by Sarah Dunant
“Münster! Yes. And a line of other cities going up in the flames of heresy and revolution.”
He is right. Though Münster is the one that has them trembling. The freshest horror is always the best, and the story of Münster is as fresh as they come, newly arrived with the German merchants over the spring passes of the Alps. The fact is that the heretics, men and women, who took Münster were so mad for their new God that they defied not only the Church but also every rule and custom of government. Having butchered those who ran the town, they declared their own Republic of God, in which there was no wealth, no privately owned property, no kings or rulers over others, indeed, no laws at all. We had sat in this very room, my lady and I, and joked about the fact that a world of Münsters would have us out of business soon enough, since there is no marriage either and therefore no sin.
But a poor man’s Heaven is a rich man’s vision of Hell, and when the German princes finally starved and blasted them into submission, they matched savagery for savagery, ripping the flesh off the preachers and sticking their carcasses up in cages around the spires of the cathedral so that their slow rotting would act as a lesson to others.
“What? You don’t really think the Crows fear that kind of revolution could come here, do you?”
“No! This Anabaptist nonsense is more for rabid scholars and paupers. Venice is far too comfortable to need to fear heresy, especially because the Lutherans show such a talent for trade. But for that very reason, the city must also still be seen to be pure in its faith. Hence this latest decree against blasphemy and curses, which we all know is as much about their nervousness over vice as it is about the promotion of the true faith. It’s unlucky timing for your healer, for she may get caught in its undertow. Fiammetta is right. Even if you told them the truth—that you were there because you thought she stole your ruby from you six years ago—that still makes her a thief and you a courtesan’s dwarf consorting with a woman accused of child murder and witchcraft with a house full of stinking unctions and a book of spells written in code. It wouldn’t save her, and it could very well damn you all.”
“So what will they do?”
“Look, my specialty is the life of whores, not witches. I don’t know what they will do. They will put her on trial—”
“Will they hurt her?”
“God’s blood, man, of course they’ll hurt her. They hurt everyone who hurts the state, you know that. What—are you soft in the head as well as in the groin now, Bucino?”
“Don’t mock him, Pietro.” My lady is quiet now that she has got her way. “La Draga saved his life. You know that. And though it seems she stole from us, she has also been good to us for a long time.”
“Hmm. Well, I know what it is like to nearly die. Still, you would do better to let her go. Or make your representation from behind the court rather than in front of it. If you have someone in your bed who can influence justice, Fiammetta, give him a particularly good time and then ask for a favor. But if you stick your head above the parapet, don’t blame me if it gets blown off.”
It is dark. Aretino is gone, and my lady is at work in bed, lying next to our old shipman, helping him to huff and puff his way to a kind of leaky pleasure. Loredan, our influential Crow, is due to dine with us in a few days’ time. La Draga is neither dead nor condemned yet, and there is nothing we can do but wait. And while there is not enough wine in the world to take away the horror of what may be to come, there is enough in my stomach right now to dull the panic for a while.
The night is warm, and I am sitting outside watching black boats glide through black water, their lamps like guiding fireflies in the night. There is chatter and laughter carried on the air. Aretino sees it well enough: Germany may be aflame, but Venice is far too comfortable for revolution. It never fails to perplex me, this city: the way it believes its own propaganda. In Rome, men said all kinds of things about civic greatness, but privately—even publicly sometimes—they could always acknowledge the smell of rot. Not here. Here we live in the greatest state in Christendom; powerful, rich, peaceful, just, and inviolate, the virgin city that no enemy can penetrate, which is strange enough considering that men come here from all over the world with the express intent of penetrating wherever and whatever they can, virgin or not.
Of course it is myth. If Heaven were on earth, why would men need to die to get there? And yet…and yet…in some ways it is also true, which is the most perplexing thing of all.
There’s a book that is argued over in educated circles nowadays. By a Florentine named Niccolò Machiavelli, a man who was thrown out of government and subjected to the strappado and who used his exile to write a treatise about the art of governing, which he sees as based less on Christian ideals than on pragmatism. For him, the most successful rulers control by force and fear rather than consent. When I read it first, I found it fine enough, for men, I think, are much as he describes them, more susceptible to punishment than to kindness. Still—for all that my natural disposition is that of the cynic, I do not think that is how Venice works. Of course men are frightened of power (God knows, at this moment we are terrified of it ourselves—but I will not think of that now), but it’s not just fear that keeps this state intact. Once again, Aretino is right. Venice is too comfortable for revolution. And not just for those who rule it either. Even poverty here, it seems, is more bearable than in other places. Yes, there are often more beggars than can be sustained, but while those who come from outside the city are subject to exile after a good whipping, if you are born here and sit on church steps with your hand out, as long as you stay in your own parish, no one will cut it off, and you will be given alms enough to exist, if not to live. And while you may be hungry, there is always another festival to look forward to, to be caught up in its ceremony and splendor, to have the chance to exploit its drunken charity. It would not be enough for me, but then I live on my wits, not the stumps of my arms or legs.
