The Mourning Emporium (43 page)

The Abbess welcomed Teo with a kiss on the forehead. Her robes gave off a delicious scent of candle wax and lavender as she ushered Teo into her lamp-lit study, where jeweled Bibles and richly tooled hymnbooks glowed on deep mahogany shelves.

Signor Alicamoussa kissed Renzo warmly upon both cheeks. “I would not for thirteen worlds agree to leaving youse here, my precious boy, except that I know youse’ll be in the handiest of hands. Belonging as they do to an old friend, in factiest fact.”

When Teo awoke, it was to the sounds of water dripping and waves surging.

“Halt! Who goes there?” demanded a boy’s voice as Teo laid her hands on the ladder. Even though she could not see the boy, Teo saw his writing in the air above—swift and cheeky.

Sailing school was more demanding than land school. For a start, living on a ship meant learning a whole new language.

“I never met a child I didn’t want to slap.”

Miss Uish wore a row of lacquered kiss curls across her forehead. On January 2, when the school inspectors came aboard the Scilla, Teo noticed with wonder how grown men fixed on those curls. And how they stared at Miss Uish’s eyelashes, which curled like palm fronds. And how they followed her swaying walk with their eyes on stalks. And how every one of her radiant smiles apparently detonated their brains, until there was nothing but bewildered liquid swishing about inside their grinning heads.

Teo and Renzo passed every unsupervised minute searching the ship, quietly calling out Professor Marìn’s name belowdecks and in the passages that led to the cargo hold. All they heard in response was the dejected creaking of the Scilla’s timbers.

As Teo had run off toward the House of the Spirits, Renzo had stared after her retreating figure, his hands clenched in frustration. He would not let Teo outdo him in daring! He quickly decided to sneak back into Miss Uish’s stateroom.

Queen Victoria’s health had taken a lurch for the worse. She lay in deathly silence upon her bed at Osborne House, too weak to raise her head.

“There shall be no more vulgar Venetian spoken aboard my ship!” announced Miss Uish, as the Scilla creaked out to the lagoon mudflats for what she had described as “a most interesting training exercise.”

The whine of the cat, Miss Uish’s tinkling laugh and Renzo’s grunts were painfully audible as Teo crept down toward Professor Marìn’s stateroom the next morning. She refused to call it Miss Uish’s, even though everything pointed to the fact that its rightful occupant had been murdered. She lifted the latch of the door and let herself in. A dismal gray light flowed through the mullioned windows, falling on the bed and its unusual pillow.

Sofonisba listened to Renzo with a tolerant expression.

The temperature plunged, freezing the mercury inside the Scilla’s thermometer. Stalactites hung from the Rialto Bridge. In the smaller canals, the water no longer writhed under the crust of ice, but lay stilled to the consistency of cold porridge. The crenellations of the palaces were laced with ribbons of frost.

The Scilla crept out of the bacino in the dead of night. Sebastiano and Marco were set to bracing the yards, brailing the spanker and cluing up the mizzen-royal.

Miss Uish rapped, “Full assembly at five bells and there shall be no more sulky faces. Cookie, you should mark this on your calendar! January 15, 1901, a red-letter day!”

The Pretender was on deck shooting gulls when the news flew in from Osborne House.

The Little Beauty appeared to drift into the Scilla’s clutches like a particularly negligent fly into a spider’s web. The Little Beauty’s Australian officers put up not one morsel of a fight. Miss Uish waved them all off alive, taking only one captive: a haughty English girl of pale coloring.

Bertie, Prince of Wales, was the person most immediately affected by his mother’s decline. He’d been waiting six decades for his chance at the most important job on earth. But he was not one bit prepared for it. Queen Victoria, who’d never entertained a high opinion of her eldest son’s brains, had shooed him out of public life. Bertie took every opportunity to enjoy himself while he could. Now his half-century of playtime was nearly over.

The Scilla plowed on through restless waters. Dim coastlines appeared in the distance. Foreign smells floated across the water. Unfamiliar birds landed on her masts.

The rest of the night passed in furious planning.

It was Teo’s suggestion to raise the Venetian flag again. And indeed, as Sebastiano unfurled the golden winged lion on its crimson silk, proud smiles returned to the frightened and shamed faces of the boys. The Italian flag fluttered gaily beside it.

As the Bombazine plunged and rolled at the Sea Sorcerer’s mercy, the soul of Queen Victoria was quietly preparing to depart this life.

