Act of Faith (12 page)

It was a towering, shimmering confection, its arches adorned with the faces of angels and more gold than in all of Christendom. Above the front door, a herd of wild, gilded horses turned their faces towards the city. Stories were traced in mosaics on its arches and soaring domes; ancient stories — of Noah and his Ark, of Moses and Abraham. For some reason, tears came; great, fat tears that wouldn’t stop.

Someone grasped my hand. Willem. I don’t know if he noticed my tears. He stared, too, with his head pitched back and face upwards, at the ceiling as we moved slowly across tiles worn down by millions of feet over a thousand years.

‘Have you ever seen such a place?’ he whispered. ‘It really is a world of miracles, isn’t it?’

I smiled.

‘Isabella,’ he said softly. ‘Is it true what our master says about the tigers?’

I nodded. ‘It is.’

‘And the Pyramids?’

‘Yes, Willem. Though I have never seen such things myself, many people have written of them. There is an elephant in the menagerie in London.’

‘I never knew.’

‘Perhaps one day you will see them.’

‘Anything is possible,’ he said. ‘I never imagined I would stand on the other side of Europe, in a place such as this, yet here I am. And it is truly marvellous.’

‘You’re not worried that it’s full of Papists?’

‘I should be, I know, but it seems to me that any people who can create a treasure like this … they must have some grain of goodness within them, surely.’

‘Your Dutch preachers wouldn’t like to hear you say that.’

‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘But maybe they don’t understand about everything in the world. They never taught me such things. They probably don’t know about the tigers and the Pyramids. After all, they haven’t travelled as widely as me.’

I grinned. He wandered off thoughtfully, gazing at the ceiling, the pillars, the people praying silently in the darkness.

I could have stayed there for hours. I think, perhaps, we did. I couldn’t tell. Nobody tried to stop us; nobody told the old man in the Jew’s cap and the two Protestant youngsters to leave. People even smiled at us.

But at some point, our master whispered to us, ‘Come. We can return any time we like. Isabella, there is someone I want you to meet. This is not the only wonder in the city.’

Master de Aquila led us inland from San Marco, turned right down a narrow lane, and right again.

‘This should be the place.’

It was a huge red door, and, like so many doors we had seen, its handle was the head of the winged lion of Venice.

‘This way. Upstairs.’

Willem counted the stairs up three flights, until Master de Aquila knocked on a door, pushed it open and stood aside so I could enter.

We heard a familiar click of metal type, the thud of a press, the rustle and fold of paper. The low murmur was in a foreign language, but any of us could have guessed what they said:
Ink now. Steady. That’s smudged. Try a clean sheet. Better. The proof sheet’s fine — do another twenty.
But in this room was something I had never seen; something I had never thought to see, in this world
or the next. A figure leaned over the collating table, straightened, put one ink-stained hand to her forehead, and looked right at us. A woman.

A woman printer?

She threw a handful of papers onto the table and walked towards us, a sudden smile softening her face. She was not much more than thirty years old, and wore a dress of some kind of shiny black fabric, drawn in tightly at the waist, which shimmered as she moved. Her hair was bleached and braided, like that of so many women we’d seen in Venice, but there were spots of splattered ink on her forehead. It seemed to take forever for her to cross the few paces from the table to the door — on the way she stopped to shout something in Venetian at the copy boy near the window. I watched her. My mouth might even have been open. Then she was standing before us.

‘Master de Aquila,’ she said in French, in a rich voice with a soft, lilting accent. ‘You honour us with your visit.’

My master bowed his head in greeting. ‘Signora Contarini, it is we who are honoured.’ He bent and kissed her hand. ‘May I present my protégée — Mistress Isabella Hawkins.’

She stretched one hand towards me. I let it hang there in the space between us, not sure if I were supposed to kiss it or shake it. She smiled. I couldn’t take my eyes from her face, from her green eyes, from the ink that marked her as a woman who worked in a print shop. Like me.

‘Master de Aquila has written to me about you,
bella
,’ she said. ‘You are welcome in my humble workshop.’ She turned back to face the workshop and spread her arms wide as if conjuring a miracle — a trick. ‘As you see, we are only small, but even lion cubs may roar loudly when they put their minds to it.’

‘Indeed,’ said my master.

‘Of course,’ she said to me, ‘I have read your father’s
Discourse
: we printed an edition here, in this very room.’

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. It’s silly, I know, but until that moment I had believed I was the only girl in the world who knew anything at all about printing, who scrubbed the ink from under her fingernails every evening, who felt the motion of the press as familiar as a heartbeat inside her. I wasn’t yet sure whether I was in awe of Signora Contarini or deeply disappointed. But there was no time to think about it.

