Winds of Folly (28 page)

He need not have worried. The wind dropped as the sun rose and then blew fitfully in brief scorching bursts that felt like the opening and closing of an oven door until halfway through the afternoon watch it died away altogether and left them to their other demons. Standing, high in the prow, beneath the limp staysails, Nathan felt a subtle stiffening through the keel, as if the sea were resisting them, pushing them back or dragging them down. The gurgling water under the hull seemed oddly ominous, like a muttered curse, and he had the oddest feeling that the sea was draining away beneath them down a giant plughole, leaking away from under their hull. And then a shout from the lookout alerted him to the presence of land.

Nathan took his glass and, with the Captain's permission, went aloft. They were approaching what appeared to be a long, low shoreline which the charts informed him were the barrier islands blocking access to the Lagoon of Venice. There were several gaps between them but a foreign vessel could only enter by way of the Porto di Lido, the skipper had informed him, and then only with a qualified pilot. Kyrgyakos himself, though he knew these waters as well as any Venetian – and better than most, he sneered – was not allowed to guide them there, on pain of blinding and four years in the Doge's prison. Nathan thought he was joking but could not be entirely sure. The Venetians had lost an empire, but they had a jealous regard for what remained.

Further north, he could see other ships, large and small, standing in for the port, or waiting stoically for permission to do so.

But where
was
the port?

Nathan scanned the nearby shore. Not here, for sure. His questing gaze dwelled upon nothing more substantial than a long, low island of mud and shale with a few reed beds and some soggy grasses, limp as the schooner's sails in the breathless
air. To the south lay the sparse huts and nets of a fishing village, its boats drawn up on the strand with cabalistic signs on their jaunty prows: of horses, angels and ancient gods, and a single evil-warding eye. The sluggish sea was studded with black flags – Dan buoys they called them in his native Sussex, employed to mark fishing nets or lobster pots – with a scum of herring gulls bobbing on the oily swell. He could have been off the shingle banks of Dungeness or the Romney Marshes, or the bleak, black mudflats on the approaches to Rye Harbour: the desolate world of fishermen and salt-gatherers and smugglers. This was the Venice of old, surely, when the refugees from the mainland had fled here from Attila's hordes and scratched a barren living from the mud, before they began to build their churches and palaces – and ships.

He moved his glass to the north, following a line of stout wooden piles rising from the water in clusters of three, like tripods of stacked muskets guarding some vital channel: some with lanterns or little shrines on top, and on one a cormorant, spreading its wings to dry in the warm air. Through the gap into the lagoon, across the wastes of murky water, there were a few small sails: of fishing smacks and coastal traders. And then, in the middle of this desolate inland sea, he espied a man walking. He had to focus the lens to be sure of it, for at first he thought it was another marker flag, or a large bird, but no, it was a man: a solitary Neptune prodding with trident or net, at least a mile from the nearest land. Or was he? For even more ludicrously there was a woman, too, not far from him, hanging washing on a line. A line that appeared to be strung out across the sea. Then he looked again and saw it was an island, or mud bank, scarcely breaking the surface of the water, but with little low shacks, and fishing nets hung up to dry. And there were others like it: flat, featureless lumps of mud, lying about like stranded whales driven into the shallows by the tide and
left to rot. For there was a tide in this corner of the Adriatic, Nathan had learned: a startling, treacherous rip tide that rushed in across the mudflats, covering the lower islands and pouring into the canals of Venice itself, sometimes flooding the streets and piazzas, sloshing into the ground floors of houses – wherever they were. Perhaps they were under water now.

Then the Sirocco breathed on them again, and the sails filled and flapped, then filled and stayed filled, bearing them northwards, skirting the muddy shores of Pellestrina and bringing them closer to the sails they had seen earlier, clustered about the Porto di Lido. And then, rounding a promontory, they saw her. With a shocking suddenness as if she had risen like Aphrodite from the waters. A wondrous city of towers and domes, steeples, columns and campaniles topped with statues of saints and angels and Christian crosses: a mirage in a watery desert. Venice, the Bride of the Sea.

