The Mourning Emporium (2 page)
Lately, the forces had been swelled by stripping the well-stocked graveyard on Hooroo for men who’d been hanged for bushranging or murder. Finally, there were the living criminals he’d bribed with pardons. Of course, the most dangerous—living and undead—had already been dispatched north on that satisfactory little mission to Venice, with Lieutenant Rosebud himself and the lady. His guest had insisted that she too be given a pardon, despite her crimes. “She’ll be perfect for the work in hand,” he’d rasped.
Down on the beach, the Ghost-Convicts sang gruesome sea shanties as they drained the dolphins. The dreadful noise masked the baaing of several sheep they had hidden under an upturned dinghy.
“Nice to see them so jolly,” thought Harold Hoskins. “And they’ll be happier still to take revenge on the Old Country for years of subjugation and snobbery.”
Now the Pretender could start topping up their high spirits with mentions of the jewels that would be worn by the world’s royalty, who’d soon be gathering in London for Queen Victoria’s funeral.
What a shame that metal was in short supply on Hooroo, mused Harold Hoskins. They had to use bullets made from pollywaffle—pellets of compacted parrot dung.
A deep shadow of black glided along the distant foreshore. Harold Hoskins knew better than to call out. No, better to let him come in his own time.
The Pretender’s guest favored a long black cloak. It emphasized the deathly pallor of a face Harold Hoskins still found it hard to look at for long—although the lady obviously hadn’t been able to drag her eyes away from it. Given that long black cloak and that upsetting face of his, it had been easy for Harold Hoskins and Lieutenant Rosebud to coin a code name for their guest when he was first washed ashore, all those months before.
“Signor Pipistrelly” was what leapt simultaneously to their lips.
“Signor Pipistrelly”—Mr. Bat.
Harold Hoskins was not entirely sorry to realize that Signor Pipistrelly would be rushing north too, just as soon as he heard the birds’ news. A barn had been prepared for him outside Calais, conveniently close to the English Channel.
At the same moment, but half a world away, two men stood high up on the bell tower of San Giorgio, gazing down on the ice floes in the lagoon. The older of the two drew respectful bows from the other Venetians who’d hurried up the terrace to behold the full scale of the disaster from the best vantage point in the city. Professor Marìn was the famous author of such excellent volumes as The Best Ways with Wayward Ghosts and Lagoon Creatures—Nice or Nasty?
The other man, quite unreasonably handsome, was nevertheless oblivious to the admiring glances of all the ladies. The circus-master Sargano Alicamoussa was too distressed: not just at the devastation of his beloved Venice, but at the news that schools of South Sea dolphins were perishing from a mysterious disease in the Pacific.
He lamented, “Is a hair-erecting horror! First the ice. Now this! Can it be coincidensical that the dear dolphins that helped us in the battle are suffering so? Colder than goanna’s blood is a villain who destroys such noble beasts, yes.”
Signor Alicamoussa was a native Venetian, but had passed much of his life roaming the Antipodes in search of rare Australian beasts. So his vocabulary was sometimes alarmingly exotic.
Now he wiped a tear from his brilliant blue eye, causing three ladies to rush forward with their handkerchiefs. When they had retreated, the circus-master continued, “The brave dolphins perished too close to the island of Hooroo. Youse’ll know I was there last year, Professor, for to collect some bare-eyed cockatoos. I don’t trust that knack-kneed dingo Harold Hoskins any more than I’d trust a dog with a butcher’s bucket. Is something crook going on there, yes. My oath!”
He lowered his voice. “Reckon that Harold Hoskins has got himself a snoot of baddened magic.”
“Impossible!” cried the professor. “Young Teodora put an end to all that for us.”
Signor Alicamoussa confirmed joyfully, “And the sweet girl’s safe from the ice, bless the beetles. And is surely sure that dearest Lorenzo …”
An egret alighted on the railing and tiptoed on its star-shaped feet toward the two men. It bent its graceful neck toward them and chirped a few sad notes before it flew off.
“No! Poor Renzo!” breathed Professor Marìn.
“I’ll be there”—Signor Alicamoussa was already striding toward the stairs—“quicker than three jumps of a fleck-eared flea.”
“Godspeed, Sargano,” called the professor. “You know where I’ll be. I’ve got a ship to shape up.”
