Chapter 193: A Plague of Good Intentions

At dawn on Epiphany, Vito took the old stick from its peg beside the sea-serpent chart.

He brought the stick on his forearm every dawn now, and the barge for the palace left from his own water-gate. It saved him the walk and, unfortunately, left him no excuse to avoid the journey.

The new colleganza went around the Rialto that week. Every house took its share and thanked God for the size of it, while Caterina signed with Lucrezia on her knee and the industries paid on their appointed days.

On a fleece beside the table, Lucrezia, five months and some weeks old, sat upright by herself. Leo counted the seconds on his fingers, while Lucia stood over her with folded arms, inspecting the achievement.

<anno data-annotation-id="1813ffcf-61ff-365b-b585-6e9b229d0021" data-title=""Papà! Papà, varda, varda! La se ga sentà da sola, da SOLA, sensa gnente drìo la schena! Mì ghe l’ho ordinà, mì, el capitan! Ghe go dito ’Sèntate!’ e la ga ubidìo, ciò! And now tuti lo sa, tuti, fin a San Marco!"">"Papà! Papà, varda, varda! La se ga sentà da sola, da SOLA, sensa gnente drìo la schena! Mì ghe l’ho ordinà, mì, el capitan! Ghe go dito ’Sèntate!’ e la ga ubidìo, ciò! And now tuti lo sa, tuti, fin a San Marco!"1</anno>

Lucrezia listened to the claim, wobbled, and fell backward onto the fleece. She was quite unharmed, though the captain had rather less to boast about.

By February, the stick had become a regular visitor to the Ducal Council’s table, where Dorsoduro wrote down everything anyone said and a clerk brought a mended clause before Ziani. The Doge read it three times, keeping two fingers on the vellum and the seal in his hand.

The election law needed two changes.

Once a district had been drawn, it had to stay out of the jar until all thirty-five districts had taken their turn, and any dead elector had to be replaced within the week. The Great Council passed both changes without a speech.

It was a useful afternoon when no one felt the need to hear himself talk.

In a low room of the palace, the jurists appointed to gather the laws met three mornings a week with four clerks. Their chest held laws made by two Doges, forty years apart, concerning the same debt.

During Lent, the dead bell of a parish behind the new land gate carried across the water and into the Ducal Council’s room. A flux had broken out in the poor parishes of Cannaregio, the children being the first to suffer, and before the thaw more than forty people had been buried.

The hall heard the bell and treated it like a change in the weather.

Vito put his hand flat on the first document of the healthcare edict.

Midwives and surgeons of the Republic would wash up to their elbows and boil their linen, ships carrying the sick, along with houses where sickness had appeared, would be held for forty days at an island in quarantine. Cisterns would be kept clear of privies, and refuse would be carried out on the ebb.

A young patrician was asking the oldest sea power in the Latin world to wash its hands.

Every sickbed in Venezia belonged to some party, there was a physician’s fee to collect, a bleeder’s knife to use, and a priest’s soul to save. The Council’s quarrel was with the councillor proposing the edict, a patrician who sold soap and spirit but wore no physician’s gown.

The Councillor for San Marco stood and offered a precedent. "Messeri, per carità, I beg you, I implore! Remember the year of the great frost! A flux took half a parish, and with the thaw, pfft, it was gone like a thief at cockcrow! This city has carried her filth out and carried it back with the tide since San Marco’s bones came from Alexandria in a barrel of pork, and the Evangelist, did he complain? He has endured it in silence, in silence! Shall we be more delicate than a saint?"

Vito rose in his formal costume.

"Ah, Messer Councillor, the precedent, it does you honor, truly, it warms the heart! And the forty days. You wonder, Messeri, why forty? For the priests, ecco! Every priest in Venezia already believes in forty. Forty in the desert, forty in Lent, forty of the Flood! A law dressed in a number the Church has blessed already, Messer, it is half passed before the ink is dry."

Ziani put two fingers on the leaf. "Ebbene. Ebbene, ebbene. A cure I have never seen at work, this I will not seal. Show me ten cured men, a number I can count on my own hands, and my hands, grazie a Dio, they still obey me."

Castello, whose knuckles were black with tar and who had been silent all morning, brought his hand down flat on the table.

In April, after Easter, the midwives came to their weekly meeting in the sala. Since the previous Pentecost, not one mother had died among the women taught there, while among the others in Castello alone, six had been lost. It was a difference that even the men who disliked the woman could understand.

Caterina spoke to Vito in the doorway. "Eh, caro mio, take it to your table. That hall will not believe a midwife, mai, never, until a man in a gown has said it, and you, benedetto, you own a gown. So wear it, and say it."

On a stool at the foot of the table, Lucia took the hands of the grandest midwife in the room between her own. She spotted a black line beneath one thumbnail and pointed the woman back toward the ewer.

Leo inspected the washes and announced the result.

