The Mourning Emporium (37 page)

Gloriana insisted, “Chameleon oil is just what you need! The only perfect liniment, you know! Please to hand it up on deck. Shake the bottle until its contents become cream-colored. And then anoint the affected parts.”

Having finally pinned Rosebud to the deck with his foot, Signor Alicamoussa scratched his handsome head. “Reckon youse taily ladies might of had couple few ’plashes too many of the old cough medicine. Yet is worth a try.”

A chain of boys and girls handed bottles of chameleon oil up the ladders to the rail, where others snapped them open and poured the contents on the wounds of the poor pumpkin-sellers. Below, Nerolia could be heard explaining, “Immediately the chameleon oil has been applied, it sets out upon its message of discovering and healing, traveling with lightning rapidity to the seat of the trouble. This found, it restores to the affected part all that pristine freshness which pain and suffering has caused it to lose.”

And indeed, the chameleon oil seemed to work just as it said on the label. The pumpkin-sellers moaned, but the color was returning to their faces. Soon they were standing up, and instantly returned to the fray.

“Bag o’ nuts!” exclaimed Flos. “It works after all!”

Meanwhile the London mermaids busied themselves loading arrows into their bows. Despite their delicate arms, they proved most dextrous shots. A rain of arrows fell with deadly accuracy upon the tallest Ghost-Convicts, whose skulls were visible from the water. And when the Hooroo criminals launched their boatful of sheep and tried to sneak away, the London mermaids holed its sides in a hundred places so it sank. Fortunately, the sheeps’ wool kept them afloat on their backs with their legs in the air until they could be guided to shore. And in this way they also served as useful rafts to transport the exhausted fat weasels, squirrels and rats.

Under cover of the chaos, Bajamonte Tiepolo had stopped fighting with Renzo, who was now dealing with two Ghost-Convicts. It was some minutes before anyone realized that Il Traditore had disappeared. Renzo, having pushed both his opponents into the water, ran around the deck, shouting, “Show yourself, Traditore! Give me satisfaction, you coward!”

Sofonisba paused to lick her back, shoulders and right front leg. So she did not see Miss Uish approaching her from behind, a dagger in hand. Renzo rushed forward to put himself between Miss Uish and the cat.

“Interfere with me, would you, boy?” shouted Miss Uish. “Well, you can be the first to see what happens to interfering children!”

Turning to Lieutenant Rosebud, who had raised himself from the deck and recommenced his duel with Signor Alicamoussa, she shouted, “Let’s show them the spirit of Christmas past, shall we?”

Rosebud kicked Signor Alicamoussa to the ground. Winded, the circus-master cried, “Youse’d give me a porridge-stirrer in the gut, would youse, sir? Youse’ll not.…”

But the lieutenant was striding away, burrowing in his pocket for a key. Deftly, he unlocked that mysterious door to what Teo had thought, when she first came aboard the Bombazine, was a cupboard, and from which she had heard that sinister voice crooning “Silent Night.”

Now, out of that cupboard, flowed a shimmering tribe of heart-stoppingly ugly apparitions. They were dressed like mangy bears in shaggy fur coats. Those with bare faces had grotesquely twisted features. Others wore fearsome masks with devilish faces painted on them. Some had eyes that lit up as if on fire. Each carried a tall birch rod, and those rods were immediately employed to attack as many boys and girls as they could find. Teo crumpled to her knees as one of the creatures dealt her a blow across the shoulders. Thrasher and Hyrum were both on the deck too, their necks pinned down by filthy boots. The creatures lowered their jaws toward them. Miss Uish snarled, “Famous pedophages all of them, my sweet cupboard creatures.”

“Child-eaters?” gasped Teo, turning to Renzo.

“Over my cadaver,” shouted Signor Alicamoussa, back on his feet.

Turtledove shouted, “Wot’s this? Child-hurters? I’ve heard about these types. Diabolical monsters wot punish childer at Christmas, instead of givin’ ’em presents an’ puddin’ an’ lovin’. Eats childer, yew say? I’ll be havin’ ’em!”

The shaggy spirits were happy to terrorize half-grown humans, but they proved none too fierce when it came to confronting a six-foot-tall sword-fighting circus-master and a large English bulldog with his blood roused. They were soon backed into a corner, Turtledove lunging at their calloused ankles and occasionally leaping to nip one on its long, pointed nose.

“Teo,” Turtledove shouted, “has yew got a spell for these bully boys in yer head-library? Use it, do. They’s not awful bothersome, but they is wasting me time.”

