Page 122 of Dark Tides
“As I say.”
Without another word, Mordecai added three links of a gold chain and the scales tipped and wobbled to Sarah’s advantage.
“Hold out your purse and he’ll pour it in,” Felipe instructed.
Sarah did as she was told. “There you are,” he said as she pulled the strings of the purse shut and carefully tied it on her belt.
He guided her away from the stall, and they left the square and climbed up the steeply canted Rialto Bridge. On either side were little stalls selling beautiful pieces of glassware, exquisite metalwork: daggers enameled with glass, set with jewels. Spice sellers had colored and scented powders that Sarah had never seen before, there wereperfumed soaps and sprinkling dust and oils on another stall, while another had yards of silks and velvets in the shadow of a huge oiled and painted parasol. Even the air smelled strange and exotic, scents of patchouli and lemon and rose billowed about them as they walked. Sarah stopped to smell the sharp wintry scent of myrrh.
“Does it make you dream?” Felipe asked her quietly as they arrived at the warehouse door.
“I think it is a city of dreams,” she said. “I can’t understand how Liv… how my mistress can bear to live anywhere else.”
“Ah, she left wearing black, her dreams drowned,” he said with ready sympathy. “Is she still in mourning black in London?”
“Yes.”
“She’s the sort of woman who will never leave it off. She loved her husband very dearly. She grieved for him like a woman driven mad with sorrow.”
“And it suits her,” Sarah pointed out, which made him laugh.
“Yes it does.”
“They were very much in love?”
“At first they were inseparable. She would walk with him on the marshes and go with him on his visits. He insisted on going to the poor—he had an interest in quatrain fever—and she was quite unafraid. They went together, in doctors’ masks like a pair of black herons. You know?” He smiled.
“Herons?” she repeated.
“They wore the black gowns and the great masks of doctors, the long beaks stuffed with herbs to protect from infection, the eyes like holes. The gowns black. I used to laugh at them, going together like a pair of birds with big beaks like egrets on the marshes.”
“Did she show him the antiquities?”
“He saw them when he first met her, in her first home. She was enthroned among them, a beauty among beauties, in her palazzo. She was a wealthy wife, rich in everything but happiness. When her first husband died and she condescended to marry the doctor, she brought all of the treasures to him as her dowry. Of course, he had no idea what we had in the store.” Felipe guided Sarah up some steps to a great storehouse.
“Did he never see her store? Did he visit your house?”
Felipe turned the handle of the pedestrian door in the great doorway. At once a wall of sound billowed out. He smiled. “Listen! That is the sound of people making money!”
Sarah laughed.
“Now, this is the weekly feather market,” he told her. “The great hunters and collectors go all around Europe, all around Asia and Africa, they deliver feathers in their millions. The feather merchants buy them here, in the raw, and also treat them, dye them, clean them, sculpt them, and bring them back here to sell to milliners and costumiers. This is where the feather dealers sell sacks of feathers to traders taking them on to London and Paris, to their own markets. So you will see everything here from a dirty pelt to a completely finished single feather. You can buy in any amount.”
Sarah was starting through the door when he put a hand on her arm. “But not with that face,” he said.
She turned to him, surprised. “Am I dirty?” she asked, brushing her gloved palm across her cheek.
He smiled. “You are eager,” he said. “Never look eager in Venice. You put up the price just by the way you walk into a market. This is a market for haggling, in a city which admires indifference. You will show me what you like—discreetly show me—and I will halve the price. But I cannot do it if you look like a child on the morning of Christmas Eve, opening presents.”
She laughed and composed her expression. She did not know it; but she was enacting Livia, at her most disdainful. “There? Do I look above it all, and very indifferent to everything? Very bored?”
“Like a queen,” he said, and stepped back to let her precede him into the hall.
She was glad he had warned her of what to expect. One side of the hall was like a butchers’ shambles, piled high with bleeding pelts, some of them stinking of the dead birds’ dung, some of them inadequatelycleaned and rotting already, sharp with the stink of vinegar that had been poured over them during quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. Wings that had been savagely hacked off dying birds lay in mountainous piles, birds that had sported fine crests had been roughly beheaded so that the crests were perfect but the necks were blood-clotted stumps. Bodies with beautiful breast plumage, showing long colorful tails, were piled on the floor. Sarah turned her head: “Disgusting.”
“Allora,every trade has its dirty side,” Felipe said philosophically. “And all these have been in quarantine on the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo. Anything that might bring an infection into Venice has to go to the island and be cleaned—aired, or smoked, or soaked with vinegar. Only when it’s clean may it come here.”
“Oh, the Captain, Captain Shore on my ship, said something about this.”