Just across the water, at the Hotel Danieli, a lady with a row of kiss curls on her forehead sat at her dressing table, admiring her beautiful face in the mirror.
She’d had the luck—or the foresight—to insist on a room on the third floor, well above the ice flood. She’d just finished dabbing her wrists with perfume and was tucking a pistol into the belt that cinched her waist, when she was summoned to the window. A seagull was tapping on it with his yellow beak.
“You have news for me?” she asked, drawing on her gloves. Her voice was cold and clipped.
She opened the window and let the bird in. “Is there news of the insufferable Studious Son?” she demanded. “And of the accursed and as yet Undrowned Child?”
On the night before Christmas, the city had been caught by surprise: a brutal, murderous surprise.
Venice was used to floods. Fifty times a year, several feet of water tumbled into the great square of San Marco and other low parts of the city.
“So?” the Venetians asked, and shrugged. “What’s a bit of water?”
The next tide always pulled it out again. People usually managed to extract some fun from this practical joke played by Nature. Gondoliers would pole people straight into cafés and they’d drink a glass of wine at the bar, still standing in the boat.
But on Christmas Eve, 1900, the sea had risen swift and silent in the night. The hydrometers of the Brenta Canal were simply swept away, so they could warn no one. Coils of gray water snaked deep into the city. Venice had never seen floodwater like this, slithering on its cold belly through the streets, carrying on its back flotillas of cruelly sharp miniature icebergs and ice floes in jagged sheets.
Many Venetians had been to midnight Mass; others had sat up late, enjoying the Christmas Eve feast of fried fish and reminiscing over Christmasses past. Everyone went to bed overfed, overtired and very happy.
So no one heard the poor tethered dogs of Venice barking until the water closed over them. As the sea crept up the walls, a few Venetians who lived on the ground floor woke. They were the unlucky ones. Alerted by a slapping noise, they innocently opened their doors. A mountain of water gushed in and swept them away.
The ice floes clanked as the waves surged higher. The snake of water lashed its tail. The ice nudged, scraped, rattled and finally shattered the windows of houses, shops and churches. Suddenly, the narrow streets were flowing with a shocking soup of food and furniture, Christmas wrappings and baubles, baby carriages and chamber pots, children’s toys and human beings. Rings and necklaces tumbled from the jewelers’ windows. Coffins floated out of funeral chapels to jostle among the icebergs. The jaws of the water snatched the dead fish from their baskets at the Rialto Market and bore them away in limp shoals down the Grand Canal.
The next people to be woken were the staff of the Accademia Galleries, home of Venice’s finest paintings. With the water rising over his knees, the night watchman telephoned for help. Soon all the museum curators came sloshing through the city in the thigh-high boots all Venetians kept for flood times.
But it was too late to save the paintings of Venice herself: portraits of the city painted by Bellini, Carpaccio and Canaletto. The priceless masterpieces floated through the smashed windows to join the thickening soup.
The sorrowful light of Christmas dawn revealed a drowned city. The ruins of gondolas lay like the skeletons of slender whales. In front of the shops, the remains of their wares, sodden and black with mud, were heaped in funeral pyres, waiting to dry out enough to burn. Venice looked like an enormous flea market, one that sold only pitiful damaged goods.
The first outsiders the Venetians saw were photographers and journalists, who called comfortably from their safe, dry boats, “Are you Venetians freezing and wretched? Have you lost your mothers? Any babies swept away?”
Mute with misery and cold, the Venetians stared back at them. The journalists jotted furiously while swigging hot whisky-and-orange from their flasks.
“Row on, man!” they ordered their boatmen. “This lot aren’t wretched enough. See if you can find a motherless child crying, will you?”
Everywhere Venetians were asking each other one question: “Why?”
After all, Venice was famous for her great seawalls, the murazzi. How had the murazzi failed the city, just when they were needed the most? A party of fishermen set off in salvaged boats to see what had happened, and to forage on the islands where Venice grew her food. As they approached the Lido, the men paled. The murazzi had been flung around like toy building blocks. And the orchards of Sant’Erasmo were sad ghosts of themselves: bleached, flattened and poisoned with salt.
From a distance, the fishermen glimpsed swollen bodies on the shoreline of Pellestrina.
