The Mourning Emporium (20 page)

A curtained screen separated off one corner of the room. Teo followed Sibella’s eyes there. Kicking aside a porcelain chamber pot, she poured the pitcher into the hip bath. She scrubbed the slime and stink of squid off her body, dried herself with a sheet from a neatly folded pile of fine Irish linen and daubed her wounds with pink ointment. It wasn’t magical, like Venetian Treacle, yet it quickly soothed the pain.

From the other side of the screen, Sibella said coolly, “I have some old dresses, which I had planned to give to my maid before I was taken hostage.”

“Don’t want to wear your fancy clothes,” replied Teo, as a gray silk dress was hung over the side of the screen.

“Won’t the boys hate you even more, if you go on trying to masquerade as one of them?”

Scowling, Teo snatched up the gray silk dress. Then she sat cross-legged on the floor and ripped off all the lace ruffles. It was good to feel the delicate fabric tearing under her angry fingers. She threw the ruffles over the screen.

“Well, fashion can live without your contribution, Teodora, but decency requires you to at least wear these.”

Over the top of the screen was draped a pair of combinations with lace around the neckline and a row of pearl buttons. “Cotton batiste, Chantilly lace,” Sibella explained. It was a long time since Teo had touched anything so soft.

A fearsome item was then handed over the screen to Teo. “And you’ll definitely be needing one of these corsets. Every woman should possess a perfect and attractive figure. Even the most unpromising shape can be transformed to queenly beauty, superb and fascinating.”

The last time Teo had known a girl who spoke like this, it had been one whose vanity and insecurity had pushed her into the clutches of Bajamonte Tiepolo, just because he gave her a bit of finery to wear. True, Maria was now a changed person, a friend, but … Sibella was stronger-willed than Maria, more aristocratic and seemingly less insecure. Teo thrust the corset imperiously over the screen.

“I can’t work in that,” Teo said shortly. She assumed that she would continue with her duties about the Scilla. There were barely enough hands to keep the ship afloat. The rats would still be gnawing and the Scilla was creaking audibly at every loose seam since the squid attack.

Teo peered around the edge of the screen.

“No, don’t even think about it!” She recoiled as Sibella held up a small gray cotton bustle, apparently stuffed with horsehair. “And don’t look at me,” she implored.

With a mocking smile, Sibella turned her artificially narrow back. Teo rebuilt herself from the combinations up, adding the simplest possible petticoat from the snowy collection on the floor, and completing the outfit with the desecrated silk dress knotted at her waist with a black sash, and a pinafore with handy pockets for tools.

She emerged from behind the screen, carefully avoiding even the briefest glance in the looking-glass on the bureau.

“The Puritan look,” commented Sibella, “suits you, insofar as anything might, I suppose. Though even Puritans don’t bite their fingernails up to the elbow like you do. Let me at least retie your sash. Some people just don’t have the knack.”

It was sorely tempting to answer this offer by tearing the sash in two, but Teo forced herself to accept Sibella’s deft ministrations. Having lost one of her shoes in the sea, she could not afford to snub Sibella’s “patent galoshed brogue vamp” boots, which were snug and warm.

“Thank you,” she said gruffly.

Then she climbed on the deck, where the boys were struggling to repair the squid’s damage by lamplight.

Every head deliberately turned away from Teo. She took her position at the tar bucket and busied herself with sealing the loose seams of the poop deck. Not a single boy threw a look or a word in her direction, or asked if her wounds still hurt, or came to work alongside the deceitful girl who’d been pretending to be a boy.

After a midnight supper of hot chocolate and ginger cake, at which she was studiously ignored, Teo returned unwillingly to Sibella’s cabin. As she opened the door, she became aware that the wind had threshed any remnant of tidiness out of her hair, and that she’d somehow contrived to tear the gray silk dress in three new places.

Sibella smiled icily. “Teodora, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. Nail brush, say how do you do to Teodora. And by the way, I’ve made up a bed for you in the lid of my trunk.”

The trunk was so big that Teo could stretch out fully inside.

Teo growled, yet she took the warm flannel nightdress Sibella offered her, closing her ears to the explanation of its “waterfall frills, edged with pink zephyr.”

Sometime in the early hours, Teo was woken by singing. Without moving her body, she opened her eyes. Sibella crouched over her pillow box with a candle in her hand. She was chanting quietly to the leeches inside. Teo raised her head. She could see the leeches were churning, waving their heads in a kind of ecstasy. She tried to hear what Sibella was saying to make them so excited, but the words were too faint to be comprehensible.

