The Mourning Emporium (26 page)

CHILDREN SEIZED AND SHORN IN STREET!

Renzo and Teo pulled up short in front of the billboard, bending down to read the details. Dozens of children, of all ages and degrees of poverty and affluence, had been pulled behind gates, under bridges and into hansom cabs—and relieved of their hair. The dazed boys and girls could recall nothing of their ordeal, thanks to harsh blows to the head.

“Do you remember,” Teo asked Renzo, staring at the poster, “how Miss Uish shaved our heads? And how the children in the hospital two years ago had their heads shorn by that horrible nurse?”

Renzo shivered. “But what would they want with the children’s hair?”

When Teo and Renzo arrived back at the mourning emporium, they found the Londoners in a state of outrage. It was already apparent what happened to the stolen hair. That morning, while Teo and Renzo were with Uncle Tommaso, the streets had been suddenly flooded with vendors selling mourning brooches for Queen Victoria’s funeral.

The street vendors sold their mourning brooches at a shilling, a tenth of the price of the smallest pin in the Mansion Dolorous’s own expensive range. The boys and girls had winced when they overheard Mr. Tristesse fretting, “If those charlatans destroy our brooch business, we’ll not be able to afford so many child mourners.”

“We must investigerate,” barked Turtledove, when Messrs. Tristesse and Ganorus had left the building. “I’ll not have me childer out on the street on account of this hairy fubbery.”

Tig was despatched to buy one of the offending brooches, clutching a handkerchief of grimy pennies pooled from every member of the gang.

“I feels disloyal layin’ out good money on ’em, doan I?” she protested.

“It is research,” insisted Renzo.

“Doan tell me what I’s doin’!” blustered Tig, trotting out of the door.

“I do most prostrately apologize.” Renzo bowed his head.

Pylorus shouted, “Oooh, so sickly sweet that boy is! Pass the sick bucket! Sorry, the expectoratin’ receptacle.”

Renzo blushed and looked at the ground.

Turtledove barked in his most undovelike fashion, “Stand up to ’im, why doan yew, Renzo? Hain’t yew got no gall or gizzard, boy? A word ’twixt yew an’ me—I likes to see a bit o’ cheek in me childer. Doan like to see ’em too biddable. I likes character, lashings of it! I cannot be doin’ wiv polite childer. Manners is the scum wot rises up when yew bile the spirit out o’ a child.”

Then Turtledove pinned a heavy paw on Pylorus’s shoulder and growled, “Show me yer tongue! Yes, just what I thought, all black wiv nastiness!”

“Licorice, actually,” remarked Greasy dreamily, “and aniseed comfits.”

“All the worse for yew; how many times ’as I told yew not to raid the comestibles here? Now, have conduct, boy! ’Pologize handsome-like to poor Renzo, do. Yew know I’ll have no sarky sass, no meanness ’tween one an’ t’other. Woan suit, woan suit at all. Now yew two borrow the hatchet an’ make nice.”

“Got one!” Tig hurtled back in. It had not proved hard for her to find a vendor. Two had had the audacity to set themselves up right outside the Mansion Dolorous. Indeed, every second street corner, as far as the eye could see, boasted a person of indeterminate sex, swaddled in scarves and wearing a strange felt hat bobbing with corks, with a small tray of brooches on his meager lap, beside a black tin can with some kind of liquid inside it.

Tig opened her handkerchief to show an oval-shaped brooch. The boys and girls passed it from hand to hand. The brooch contained very fine chestnut, blond and black hairs, intricately plaited and encased in glass. On the back of each brooch, there was a gummed label: THE HAIR OF THEIR LATE MAJESTIES PRINCE ALBERT AND QUEEN VICTORIA. NEVER FORGOTTEN.

“Well, that’s not right,” said Renzo officiously. “Albert was her consort. He was never referred to as His Majesty. It should say ‘Hair of Her Majesty Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.’ Not to mention that Albert died back in 1861.”

“And not to mention,” Teo pointed out, “that there must be thousands of these brooches for sale at the moment. From his portraits, Prince Albert had a good head of hair, but he wasn’t—how would you say it in English?—un mostro peloso—a hairy monster. And Queen Victoria’s hair must have been white by the time she died.”

Turtledove turned the brooch over with his paw.

“That is childer hair, that is,” he growled. “I’s goin’ to bite them criminables from Shoreditch to Kensington.”

“What did yer vendor look loik?” demanded Greasy. “Close up?”

“Were hard to see,” answered Tig. “He were that covered up, right to his eyes. An’ he wore blue spectickles. Strange, though—I passed annuva two of ’em on the way back, an’ they was both got up in the same rig, same black tin cans an’ corky hats an’ the same blue spectickles.”