For the rest, the professionals who follow trades or risk their lives on business—well, each and every one of them has a confraternity that looks after its own. Pay your dues and the confraternity will pay you back: help with your daughter’s dowry, support you if you lose your job, even cough up for your funeral if you can’t and supply mourners to swell the procession. So what if you cannot be part of government? At least you have enough independence not to feel ruled and enough money to enjoy it. Every cog in this wheel of state is well oiled and maintained, so that as long as the ships keep coming in and the money keeps flowing, who would want to live anywhere else?
Who—except the criminals? And yet even here, even with its reputation for severity and violence in justice—thieves and frauds flayed and losing their limbs between the Pillars of Justice, traitors and heretics flung into the deep—it is not without some understanding of clemency. Aretino is right about this too. In all the years I have been here, while I have seen enough murderers strung up and left to twitch, I have never smelled witch flesh on a pyre. Though I daresay the bones of small souls snuffed out before birth will qualify fast enough as murder at a time when the world has grown so afraid of slandering God.
The wine bottle is empty now, and I am too blurred to fetch another. But not so blurred that I cannot still tell black from white, hopelessness from hope. We cannot help her without hurting ourselves. Worse: even by hurting ourselves we cannot help her. I have spun it every which way, like juggling plates on the stick, and they all crash to the ground. If the Devil as a dog at her window turned out to be a dwarf with a talent for housebreaking, it would make no difference: she would still go down for the bones and the book and the dogs’ paws and the astrological signs and the gossip that will grow now like fungus—the young girl who cured fits with the ashes of a sodomite, the woman who washes wombs free from unwanted babies, the witch who binds men’s pricks with holy water and incantations. God knows, I believed some of it myself. God knows, some of it is true. Venice, after all, is the mistress of the market: if someone wants something enough, then some
one else will make money from providing it, be it silk, sin, or witchcraft. A woman buys a new dress to attract a lover, only to find herself pregnant with his baby while she is still a virgin or her husband is away on business. What can she do? Some flush out early babies in blood naturally and we call it God’s will. For others, desperate for such a release, La Draga is a substitute. The result is the same. No baby. How much worse is her intervention than the acts of the men and women who practice the sin of sodomy in marriage to avoid conception? I think it is less the act than what we call it.
Similarly, when we are afflicted and there is no remedy, the Church tells us that suffering is good: the will of God again. Yet which one among us would not stop the pain if we could? Drink this cup of herbs and blood and you will feel better. Is the Devil in the herbs, the blood, or the woman who prepares them? As for the business of love and obsession: well, since any man with a head on his shoulders knows it to be a disease that infects the mind as well as the body, a clever poet can be as dangerous as a witch when it comes to spreading or attacking the affliction. So La Draga is a witch. I am a pimp. My lady is a prostitute. We are all guilty. The difference is that she is exposed for it. For which I am to blame. But my sacrifice will do nothing, only incriminate my lady as well as myself. Once a courtesan is publicly arraigned, even on the whisper of witchcraft, her bed becomes as contaminated as her reputation.
And were it not for my lady? If the sacrifice was only mine? Would I do it then? Try to help this thief and fraud? This liar? This woman who held me in her arms and saved my life? Even if I could not save hers in return, at least she would know that I had tried, that it was never my intention to have her so damned.
So would I do it? I cannot answer that. For I do not know. All I do know is that every time I think of her my stomach fills with bile, but whether it is for her betrayal or her suffering I cannot tell, for the panics of them both have somehow become interwoven in me.
And this confusion, I swear, has nothing to do with the wine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The days pass slowly. Men come and go, but our Crow sends messages that he is delayed on government business. Gabriella, who grows seemingly more innocent the longer she serves in a house of sin, is sent out with Marcello to the office of the church prison to inquire after her cousin, a young woman from the Celestia district who was taken by the church officers ten days before. The news she brings tells us mostly what we already knew. A woman, Elena Crusichi, has been arraigned for witchcraft, with depositions from the Church and witnesses, and she is to be brought to trial when the evidence is ready. She has been moved from the local district prison to the central one, beneath the Doge’s Palace, and is being held there at the expense of the state, which means that she will slowly starve—Venice is as canny as anywhere else when it comes to questions of money and justice. Food will be allowed in from outside from relatives, but only if it is shown not to contain anything that might help her in her spells or Devil worship.
If we cannot free her, we can at least keep her well fed. From now on, Mauro will be cooking for a prison as well as a whorehouse.
He is already under pressure. Tonight, at last, Lord Loredan is to visit, and since it is well known that his juices flow as freely from his palate as from his prick, Mauro has the job of producing the first climax, to which end he is now clucking away in the kitchen, as loud as the capon that, roasted with orange and cinnamon sauce, will make up one of the dishes. After that, assuming our lordship can still locate his prick under all the food in his belly, it will be up to my lady.
Though La Draga’s fate has affected us all—even Gabriella has lost something of her sparkle—my lady has subdued her anxiety to her will, throwing herself into business and the task of making herself irresistible again. In this way, while she cannot keep her lover, she might yet save her friend. She is as much in charge of the household as I am now, and her energy almost gives me hope. She has spent the whole day in her own kitchen with pastes and perfumes, creams and tweezers. Her skin is swan-white and smooth as silk, her breasts push out like rising full moons from a dark velvet sunset, and her smell is jasmine with a hint of musk rose underneath. Most men would give her anything she asked just to have the pleasure of watching her unlace her bodice. But Loredan is a man born to privilege, someone who expects rather than enjoys perfection, and he has been known to come and leave without a single compliment passing his lips (though he is not so stingy with his purse).
