The Mourning Emporium (19 page)

Five hours later, the black bird soared through the open skylight of a low Gothic barn near Calais and settled on the shoulder of a cloaked figure. It cawed something into an ear that seemed to be not quite made of flesh.

“Good,” snarled the figure. “Now it begins! We leave tomorrow for our rendezvous with the Bombazine. And then … London!”

As he spoke, another cormorant arrived, its wing tips coated with ice. Timidly, it approached the cloaked figure and cawed some less welcome news into that fluid ear. A skeletal hand grabbed the neck of the exhausted bird. A second later, it fell lifeless on the floor of the barn.

The story it had brought was of mutiny and an escape in the remote reaches of the western Mediterranean Sea.

“Summon Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni!” barked Signor Pipistrelly to the cormorants who stood staring at their dead companion. They did not need telling twice, but rose into the sky in a greasy tumble of wet black feathers.

It was nearly the end of Teo and Emilio’s dusk dogwatch. The moon silvered the seam of the wake. Unfamiliar stars punctured the cloudless black sky. The waves breathed softly beneath the prow as the Scilla sped north. To starboard was the distant coast of Portugal.

Their bellies were full and round. For what a superior supper they’d enjoyed that night! With Miss Uish gone, Cookie had unlocked the cupboard of fancy foodstuffs stolen from the vessels they had pirated. There’d been ham and tinned pineapple, for which Cookie made a molasses sauce; there were tinned carrots, which Cookie served with preserved ginger. He made a special dish of potatoes and leeks in a chili-lemon-cheese sauce for Teo. The smell of hot cheese still lingered in the air, and Teo and Emilio had a plate of ginger cake to nibble on, should they get a little peckish during their watch.

“It would be a beautiful night,” thought Teo, “if Professor Marìn had not been murdered, and if Sibella wasn’t here, and if Bajamonte Tiepolo …”

She smiled grimly. “Well, it’s a beautiful night anyway, and we can all be grateful for a moment of peace.”

Emilio, at the wheel, seemed to be thinking the same thing. He murmured, “Lovely evening! This is the safest I’ve felt since before the ice storm.

“Teo, there was something I wanted to ask you. Did I ever see you in Venice, you know, before all this happened? You weren’t at our school, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t.” Teo was glad to have a bit of truth to tell.

“And I’m thinking your accent isn’t quite Venetian; it almost sounds as if you come from the south, or somewhere like that. It’s just a bit odd, because there aren’t that many boys in Venice, and we all know each other.…”

Teo’s mind spun. To tell Emilio the truth about her past and about Bajamonte Tiepolo would only endanger him, if Miss Uish caught up with them again, if the Bombazine had survived the storm. And what about the other boys? They would not be pleased to hear that she and Renzo had been keeping such a terrible secret all this time. And if they found out that she was a girl? That didn’t bear thinking about.

“I—I had a tutor at home,” she stammered, “and …”

Suddenly, the Scilla lifted up into the air.

“What the bucket is that?” cried Teo, clinging to one of the cannons. The deck tilted giddily. This was not like the lee-lurches that occasionally tossed the Scilla in a high sea. No, this felt as if someone had lassoed the ship from behind. A stink of rotten eggs saturated the air.

Screaming boys in their underwear swarmed on deck just as a pink feeler, the length of a tree, arched over the bow. Teo caught a glimpse of a cone-shaped body as big as a carriage just below the surface of the waves.

She shouted, “I think it’s a giant squid!”

Another tentacle appeared at the stern. The squid’s body rose briefly above the waves. Four pairs of tentacles were now wrapped around the boat, each a separate monster. A fifth pair, thinner and longer than the rest, was inching up the part of the deck not yet covered by water.

“I’d say that was a colossal squid.” Renzo’s voice shook.

“Renzo!” screamed Massimo. “What do colossal squid ea—?”

Massimo’s words were cut off by a tentacle that wrapped around his face. There was a brief, horrified silence and then he grunted in muffled pain. The tentacle uncoiled, seized Massimo’s leg and dragged him, screaming, toward the taffrail.

Renzo wrenched the axe from the woodpile. He brought it down on the tentacle, severing it completely. The bleeding stump slithered back into the sea. Massimo slumped onto the deck.

As Renzo bent over Massimo, deftly extracting a black hook from his leg, yet another tentacle slapped over the taffrail by the forecastle. A third seized the mast, while a fourth took hold of the wheel. It was the fifth tentacle that found the cannon behind which Teo crouched, making herself as small as possible. It wrapped itself neatly around her body and pulled her out from behind the gun. Pain seared her arms and sides as its barbed tentacles lifted her into the air and plunged her beneath the boat.