‘I can see the Italian in you,’ she said. Her finger traced the line of my jaw. ‘Your mother was from Genoa, I’m told.’

‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘But she died when I was born.’

‘This is Isabella’s first visit to the country of her ancestors,’ said Master de Aquila. ‘There is much here that is unusual to her eyes.’

‘Indeed, our young friend is dismayed to find me here, I think.’ Signora Contarini took my arm and led me into her workshop. ‘She believes I should be at home, wringing my hands, like every other widow in the city.’

‘Not dismayed,’ I began. ‘I just never expected …’

‘Did you think you were the only female in the world allowed inside a printer’s
atelier
?’ She laughed, throwing her head right back. ‘No, no. You are wrong. There are three of us: you, my dear Isabella, and me, and Caterina.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘My cat.’ Her laughter filled the room and burst out of the windows. ‘You are in Venesia now,
bella
, the city of water and warm airs — just like a woman, they say — and here you will find women who are printers and scholars and painters. There are
even poor girls who work all day in the Arsenale, building ships or making cannons, or whatever it is they do there.’

I looked around to seek out my master, but he and Willem had wandered over to the press to talk to the men. In the corner, a man with silver hair and beard bent over a manuscript, scratching corrections in the margins. The cat was fast asleep on a pile of paper. Nobody seemed to think our presence remarkable.

‘There are women who work as printers elsewhere in the world, you know,’ she said, as if she had read my thoughts. ‘Mostly they are, like me, the wives or widows or daughters of printers or typesetters. A family tradition. After my husband died, it was this or a convent — which would you choose?’

I hesitated, still a little stunned.

‘No need to answer,’ she said. ‘You have already chosen.’

She let go of my arm and handed me a sheet of the finest, creamiest paper I’d ever seen.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I need your professional opinion on this — your master tells me you are an authority on Herodotus.’

‘He exaggerates, I’m afraid.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘He is proud of you, why shouldn’t he exaggerate a little? But I hope you can help me, anyway.’

I squinted at the paper. It was a page of the worst English translation of
Histories
imaginable. My face betrayed me.

‘Is it that awful?’ asked Signora Contarini.

‘Dreadful,’ I admitted. ‘Really dreadful.’

Master de Aquila would have howled, called for the translator to be hung, or shouted at me and Willem and anyone else in sight. But Signora Contarini laughed so much tears ran from her eyes.

‘I knew it,’ she said at last. ‘I can barely read any English, and even to my eyes it looked strange. That scoundrel of a priest who
did the work has fled the city and left me with no
Histories
worth printing.’

She threw the sheaf of papers high into the air. They flew, suspended in time, in light, and then fluttered to the floor like doves’ wings.

‘
Bella
,’ she said, ‘you and I had better get to work.’

So my life in Venice began. Each morning, Master de Aquila or Willem escorted me from the Ghetto, across the bridge and through the winding lanes to Signora Contarini’s workshop, where she and I sat side by side at the proofreading table and tried to turn her mangled translation into something that would pass for English. Frankly, it would have been better to start all over again, the translation was so poor. But it was good to be working again, instead of trailing around the maze of streets after Master de Aquila, waiting in chilly marble hallways while he met with paper merchants and bookbinders, listening to the men talk as if I weren’t there.

Signora Contarini’s workshop was noisy and alive, and everything was terribly familiar and yet also strange. I half-understood a lot of what went on, but the printers spoke in so many different versions of Italian that sometimes the conversation might as well have been in Hebrew for all I understood of it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the
signora
one afternoon. ‘I learned Italian by reading Dante. It’s not the same thing at all.’

‘And I learned English so I could read Shakespeare,’ said Signora Contarini. ‘We are two of a pair, you and I.’ She smiled. ‘Dante’s Italian will stand you in good stead — although we speak Venetian amongst ourselves, we can understand much of what you say. If you had learned Neapolitan or Roman we would not comprehend a word of it.’

In the late afternoons, like everyone else in Venice, our little group strolled along the canal walks and across the bridges. As the days passed in a haze of warm fogs, I found myself falling deeply, irrevocably in love with the city. During the mornings, it seemed to be a cat, drowsing in the piazza, stirring only to eat. But as the day wore on, it rose, shook itself and began to prowl.

The streets were always filled with people — not rushing, not frantic, like in London, but smiling, gossiping, gaudily dressed people who strolled arm in arm in the evenings and laughed at private jokes.

The city filled up all of my senses and my mind, and, somehow, started to heal my heart and seep warmth into my bones. I was surrounded by sounds: soft sploshes of water against oars and boats and houses; the squeals of children, laughing in a hidden courtyard; a convent choir practising a
Te Deum
; an argument, a prayer.