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.

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

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.

“Pssst!”

They shuffled through the snow that lay in dirty pillows all over the crooked, sour streets of Southwark, passing under humid railway arches that trailed dark tears of ancient moisture. Overhead, the chimneys belched beery odors and worse. As they walked, the Londoners told Teo and Renzo of their many famished goings-to-bed and belly-growling mornings before they found Turtledove and the Mansion Dolorous; of sleeping in ditches and waking with rats snoring on their heads.

Turtledove was built more for inspiring awe than for speed. However, it was a speedy cuff that the brindled bulldog administered to the side of Renzo’s head now, and a speedy blow with which he rolled Renzo on his back, holding him down by a paw to the throat. The fob-watch from the dog’s black sateen waistcoat dangled above Renzo’s terrified eyes.

Sleeping in a coffin, however softly padded, held few charms. As soon as he laid himself down, Renzo missed the roll of the sea and the rough enfolding comfort of his hammock, not to mention the sleepy late-night chatter of the crew of the Scilla.

Renzo could not find any pumpkin-sellers. He had marched north over London Bridge, his hands driven into his pockets and his head down against the biting wind. Across the choppy water behind him, the broken masts of the Scilla jostled in St. Mary Overie Dock. This was as close as he dared to go to her: the quarantine officers, he knew, must still be guarding the boat.

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.

“There’s Pattercake’s sign.”

The shell showed the terrified faces of Greasy and Marg’rit as a circle of Ghost-Convicts closed in on them. This was a sight that deprived Turtledove of coherent speech. He choked and whimpered, turning around in circles in his distress.

“Them photygraphs is a libel against nature!” declared Turtledove. “Yew two is way better-looking than that, me poppets! Doan let no one say otherwise! This is some rum story got up for to addle the noodles of the public.”

“The water is melting! The ice, I mean!”

Three hours later, Renzo was led into a courtroom at the Old Bailey.

Teo climbed halfway up the ladder and threw the sack of day-old bread over the Scilla’s taffrail. No one called down to greet her: she guessed they were all keeping warm belowdecks. Why wasn’t Renzo there waiting for her, though? He always seemed to sense when she was coming back from one of her errands ashore.

Skimming over the black Thames, Teo dodged miniature icebergs. As she stood poling with her single oar, she was grateful to Renzo for the gondoliering lessons in Venice. The coracle was easier to manage than a gondola, but the currents of the Thames were far more dangerous than the Grand Canal’s lazy swaying. The unpleasantly familiar shape of the Bombazine appeared ahead all too soon. Starlight showed the black ship looking distinctly worse for wear: the Sea Sorcerer’s storm had broken her back and slanted her masts. The pirate flag still hung in tatters.

Teo kept her mouth tightly shut, trying to breathe as quietly as possible. The fact that he could not see her meant Il Traditore had indeed managed to drag his spirit into an almost human body. And that meant that his power was not only renewed—it was greater than before. It had become stable inside human skin, and was concentrated in a being that did not change shape or lose its memory.

Teo was not twenty yards from the boat when she felt her arms brushed by something soft and flabby. Putting her head under the water, she realized that she was surrounded by unblinking pale blue eyes. Those eyes belonged to brown squid. Each squid was only about one foot long, yet there were thousands of them. A wall of squid blocked every way she looked.

“Preparations for the funeral are all in order, dear Bertie?” the Pretender asked the new King of England over their after-supper brandies.

Eighteen months before, Teo had run through the labyrinth of the Palazzo Tiepolo in Venice, looking for Renzo, who had fallen into the cruel wooden hands of some animated statues called Brustolons. Now she hurtled through the long passageways of Newgate Prison, equally terrified of what she would find.

Teo screamed, “No! He’s innocent! This is murder!”

By the time a somewhat dusty Renzo was strolling out of Newgate with a crowd of visitors, Tobias Putrid had also been rescued from Bedlam by Signor Alicamoussa, posing as Tobias’s long-lost Italian uncle, who had come to take him away to the notorious Venetian lunatic asylum on the island of San Servolo.

Teo awoke in a pleasant barnyard fug.

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.

As ever, the old Queen preferred to snub London.

“A lovely long sea,” commented Teo, looking down on the unvarying blue rollers. The wind filled the belly-parts of the sails like a light yet satisfying meal. A week of stormless weather, with a sense of anticipation and warmth in the air, had so far made for pleasant voyaging.

Bajamonte Tiepolo

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