Teo was already mentally flicking though Professor Marìn’s The Best Ways with Wayward Ghosts, speeding straight to the chapters that dealt with “Malevolent Spirits of Christmas Past.” Following the professor’s instructions, she shouted,

“Love! Light! And Christmas Delight!

Diminish all who trade in fright!”

A rude noise, like a balloon deflating, issued from the corner where the spirits huddled. They shrank to the size of dolls and scampered away like rats, leaping for the stanchions and throwing themselves overboard.

“Took off like ruptured ducks!” Signor Alicamoussa grinned. “Feather me!”

“Ship’s rats are bigger than them now!” Teo exclaimed.

Pucretia’s voice came up from the water. “And we brought with us a soda fountain, and a plentiful supply of ROUGH ON RATS.”

ROUGH ON RATS proved even rougher on diminished Christmas spirits.

“Now, what about Sofonisba?” Teo cried.

Turtledove’s brain was running in the same direction. “Where’s that Uish woman now? Estimable Feline, I trust yew’s vanquished the female child-hurter? Because now I’s goin’ to pulverize wot’s left of her. They’ll have to bury her in a hundred cardboard boxes.”

Miss Uish was nowhere to be seen. Poor Sofonisba, however, lay panting on the deck, a bright ribbon of blood flowing from her side. One wing had been cut off and most of her tail lay an inch apart from her body.

Turtledove bent over her tenderly, nudging her with his soft muzzle.

“The bravest cat in the world will get the best care the quacks can provide. Yew’ll soon be better,” he growled. “Yew’ll come back to the Mansion Dolorous and I shall treat yew as one of me own childer.”

“Idiot! Fool!” hissed Sofonisba. “While you’re whispering sweet nothings to me, they’re getting away.”

There was the sound of a splash and a glint of shining pink disappearing beneath the water.

“Wot, in the name of Unholy Cat,” asked Turtledove, “were that?”

“The Cala-Mary!” gasped Teo. “The squid submarine! My parents must have finished it.”

And then she remembered what Bajamonte Tiepolo had said when he sensed her presence in his stateroom.

“Your parents are nearly finished,” he had told her, “in both senses of the word, for, of course, it would be foolish of me to allow them to live once they have served my purpose.”

Bajamonte Tiepolo, Orphan-Maker.

Teo, her face bloodless and her heart almost at a standstill, ran to the booby hatch and hurtled down toward the laboratory.

Teo had had many astonishing things happen to her in her life, more than the average twelve-year-old dreams about, in fact. Yet she’d never been so shocked as she was now, at the sight of her highly rational and scientific parents leaning out of a large porthole and talking seriously to a school of mermaids in the water below.

For the first time in her life, Teo was rendered absolutely speechless.

“You can see them?” she eventually squeaked. She’d been so sure that, in the eminently sensible minds of Alberto and Leonora Stampara, modern science must have done away with mermaids, talking dogs, magical creatures and even reincarnated spirits like Bajamonte Tiepolo, explaining the sight of them as the product of a simple ganglionic imbalance or an ocular disturbance.

A dozen boys and girls poured into the laboratory, ducking their heads shyly at the sight of the unfamiliar adults. The parrots flew in behind them, taking roost on the lanterns.

“My parents,” explained Teo proudly, hugging them fiercely. She was surprised to receive twin embraces that were just as fierce in return.

“The danger must truly be over,” she thought, “for I seem to have come out from between-the-Linings.”

“Oh, Teodora,” sobbed Leonora, “they told us they would hurt you.”

“Did you build that Cala-Mary then?” asked Rosato admiringly.

“We’re not proud of it,” Leonora said gravely, over the top of Teo’s head. “We had no choice.”

“Course not,” agreed Bits magnanimously. “You was slave labor, jist loik Greasy ’n’ Marg’rit. Forced, loik.”

“But now they’ve got away in it anyways,” pointed out Pylorus in a small voice.

Alberto Stampara smiled calmly. “They won’t get far.”

Leonora explained, “Knowing it was to be used for evil, we built a fatal error into the submarine. Two minutes after launch, the cabin will completely fill with dark blue ink.”

“Poisonous dark blue ink,” added Alberto.

“And in serving Venice so against her Enemies,” Lussa declared, “Leonora and Alberto Stampara have now joined the ranks of the Incogniti, Secret Protectors of Venice.”

Teo cried, “Which is why they can see mermaids!”

“You mean they’s made sure that old Bargyminty and that woman’s goan to cark it?” cried Bits. “I hain’t sayin’ I wish anybody ill. But I hopes that’s what you mean.”