They joined the flow of shipping waiting for permission to approach the gilded throne. Ships of England and of France, of Spain and Portugal, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, of Genoa, Naples, the Papacy, and the
Serenissima
herself. And there they lay, netted in the shallows of the Adriatic, for across the channel between the two islands there was a barrier: an immense chain stretched between the two fortresses of Castelvecchio on the Lido and the Fortezza di Sant'Andrea on its own island opposite. And though it was lowered during the day, its massive iron links resting upon the seabed, everyone could see the great winches that raised and lowered it, and the floating batteries that were moored at intervals along its length. Venice, even in decline, was no ripe plum to be plucked by the first adventurer bold enough to mount an assault. The fleets of Pepin the Frank, of Genoese and Turk, the pirate Slavs and Uskoks, the Moors from North Africa, the mercenary armies of Popes, Medicis and Hapsburgs, all had tried and failed to
breach those massive sea defences. The
Serenissima
remained inviolate in her marshy backwater on the edge of land and sea.

They spent the night here, in this unfriendly anchorage, and most of the day that followed, awaiting inspection by customs and harbour officials, sweltering in the heat and swatting at pestiferous insects, but finally, towards late afternoon, cleared of illness and ill-intent, they took their pilot aboard and proceeded slowly up the channel, wafted by the fitful Sirocco past the guns of Sant'Andrea, round the tip of the Arsenale and into the Basin of St Mark with the Isola San Giorgio Maggiore to larboard and the great, magical city close on their lee, brilliant now in the early evening sun, the domes and rooftops gleaming with a deep golden light.

And three dead bodies hanging from a rope between two stone columns on the waterfront.

‘Welcome to Venice,' remarked Kyrgyakos as he noted the direction of Nathan's gaze.

‘Is that normal?'

‘As normal as anything in this city. More normal than most. This is how they dispose of the common criminals. Others have a less public execution.'

But Nathan's attention had been attracted by something of more professional interest. There were four ships-of-war moored in the Basin of St Mark. He studied them closely through his glass as the schooner glided slowly by. Two 70-gun two-deckers, the
San Giorgio
and the
Vittoria
– both of which Spiridion had said could take their place in the line of battle – and two frigates, the 42-gun
Bellona
and the 36-gun
Artemise
. They were certainly in far better shape than those he had seen in Corfu: the sails were neatly furled, the ropes all in place with no loose ends showing, no rust or refuse running down from the gun ports – the hulls seemed newly painted, in
fact – and the guns, what he could see of them, appeared to be well maintained. But there didn't seem to be many people aboard. He could see no more than a dozen or so figures, alow and aloft. It was possible they were all ashore, but still …

Their pilot led them to a mooring at the edge of the Canale Orfano – the Canal of the Orphans – where, in the not so distant past, Kyrgyakos informed Nathan, condemned prisoners were given a less public execution by drowning. They were taken at dead of night from the Doge's dungeons, bound and burdened with heavy weights, and tossed without ceremony into the murky waters of the lagoon.

‘It is said that they still dispose of certain prisoners in this fashion,' he confided. ‘Political prisoners. Those who might cause them some embarrassment if they were hanged in public, on which account it is forbidden to fish here. Not out of consideration for the dead, you understand,' he added, lest Nathan attribute so feminine a sentiment to these pitiless rulers of the
Serenissima
, ‘but for the living.'

For all its beauty and all its splendour, Nathan did not think he had ever moored in so hostile a haven, nor beheld a city where he had felt such a strong sense of foreboding, or of watchful hostility; not even when he had come to Paris at the height of the Terror, with the grim Goddess of the Guillotine under her black shroud on the Place de la Révolution.

‘Well, are you ready to go ashore?' enquired the Captain with a smirk.

