Page 150 of Dark Tides
“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 abarena.”
“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 storefor 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.
DECEMBER 1670, LONDON
Sir James sent Livia home to the warehouse escorted by Glib. Silently, the two of them took a skiff to the Horsleydown Stairs, and sulkily he walked her to the warehouse door.
“When does she leave?” she demanded.
“Who?” he asked, pretending to ignorance.
“The old crone. The aunt.”