A fierce bubbling in the river answered Bits’s question before Leonora and Alberto could. A sudden blush of blue crept over the icebergs juddering in the current around the Bombazine.

“If the ink has been released, it can only be because the cabin filled and the submarine has sunk to the bottom of the river,” explained Alberto quietly.

“Hain’t he got baddened magic, though, yer Traitor?” asked Pylorus. “Won’t he ’scape?”

“Bajamonte Tiepolo has … had achieved a Human State again,” affirmed Lussa. “So He can drown just like an ordinary Man. Like the Woman Uish, who was never More than a Very Bad Example of a Human.”

Everyone’s faces tightened. Yet in her heart, Teo was not a bit sorry. If anything, death by drowning in blue ink wasn’t a bad-enough fate for Miss Uish. And there was no fate too terrible for Bajamonte Tiepolo.

The Venetian mermaids broke into unruly rejoicing. “He has unscrewed his billiard table!” and “Worms’ night out!”

Flos shouted happily, “He’s basted da poison turkey!”

Marsil cried, “And he’s tied up his plum puddings!”

“Puddings! Puddings! Puddings!” screeched the parrots, though one cried “Worms!” in a wistful way.

Pucretia looked up sharply. From her quiver, Nerolia pulled a large green bottle of PATENT VERMIFUGE. The parrot whistled and looked away.

Renzo said soberly, “They will be dead, but the Pretender doesn’t know it yet.”

“And if yer Bargyminty and the childer-hurting wishy-woman is dead …,” Turtledove said slowly and regretfully, “it means we cannot interrogerate ’em as to the Hooroo plans for Venice. We is in the dark. Things ain’t so rosy as we thought.…”

“There is someone we could ask,” Teo said. “Someone who was always thick as thieves with Miss Uish. And she’s still here.”

Everyone turned to look for Sibella. She’d been safely tied to a chair in a corner of the laboratory, awaiting the judgment of the victors of the battle. She dared not struggle, of course, because of her hemophilia.

It suddenly occurred to Teo that it really was outstandingly callous of Bajamonte Tiepolo and Miss Uish to abandon Sibella to the mercies of those left on the Bombazine, all of whom had reasons to hate her. Yet she suppressed her pity. This was war. The fates of London and Venice hung in the balance. There were things to set straight, and this was Teo’s opportunity to do so, while people were at last ready to listen to her on the subject of Sibella’s treachery.

Lussa listened patiently while Teo listed her grievances against Sibella. “She spied on us. She treated us like dirt. As soon as she could, she ran to the Bombazine and joined our enemies. Even when we were at sea, she used her horrible leeches to send messages to them. There has always been something strange about her. And finally, who is she? Why does no one come to find her, or care about her? Nobody loves her, and there must be a reason for that.”

“How very banal,” remarked Sibella, “the case against me.”

Teo felt a red haze pass in front of her eyes. In that blood-colored shimmering, Sibella’s pretty face distorted. The features sharpened, lengthened. Suddenly, Sibella looked almost exactly like a miniature version of Miss Uish herself. Teo swayed, and Sibella’s face changed again. Now those blue eyes seemed to darken to greenish brown, with a rim of red around them. And her pupils seemed to narrow like a snake’s.

Teo’s feelings rioted out of control. A fierce torrent of words rushed out of her mouth. “I know who you are, Sibella. Is it so uncommonly banal,” she hissed, “that you must be the daughter of Bajamonte Tiepolo himself? And Miss Uish is no doubt your mother! You are the spawn of Venice’s worst enemy and London’s worst enemy!”

Silence fell on the room.

Ann Picklefinch whispered, “It’s true, that Sibella hes an uncanny way aboot her.”

“That is a dreadful thing to accuse her of!” exclaimed Renzo. “On what evidence?”

Signor Alicamoussa murmured, “Teodora, reckon youse is barking up the wrong dog there.…”

Teo shouted, “She’s not denying it, is she? Remember how she came aboard the Scilla? We didn’t capture her, not like the other prisoners. That Australian ship practically delivered her giftwrapped. And then why did she run to the Bombazine, if not back to Mamma and Papà, like a good little girl?”

Sibella’s face might have been etched on white marble, so unmoving were her features. She murmured, “I was not welcome on the Scilla.”

Lussa intervened, “Teodora, your Rage is intemperate. If this Child were truly the Daughter of Il Traditore & the Uish Woman, would They really have abandoned Her here? Even if They do not love Her, She would surely be worth Something to Them. As their Heiress, at Least.”