The Italian Garden

by Judith Lennox

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Striking out on her own path of independence, what will she leave in her wake? Set amid the wealth and beauty of sixteenth-century Europe, Judith Lennox's novel, The Italian Garden, transports her readers to a tempestuous world of love and betrayal. Perfect for fans of Rachel Hore and Dinah Jefferies. The du Chantonnay estate of Marigny on the Loire consumes the desires of two powerful men - bitter, worldly-wise Guillaume du Chantonnay, and ruthless Hamon de Bohun - who will stop at nothing to possess it. Toby Crow, a young soldier of fortune, is also drawn to Marigny, for his mysterious origins are somehow bound up with the chateau. Italy's most priceless beauty, exotic Joanna Zulian, would crown Marigny's perfection. But Joanna, bred a vagabond and newly escaped from a stifling marriage to the artist Gaetano, vows never again to be possessed by any man, nor obey any laws but her own. With the help of the adoring English doctor Martin and a reluctant Toby, Joanna forges her own path through war-ravaged Europe. And when Joanna comes at last to Marigny, it is to weave the whole intricate tale of the de Bohuns, the du Chantonnays, and her own colourful life into the Italian garden she designs. It will be her own legacy, a legacy fraught with danger... What readers are saying about The Italian Garden : 'I loved the time period, the colourful background of Venice... the development of the characters and the twists in the plot. Great writing ' 'Another wonderful story of power and greed, but always with the thread of passion ' ' Thoroughly absorbing read, was gripped throughout'

Release date: April 9, 2015

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 480

Sample

In Castile, they sold powders of antimony and salts of mercury at a mystery play that lasted for twenty-five days. An epidemic of sweating-sickness broke out among the audience: Donato mumbled Latin verses, Sanchia made tisanes of feverfew. The child Joanna, pulling her tattered velvet cloak around herself, watched as Death and Beauty, Five Wits and the Angel, strutted on the ochre dust.

The end of the century approached. The clouds rained blood, and in France a triple moon cursed the night sky. A thunderbolt seared through the Vatican, hurling the Pope from his throne. There were plagues and epidemics, but they were necessary to Donato Zulian’s trade.

In Navarre, Sanchia taught Joanna her letters and the names and properties of plants. Donato stood on a dais in the market-place, roaring at the crowds, one fist thumping his other open palm, his pointing fingers and wild eyes drawing the sick like lodestones. A musician played the fiddle, and another the tambourine and Joanna danced, chestnut hair whirling in the dusty heat, her bright skirts fanned around her. When the dance was done, people clapped and threw her coins.

In the summer of 1502 they carried vipers coiled in woven baskets to cure snake-bites. Donato sold all his oils and unguents, and a gentleman paid gold for a remedy for the French pox. They dined in the kitchens of the gentleman’s castle, and Joanna breathed in the scent of the sweet rushes on the floor, and heard in the distance the sound of a lute. The gentleman, in his gratitude, gave Sanchia a pair of black velvet sleeves and Joanna a fur-trimmed cloak. Later that night Donato drank bottle after bottle of good red wine, and Sanchia bought her daughter a pen and a horn of ink. They had no paper, so they drew letters and faces on the back of Donato Zulian’s banner, and Donato, returning from the tavern, laughed, and called Joanna his pet, his kitten.

In Lisbon, they bought ginger and rhubarb from Cathay and, from the Malabar coast, zedoary to warm the stomach. The spices and drugs had been carried by sea from the Indies: Donato, opening another bottle of wine, said that the journeys of the Portuguese sailors would mean disaster for Venice. Sanchia, watching the ships with grey-green, troubled eyes, held her daughter’s hand and said nothing.