“What has they got to hide?” growled Turtledove.

“And they started acting awful sneaky-loik when they saw me lookin’ at ’em. I saw two of ’em do the strangest thing. Those black cans wiv handles they carried—when they thought there wernt no one looking, they sprinkled somefing out of ’em against the nearest doorpost an’ door handle. I saw ’em do dozens of doorknobs loik that. An’ no one said nuffink or tried to stop ’em.”

Teo asked, “What were their voices like?”

“They dint talk to me at all. They jest pointed. I thought they might be mutes. But when I walked away, they started jabberin’ among themselves, funny words, wiv lots of swearin’ in ’em. It dint even sound loik proper English. Was loik they had bees up their noses an’ was yawning at the same time.”

“An Orstralian accent, yew mean?” asked Turtledove. “So those were billycans they was carrying.”

“The criminals from Hooroo that Harold Hoskins pardoned, that’s who they are,” Renzo said darkly.

“Renzo, Teo, yew’s off funeral duties now. Full-time looking for taily ladies, that’s what yew’s doin’ now. Wiv my help, nat’rally,” Turtledove was barking when Pylorus Salt rushed in from the street with a newspaper in his hand.

“They’ve set the date for Queen Vic’s funeral,” he announced. “February second. What a crush that’ll be! You woan be able to see the streets for all the people in ’em.”

To bury Queen Victoria with the kind of pomp and ceremony that she herself would have expected—now, that was an undertaking to rival the construction of the pyramids in Egypt.

The crowds were already gathering. There was not a hotel room to be had, nor a spare bed in anybody’s house from Ealing to Wood Green.

Nor, it seemed, was there a vacant branch on any tree in London.

Everyone remarked about the sudden profusion of cormorants. They were seen not only in their usual haunts along the Thames, but in gardens and parks and on people’s roofs.

Black birds for our blackest days, commented the Times. Even Mother Nature sends her mourners to the world’s most magnificent funeral. For was our great Queen not everybody’s mother?

Obsessed with new daily details of the funeral plans, none of the newspapers could spare a column inch for another, more domestic phenomenon that befell many Londoners over the next few days. Those people would open their front doors and exclaim, “Ugh! The doorknob’s all wet. What’s that smell?”

And those same people would shortly afterward begin to feel quite unwell.

In Venice, The Key to the Secret City had led Renzo and Teo to the mermaids, sure as a piece of string. Without the book, they had no clues. There were no buildings in London as remote and romantic as the House of the Spirits, at least none that seemed magical enough to house a hundred tousled blond mermaids and their printing press in a cavern below.

Humans should be easier to track down. Teo and Renzo inquired discreetly at the large museums for natural history and science in South Kensington: Had any of their own scientists gone missing? Where were the best scientific facilities in London? But no hints emerged as to the whereabouts of Teo’s adoptive parents.

Nor did the Incogniti have any luck. “È come se fossero sepolti sotto il mare! It’s as if they were buried under the sea!” Uncle Tommaso despaired.

That night Teo slept uneasily in her cotton shroud. In the early hours, the night-nagging dream returned, the one in which Bajamonte Tiepolo’s voice whispered, “Death to Venice and all Venetians!” in her ear. “Blackness to her image. Oblivion to her memory.”

She woke up, crying “Lussa!”

LONDON CHILDREN DISAPPEAR, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED whooped the morning headlines. Children were not simply being shaved. More than two hundred had suddenly vanished without a trace.

The Mansion Dolorous gang were confined indoors. But after they’d passed a chafing day inside the mourning emporium, Turtledove came back with a warm, damp package and a guest: the barge dog Pattercake.

“Fish ’n’ chips and eel pie—summat to celeberbrate,” the bulldog said mysteriously, winking at Teo.

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Pattercake, tearing open the package and helping himself to a battered haddock. The children swarmed around the table.

But instead of smacking his lips, Renzo talked nostalgically of his favorite Venetian dish, seppie e polenta: slices of corn porridge in a lake of hot squid ink.

“You drink ink in Venice? Dear lordy-lordy!” Bits rolled his eyes.

“Maybe that’s what makes ’im talk loik that?” asked Thrasher.

Rosibund weighed in with, “It wernt an ice flood what destroyed Venice. Renzo bored it to estinkshon, didna’e?”

“What’s bitin’ yew?” cautioned Turtledove. “Leave ’im be. Quiet, childer! Pattercake has brought t’intelligence we’s been awaiting. Teodora, Renzo, yer friends, the Venetian mermaids, has finely been locatered. All this time, they’s been hiding thesselves in a cavern under London Bridge, not fifteen minutes’ trot from ’ere.”

