Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth

arrogant and implacable vindictiveness, ran like a dark thread through the history of the family. One Lorenzo Fornarini, arrested by the night constables in 1323 for brawling in the street, had refused to pay his fine, and when an official of the court came to his house for the money he had threatened the man’s life. Because of these menaces his fine had been increased by one hundred lire di piccoli . Six months later Lorenzo, aided by a runaway slave named Jacopo Saraceno, to whom he had promised money, waylaid the official and stabbed him to death. It says much for Venetian justice at the time that no distinction was made between patrician and slave: both were publicly garrotted. Then there was Andreolo, who in 1509 killed a lady’s steward, an elderly man quite unknown to him, because the lady had repelled his advances, and he knew she valued the man. And there was Naufosio who while campaigning in Lombardy against the Visconti put to the sword all the male citizens of Lodara because the town had held out against him – a usage most uncommon among Venetian commanders, and for which Naufosio had been recalled …
    So Raikes read on, learning a good deal about the Fornarini family and something more about the past of Venice. But it was nearly two o’clock in the morning, and his eyes were heavy, when he stumbled on one small fact which seemed to him worth all the others put together, and irradiated his being with joy.
    Barbaro had reverted to the sainted Patriarch Francesco, extolling his virtue, praising his life of austerity and chastity, which shone like a beacon amidst the turbulence of those days. The greater was the pity then that the only other Fornarini to hold high ecclesiastical office should have so signally failed to follow his illustrious forebear’s example, should indeed have so far failed as to have been notorious for his profligacy, and that in a licentious period.
    There was a footnote to this and Raikes, looking down to the bottom of the page, discovered that the prelate referred to was a certain Piero Fornarini, Bishop of Venice from 1737 until 1752, when he had choked on a chicken bone and died.

6
    IT WAS A day of bright sunshine, clear enough, though the sun was softened by the remnants of the night’s mists. Once past San Michele and Murano they were in the open, the great expanse of the Lagoon before and all around them, a vast glimmering sheet, patterned by its shallows, streaked here and there with rippling flashes where mud flats broke the surface; elsewhere unblemished, pale blue, with a soft shine to it as though wiped with oil.
    The boat steamed north-east towards Mazzorbo following the staked-out line of the deep-water channel. Raikes strained his eyes eastward across the shifting glimmers of the surface to where the brightness gathered and dazzled. He could make out the long shape of the Lido and the campanile of San Nicolò. Small islands, mere mudbanks tufted with vegetation, were discernible on both sides; others, more distant, were half lost in the haze, darker impurities in the clouded liquid of the horizon. To the east a mile or two away he thought he identified the island gardens of La Vignola and Sant’Erasmo which supply Venice with vegetables. He considered asking Wiseman about this, then decided against it, not wanting to accommodate the information that Wiseman, once asked, would undoubtedly pour forth – he had a chapter on the Lagoon in his Byways .
    The boat passed close to an island he remembered, the sad, abandoned San Giacomo in the Marsh, with its broken walls, grassed-over mounds of rubble and listing birch trees. ‘Appropriate name,’ he said to Wiseman. ‘It looks like a marsh, doesn’t it? A marsh that someone was once foolish enough to build on.’
    They were standing towards the stern, where it was roofed but open at the sides. Wiseman had turned up the collar of his light tweed overcoat. With his hair ruffled by the sea breeze and his cheeks rosy from the