That autumn, the crops failed, cursed with a dark purple blight that made people mad. Sometimes hungry crowds threw stones at the Jews, sometimes at the gypsies, at other times they hurled them after the travelling physician with his useless remedies and his hollow promises of everlasting life. Donato carefully bound the cut on Sanchia’s forehead, and his hands hardly shook at all. Joanna, who was almost eleven now, built up the fire, and cooked the meal, and set heavy stones on the edges of the tent, so that her mother, sleeping inside, should not feel the cold wind. Joanna ate alone, because Donato was not hungry, only thirsty, and Sanchia, lulled by one of her husband’s philtres, did not wake. She ate alone, and remembered the expressions on the faces of those who had thrown the stones. Mountebank, they had shouted. Zany, a boy had spat at her, and she had picked up a stone herself. It had struck him on the forehead and he had fallen to the cobbles, and lain there, quite still.

In the spring, when Sanchia’s cough had eased, they travelled north into France. At the fair in Lyons Donato set up his stand and his booth and sold cures for toothache. To kill the worms that wriggled from the head and gnawed into the teeth, Donato burned wax candles studded with henbane seeds. Sanchia had gathered the henbane by the sea. Joanna took the money from the patients as they staggered from the booth. One of them, hazy with henbane, pinched her chin and asked her for a kiss: Sanchia, crouched in a corner, cursed him in Spanish and sent him on his way.

In the gentle valleys of the Loire the grapes ripened in the misty sunlight, and lizards darted among the stones, finding shelter from the heat. At night, they watched the St John’s Eve bonfires flare up into the sky and paint the darkness. The light changed the fields and the meadows to gold, gilding the endless flowers, limning the cornfields and the vineyards with bronze. Half closing her eyes, Joanna saw sparks and flames mingle with the stars in the sky. Soon, Donato said, Saturn and Jupiter would be no longer in conjunction. Then the evil times would be past.

The following day they were invited to the castle of a great nobleman, whose daughter was sick of the bloody flux. Donato fortified himself with wine, and talked of the university of Bologna and watching the dissection of corpses in the theatres of Padua. Sanchia, shaking out and sponging crushed and grimy garments, smiled and kissed her husband.

Waiting alone in a cold ante-room in the castle, Joanna studied the single great tapestry on the wall. There was a lion, and a unicorn, and rabbits, and ermines and monkeys and dogs. And there were flowers everywhere – in the grass, in the sky, studding the graceful, spindly trees. If she looked through the one narrow window, she could see the thousand flowers of the valleys outside: poppy and corncockle, larkspur and buttercup and wild rose.

The nobleman’s daughter died, and Donato Zulian and his wife and child left town quietly one night. To cheer up her father, Joanna made a new banner out of an old petticoat. The banner bore the name of Zulian, and was decorated with a glorious garden painted in the dyes Sanchia had extracted from the roadside flowers. It pleased Joanna to make flowers from flowers, and Donato looked, and hugged her, smiling.

Winter came early. On All Souls’ Day they stood on the grey rocky coast of Brittany looking out to a jagged sea. There were holes in the tent, and none of them knew the language of the Bretons. We’ll sail to England, said Donato, narrowing his eyes as though he could pick out England’s island coastline from the horizon. A new country – a new beginning …

Sanchia had red marks on her cheeks the colour of bruised poppy petals. Joanna watched as her mother took Donato’s sleeve and walked with him across the white sand to where the foam whisked patterns of lace on the shore. The gulls circled overhead, their cries as meaningless as the gaunt jabber of the Bretons, and Sanchia spoke, her head resting against Donato’s shoulder. Her words were torn to shreds by the wind, but when they returned, Joanna saw that Donato’s eyes were wet, as though the sea spray had washed over him. We’ll go back to Spain, he said.

Sanchia died when they were within sight of Aragon. Joanna, who had fallen asleep crouched by her mother’s pallet, heard Donato’s terrible roar of anger and grief.

The next day they walked to the nearest church. Donato carried Sanchia wrapped in Joanna’s best fur-lined cloak; Joanna led the mule, which was laden with the tent, the banner, their pots and pans, jars and unguents. The bitter wind tore at the girl’s uncovered hair, and tugged at the tattered garments covering Sanchia Zulian’s corpse. Donato told the priest that his wife had been shriven: the priest, had he known the truth, would have said that Donato Zulian lied. Donato had no shame, though, he knew that Sanchia would have had nothing to confess.