<anno data-annotation-id="281fbccd-e755-eadb-d5b1-8d329e9df665" data-title=""Vintitrè man lavàe, Mamma, vintitrè! And one dirty. Una sola. The grand lady’s. Mì go contà tute, Mamma, tute, e gnanca una me ga scampà!"">"Vintitrè man lavàe, Mamma, vintitrè! And one dirty. Una sola. The grand lady’s. Mì go contà tute, Mamma, tute, e gnanca una me ga scampà!"1</anno>

Lucrezia, now nine months old, watched everything from her fleece as the grand midwife returned from the ewer and held out her wet hands for inspection.

At Pentecost, the Great Council appointed the same six again, and the Rialto lost its wagers.

The following week, the Arsenal’s infirmary shed held ten straw pallets and a jar on a bench beside the door, with ten Arsenal men lying there with wound-fever.

The clerk’s son put his hand into the jar and drew five white tokens and five black ones. The patients with white tokens received lime-water, boiled linen, and the green part of the bread from the cellar, while the patients with black tokens got the bleeder’s knife and the hot iron.

On the fourth day, a caulker came in with his thigh crushed beneath a falling rib and half his blood spilled on the stones. The Salerno physician put on the house’s spectacles and dropped the caulker’s blood onto a glass plate beside the blood of one volunteer after another.

Four samples clumped like curdled milk, the fifth, Castello’s, lay smooth as lagoon water.

Castello held out his left arm beside the pallet, his right hand still on the adze at his belt, and looked ready to return to work when the business was finished. A hollow silver needle went into his arm, and a tube of boiled gut carried his blood to the caulker.

A priest of San Pietro prayed aloud, asking forgiveness for being present, while the caulker turned white, then pink.

When the shed had its answer, Castello delivered the figures from the doorway.

"Five washed, four on their feet and one in the ground. Five bled, three breathing, and one of those on a peg. I never saw plank lie, siori. Then there’s the caulker, walking on my blood. Count him as the eleventh."

On the last pallet, the caulker’s chest rose, fell, and rose again.

The charge came before the Great Council after San Giovanni. Ser Piero got to his feet one step at a time, crossing himself every second stride.

"Sancte Marce, defende nos! Defende nos! Four hundred years, Messeri, San Marco has kept this lagoon whole, whole! And his bones lie beneath the roof we raised for them! And now, an edict, a document! A scrap of vellum! It would stop a ship from the Lido, and it tells us the saint, he is not enough! NOT ENOUGH! Madonna santa, ma che bestemmia!"

Ser Zuan Michiel rose slowly, a scarred hand flat on the oak.

"Eh. Piero, Piero. I kiss the saint’s bones as hard as you, harder maybe, and he kept the lagoon, sì, sì, he kept it. But my house’s Doge? Him he did not keep. Twelve years I had, on the Riva, when that fleet came limping home sick, and the Piazza opened him like a cask. A cask of cheap wine! I was there. I smell it still."

The vote came to a hundred and seventeen against ninety-three.

The edict created three Overseers of Health.

A patrician appointed by the Forty, a physician appointed by the physicians of the Rialto, and a priest appointed by the Bishop. No order could stand without the agreement of two of the three, and all three answered to the Six.

It was not a simple arrangement, but then a simple arrangement would never have survived the Republic politics.

The Old took two seats, which was the price of getting the charge through, and the patrician’s seat would go to Ser Zuan Michiel. No one alive could accuse him of being a soap-seller.

Vito stood, and the grin remained hidden in the folds of his gown.

"One sick ship, Messeri. And the tide, she does not knock, she does not ask whose door is whose. She carries it to every door in the city. Yours. Mine. The Doge’s. And, with respect to Ser Piero, the door of the saint himself."

In his books, the Black Death came by ship, more than a century from now, and emptied half the city. He was building his wall while the men around him couldn’t yet see why it was needed.

On an August morning, the first refuse barge slid past the water-gate of Ca’ del Leon on the ebb, riding low and smelling sour as it headed for the far lagoon. Privies were forbidden within ten paces of a cistern, the Republic’s first law telling a man where he was allowed to relieve himself.

Every nave kept cats, and the Rialto laughed for a week.

A bare island within sight of the Lido porto received sheds, a well, a lamp, and a chapel with two walls. Ships carrying sick people, or arriving from a port where the Overseers had heard of sickness, were held there for forty days.

Every other ship from the east spent three days in the roads while the Overseers’ boat came out to inspect it. The Lido dues paid for the whole business, which was fortunate, since one had to pay.

At the Cross, the first nave to pass through the porto from Alexandria was La Quinta, the house’s own ship, carrying two men suffering from the flux. It was almost as though she had read the law and decided to spare everyone the trouble.

Ser Zuan Michiel’s boat reached her first, and the yellow cloth went up her masthead.

The Rialto lined the Riva and watched as forty days of the house’s cargo went to sleep on an island. Every house that had voted for the law with a laugh wanted to see whether the man who had written it would ask to be excused. Vito asked for nothing.

Out on the water, the yellow cloth stirred on the mast.