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By Root 251 0

the soft-shell crabs that were fished in these islands. Tonight was full moon so the catch was larger, as the crabs responded eerily to the pull of the lunar tides. He shook the creatures from his sleeve and kept onward, but the creatures were on his face and in his hair. He kept his terror at bay by remembering that one of his favourite dishes as a child had been made from these very crabs. Graziella, their elderly cook at the Palazzo Manin, had taken him to the kitchens and shown him how she dropped the living creatures into her pancake mix to gorge themselves to death, whereupon the crabs were cooked, with an eggy softness both inside and outside the shell. Corradino crawled forever, crablike himself, his stomach turning with the thought that the crabs that he had enjoyed must have fed on the flesh of the dead. Never more would one pass his lips. Then at last he saw San Marco, the lights from a thousand windows shining like votive candles. His eyes made out a cloaked figure and a fishing bark in the quarterlight. Instantly his treacherous memory recalled the phantom at the fornace when he was ten. Had that angel of death come to claim him at last? Sweat mingled with the rain as he croaked out the agreed greeting: `Vicentini mangia gatti.'

The answer came back: 'Veronesi tutti matti.'

Corradino had never thought he would be glad to see Gaston Duparcmieur. But he could have wept with joy as he went to board the boat, and grasped the proffered hand with real warmth.

As he hunched, chilled, in the bottom of the bark as it shot silently into the lagoon with no more than the faint plash of the oars, Corradino considered the truth of the passwords. The Veronese were mad indeed - Giulietta was a Veronese, and she must have been mad to put herself through what he had just experienced. But then he checked himself.

She was not mad, for she did what she did for love. And so did I.

CHAPTER 23

The Vessel

To have wanted something for so long, to have hoped against hope, until hope itself dies, and resignation sets in. To have almost forgotten what it was that you wanted so much. And then, at last, to be given the thing that you desired, and be _filled with joy and terror in equal measure. Venice is a prism. Light enters white and leaves in a rainbow of colours. Everything is changed here. 1 am changed.

Leonora lay beside Alessandro with her hands on her bare stomach, holding the child within.

The cacophony of bells that rang through Venice always woke her, while the native Alessandro slept solidly through the city's song.

Be not afeared. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not ...

She never minded this waking - it was a delight to her to be pulled from her dreams by the bells, to lie in the gold morning light watching the curve ofAlessandro's back, perhaps gently touching his warm hair, and to think idly of the day ahead. But today her thoughts were muddled as she attempted to absorb what had happened to her and the implications for her life. Her mind raced from the practical - what would she tell Adelino? What of her job? Did she still have one? - to the fantastical; she and Alessandro dandling a golden-headed child as their gondola swooped beneath the Bridge of Sighs. Her thoughts were ordered in one aspect - like a flock of gulls at a trawler they wheeled away singly but returned always to mass at the straining nets. All her thoughts came back to the child within her, and above all, how to tell Alessandro.

She had thought for so long that she was `barren'. The old fashioned word stuck in her head. It seemed so expressive of everything in her life then - not just the childlessness but the sensation of being alone, left. `Barren' described an empty, dark, Bronte moorland where nothing grew and no one ever trod. Her `barrenness' had become a part of her, the label that she applied to herself. She carried it like a burden. So entrenched was her psyche that after the `safe sex' of their first encounter, she had never used contraception with Alessandro. He, in the Italian way,