The letters Teo saw on the air above the back of Sibella’s head formed themselves into an antique script. Yet as soon as Teo started to read the words, they disappeared. For Sibella had caught sight of Teo’s glowing eyes in her mirror. She closed the lid on her pets, snuffing out the candle.

“You must get your beauty sleep, Teodora,” her voice chimed out of the darkness. “I can’t think of anyone who needs it more.”

Teo’s first chance to be alone with Renzo was not until he took the wheel at the beginning of the second watch.

“Teo, at last!” He smiled with relief. But she was quick and blunt.

“Your Sibella is using her leeches to send messages to her friend Miss Uish. When she chants to them at night—it looks like magical spells, Renzo. Miss Uish has baddened magic. What if Sibella does too? What if she’s telling Miss Uish that there’s a certain Undrowned Child, a girl, still undrowned and on the Scilla with her friend the Studious Son? And what if Miss Uish is telling Bajamonte Tiepolo?”

Renzo looked around anxiously.

“Obviously you don’t want to be seen talking with me,” blurted Teo, “but please hear me out. Don’t you see that things have changed? How can we take these brave boys to London on a half-truth? Now we have to tell them about baddened magic and …”

“No! Professor Marìn said it was safer for them not to know too much.”

“Naturally you want to carry out his wishes. So would I. But Professor Marìn was dying when he said that, Renzo. His mind was clouded by pain.”

Teo struggled to keep her voice low. “Put some oil in your lamp! Most of these boys are orphans because of Bajamonte Tiepolo. Including you, Renzo. It’s clearly Il Traditore who created the Bombazine! For all we know, he might even be aboard her. Who else would summon up Ghost-Convicts in-the-Slaughterhouse? No doubt the colossal squid is his creature too. We have to let the boys choose their own fates. They must decide for themselves if they wish to go on. There will be danger. We may be fighting for our lives, for Venice. For London. For our world, if necessary.”

The sound of a sharp intake of breath made both of them jump. Looking up, Teo saw Fabrizio crouching like a cat over the booby hatch.

Renzo’s face pinched. Teo asked, “Did you hear everything?”

“I should think just about everything.” Fabrizio’s green eyes were bright with angry shock. He turned to Teo with a remorseful expression. “I am so sorry, Teo. You and Renzo knew all this awful stuff all along? And we’ve put you in castigo! You’ve not only been alone, you’ve been worrying about the rest of us and wanting us to know the truth, even when we were being nasty to you.”

“And spiteful,” noted Teo. “And outstandingly malicious.”

“True. We owe you an apology, a really big one.”

“Apology accepted,” Teo said quickly. “Now let’s call everyone together—just the boys, not that Sibella, mind!—and have a proper talk.”

In the messroom, Teo explained the mermaids, baddened magic, Bajamonte Tiepolo, the Pretender and the Incogniti. She included her theory about Sibella and the leeches. Initially disbelieving, then frightened, some of the boys finally grew angry about being kept in the dark about Il Traditore and the danger that faced not just Venice but now London.

“Didn’t you trust us?” complained Sebastiano. “Did you think we were cowards or something?”

“We’re Venetians too,” Giovanni stated with dignity.

“The professor was afraid what might happen to you if Miss Uish found out you knew the truth.”

“Well, now we do, and now we—that’s all of us—have to make a plan,” said Emilio brusquely, waving a rolled-up chart in his hand. “By the way the Sorcerer’s winds are blowing us, we’ll be in British waters by tomorrow.”

“There can be only one plan,” said Renzo. “As soon as we get to London, we must find the mermaids and the Incogniti.”

“And look for my parents,” Teo added in a small voice.

“Of course we will,” said Sebastiano generously. “First thing.”

And all the while they spoke, the Scilla sped toward England on the Sorcerer’s wind, magically maneuvering round icebergs that Emilio’s charts could not warn them about. When the sailors returned to their duties on deck, no one wanted to mention that the cold was getting more bitter.

In the churning waters of the English Channel, only Teo was happy to see how few fish came to the hooks of their rods. Those that did were unearthly creatures scooped up by the strange currents. Some waved tentacles with phosphorescent tips. Others had no eyes at all. Cookie tried to disguise them in a spiced stew, yet those fish still tasted unpleasantly of the past and of the deep, and of something better left undisturbed.