Donato drank through the spring. Joanna sold simples and salves, wrote letters for the anxious and illiterate, refused offers of easier money with a curse or a flick of a sharp, narrow-bladed knife. In the summer, rousing his shaking, abused body, Donato said that they would go back to Venice, to stay for a while with his brother Taddeo.

They bought another mule, and Joanna patched the holes in the tent. To Joanna, Venice was as unknown a country as England or the Americas. Donato’s old reluctance to return to his family, his homeland, increased as they travelled from Toulouse to Avignon, from Savoy to Genoa. Donato rode the mule, Joanna walked beside him. She dosed him with feverfew when his head ached, with ivy and centaurean when his stomach heaved. When he was feeling better, he spoke of his brother Taddeo, and his sister-in-law Isotta. When he tried to speak of Sanchia, he cried.

In Genoa, Donato drew his daughter to his side. He must go back to Spain, he said, to the town where he had met his beloved Sanchia. There was a monastery near by, where his skills had been respected: the brothers would look after him until he was better.

But Joanna could not accompany him. Joanna was a young woman now – Donato’s voice trembled, tears started again from his eyes – and a young woman needed a mother’s protection. Isotta Zulian would be Joanna’s mother, Taddeo her father. Perhaps, God willing, there would be sisters, brothers, too. Donato’s most precious treasure must travel to Venice alone. When he was recovered, Donato would join her.

He had written a note to his brother. The tails of the letters formed spider trails, crawling into the margins, blurring into the words below. He would not, Donato added proudly, send her to his brother undowried. Breathing heavily, rummaging through a battered saddlebag, Donato took out a book, a purse and a necklace. The book was Dioscorides’ herbal, the purse contained two Genoese ducats, a French ecu d’or and a Venetian zecchino. The necklace, which was of jade and black pearls, had belonged to Sanchia. Donato began to weep again.

When he had wiped away the tears, he told Joanna that she would set off the following day. He had engaged a reliable escort for her. He himself would join her in Venice by the end of the following summer.

The painter Taddeo Zulian, his workshops and his family, occupied a house in the same square as the church of San Giovanni e San Paolo. The great brick body of the church, its façade as yet unfinished, towered over the piazza with a benevolent, orderly authority.

It was late autumn, and a thin grey mist had begun to settle over the city of Venice, blurring the outline of the church and the nearby Scuola di San Marco, hazing the features of the people hurrying through the streets. At the window of his workshop, Taddeo paused and looked out to the brick-paved campo beyond. He could hear fragments of conversation, the cries of street-sellers, tail-ends of bargains and beginnings of quarrels. Greek and Spanish and Turkish and Slav wafted through the damp air to dissolve in the busy, quiet industry of Taddeo Zulian’s workshop. Merchants and sailors, mercenaries and courtesans crossed the campo, hailed friends, carried baskets of shopping. Taddeo’s mouth curled at the pretensions of the courtesans, who wore low-fronted, over-ornate gowns, and the white silk headband of the bride. Five crowns for a kiss, one hundred crowns for rather more, Taddeo’s brother-in-law Gaetano had told him. Taddeo sniffed.

But as he glanced back round the workshop, his smile returned. The workshop was the largest room in the house, spacious and organized, all the rolls of canvases and fabrics, the jars of paints and sizes and dyes, in their proper places. Taddeo Zulian ran a successful business and an orderly house with the help of only two apprentices and a journeyman. And Isotta, of course, and Lena in the kitchen and Matteo to run errands. He did not squander his earnings on fancy clothes, or on black slaves to row his gondola. He did not envy his betters these things – his livelihood depended on the need of the Contarini, the Querini, the Malipieri, for frescos, portraits and wedding-chests.