“There’s Pattercake’s sign.”

Turtledove’s broad nose nudged an unpromising door in a dank passage by the river. Five scratches, clearly inflicted by a dog’s splayed paw, ran horizontally across its dilapidated surface.

Renzo, Teo and Turtledove were accompanied by the District Disgrace, who had revealed a romantic side to her nature, insisting that she must see “the bootiful mermaids” at any cost, and by Tobias Putrid, whose ease and expertise in subterranean tunnels might prove useful.

Renzo held aloft a lantern to light them down the stairs. The walls were lined with shelves, and those shelves were lined with boxes and bottles bearing extravagant labels, illustrated with chromolithographs of large-eyed ladies with long, lustrous hair and remarkably pale faces. Always happy to have long words in her mouth, Teo read the labels aloud as they descended:

“The Original Widow Welch’s Female Pills.

“Nurse Powell’s Popular Pellets for all Female Ailments (Delay is dangerous, write at once and obtain relief).

“LYDIA E. PINKHAM’S VEGETABLE COMPOUND (ONLY A WOMAN CAN UNDERSTAND ANOTHER WOMAN’S ILLS).

“ZAM-BUK

(CONTAINS THOSE SUBSTANCES WHICH NATURE HAS INTENDED FOR THE USE OF WOMAN EVER SINCE SHE BEQUEATHED TO HER THE INSTINCT TO RUB A PLACE THAT HURTS).

“Dr. Brodum’s Nervous Cordial and Botanical Syrup.

“Dr. William’s Pink Pills for Pale People (Go to the very cause of the mischief).

“CHAMELEON OIL

(THE ONLY PERFECT LINIMENT).”

The steps flattened out at a wide landing. Teo heard waves shuffling against stone. Renzo’s lantern showed a cavern clad in lavatorial white tiles. A sewer rat of dimensions that commanded respect launched itself into the black water immediately in front of them. Moonlight picked out its long crooked muzzle and a flash of yellow tooth. Then Teo caught sight of a glittering blue scale.

“Lussa!” she exclaimed, for a shaft of moonlight now revealed ranks of mermaids glimmering like fireflies at the far end of the echoing chamber, their faces all stippled in the light cast by lanterns swinging overhead. On a high ledge, the Sea Spiders were busily spinning large rectangular cocoons under the beady observation of the mermaids’ parrots. The turtleshell was fixed to a mossy post.

Teo was aware of breath sharply drawn in at the sight of the mermaids. Turtledove and the Mansion Dolorous gang had not disbelieved Renzo and Teo’s account of them. But actually to see the mythical creatures had a literally stunning effect upon the Londoners. Looking at their taut faces and dropped jaws, Teo remembered, with compassion, the first time she herself had encountered the mermaids in their cavern under the House of the Spirits.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered, squeezing the District Disgrace’s hand, “they don’t bite.”

Turtledove advanced and bowed deeply, inquiring, “How do? How do?”

Flos called out excitedly in English, “Sink me if ’Tisn’t da Undrowned Child and da Studious Son! Wiv a dawg! And a dear little Lunnun chickabiddy and a ripe codling too!”

Marsil cried, “By Neptune’s Mandibles, that’s a sight for sawed-off eyes!”

Teo was amused to notice that, even in English, the Venetian mermaids spoke in a dialect coarse enough to bring a lump to a pirate’s throat.

Lussa’s English, however, was as aristocratic as her Venetian. “Dearest Children, We thought You were still in Venice, aboard the Scilla, with a Field of Excluding to block our Turtleshell’s Vision! What has brought You to this dangerous City? Can it be that Venice’s Undrowned Child & Studious Son shall also help London against Bajamonte Tiepolo? And However did You find Us? Even the dear Incogniti know not our Hiding Place, lest One of their Number be Captured and Tortured. Did Professor Marìn …?”

“Turtledove here,” Teo said, stroking the dog’s head, “found you for us. But Lussa, we have to tell you …” She broke into a sob.

Renzo finished her sentence quietly. “Miss Uish murdered Professor Marìn at sea and turned us into pirates.”

Lussa clutched her heart. “ ’Tis too Terrible to bear.”

Regaining her composure, Lussa nodded gravely at Turtledove. “We thank You, Noble Canine, for bringing our Children. Venice thanks You.”

“Pleased to meet yew, Yer Majesty, Missis Lussa.” Turtledove bowed. “These young ’uns has told me all about yew ladies. Quintus Turtledove, an’ my two proty-jays, the District Disgrace an’ Tobias Putrid.”

As the Venetian mermaids swam closer, it suddenly became clear that they were not alone.