Lazzaretto Vecchio, Venezia The tiny island's terrible history floats in the night like an invisible but poisonous cloud.
Lazzaretto Vecchio – Venice's biggest burial ground, the home of the plague dead.
Almost a century and a half earlier, the disease had devastated the city. More than a third of the population – around fifty thousand people – had been killed. Such was the toll, prisoners had to be released to ferry the dead – and the dying – out to the lazaret, Italy's first quarantine island. Back then, it was more benignly known as Isola Santa Maria di Nazareth, but the saintly name was lost as the cadavers stacked up. The hospital did its best to cure the incurable, but it quickly became just a sorting office for the dead and the dying.
Since then, it's been uninhabited.
Or so people believed.
As Tommaso steps ashore, his nerves are in shreds. He remembers only too well the stories the brothers at the monastery told about the island and how mass graves were hurriedly dug to swallow rotting corpses that the city couldn't cope with. He knows that the steps he now takes were once routes for carts full of wasted lives, corpses of men, women and children carried to communal pits to be burned.
Oarsmen with lanterns fall in at the front and rear of the party as it heads further away from the shore and into what seems a dense thicket.
The night is quickly becoming icy, and the ground underfoot hard and slippery. Someone in front stumbles and then the lanterns go out. A woman shouts. Lydia, by the sound of it.
Something cracks into the side of Tommaso's head. He thinks he's cracked it against a low-hanging branch.
Then another blow slams into his head. Much harder this time. Strong enough to knock him flat and to make him realise he's being attacked. He rolls on the hard, slippery ground and covers his face to protect himself.
Pain explodes in his right shoulder.
Now in his side and thighs.
A flurry of clubs smash his head, legs and arms.
A knee thumps into his gut and stays there.
They're kneeling on him. Pressed so close to him that he can smell them.
Alcohol. Garlic. Strange perfume.
A fist pounds his face. Bone-jarring brutality. Blood and teeth in his mouth. He spits and coughs for air.
Hands grab his legs and arms.
He's dizzy. Blacking out.
Something rough touches his face.
A rope.
The last thing he's conscious of is the smell and feel of the noose, as it slips over his busted nose and tightens around his throat.