“Does it make you dream?” Felipe asked her quietly as they arrived at the warehouse door.

“I think it is a city of dreams,” she said. “I can’t understand how Liv… how my mistress can bear to live anywhere else.”

“Ah, she left wearing black, her dreams drowned,” he said with ready sympathy. “Is she still in mourning black in London?”

“Yes.”

“She’s the sort of woman who will never leave it off. She loved her husband very dearly. She grieved for him like a woman driven mad with sorrow.”

“And it suits her,” Sarah pointed out, which made him laugh.

“Yes it does.”

“They were very much in love?”

“At first they were inseparable. She would walk with him on the marshes and go with him on his visits. He insisted on going to the poor—he had an interest in quatrain fever—and she was quite unafraid. They went together, in doctors’ masks like a pair of black herons. You know?” He smiled.

“Herons?” she repeated.

“They wore the black gowns and the great masks of doctors, the long beaks stuffed with herbs to protect from infection, the eyes like holes. The gowns black. I used to laugh at them, going together like a pair of birds with big beaks like egrets on the marshes.”

“Did she show him the antiquities?”

“He saw them when he first met her, in her first home. She was enthroned among them, a beauty among beauties, in her palazzo. She was a wealthy wife, rich in everything but happiness. When her first husband died and she condescended to marry the doctor, she brought all of the treasures to him as her dowry. Of course, he had no idea what we had in the store.” Felipe guided Sarah up some steps to a great storehouse.

“Did he never see her store? Did he visit your house?”

Felipe turned the handle of the pedestrian door in the great doorway. At once a wall of sound billowed out. He smiled. “Listen! That is the sound of people making money!”

Sarah laughed.

“Now, this is the weekly feather market,” he told her. “The great hunters and collectors go all around Europe, all around Asia and Africa, they deliver feathers in their millions. The feather merchants buy them here, in the raw, and also treat them, dye them, clean them, sculpt them, and bring them back here to sell to milliners and costumiers. This is where the feather dealers sell sacks of feathers to traders taking them on to London and Paris, to their own markets. So you will see everything here from a dirty pelt to a completely finished single feather. You can buy in any amount.”

Sarah was starting through the door when he put a hand on her arm. “But not with that face,” he said.

She turned to him, surprised. “Am I dirty?” she asked, brushing her gloved palm across her cheek.

He smiled. “You are eager,” he said. “Never look eager in Venice. You put up the price just by the way you walk into a market. This is a market for haggling, in a city which admires indifference. You will show me what you like—discreetly show me—and I will halve the price. But I cannot do it if you look like a child on the morning of Christmas Eve, opening presents.”

She laughed and composed her expression. She did not know it; but she was enacting Livia, at her most disdainful. “There? Do I look above it all, and very indifferent to everything? Very bored?”

“Like a queen,” he said, and stepped back to let her precede him into the hall.

* * *

She was glad he had warned her of what to expect. One side of the hall was like a butchers’ shambles, piled high with bleeding pelts, some of them stinking of the dead birds’ dung, some of them inadequately cleaned and rotting already, sharp with the stink of vinegar that had been poured over them during quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. Wings that had been savagely hacked off dying birds lay in mountainous piles, birds that had sported fine crests had been roughly beheaded so that the crests were perfect but the necks were blood-clotted stumps. Bodies with beautiful breast plumage, showing long colorful tails, were piled on the floor. Sarah turned her head: “Disgusting.”

“Allora, every trade has its dirty side,” Felipe said philosophically. “And all these have been in quarantine on the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo. Anything that might bring an infection into Venice has to go to the island and be cleaned—aired, or smoked, or soaked with vinegar. Only when it’s clean may it come here.”

“Oh, the Captain, Captain Shore on my ship, said something about this.”

“Yes, of course. If you had sickness in London, the Captain, his crew, and even you would have to kick your heels for forty days on the island before you were allowed into Venice. Any goods you brought in would be cleaned while you waited, to see if any infection showed. The merchants hate the delay; but it keeps us free from illness.”

“And after forty days they are released?”

“Of course,” he said smoothly. “So everything here is clean. It might stink but it’s not infectious.”

“But it is…” She could not find the word. “Cruel?”

“A severed head? Of a bird? And this from the nation that beheaded a king? I thought you were bolder than that! You know, someone always gets hurt if there’s a profit. But if you are so squeamish, come and see the finished feathers. There are no broken necks here!”

There were a hundred stalls made from boards on trestles lining the long hall and a double passageway down the middle, each heaped with a speciality. Sarah could see sheaves of peacock tails, the strangely sculpted feathers of birds of paradise. There were drifts of snowy white feathers from egrets, and the enchanting dapple—like speckled bronze on marble—of barn owl feathers. Cormorant pelts shone an iridescent green-black, a pile of parrot tails showed a violent almost luminous blue. There were sacks of tiny feathers sold by weight, sorted by color, the deep reddish-brown of feathers shaved from dead pochard heads, the black-cobalt of male mallards.

On the middle stalls the feathers had been cleaned and dyed. Jet-black feathers—the hardest color to achieve—made a pool of darkness in sack after sack, graded by size. There were feathers that had been expertly styled and finished, cut into scalloped edges, shaved to a single bobbing frond. Some had been dusted with gold so they glinted and glittered, some had been set with sequins, all of them were beautifully worked and stroked so the fronds sat together in lustrous perfection.

“Oh,” Sarah said, taking in the riches all around her.

“Face,” Felipe said.

Sarah bit down a giggle and composed herself. “But I have no more than half my guinea for spending,” she whispered urgently.

“Do you want quantity or quality?” he asked.

He could see her yearning look at the perfect single plumes, then she resolutely returned to the sack of kingfisher feathers. “How much of these would I get for my half a guinea?” she asked.

He turned and spoke in rapid Italian to the stallholder.

“They charge by their weight in gold,” he said. “Do you want a guinea’s worth of this sort?”

Sarah gulped, but she knew that she could sell them for five times that price in London. “Half,” she said. “I have to keep some back, in case of trouble.”