Teo opened her eyes. The water was pinkly cloudy.

“Squid blood,” Teo realized. Horribly, she saw the squid’s maw chewing and grinding. The squid now brought her close to its own lidless eye. It was the size of a large dinner plate. The cold eye swiveled in its socket, taking in Teo’s heaving chest, her fingers holding her nose, her flailing feet.

“It’s waiting for me to suffocate,” Teo thought, “so it can eat me without a struggle.”

Any other child would have conveniently drowned at this point. But this was not the first time a monstrous sea creature had tried to kill Teo. She had certain resources at hand. When the infant Teo had been shipwrecked in the Venetian lagoon, she, alone of all her family, had been rescued in the strangest way. Fish had come from all over the lagoon to tip bubbles of air into her mouth, keeping her alive until the mermaids arrived to carry her away to the nuns at the House of the Spirits. And the year before last, when she’d been forced to hide from a pack of sharks in the depths of the Grand Canal, the kind Venetian fish had once more come to her aid. They’d fed her air and distracted the man-eaters while she swam to safety.

The fish of these northern waters were not Venetian, yet Teo hoped that they had the same good hearts as those of her previous acquaintance. “I am the Undrowned Child.” She sent the thought shimmering through the water. “Please, please, help me to stay that way.”

There was a rustling like someone shaking silver foil. Teo’s skin tingled with the vibrations in the water. Then, in a wave of color, they arrived: fish of every species and size. Each swam to her mouth, breathing air into it.

The squid watched impassively. Occasionally, a tentacle snatched a fish and pushed it into the parrotlike maw. Each time that happened, it relaxed its grip on Teo. The barbs retracted from her skin while it chewed the fish, all the while eyeing Teo greedily, as if she was a particularly good delicacy to be saved for dessert.

“I am the Undrowned Child, not the Unsucked or the Uneaten Child.” Teo shuddered. One of her shoes fell off, dropping down through the bottomless water. The fish stared at Teo fearfully, their mouths open as if trying to apologize for something.

“They can’t do any more for me,” she thought. “But if my timing was right, I could wriggle out of my clothes and swim to the surface.”

Another mouthful of air, another thought: “All my clothes?”

Teo remembered being laid out on a table in the Games Pavilion in Venice, with Bajamonte Tiepolo gradually cutting off the hem of her skirt and petticoats so that he could print the spells that had been embossed on her legs when his Spell Almanac was briefly transferred to her body. There would be nothing gradual about losing her clothes this time.

The squid’s eye suddenly bulged. Teo read surprise in the glassy oval.

Again the eye widened, registering unmistakable pain.

“They’re doing something up on the surface!”

A long pink tentacle suddenly plummeted past her into the depths. Up on the Scilla, Renzo must have hacked it off. A second tentacle followed. The squid’s eyes were blazing now, its barbs clawing deeper into her skin.

Then a fine fat grouper arrived, pouring his bubbles into Teo’s mouth. He had a resigned expression, nodding sadly to her.

“No!” Teo wept. “Too many creatures have died for me already.”

But when the grouper turned slowly, as if to leave, the squid’s barbs retracted. One of the tentacles that held Teo unwrapped itself and went in prodding pursuit of the plump fish. The other loosened. Teo took her chance. She left her trousers, jacket and shirt impaled on the squid’s barbs, and hurtled up toward the surface, narrowly missing a thump on the head from a third lopped tentacle on its way down to the sea floor.

A feeder tentacle thrashed through the water behind her, hunting its lost prey. A barb caught Teo’s ankle, dragging a deep gash through it. As Teo broke the surface, she saw the Scilla twenty yards away, already starting to right itself. Renzo was slicing at the remaining tentacles. The other boys were using knives from the Scilla’s galley to stab at sections of squid that still clung to the boat.

“Here! Help!” The words came into Teo’s head, but she had no breath to utter them. She could hardly hear the hoarse gurgle herself.

She saw Rosato and Giovanni desperately scanning the opposite horizon. She heard Sebastiano and Marco calling her name. Renzo ran back to the wheel, constantly craning his neck toward the water. Sofonisba ran along the taffrail, meowing “Teo! Teo!” Why did none of them look in her direction? The waves were carrying the Scilla farther away each moment.