He did not envy, and neither did he desire, the responsibilities that were the lot of the families of the Great Council, those families whose names were listed in the Libro d’Oro. Politics – the machinations of the della Rovere Pope, Julius II, the lust for all things Italian of the French king, Louis XII – were simply not his concern. Taddeo’s concerns were his family, his house, his guild.

Taddeo Zulian was of medium height, grey-haired, his loosening stomach hidden by black robes. He had selected a wife who neither nagged nor flirted, and he took only hard-working, sensible boys as his apprentices. He resisted innovation, both in his work and in his private life, believing that to stray from existing rules invariably proved foolish. His one regret was that his wife had proved to be barren, providing him with no healthy sons to guarantee the continuance of his name. He prided himself that, years ago, when Isotta’s barrenness had become apparent, he had been forgiving and generous. Her dowry had been substantial, and besides, Isotta was a good, dutiful wife in every other respect – hard-working, undemanding and acquiescent, and of good family. On Taddeo’s death, the house and workshop would be left to Isotta’s brother Gaetano, an arrangement with which Taddeo was perfectly content. Gaetano Cavazza was a strong, capable man, good company, lacking his sister’s feminine weaknesses of extravagance and inconsistency.

Taddeo turned his back to the window, checking the industry of his apprentices, Marin and Alessandro. Cursing his deteriorating sight, he inspected the progress of the altarpiece, the wedding-chest, the trays. From below, he heard the knock at the door, but, taking up his paints and brushes, he did not go downstairs to receive the visitor. He was busy: Isotta would tell him if the caller was worthy of his attention.

She had Italian from her father, and Spanish and French from her mother, as well as a smattering of Flemish, English and Portuguese from their travels. But Venice, with its exotic, distorted idiom, almost defeated her. Her father’s accent had softened over the years, adapting to other tongues. Joanna sat with her head held high, her lips clamped together, her heart beating unusually fast, as the gondola slid past palaces and warehouses, waterways and bridges.

She had separated from the reliable escort in Cremona after he had tried to climb into her bed one night. Since then, she had journeyed alone along the valley of the Po, attaching herself to groups of pilgrims, merchants or journeymen. She covered her red-brown hair with a black shawl, and she kept her knife hidden in her sleeve. She saw wolves prowling the high plains of Mantua, and mist hazing the marshes of Ferrara. She sold her horse in Chioggia, travelling by barge through the marshes and lagoons up the coast to Venice.

Venice had come to her out of the sea, unreal, floating, suspended somewhere between grey water and grey sky. On the Grand Canal, Joanna alighted from the barge and hired a gondola. The gondolier had laughed at her accent, but had accepted her coin and set off through the darkening afternoon towards the house of Taddeo Zulian. The tall, cramped buildings of Venice crowded over the water, jostling for space. There was no road in front of her now, only the slick black water, the towering houses.

She found her uncle’s house in the corner of a small square. Inside, as the servant scuttled away to find his mistress, Joanna waited.

It annoyed Taddeo Zulian to be interrupted in his work, something which he made quite clear to his wife. Isotta was mumbling something about a girl, and Donato. It took Taddeo a good five minutes to realize that she was jabbering about Donato Zulian, his brother, but when he understood, he frowned and hissed, so that the apprentices might not hear, ‘Donato? You’ve had word? A letter?’

Isotta shook her head. For a moment her faded features looked triumphant. ‘Not a letter. Donato’s daughter is here.’

The apprentices were staring open-mouthed, but for once Taddeo Zulian did not call them back to work. He put aside his brush and paint.

‘Donato has a daughter?’

Isotta nodded, her pale blue eyes wide. ‘She is here, husband. Downstairs. Her name is Joanna.’

Unusually, Taddeo found that he wanted to shake his wife, to destroy her pathetic pleasure in being the bringer of such unexpected news. Generally, Isotta induced in him no emotion stronger than mild irritation. Taddeo acknowledged that he was upset.

He said, unkindly, ‘You must calm down, Isotta. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.’

For once she did not redden and weep; instead, she tugged at his sleeve and said, ‘You must come, Taddeo. She’s downstairs.’

