Whispering Bones. Rita Vetere

      Nine-year-old Isabella Moretti raced along the deserted streets toward home and safety. She kept to the main arteries, avoiding the maze of narrow back alleys that would shorten her route but where she would likely encounter the bloated, festering body of some poor unfortunate who had been left to die in the street.

      As she turned a corner and veered north along the canal, Isabella skidded to a stop, her heart clenching in terror. On the cobblestone pavement directly in front of her, a stray dog, its dirty fur matted and spiked, looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes. Then it growled deep in its throat before tearing savagely into a foul-smelling corpse, the body of a man which had been tossed like rubbish on the steps of a nearby dwelling. With eyes as round as saucers, Isabella watched the starving animal yank a strip of purple, bruised flesh from the stinking cadaver before hungrily devouring it.

      She quickly checked the front door of the residence and saw the clearly marked “X” indicating the presence of pestilence. One hand reached for the crucifix hanging from her neck. The other desperately clutched the satchel of food she’d been dispatched to obtain from her aunt. Isabella uttered a silent prayer, surrounded by the nightmare that had descended over the city in the form of the great mortality, the Black Death.

      Her heart suspended in the back of her throat, she slowly backed away from the animal and the infected body, hoping she had not come into contact with contaminated air. No one knew what caused the plague to spread from person to person. The Doge had issued a proclamation that drinking or bathing in the water was forbidden. The priests declared there was no hope. For their sins, the people of Venice were to die. Uncle Francesco, who had travelled to Lutece in France, said the sickness was rampant there too, and it had been determined that touching an infected person was the way the evil spread.

      Fear sat like a ball of lead in her stomach as she moved away from the dog and the foul-smelling corpse. When she felt it safe to do so, she turned and ran, and did not stop until she reached the main canal. The only other people she might encounter crossing the bridge were the three physicians who still traveled about the city. And the pizzicamorti, she reminded herself.

      Isabella was deathly afraid of the pizzicamorti, the masked men who moved about the city in their long, tarred black cloaks with gloved hands and bells at their ankles to herald their approach, the men who collected the plague-ridden bodies to be buried or burned. Papa had explained to her that the strange white hooked-nose masks worn by the pizzicamorti contained aromatic herbs to counteract the sickness, and were necessary to keep the disease away. But to Isabella, the pizzicamorti appeared nothing short of monsters.

      Arriving at the main canal, she slowed to a trot to allow the burning stitch in her side to ease. As she crossed the viaduct, Isabella looked out over the water. A large boat, heaped with the corpses of the day’s dead, emerged from beneath the bridge. The barge and its gruesome cargo, she knew, was headed to the Lazaretto on Santa Maria Island or to one of the other outlying islands, where the disease-ridden bodies would be burned or buried in mass graves.

      On the distant horizon, plumes of charcoal smoke had already begun to blacken the sky. The ghastly stench of rotting and burnt flesh hung heavily in the air, an odor that permeated the city daily.

      The sickness raged out of control in this, the second summer of the recurrence of the plague. Last week, she had heard Papa say more than five hundred were dying each day in Venice. The wealthy had fled to the countryside last summer, when the first victims had fallen prey to the dreaded disease. The remainder of the port city’s population, including Isabella and her family, did their best to remain indoors as much as possible. Even the churches had closed their doors, the priests refusing to attend at the homes of any who had taken ill. Instead, the dwellings of those who had been infected were marked with an “X”, and no one was permitted to enter or leave, the doors sealed and windows bricked up, imprisoning the sick inhabitants. Every few days, bodies were pulled from the marked houses by the pizzicamorti and taken to one of the islands for disposal. Those who were found alive in the pest houses were brought to the Lazaretto, the quarantine hospital on Santa Maria Island, although it was said few, if any, survived.

      Papa had turned to his sister, hat in hand, in the spring, when procuring food for the family had become a problem. Isabella’s aunt had a connection to one of the men who operated the delivery barges, and the man had been conscripted to obtain supplies for them. Still, no one in her aunt’s household dared venture out to deliver the supplies to Isabella’s family. Usually Papa, but sometimes her older brother, Roberto, made the weekly trip to pick up the food. By remaining indoors and rationing their food, the Moretti family had managed to keep from contracting the sickness for the past year.

      Then, yesterday morning, disaster struck. Death had pried its way into their home, placing its hand upon Roberto. Isabella had awoken to the sound of her mother’s bitter weeping, and Papa had taken her aside to explain Roberto had taken ill during the night.

      Standing in the doorway of her brother’s room, Isabella had seen her mother placing a wet rag on his fevered brow, while Roberto shivered uncontrollably on his bed. Mamma immediately ordered her out of the room, but not before Isabella glimpsed the walnut-sized lump on her brother’s neck, and the purplish splotches already covering his exposed skin. The stench of his sickness soon filled the house. All that day, her mother burned incense and kept a roaring fire going, said to be beneficial. But Roberto only worsened by the hour, the pus-filled lumps on his neck and under his arm growing larger, his delirium increasing. Toward evening, he began to vomit blood, and Isabella knew what that meant. The widow next door had begun to vomit blood on the day before she died. It was the tell-tale sign death was imminent.

      Before the sun had risen this morning, not knowing what else to do, her frantic parents bundled Roberto up, and Papa himself had taken her brother by boat to the plague hospital, the Lazaretto on Santa Maria Island, in the hope he might recover there. If Roberto remained with them, Papa argued with her mother, the house would surely be placed under quarantine and they would all be dead within the week. Isabella had not been allowed near her brother, not even to say goodbye, and she had cried broken-hearted tears long after the boat bearing Roberto disappeared on the horizon at sunup. With her father and