“Save me! Please!” Still nothing but a wet rasp emerged from her mouth. She began to swim toward the boat, dodging and kicking the feeder tentacle that came thrusting up every few yards to find her. At last, weak with gratitude, she felt the rough wood of the Scilla’s bow against her arms.

The slender tip of the feeder tentacle surged up just beside her, like a blind snake turning this way and that. Now that she was nearly safe, Teo was overcome with anger. This creature had tried to eat Massimo and to sink the Scilla. It was no doubt one of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s revolting pets.

She grabbed the tentacle, and in one swift motion tied it into the most complicated nautical knot she could contrive, combining the sheepshank with the bowline and finishing with a tight clove hitch. She threw the writhing lump of tentacle as far away as she could.

Then she hauled herself out of the water and climbed swiftly up the rungs of the ladder, hoping against hope that there would be no one at the top to see her in her clinging lacy combinations and utterly translucent vest.

“Well, she can’t sleep with us anymore. A girl! Ugh! All this time there’s been a girl in our cabin!”

The deck was darkly slippery with squid gore. The end of one tentacle still lay twitching across the water barrel. Massimo’s leg and face were bandaged, and seeping blood. Yet he joined the circle of boys who surrounded her, staring with disgust and fury. The murderous squid appeared to be a mere nothing compared to the horror that was Teo.

Renzo met her eyes, shaking his head subtly. A bitter realization swept over her: “He means I’m not to give away that he knew about me.”

The wounds made by squid’s hooks began to burn, but not as much as Teo’s feelings.

“It’s ’cos of him—her—that the squid came. Everyone knows girls bring bad luck on a ship.” Sebastiano stamped his foot.

“And if Renzo hadn’t …” Massimo’s voice quavered to a standstill.

Emilio suggested, “It’s un-Venetian for a girl to be at sea.”

“But your Sibella’s a girl,” protested Teo.

Sebastiano maintained stonily, “Sibella’s different.…”

“Very civilly put together, that one …,” added Emilio.

A cool, sweet voice rose above the debate. Sibella appeared on deck. “Gentlemen, given these trying and detestable circumstances, I shall gladly share my cabin with Teodoro, or should one say Teodora?”

The moon shone, it seemed, specially down on Sibella, so that she glowed with an angel’s shimmering silhouette. She glided across to the boys as if her delicate boots did not touch the deck. She was the only person not drenched in squid blood. Every blond curl was as perfect, as if spun from golden glass.

Sofonisba asked, “And where was she when the squid attacked?”

As usual, the boys were mesmerized by Sibella.

It was only when she sauntered away that they turned back to stare at Teo resentfully; all except for Renzo, whose expression was agonized.

Teo opened her mouth to speak.

“Let’s put Teo in castigo,” suggested Renzo quickly, with the air of someone solving more problems than one. “None of us shall talk to her, or listen to anything she has to say.”

He marched past Teo to the wheel, mumbling, “I’m sorry. You and I need to talk when we’re alone. But for now it’s safer for everyone this way.”

“Particularly for you,” remarked Sofonisba, gently licking Teo’s hand.

Sibella had transformed the storeroom that served as her cabin. Now it was lined with silk like the inside of a jewel box. Exquisite dresses hung on every inch of the walls and spread out on the floor. Teo tripped over an ice-blue mantle trimmed profusely with what looked like white froth.

Sibella lectured, “Do be careful! Pray don’t drip blood everywhere! That’s guipure lace with crepe ribbon bows, lined with silk. And the hood is of velvet gauze.”

Glancing around with wonderment, Teo realized why Miss Uish had exulted in the prospect of a large ransom for Sibella. Clothes like these must have cost a fortune. Sibella had accessories that Teo had never even heard of. A pink box was labeled ACME INFLATED DRESS IMPROVER. She had a bonnet brush as well as a zylonite hairbrush. Her bureau overflowed with bone-topped powder puffs, ivory hand-mirrors, glove-stretchers and nail-trimmers. Another box boasted in copperplate embossing that it contained a Benson’s lady’s keyless lever watch. Sibella had scarves and skirts and silk stockings in every color of the rainbow. Teo wondered why she always wore white on deck, yet scorned to ask.

The door was rapped once and Cookie came in bearing a pitcher of steaming water and a tube of ointment. He pointed to Teo, and looked sympathetically at the sucker-marks of the squid, the scratches of its hooks tattooed over her arms, and the blood trailing from the gash in her ankle. It was the first truly kind human look Teo had received since surviving the attack, and she bit back tears, nodding a tight smile of gratitude. She was absolutely not going to cry in front of Sibella.