaps you should tell her to pray.”
“Could we write to him? And see if he’s still alive?”
“Yes, we could write to him. But anything you write would be read by the governor of the lazaretto. They would probably not allow him to reply—and any reply would be passed through smoke or dipped in vinegar to clean it before it could come to you. It would take days, weeks. If he’s alive at all.”
“But we could get him a message?”
He shrugged. “If you wish it. But what is there to say to a man condemned to death, and waking each day knowing death is coming? What is there to tell him? He’ll know by now that his wife denounced him and left Venice.”
“He doesn’t know she went to London and is stealing from my mother!” Sarah said sharply.
He looked at her with compassion. “Why torture him?” he asked. “He can do nothing to help his sister or punish his wife.”
She turned to the window and looked down at the busy canal below. He saw her shoulders slump in defeat. “You’re right,” she said. “You’re right. It would be to torture him. I won’t tell him that. I will write only to say that we have not forgotten him, and that his mother loves him, that we all miss him. That’s all she asked me to do—to see that he was not dead. I can go home and tell her that at least.”
“Nobody could ask for more,” he assured her. “Nobody could do more. And you are right not to fight against a certainty. Just write to say good-bye.”
She nodded, her face grave. “If I write a farewell, can you promise me that you will get it to him?”
“I can try,” he said. “Don’t write anything that would incriminate me. And remember that it has to be left open—anyone can read it, everyone will read it.”
He turned to the sideboard, pushed the map aside, and gave her a quill and a bottle of ink.