They landed on the Riva degli Schiavoni, not far from where the three bodies were hanging, and Kyrgyakos sought directions to the American Consul's house and a gondola to take them there. While he was thus engaged, Nathan took a short stroll across the Piazza San Marco, marvelling at the splendour of the buildings that rose up on either side. If this was an empire
in decline, it hid its failings well. Here was the Venice of old, the wonder of the medieval world. The Great Basilica of St Mark, the towering campanile or bell-tower, the magnificent Logetta erected at its foot, the Library and the Mint, the awe-inspiring Palazzo Ducale … Such ornamentation, such stat uary, such columns and towers and domes and spires … it was like something out of a fairytale, or rather a great many fairytales, with bits and pieces from each and every one, all jumbled together in some glorious fantasia, with the ginger bread cottage grafted on to the ogre's castle and a clocktower stuck on top.

The Doge's Palace was a masterpiece of Gothic architecture, while the Basilica looked as if it had been lifted bodily from the heart of Baghdad, blessed with Holy Water, girt about with saints and angels, studded with crosses and dropped into a convenient corner of the Piazza. And given the Venetians' appetite for plunder, this was by no means unlikely. Throughout the Middle Ages there was hardly a vessel that did not return from the Orient without bringing a column or a capital, a statue or a frieze taken from some ancient building to glorify the fabric of the Basilica. Gradually the exterior brickwork had become covered with various marbles and carvings, many of them much older than the building itself. Even the supposed body of St Mark the Evangelist – the Patron Saint of Venice – had been stolen from Alexandria. And the four bronze horses that fronted the Doge's Palace had been scavenged from a palace in Constantinople. But whatever their inspiration or origin, the buildings formed a complex that was essentially Venetian. Nathan could only stare in wonder and amazement. On one side of the piazza stood Ancient Rome, on the other Byzantium. And between them the three grim puppets of dancing Death, twisting on their ropes in the stagnant air as a warning to those who thought to flout the continuing authority of those who ruled here.

The Doge might be as empty a title as Spiridion implied, the relic of St Mark a fraudulent collection of old bones, but their pretence was clothed in such magnificence one might be forgiven for thinking the camel trains still staggered into the caravanserai of Aleppo under their weight of treasure, and that the Venetian factories of the Levant still bulged with merchandise waiting to be despatched across the seas to this jewel of an island that had made itself, by its own initiative and industry, its prudence and guile, into the crossroads of the world.

But then Nathan boarded the gondola Kyrgyakos had hired for them and as they headed northward into the labyrinth of narrow canals behind the Piazza he saw the reality behind the glittering façade: the derelict warehouses, the disused cranes and pulleys, the abandoned, boarded-up townhouses of the merchant princes and the squalid tenements of the poor; the lines of washing strung from the windows, the effluvia that poured into the canals from a thousand waste-pipes and sewers, the collapsed pavements and the rotting piles – everywhere the evidence of decomposition and decay.

Then they came out on to the Grand Canal and were caught up in a frenetic bustle of boats and barges and sandolos and gondolas and countless other craft that Nathan could not have named, all loaded to the gunwales with people and produce, darting about like so many water boatmen. And here, on a bend of the canal just to the north of the Rialto Bridge they found the house where they had been told the American Consul lived – the Ca' da Mosto – not so much a house as a palace with a massive Stars and Stripes trailing from the flagpole on the third floor and almost dragging its hem in the water below.

He had Kyrgyakos drop him off at the water steps and advanced alone to the immense, brass-studded door fronting the canal. His summons was answered by an impressively
liveried black footman in a powdered wig who spoke to him in the deep, musical English of the Southern States, took his letter of introduction from Signor Foresti and invited him to wait in an elegantly-furnished reception room while he enquired if the Consul was at home.

The Consul was, and he did not keep Nathan waiting for more than a few minutes or so. A tall, lean, elderly gentleman with the elegant periwig of an older generation and the genteel manners of a Virginian, which indeed he was: Mr James Hamilton Devereux of Albemarle County, Virginia, not far from Mr Jefferson's house at Monticello, did Mr Turner know it? Mr Turner regretted he did not. Nor, even more regrettably, did he know Mr Jefferson.

Nathan had laid out the bare bones of his deceit in the letter he had dictated for Spiridion and which the Consul now held in his hand. ‘So you have met Signor Foresti? An excellent fellow, even though he represents the British.' The Consul had met him several times in Venice, he said, and had once had the pleasure of visiting him in Corfu in his yacht.