Taddeo found himself rising to his feet, his curiosity overcoming his irritation. He was half convinced that the foolish woman had got it all wrong, that Donato and the Spaniard were still childless and on their travels, but he followed Isotta to the door and out of the workshop to the small chamber his wife used for mending and embroidery.

The light was poor, the single window faced on to the back wall of the house beyond. The room stank of the canal, of the herbs Isotta scattered to counteract its smell, of the wax candles and pomanders and scented handkerchiefs she collected.

He did not comment on her extravagance this time. Isotta had brushed past him to lead a figure from the shadows. A woman – no, a girl: Taddeo quickly estimated that she could be no more than twelve or thirteen years old. Donato had left Venice in 1490, had sent word of his marriage to the Spanish woman in 1491.

‘This is Joanna,’ said Isotta, proudly. ‘Donato and Sanchia’s daughter.’

The girl curtsied. Her clothes were ridiculous: she looked, thought Taddeo, like a gypsy. Her face – when she rose from her curtsy, looking up at him, he realized that she was beautiful. It was the artist that told him, not the man. Taddeo preferred the sort of prettiness that Isotta had once possessed: fair curls, round pink cheeks. Joanna Zulian’s long hair was a light chestnut, her eyes grey in a pale oval face. She was tall for a woman, only a few inches shorter than Taddeo himself.

The girl said, quite composedly, ‘I’m sorry to appear so unexpectedly, Uncle Taddeo, but if I’d sent a letter it would like as not have reached you after I arrived.’

She wore a red skirt striped with braid, a green bodice and black sleeves. All three were travel-stained and patched beyond what even Taddeo would have considered reasonable economy. Her bare feet were grey with dust.

‘Is he dead?’ Taddeo said suddenly. ‘Is Donato dead?’

He experienced no grief at the thought: he barely remembered his younger brother, had not seen him in fifteen years. And Donato had been such a fool.

But Joanna shook her head. ‘My father is still alive, Uncle Taddeo. He has gone to Castile, to the hospital of the brothers in Valladolid. My mother is dead. She died last winter.’

‘Ah.’ In a stab of the fraternal resentment he had thought long buried, Taddeo saw it all. He laughed humourlessly. ‘So my brother found himself saddled with an undowried daughter.’ He considered Joanna Zulian’s slight body, her heavy-lidded eyes, her small curved mouth. ‘And no wife to chaperone her. A liability indeed! Enough to make any man unwell.’

‘Taddeo!’ exclaimed Isotta, but Joanna Zulian, crouching on the floor to scrabble in a bag, merely said, ‘I am not undowried, uncle. I’ll not be a burden to you.’

Standing, she showed them her pathetic dowry with such pride that even Taddeo, drawn to the limits of civility by his brother’s habitual lack of consideration, found himself silenced. A rubbishy necklace, an equally rubbishy book, and a few odd coins in an old silk purse.

Isotta said hesitantly, ‘Joanna can sew and cook, Taddeo. And write. Her mother taught her.’

Isotta could write no more than her name. Isotta already called this ragamuffin, decorative flotsam, Joanna. Yet he listened to what his wife was saying. There was always a need for another cook, another seamstress, another clerk. And you did not have to pay a niece. And besides, he knew that he had no choice. The girl bore his own name, the name of Zulian, and he could not leave Taddeo Zulian’s niece to earn her bread on the streets, or shout her wares in the market-place like that mountebank, her father.

Joanna knew within a week that to Isotta Zulian she was the daughter fate had denied her, and to Taddeo Zulian she was another pair of hands to help in the smooth running of the artist’s household. She had no objection to either role, she had always expected to work in return for her bed and board. Work took her mind off things. And besides, she would not remain in Venice for long. Her father would come for her within a year.

In the back of Dioscorides’ herbal, Joanna noted down the day on which she had parted from Donato. She had ridden from Genoa on the last day of July, 1504. Which meant that her father would come to Venice by the end of the following summer.