“More dead,” they sighed, unrolling blankets. “Will it never end?”
But as the fishermen approached, the bodies emitted loud honking sounds. Those icy beaches were now home to some new inhabitants. The ice storm had swept a colony of monk seals north from Croatia. The seals cried their fear and loneliness in the unfamiliar environment.
And now snow was falling in thick threads, weaving a white blanket over the town. Fragile roofs sagged under quilts of snow; churches were folded away in blank curtains of ice. It was as if the city had died, and now lay pale and otherworldly in a soft white shroud.
And so it was, on the afternoon of Christmas Day, that Teodora Gasperin came to be standing on the frozen water that jutted into the lagoon. Until the moment she’d encountered the Vampire Eel under the ice, Teo had been wondering about her adoptive parents, a mile away across the water.
While Venice froze and drowned, at least those two must have been safe at work in their beautiful new laboratory perched high on the island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio, where they were the proud directors of the new Lagoon Museum. Knowing them—Teo smiled fondly—Leonora and Alberto Stampara probably hadn’t noticed the icebergs sweeping past the island. Their eyes would have been glued to their microscopes.
“They didn’t even come back for supper last night! Christmas Eve!” Teo grumbled. “I know they’re on the verge of a breakthrough, but really, how can the locomotion of the common squid be so interesting that they forget to come home and watch me open my presents?”
She sighed indulgently. “Well, it’s not the first time.”
And when they did come home, she knew they’d be their usual affectionate selves, liberal with hugs and praise. She couldn’t have asked for kinder adoptive parents. And a little absentmindedness on their parts meant that she and her friend Renzo were free to explore the city and islands to their hearts’ content.
All was also dry and snug back at their third-floor apartment near the Fondamente Nuove, where the family’s housekeeper, Anna, was boiling cauldrons of soup and roasting slices of pumpkin. Teo had spent her day trudging through the streets to deliver buckets of soup and trays of pumpkin to neighbors whose ground-floor rooms were still pitifully damp and whose ovens were clogged with mud. The hours had passed in a steamy haze of onions, hot water and the grateful tears of the people Teo visited. She imagined Renzo doing something similar where he lived, over in Santa Croce, on the other side of town. Renzo’s mother was just the sort of woman to tuck up her sleeves and throw herself into helping those less fortunate than herself. Teo pictured her busy in her blue shawl, bringing as much comfort to people with her lovely face as with her kind, swift hands.
“Of course Renzo’s safe,” she told herself. “Of course he is.”
But she still asked everyone she met, “Do you have any news of Santa Croce?”
They shook their heads. Teo had glimpsed the lists of the dead on the walls. They were so miserably long that she could not bear to study them. In tiny Venice, everyone knew everyone else, or was related to someone who did. The names of people Teo knew and loved were bound to be written on those sheets of paper.
There was no doubt, fortunately, that their friend Maria was out of harm’s way: the convent school where she boarded was on high ground over on the island of Giudecca. A neighbor told Teo that the nuns were taking in people made homeless by the flood. Maria would be in her element, sorting out warm clean clothes for everybody, choosing the prettiest dresses for the saddest girls who needed them the most.
And Teo too had tried to bury her own worries in hard work. All day, the sun had hardly dared to show its face, as if it knew that it was irrelevant to the desolate city. The orange glow of Teo’s hot pumpkin was a cheering sight in the bitter mist and inside houses lit only by stubs of candles.
At last, when everyone possible had been comforted with soup and hugs, Teo had slipped away for a little time to herself. Standing on the lonely shore at the Fondamente Nuove, she finally allowed her shoulders to sag. She was tired to the marrow of her bones. She’d slept fitfully the previous night, tortured by a nightmare.
Some of it had already come true.
In her dream, shadows had flitted through black water. There had been tails with jewel-like scales, and pale, slender arms bearing away flailing humans and tumbling paintings. A black ship with cobwebbed sails had cast nets down into the water where drowning souls thrashed and screamed. There had been images of giant squid pushing children into their thorny maws, and of a dead Venice trapped and perfectly preserved beneath a hundred feet of crystal ice. Over these scenes had floated a gray eminence, not quite man-shaped, not quite bat-shaped. It had swooped to whisper in Teodora’s flinching ears: “Death, and worse, to all Venetians.”