The air was saturated with scents, from the stinging salt-marsh miasma to gusts of ocean spray, spices in the market stall, orange blossom, lamb and fragrant herbs slowly simmering, wine and seaweed and rosewater. I gazed all around me at the stone walls, the sea, the old men snoozing in the afternoon. I peered down dark laneways and through half-closed doors, and returned every day to the golden cathedral to wonder at its craft, its precious stones and million tiles, at its stories.

One day, we stepped out into glorious sunlight. The canals glowed green, the lagoon appeared a shimmering blue, and the city shook off its mist. I closed my eyes to feel the sunshine on my eyelids.

‘Today, Isabella,’ said Signora Contarini, ‘you will see Venice in all her glory.’

Everywhere, there were new houses and half-constructed churches of gleaming stone, with bright paintwork and gilded windows. Signora Contarini led us all over the city, even into cathedrals filled with rich frescoes and statues and people praying on cold marble floors. We took a boat across the Grand Canal to a pure white cathedral filled with light and divine as the dawn. We walked past paper shops and milliners and costumiers and the great opera house. There were so many buildings and paved courtyards and squares, but no trees, no grass, no gardens. Just stone.

Signora Contarini knew all the gossip: which family owned what
palazzo
, councillors who spent more than they could ever afford on new buildings, merchants who lived in fortresses with storerooms full of gold and spices.

‘They should make a rule — tear down every building more than fifty years old,’ she said. ‘Nobody in Venice wants to look at mouldy old houses. I expect we will build the city anew in every generation, so it never ages.’

‘A city of eternal youth?’ said Master de Aquila.

‘What a wonderful idea,’ the
signora
said.

‘All these buildings,’ said Willem. ‘Do they really float?’

‘The city is made of islands,’ she said. ‘In a way, each house is an island. It has its roots deep in the mud, yet it moves, just a little, with the sea.’

‘That’s why I feel queasy all the time,’ said Willem. ‘I thought it was the food.’

‘Perhaps it is the proximity of my beauty,’ said Signora Contarini, and then laughed aloud at Willem’s expression. ‘But
that cannot be the case,’ she went on. ‘You have been travelling for months with the prettiest girl in Venice. You must be immune to the charms of all other women.’

I blushed. I needn’t have.

‘Who is she talking about?’ asked Willem.

I slapped his arm. He looked surprised.

‘You?’ he said. ‘She’s joking, surely.’

‘Young man, you are hilarious,’ said Signora Contarini. She took Master de Aquila’s arm and walked on ahead, still laughing.

‘Is she mad?’ Willem whispered to me.

‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But in a good way.’

At the gates of the Ghetto, she left us. ‘Here you are, home at last,’ she said.

‘Thank you, my dear
signora
,’ said Master de Aquila.

‘It is my pleasure,’ she said. ‘I love showing off, as you can probably tell, and I particularly love showing off my city. I am only sorry you are not here in the season for the Carnevale. Then you would see Venice at her very best, although there are too many tourists for my liking.’

‘I’m sure it’s lovely at any time of year,’ I said.

She looked into my face, then up and down, as if assessing for the first time my dress, my boots, my hat.

‘I have an idea,’ she said. ‘You should not miss out on festivity altogether, Isabella. I shall give a banquet in your honour.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said, with an anxious glance at Master de Aquila. He just beamed at me.

‘We will find you a beautiful gown,’ the
signora
said. ‘My maid will attend to your hair.’

‘That really is making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ said Willem.

Signora Contarini gave him a look that would have burned a hole in the best paper in Venice.

‘Please,
signora
, don’t put yourself to any trouble,’ I said quickly.

‘No trouble at all,’ she said. ‘Leave everything to me.’

She gave Willem one last withering glance, then glided off across the bridge, waved before she turned a corner and vanished out of sight.

‘I’m not going to any banquet,’ said Willem.

‘Apprentices will not be invited,’ said Master de Aquila. ‘And no wonder. Watch your tongue in future.’

‘What did I say?’

Signora Contarini would not be deterred from organising a banquet. In fact, I suspected she couldn’t be deterred from anything once she’d set her mind to it. Master de Aquila and I surrendered to the idea, he quite willingly, me more reluctantly, although when a gorgeous cream silk gown and matching slippers were delivered to me, I decided a banquet wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

As the day grew closer, Willem grew grumpier. As Master de Aquila had predicted, mere apprentices were not invited to share the
signora
’s supper table.

‘Not that I care,’ Willem said every morning. ‘Why would I want to go to a stupid banquet?’

He continued to pretend it wasn’t happening, right up to the moment we left, dressed in our finery, with a special pass from the Ghetto guards to stay out in the city after the gates closed. Willem was nowhere to be found.

Master de Aquila offered me his arm. ‘He will be sorry he did not get to see you in your gown.’

‘I doubt it,’ I said.