It is Venice, 1604, a city of dead ends and alleyways, crumbling stucco and private ridotti where fortunes are lost over games of primero. It is a place of courtesans, spies and ex-concubines who live out their best years in island nunneries.
Then one sister upsets the apple cart. Suor Annetta has brought to Venice a rare and valuable thing, a diamond so special it blesses the good and brings sfortuna to the bad. Once in the eye of an Indian idol in Golconda, it found its way to the Ottoman court, where Annetta wrenched it from the clenched fist of her dead mistress, the Sultan’s mother, in a vain attempt to bargain her friend Celia from captivity, before ending up in a convent herself.
News of the ‘Sultan Blue’ escapes, and the Levant Company – a band of rogues, traders and ‘intelligencers’ – will do anything to get their hands on it. These include Ambrose Jones, the vile collector of curios for his master’s cabinet; John Carew, the lusty, stone-eyed villain, who slips into convents by night, ‘churching’ the none-too-resistant sisters; and Paul Pindar, senior Company member and recovering gambling addict, whose lust for the diamond leads him to the ridotto of the mysterious Zuanne Memmo and his masked gamers, while he searches for clues of his lost love, abducted by a Turkish corsair.
Katie Hickman, best known for her Courtesans (2003), is strong on atmosphere. She paints a Venice you can visualise (gondolas, beaked masks and tarocchi cards), and even smell: the canal’s oily stench necessitates herb-filled nosegays and ‘cotton cambric drenched with attar of roses’. Clothing is wildly sumptuous. Noblewomen, whose cheeks glow with carmine, are dressed in pointed stomachers, and ‘outrageously high’ collars made from ‘stiffly starched point de Venise lace’ fanning out behind in ruffs like peacocks’ tails. She has clearly enjoyed the character of Constanza, the sharp-witted courtesan of advancing years, who is wise enough to hide her love for Pindar, as ‘desire for a man, or disgust, whatever is felt for him must never be shown, but must be concealed always, disguised behind the courtesan’s mask. On this rested everything.’
This is an enjoyable novel and the plot moves apace, though I couldn’t help wondering about the backgrounds of the male characters and why they seem to hate each other so much. There are moments too where the dialogue threatens to overwhelm a world that Hickman draws with considerable skill and delicious attention to detail.