The Mourning Emporium (18 page)

“At least I’ll have the Studious Son’s life!” she shouted, producing a vicious little dagger from a hidden pocket in her skirt.

“The Studious who?” asked Fabrizio.

“Rush her!” shouted Teo. “I’ll go for the knife.”

“Watch me!” cried Sofonisba. In the scrum of boys, whalebone corset, cat-fur and brown curls, the blade of the dagger caught Teo’s fingers in a stripe of pain, but she managed to send it flying through the air. It impaled itself in the mast just as the sailors pushed the professor’s murderess and her assistant up against the taffrail, which groaned under their combined weight. Sofonisba leapt to Miss Uish’s head and wrapped herself around it like a furry mitten.

“Tie the prisoners together!” ordered Renzo. Over his voice could be heard the sound of metal shrieking.

“That’s the stanchion that broke when the cannon went through it,” shouted Teo. “Move them to the mast and lash them … Oh no!”

As she spoke, the weakened stanchion broke neatly away and the taffrail exploded into metal fragments. Sofonisba jumped clear of the widening gap and onto Teo’s shoulder.

Miss Uish and Peaglum tumbled into the sea.

The crew stood in awed silence.

“What have we done?” whispered Renzo.

“We didn’t do anything!” shouted Sebastiano. “The stanchion smashed, and they fell.”

“We can’t leave them to drown.” Renzo was unrolling the rope ladder. “Throw a barrel down to them. They can swim to that and keep afloat until …”

“I ca-a-a-a-a-n’t swim!” The waves had whipped Peaglum’s gag off his face.

Miss Uish floated easily on her back, her eyes full of malice. She ignored the barrel that Fabrizio and Teo pitched into the water. Nor did she make any attempt to rescue Peaglum.

Peaglum was mumbling on mouthfuls of sea, screaming and jerking. Finally, his body stilled and dipped below the water.

“Peaglum really truly couldn’t swim.” Rosato’s voice was awed.

Sebastiano whispered, “I thought they were so strong, that they were … invincible.”

They were wrong. Peaglum was just a man, now a drowned man.

Miss Uish did not sink. Even with her legs still bound, she dipped and bobbed like a sea snake. The sailors watched her kick free of her ropes and pull herself gracefully onto a passing iceberg.

“Let’s hope she freezes to death there,” cried Sebastiano, “like a codfish!”

“That’s not quite gentlemanly,” Renzo reproved.

“And what if she did?” asked Sofonisba, erecting her back leg like a spear and giving it a thorough licking.

“Let’s vote,” insisted Marco. “Hands up who wants to rescue her.”

Miss Uish did not appear to be interested in their help. She had gathered her sodden skirts about her and produced a small mirror from a pocket.

Renzo alone lifted his hand. Then he lowered it. “Now we really are outlaws and fugitives. And killers,” he blurted.

Sibella appeared on the companionway, her pale blue eyes wide with accusation. “Did you just do what I think you did?” she asked.

It was Teo’s suggestion to raise the Venetian flag again. And indeed, as Sebastiano unfurled the golden winged lion on its crimson silk, proud smiles returned to the frightened and shamed faces of the boys. The Italian flag fluttered gaily beside it.

Massimo was set to sewing Professor Marìn’s body up in their least-patched hammock. He asked Renzo to put the last stitch through the nose of the professor. “You knew him best, Renzo. He was like a father to you, wasn’t he?”

All the sailors watched hopefully, but the professor’s face did not twitch as the needle passed through his nose.

“He’s really, really gone,” said Rosato dolefully.

As Renzo tied off that wretched stitch, a black blur skimmed overhead.

“What was that?”

“Someone’s firing cannons at us?”

Another black blur collided violently with the mast. A tar-colored parrot slid down the pole to the ground, where it lay feebly flapping a broken wing.

“Whoever it is, they’re shooting parrots!”

“Poor thing.” Teo stroked the wounded bird. “Perhaps you can set his wing with a splint, Renzo?”

But the parrot then propped itself on its undamaged wing, and delivered a message in such a perfect rendition of Miss Uish’s frigid voice that everyone recoiled.

“I have joined a band of Ghost-Convicts from Hooroo on the Bad Ship Bombazine,” it announced.

“The Bombazine,” hissed Teo. “That’s the black ship that’s always on the horizon. Whoever’s on board—they must have saved her.”

The parrot tapped its beak impatiently against the mast and continued in Miss Uish’s voice. “Silence! Expect imminent and fatal revenge. Lieutenant Rosebud of the Bombazine is far less tender-hearted than I am. He has a laboratory on board this ship that positively manufactures death. Or, what is worse, half-death.”