“Stinks of baddened magic,” said Renzo, pushing his plate aside.

When sleek Sofonisba—with an air of self-sacrifice—offered them a pair of freshly killed rats for supper, Giovanni wondered aloud if Cookie might know a good rat recipe.

That night Sibella chanted once more to the leeches. Teo, exhausted by her day on deck, was unable to keep awake long enough to penetrate the mysteries of her companion’s archaic script and strange words. And she was simply disgusted when she saw Sibella pick one leech out and crush it in a mortar. Then the girl added the juice of a lemon and, screwing up her face, drank the mixture in a single gulp.

It was on the afternoon of the next day that they first sighted the British coast, opening like a grim gray smile in the water. The sea was now cluttered with cutter-rigged oyster-dredgers and Boulogne luggers. A wide estuary beckoned them toward Yantlet Creek, where an obelisk—“The London Stone!” exclaimed Renzo—stood like an old pencil in water that was dead and flat, gray as polished pewter. The sky lurked above it, the same color and seeming just as heavy. The few fishing vessels they passed looked equally lifeless, as did the handful of bleak farms that clung to the edges of the limp marshes fringing the water.

The sailors set the fore-and-aft sail and trimmed the head-sheets down to port. The Scilla slid smoothly into the mouth of the Thames. An hour passed and most of another, with nothing more dramatic than gray-green fields and sparsely populated hamlets to be seen on either side. Snatches of woodland, hazy hills and lazy flights of heron punctuated the view.

“Look! All the flags at half-mast,” said Fabrizio.

“Do you think,” Teo wondered, “is it possible that the old Queen could have actually … died?”

“The newspapers in Venice were saying she was on the brink of it, weren’t they?” remembered Sebastiano.

A short silence fell.

“If Queen Victoria is dead,” said Teo with a shiver, “then whatever Bajamonte and the Pretender are plotting must already be afoot.”

The demise of the Queen was confirmed by the deep-black mourning costumes worn by all the populace at the first town they reached. Appropriately, it turned out to be called Gravesend. Its funereal name suited it well: dull brick buildings kept their distance from a joyless pebbled beach. Renzo guided the Scilla to anchor a safe distance away from the two barnacled piers.

At Giovanni’s urging, they bought ten pints of fresh shrimp and a barrel of silvery pickled herrings from a fishing smack that came alongside, with a cauldron boiling cheerfully right on deck. From another boat, they bought some legs of “York ham,” a brace of dressed ducks, and some cheese, pickled cucumber and cresses for Teo. Another boat laden with fruit sold them sixteen pears for a penny. Reluctantly, they used some of their pirated sovereigns to pay for the food. They did not dare moor at a jetty: the Scilla was too full of stolen treasure to bear examination by any inquisitive customs officer. Large gulls and unusual crested cormorants circled above the boat. Others floated in the water, their beaks and eyes pointing accusingly at the Scilla’s hold.

“I’m thinking we’re going to have to stow the pirate loot,” said Emilio, as they continued down river, “before we get to London.”

“But not here,” answered Renzo. Tilbury Docks, vast and swarming with men and boats, was just across the river. “Somewhere quiet.”

A few miles past Greenhithe, a deserted jetty tottered into the river. Renzo steered the Scilla alongside, and the digging party, led by Sofonisba, went ashore, leaving Fabrizio on watch.

Fear of spying cormorants and gulls forced them to contrive the appearance of a jolly picnic in a field. In fact, they were soon giggling in earnest: after all their days at sea, the sailors had lost their land legs. No sooner had Sebastiano climbed ashore than he flopped on his face. Laughing fit to burst, Giovanni also stumbled into the mud.

“You’re like a bunch of drunken monkeys,” remarked Sofonisba, sniffing, yet two seconds later she too found herself unexpectedly on her back in a damp hollow.

By a beech tree, and under cover of an outspread blanket, Sofonisba dug a hole in the frozen earth. The small sacks of stolen jewels and gold—all but a modest sum for living expenses—were buried, while they pretended to drink from empty cups and lifted pieces of sponge masquerading as bread to their lips. They flinched as the shadow of a bird passed over the blanket. Fortunately, it was only a duck. Renzo was whittling an image of a cat into the trunk of the tree when Fabrizio called from the boat, “Flock of cormorants approaching from the southeast!”