Pip Vaughan-Hughes - The Vault of bones

Our room was up at the top of the house. It was a square, cramped box, and faced, not the seething square, but a decorous canal.

'Not a prime spot,' said Letice indifferently. 'Good enough for a dying girl, though, I expect’

There was a bed, a linen chest, and nothing else: no adornment of any kind. I thought of the last occupant and shuddered. Had they kept her working, the poor wretch? I pictured the girl and her rough, oblivious customers, and felt a breath of desolation pass through the close, stuffy air.

Tell me about Mother Zaneta’ I said, to drive the ghost away.

‘I broke her heart’ she replied, inspecting the sheets suspiciously. Well, they did change the linen. Now then, Mother… I told you about her. She took a shine to me – let me learn things. Made me learn. Perhaps I was going to be Mother one day – I'll never know, will I?' 'She didn't like Dardi, did she?'

'Oh, you are sharp. Dislike might be the wrong word, though. Remember I told you about the girl he killed? Well, that happened here. Not in this room’ she added, seeing my horror. 'Her name was Amelia. I don't think Mother thought she was special, but no whore-mistress likes it when the customers fuck the girls to death, do they?' Her voice was light, belied by the hardness of her words. She flicked a feather from the bolster. What does "II Bisato Beccato" mean?' I asked.

'"The Trapped Eel,"' she said, flatly, and went over to the window, where she propped her elbows on the sill and slumped wearily. 'Now what?' she said. 'Now we find Querini’ I told her.

'Easy enough. Come over here’ She pointed out across the rooftops, south-west. I saw a forest of tall chimneys, each topped with an odd inverted cone, and here and there a taller belltower. Pigeons strutted and wheeled everywhere. Further east was nothing but a blurred confusion of land, sea and sky.

The Querini Palace is just over there’ she said. 'See those chimneys there, the bright ones, next to the dragon weathercock?' I saw: the place seemed within pissing distance’We can walk there in the time it takes to eat an apple’

'Let's not’ I said quickly. We can't very well march in and demand to see Baldwin, and by the bye, would they mind giving back the Crown? You know the building. Is there a postern door, a…'

'A thief s way in?' she finished. 'No: there's a front door and a back door, like all Venetian houses. One on the square, one on the canal. And really they're both front doors, if you take my meaning. You could swim up the canal, climb the wall and get in through the pantry window, but you'd freeze to death in the water, and the wall's sheer.'. She leaned upon the sill and gazed out over the city, eyes, I guessed, seeing nothing; or perhaps seeing what her younger self had once beheld. I turned back to the room. I knew now what was troubling me: it was Anna. The first night we had spent together as lovers had been in a brothel. It was as clear to me in all its strange, mortifyingly wonderful detail as if I were seeing it painted upon the walls: a summer night in Bordeaux, the candlelight, the rutting in the room next door, the terrible mural with its fat little people who bulged their eyes at us as we played.

'I am going to have a look anyway’ I said, to break the spell. You can take me there.'

'I think I had better not’ said Letice. 'These streets are likely to be full of Querini's people. I might bump into Facio, or it might be Agneta the cook on her way to the fish market, which would be worse.'

Instead, she drew me a map in the dust behind the bed, the way to the Palazzo Querini and a crude outline of the city and its various islands. I changed into my sadly abused but patched and clean Venetian clothes and left Letice alone at the window, her yellow hair bright against the blue sky and the darting grey of pigeon wings.

I let myself out of the brothel, ignoring the curious stares of the whores. The square – the Campo San Cassiano, as I now understood it to be – was as busy as before, and I slipped unremarked through the slobbering, randy fools and, trying to remember the twists and turns that Letice had described, set off into the maze that is the city of Venice. My legs felt light and weak, for I had been a month at sea, but I followed my directions – left, second right, over the bridge, round the corner, sharp left, left again – and in no time I had reached the busy little square where the Palazzo Querini stood, its back to a wide canal. I held back in the shadowed mouth of the alley and took stock.

It was far bigger than the Ca Kanzir, and far newer, a towering edifice of chestnut brick into which were set an exotic congeries of pointed, tracework windows, carved plaques and bosses, and even fragments of mosaic and ancient statuary. I suddenly understood where the glory of Constantinople had ended up: here, in the strongrooms and on the walls of Venice, for the people of that city have decorated their houses and churches with whatever they looted from their great and ancient rival, haphazardly, as a hedgehog in an orchard will roll over in the windfalls to see what will stick to its spines. A nation of thieves indeed, and they were by no means coy about it. But Letice was right. There was no way in save through the delicately pointed door, and although I took the trouble to skirt around and steal a look at the backside of the palace from across the canal, there was no way in that way, either.

Crestfallen, I started back towards the brothel, but I could not face that desolate room again so soon, and so I wandered, and came to a teeming marketplace that ran along the bank of the canal. It was loud and bustling, and I wove my way between the stalls, gaping at what was on offer there: fish, and every kind of grotesque beast from the depths of the Lagoon. I would have marvelled at the things like pink spiders, the seething baskets of eels and the creatures that seemed to be nothing but eyes or spines, but before long I found myself at the Riva Alta and its bridge of boats: the Quartarolo Bridge, Letice had called it. I made my way across, enjoying the heave and sway of the boards beneath my feet, and fell in with the crowds on the other side, who all seemed to be heading either for the bridge or for, I guessed, the heart of the city: Saint Mark's Cathedral, and the palace of the Doges. I had intended to go there tomorrow, but I had the pope's letter and Andrew's, and the crowds and the strange luminous air of Venice had given me an unaccustomed feeling of confidence. I would try my hand now, I decided, and let the crowd carry me forward.

I was in a river of Venetians, chattering and squawking at each other like a flock of gaudy starlings. No part of Venice is ever empty save very late at night. Vacant space fills with people like a footprint in a mire fills with water. The pale morning sun was picking out marvels on every side, and I felt a surge of joy rising in my chest that seemed to lift each hair on my head and make it quiver. In a sort of daze I meandered along more streets, through squares thronged with people bedecked in the finest clothing I had ever seen, until I stepped through an archway into a wide square, at the far end of which stood the most extraordinary building I had ever seen.

'San Marco’ I said out loud, as if that might be explanation enough, though it was not.

The church – for so I realised it was – rose before me out of some fevered dream. Enough travellers have described it, and I will not enter the lists with pens more worthy than mine, save to say that it took several paces across the wide space of the square before I was sure that what I beheld was in truth a building and not a panoply of giants' armour or a wondrous spinney of trees whose leaves were gold and whose fruits were jewels. So intoxicated had I been rendered by the wonders I had already seen that I do not believe I even noticed the soaring tower of the campanile as I tottered towards the church across the herringbone bricks of the square, my sea-legs barely up to the task, and saw winged figures – humans and, it seemed, lions – swarming over the swoop and jut of the fa9ade. There were real people up there, too, and now I could see a filigree of scaffolding over the front and the four great domes.