“Like the Half-Dead disease?” thought Teo. “Did the Bombazine bring the sickness to Venice?”

They saw the Bombazine’s pirate flag looming larger on the horizon even as the parrot spoke. And then, before their eyes, the black skull-and-crossbones transformed into the deadly jolie rouge. Worse, the red slowly bruised through yellow to green—emerald-green, the color of Il Traditore’s ring and his poison.

Renzo instinctively rubbed his shoulder, the one that had been injured in hand-to-hand combat with the Traitor’s ghost. Teo could see what he was thinking: could Il Traditore his terrifying self be aboard the Bombazine?

And Teo’s own skin prickled at the memory of the green heart beating in his skeletal ribs when Bajamonte Tiepolo had snatched her up inside his cloak.

A band of Ghost-Convicts swarmed onto the Bombazine’s deck like angry ants from their hill. To crown their pirates’ rags, the crew wore black felt hats with corks bobbing from the brims.

Fabrizio, peering into a telescope, exclaimed, “Some of those fellows are half transparent. How could that be?”

The other boys trembled, silent with terror and bewilderment. Teo wrestled the spyglass from Fabrizio’s hand. She had a particular reason for needing to see close up what these convicts looked like.

Now, focusing the lens, she groaned. The Ghost-Convicts were spectacularly mutilated, some with deep cuts across their throats, others with the imprint of a shark’s jaws in their heads. All carried sturdy black tins with wire handles. The one who seemed to be their leader boasted a shark’s tooth curving out of his back. His lusterless black eyes were sunk halfway through his nobbled skull. His white lips seemed merely embossed on the leather of his face.

Renzo asked quietly, “In-the-Slaughterhouse ghosts, I suppose?”

Teo whispered, “Yes, unfortunately. And a few humans who look just as bad. Those ones must be the prisoners Harold Hoskins pardoned. To do his dirty work.”

In-the-Slaughterhouse ghosts were a thousand times worse than the more common in-the-Cold ghosts, who had committed a crime in life and wished only to redeem their sins with some heroic act. In-the-Slaughterhouse ghosts were angry to have died, and they wanted to go on behaving as viciously as they had in life.

Renzo urged, “We need something magical from Professor Marìn now, Teo! Can you remember the right pages from The Best Ways with Wayward Ghosts? Specifically, we need one for escaping at high speed from Ghost-Convicts who want to slice us to pieces.”

Teo mentally flicked through Wayward Ghosts as fast as she could. Two hundred and twenty pages in, she discovered a spell that could help them, but at a horribly painful cost. Reading the page aloud from the memory stored in her mind, Teo told the crew:

“ ‘If you have need of strong winds at sea, you may summon up a Sea Sorcerer by the gift of an innocent corpse. When he arrives, you should buy a packet of the four winds from him. He will take the corpse in exchange, and be well happy with his bargain. Do not attempt to trick or cajole him of his booty, or he shall see you sorrier than you can imagine.’ ”

“Professor Marìn’s body! We can’t! It’s too horrible!” cried Rosato.

“He loved us. He’d want us to escape,” said Marco quietly.

Silence fell. One by one, the boys nodded, Renzo last of all.

Teo read the spell as she saw it printed on the page:

“Come ye, Sorcerer, I entreat ye,

Serve us in the ways of the sea.

For us, four winds to speed our way,

For you, a corpse with which to play.”

There was a short, shocked silence. Then Emilio asked, “Where will the Sea Sorcerer come from?”

“From the sea, I ’spect, stupid,” Sebastiano replied.

“What will he look like?” whispered Massimo.

Sebastiano answered with relish, “A horrible monster, I s’pose. With scales and horns and tridents and oysters growing out of his eye sockets. And terrible breath, like dead crabs.”

There was another short, tense silence. All eyes swiveled to the Bombazine, visibly gaining on them.

“No sign of ’im. P’raps Teo’s remembering the spell wrong?”

“Perhaps there isn’t any such thing as a Sea Sorcerer.”

“Or perhaps he looks a bit like that,” said Renzo quietly, pointing.

A translucent white hand with elongated fingers was snaking over the balustrade of the deck. A second hand followed. Then a transparent figure made of gushing water slipped over the rail in front of them. Tucked under his arm was a squirming sack, knotted into four separate compartments.

The white hand gestured at the body of Professor Marìn, now sewn neatly into the hammock, only his face visible under the hood of canvas.