Meanwhile, she struggled to accustom herself to life in Taddeo Zulian’s house. To eat sitting at a table, to sleep in a bed. The bed seemed cramped and unsafe, horribly high and narrow. During her first week in Venice, she wrapped a blanket round herself and slept on the floor next to the window. But Lena, the cook, found her there one morning and laughed until the tears ran from her eyes. After that, Joanna slept in the bed, her fears of falling exceeded by her fear of ridicule.

Mealtimes, too, were an ordeal. How to hold her cutlery, what to use her napkin for. She was afraid to touch the delicate Murano glass that held her wine, convinced that it would fracture as soon as she gripped it. She went thirsty for two days until she was forced, trembling, to lift the fine-stemmed goblet. Then it seemed a miracle: that this beautiful thing, which appeared to be made of ice or crystal, was strong enough to touch, to hold, to lift to her mouth.

Most difficult of all was to know when to speak and when to be silent. Isotta, showing off her new niece to acquaintances visiting the Zulian house, went pink when Joanna greeted the adult strangers with a kiss, an inquiry as to their health and a comment on the splendour of their clothing. Later, recovered from her embarrassment, Isotta kindly explained the importance of silence, of not speaking until spoken to, of curtsying and answering only questions addressed to her, briefly, like a respectable Venetian girl.

At night, Joanna’s face had grown hot remembering Isotta’s gentle admonishments, but it had grown hotter on the day that she had danced in the square. They had been walking home from church, she and Isotta and Taddeo, and there had been a blind fiddler playing in one corner of the campo. Joanna had always liked music: she knew a hundred songs, she thought, in a dozen different languages. She knew also that she danced well: Sanchia had told her so, and the few coins she had earned had always been a useful supplement to Donato’s income. So while Isotta and Taddeo had been bowing and talking to one of Taddeo’s patrons, Joanna had danced for the fiddler. Not to earn money for herself, she had explained hastily to Taddeo, as he had dragged her away from the square. For the fiddler, whose hat had been empty until she had begun to dance. Taddeo had been rendered almost speechless then, but his face had said everything.

After that, she became more careful. Listening to Taddeo and Isotta, watching the dull daughters of acquaintances, Joanna copied them, keeping her behaviour within the rigid bounds imposed by Venetian society. She felt as though she were acting in a dumb-show, sometimes: she wanted to laugh at herself, or cry, as she played the part that Sanchia’s death, Donato’s absence, had cast her in. She was not used to houses, to walls and floors and ceilings. She was used to a tent, patched multicolour with odds and ends of material, and the night and the stars glimpsed through the holes in the roof. She was used to the open road in front of her, not the slow dark waterways and congested campi of Venice. Sometimes, in her bedchamber, when the walls seemed to close in on her, and the window grew smaller and smaller, Joanna had to clench her fists and pin them beneath her elbows to stop her beating them against the plaster, to stop her seizing and shaking the bars of the window frame.

As well as learning to behave like a respectable Venetian girl, Joanna learned the names of the servants of the Zulian household and their functions. There was fat Lena in the kitchen, who had a brother who worked at the Arsenal and a fund of sailors’ stories in consequence. Joanna, who had seen more of the world than Lena, had stories in return. Lena’s round dark eyes grew rounder at some of Joanna’s tales, and she crossed herself several times.

There was old Matteo, the messenger, who pinched her chin and called her his peach. Looking at Joanna, Matteo’s eyes would water and he would mumble about the little sister who had died more than thirty years ago. And Joanna would smile and offer to take the messages for him, because Matteo had grown old and slow. And besides, it was hard to spend even one whole day encased in Taddeo Zulian’s crowded house.

In Taddeo’s workshop there were the apprentices Alessandro and Marin, and the journeyman, Benedetto. Alessandro and Marin were much the same age as Joanna, but spotty; they quarrelled constantly, jostling for position. Benedetto, the journeyman, wore scarlet doublets and part-coloured hose and tried to pinch Joanna’s bottom when Taddeo wasn’t looking. Benedetto was helping Taddeo with an altarpiece for the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista. Scenes of the Evangelist’s life blossomed under Taddeo’s cold, accurate sketching, Benedetto’s flamboyant colouring.