The fact is, apart from his ability to pay on time, I know little about our great Crow, or what he does when he is ruling Venice. All I know are the harsh little cries he makes when in the throes of his pleasure: staccato bursts that I have come to liken to the sharp cawing of his namesake bird. Some of our regulars bring their worries and triumphs with them (when business is good, Alberini offers miracles of reflection or transparency; when it is bad or a shipment arrives broken and the bill is on him to replace it, he growls and complains as if my lady were his wife rather than his paramour). But Loredan leaves the affairs of state in the chambers of the Doge’s Palace: while he is happy to talk of Venice as an ideal, the facts he keeps to himself. As a member of one of the greater families, those who in effect rule the rulers, he is, I don’t doubt, both a diligent servant of the state, serving where he is elected, and a politician who uses his family influence to bribe or buy the votes he needs to get himself exactly where he wants to be. While he is no longer at the very heart of the matter—his place on the great Council of Ten expired a few months ago—there is no one he does not know, and if there is a scandal to be revealed or concealed, he will surely have intelligence of it. As to his capacity for sympathy—well, he has been known to be generous with what is in his power to give, such as an invitation to the Sensa. But this…God only knows what he can or will do.
Though we too will know soon enough.
He comes usually at twilight and leaves in the early hours. But tonight he is late, so that she and I are as nervous as caged dogs by the time he arrives. I sit in my room while she entertains, a book on my lap but no words going into my head. Sometime after midnight I hear the boat push off, the call of his boatman as he moves into the main channel. I wait for her to come out. Finally I go to her. She is sitting looking out onto the water, her hair a great storm around her shoulders in the way I remember it from that catastrophic night in Rome when she screwed the enemy to save our lives. Soldiers and bureaucrats. Always the toughest of clients. She turns, and I can almost read their encounter in her eyes.
“There was nothing I could say, Bucino. He knew about it all already.”
“How? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, except that it is being talked about. In the government. That much is clear. The trial starts next week, before church officials and a representative of the state court.”
“What else did he say?”
“Ooh—that the laws on blasphemy and cursing are there to protect the state against the spread of disorder and heresy. And that the murder of babies, in or out of the womb, is a serious offense. My God, and that was after I had serviced him! I swear his head is back in the council chamber before his seed is dry on the sheets.” She laughs bitterly. “And I am supposed to be good at my job.”
“It’s not your fault. He was always a cold fish. We celebrated his status, not his amiability. What did you tell him?”
“That she had healed my neighbor’s child and that I had offered to intercede for her. I don’t know if he believed me. I didn’t tell it very well.” She laughs again. “For six years I have been his way of relaxing after the rigors of government. He has never seen me cry before, and I don’t think he knew quite what to do with it.”
She stops, and we both know the tears are still close by. She is not used to failing with men, my lady, and in different ways she has experienced more of it in these past few weeks than in many years. But now is not the time for her to be felled.
She shakes her head impatiently. “He said
he would do what he could. And as far as that goes, I think he will. Aretino is right, Bucino. There is a palpable nervousness in the air. He was distracted all evening, even before I took him to bed. When I asked him why he was so busy and delayed, he said it was foreign business, and when I tried to find out more, he closed up like a clam again. But when Fausto was here the other night, he told me that the Turks are harassing Venetian ships again and that no one wants to admit to the losses.”
La Serenissima. The tension underneath the serenity.
So what do we do now? We don’t need to ask the question, for the answer is clear to both of us. We must wait and see.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Marcello and I take the food daily, docking the boat at the edge of the wharf to the left of the Pillars of Justice and making our way across the piazzetta to the side entrance of the prison. I have come to appreciate a certain symmetry in the architecture of justice and punishment that I hadn’t noticed until now: not just the fact that the scaffold is constructed in full view of the Doge’s Palace but that the palace which houses those who make the law also incarcerates those who break it. Though in this, as in everything else, there is a hierarchy. With enough money, you can buy tenure in one of the cells whose grilles look out onto the piazzetta itself, from where you will enjoy fresh air and a view of the pillars, which with money and good counsel you will not end up between. I swear there are beggars who would swap homes with these inhabitants, for along with eating their own food, they even get to entertain friends and relatives. On more than one occasion I’ve seen noblemen charged with fraud, or some such, playing cards or in conversation with youngbloods or even the occasional well-dressed lady.
Those with less influence and no money are buried in the danker cells under the floors, and while they may not hear the agonies of the men and women who are strung up outside, no doubt we cannot hear theirs either. I still remember my old well historian telling me how when they burned a notorious gang of sodomites—which was the greatest crime, for some of them were nobles and their association smacked of insurgence against the government—they garroted the Crows before the fire hit them but left the poorer, prettier boys with whom they had played to do the screaming.