The Sorcerer mimed “Mine?”, soundlessly pointing again to the body and then back at himself.

“What will you do with him?” Renzo cried.

“Better not ask,” advised Teo gently.

The Sorcerer nodded, drawing his hand across his eyes, as if to block out a painful vision. Teo held out her arms, trembling. The Sorcerer approached, handing her the bulging sack. She had to bear-hug it to stop it squirming away. Before she could say anything else, the translucent phantasm had effortlessly gathered up the body of Professor Marin and climbed back down into the sea.

The sack churning in Teo’s hands was marked with Gothic lettering. East, West, South, North. Each section was bound with a sturdy constrictor knot. She could hear each of the winds howling quietly in a different pitch.

“Open it!” urged Renzo.

“If I released them at once, we’ll just land ourselves in the middle of a great storm. I should let out the exact wind that we need, to push us away from that”—Teo pointed to the looming Bombazine—“and to get us to London.”

“I’m thinking southeasterly, then,” suggested Emilio, always weather-conscious. “So prick a hole in the most eastern part of the south pocket.”

“Renzo, can I borrow your ferro?”

Renzo handed Teo his penknife. Teo slipped the blade into a quarter-inch of sacking. A powerful puff of cool air blew her eyebrows and the stubble on her shaved head into an alarmingly vertical position.

“Is that all?” Renzo quipped. “We don’t actually need Teo’s hairstyle rearranged, though anything would be an improvement. We want the wind rearranged.”

But now the puff of air was racing around the mast, filling the sails, even jostling the steering wheel to a northwesterly hold. Then the sea seemed to stop rolling for a second, and to take a deep, deep breath. The Scilla bucked and surged ahead, like a clockwork toy ship that had been wound to its fullest capacity and set free in a bathtub.

The sailors set to, working the pumps. They hoisted a new maintopsail. They set the reefed foresail, putting the Scilla before the wind. The waves chased her fast.

Too fast. A storm was starting.

“Board the larboard tacks! Bring her close to the wind!” shouted Renzo. The sailors busied themselves cluing up the royals and topgallant sails, each silently thanking Professor Marìn for teaching him these lifesaving skills.

“Look!” shouted Fabrizio. “The Bombazine!”

The sea thrashed furiously, surrounding the Bombazine with a spume of waves. The pirate flag tore in half. Instead of lagging behind them, the Bombazine was being propelled directly into their path.

Two seconds later, the Scilla was passing the Bombazine at close range. The Ghost-Convicts brandished cattle prods at them. The Scilla’s crew was close enough to see the corks dangling from the Convicts’ hats, close enough to smell their rank rum-scented breath, close enough to see the cormorants circling over the mast, close enough to take a few very smelly brown bullets in the mast and sails, and close enough to hear a faint plaintive baaing coming from the Bombazine’s hold. There was no sign of Miss Uish. Then the Sorcerer’s wind seized the Bombazine with new ferocity, whipping away her spanker boom and spritsail yard. Enormous surges of green sea swept over her decks, beating her larboard bilge with clamorous blows. The Ghost-Convicts could be heard screaming, “ ’Strewth! Watch that flaming steerboard!” and “The wheel’s come a gutser!” and “In front o’ the bloody wind, yer drongo!”

The bow of the Bombazine was driven under a great hollow-breasted wave. Miraculously, it rose again, but was caught broadside in the trough of the next wave, and rolled to meet it instead of riding up its towering slope.

“She’ll surely broach-to and sink!” cried Renzo.

A towering, foam-lashed rock loomed out of a hollow in the waves. They glimpsed the Sea Sorcerer at its peak, calmly cradling the body of Professor Marìn. With watery fingers, the Sorcerer seemed to be luring the Bombazine toward the craggy stone.

As the Bombazine plunged and rolled at the Sea Sorcerer’s mercy, the soul of Queen Victoria was quietly preparing to depart this life.

When it seemed the end was nigh, Queen Victoria’s family filed into the room. The Petticoats recounted the names of all present, in case she could hear, although they spitefully left out that of the Pretender.

At that moment, a black cormorant was seen at the royal window, gazing in. The Petticoats swore that it sought out and caught the eye of Harold Hoskins. A footman would afterward insist that the bird had winked, and that the Pretender had silently mouthed a word that looked like “Pipistrelly.”

But all agreed on one thing: that at six-thirty p.m.—as Queen Victoria’s soul left her body—the cormorant also took flight into a shrewish easterly wind. And that the bird headed southeast.