The workshop was high-ceilinged, to accommodate the larger commissions, its walls lined with shelves crammed with jars and bottles and brushes and palettes. It smelt of oil and spirits and canvas, and the floor was littered with wood-shavings and paint-stained cloths. Joanna had never seen a room like it before; inside the workshop, she would stand breathless, silenced, her dazzled gaze darting from the sketches, to the easels, to the gloriously coloured paints.

Her mornings were spent with Isotta, in the dark, poky back room, patching and hemming linen, spinning and weaving thread. Isotta would feed the fire in the grate, and talk of the Paduan family she had left to marry Taddeo, of the sisters she had rarely seen since her wedding-day. She spoke of Gaetano, her younger brother, who was, like Taddeo, an artist. Gaetano was becoming a great man, said Isotta proudly.

Isotta made Joanna a respectable Venetian gown: black velvet with a wide neck and black oversleeves. Joanna thanked Isotta with a kiss, and secretly longed for her colours and her braid. Her feet were blistered with the rubbing of her fine new shoes. Isotta spoke of gowns and jewels and wedding-gifts, of the carnivals and banquets of her youth. Isotta herself rarely left the house now, preferring the hot, safe darkness of the sewing room.

In the afternoons, as soon as Isotta had fallen asleep open-mouthed by the fire, Joanna would leave the house. In the Rialto, the canal was packed with ships and barges from every country in the world. Sailors called to each other, merchants jostled at the quayside, unloading goods into the warehouses. The barges were crammed with grain and silk, fruit and spices. The scents of the fruits and spices conjured as many memories as the languages. The dry, sharp smell of cinnamon, from a barrel on the dockside at Lisbon … the sweet scent of melons that they had once eaten in a garden in Madrid … Donato had licked melon juice from Sanchia’s mouth, Joanna’s fingers had stuck to the dusty skirts of her dress.

Every day she expected one of the figures who stepped from a barge or caravel to be that of Donato Zulian, the tall and handsome physician, wearing his best quilted doublet and fur-lined cloak. Every day, when Donato did not come, Joanna turned from the waterside back towards the city, walking until the pain had gone from her heart.

Inside the Basilica di San Marco, she would stand and gaze up at the exquisite mosaicked prophets, at the golden-winged, inscrutable angels. Once she heard the choir sing, rehearsing for some great ceremony, their voices soaring and echoing off the five golden domes. When she closed her eyes, she could believe she heard the voices of the angels themselves.

As autumn turned into winter, the air grew damper and colder, and the mist never lifted. Joanna was glad; the changing of the seasons reassured her that time had not frozen, trapped for ever in the stillness of the lagoon. She wandered through the Campo di Rialto, with its fish-market and meat-market and money-changers, and she gazed at the treasures of the silversmiths and ivory-carvers. She learned how to repel the attentions of the young men with their black and red hose, their shoulder-length hair and velvet caps and slashed silk doublets. She watched the negro slaves, dressed in the colours of their owners, steering their black-painted gondolas under wooden bridges, gliding past the palazzi of the great families. The slaves had travelled even further than she, and were now trapped here, in Venice, for ever. That thought made her shiver. Through the doorways of the palazzi she could see to the courtyard beyond, to the paved faded gardens with their trees and fountains and frescoed walls. Sometimes she would glimpse ladies stepping down from the gardens into their gondolas, their cloth-of-gold gowns mirrored in the water, their round breasts covered only by the finest of veils.

Sometimes she walked in a different direction, towards the church of San Cassiano. Beggars crouched in the shelter of doorways, tattered garments pulled about them to keep away the cold and mist. There were quarters like these in every city, the quarters of the sickly, the weak, the unlucky. Whores paraded the squares, some of them with the marks of syphilis already on their fa