The Mourning Emporium

by Michelle Lovric

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

  The professor would point to various parts of the sail or rigging, and then pick a boy, who was expected to shout, without hesitation:

  “That’s the gooseneck, sir, at the end of the boom!”

  “That’s the jigger tackle for hauling the bunt of the topsail, sir!”

  “That’s the shoulder-of-mutton sail, sir!”

  “What is the measure of the cat-harpins?” the professor would ask.

  “One-eighth the hoist of the topsail, sir!”

  They learned to read charts, taste the winds for danger, and to diagnose the tug of a current. They applied fresh coats of best Stockholm tar to the rigging. The Scilla creaked out into the lagoon each day to give the boys practical experience of life under sail. Every evening, the old boat returned to the safety of the Zattere, and moored for the night.

  Then, after a hearty supper, there was the language of flags to be mastered, and a hundred different knots, from the tiny monkey’s fist to the formidable sheepshank.

  Meanwhile there were also things to forget, sailoring being a highly superstitious profession. The boys had to banish from their vocabularies all the words that must never be uttered aboard ship. Teo and Renzo had a head start there: the mermaids had already taught them that at sea one must never mention any part of a rabbit. Also banned was any uttering of the names of goats, hares and pigs. As the professor explained, “A boat is easily bewitched. And witches are particularly inclined to turn themselves into such beasts in order to wreak their mischiefs.”

  All the orphans were obliged to throw any item of green clothing overboard: that too was supposed to bring bad luck. And whistling was absolutely forbidden, lest it conjure a gale.

  “You must treat your ship like a goddess,” warned Professor Marìn.

  “Or a cat,” added Sofonisba. The boys had quickly ceased to marvel that she could talk: they were more interested in learning how to read her tail.

  An unusual feature of shipboard life was teaching the Scilla’s parrots to speak, using mirrors. Each boy would hide his face behind a mirror and patiently talk to his parrot. The bird, staring at a parrot face reflected in the glass, would believe another of his own species was engaging him in conversation, and would answer in kind. Although easily tricked in this way, they were otherwise highly intelligent birds and seemed to rejoice in increasing their vocabularies. Professor Marìn’s trained parrots were in great demand for transmitting messages: the telegraph office and the telephone exchange in Venice were both still submerged in mud.

  The young sailors had ordinary lessons too, but in roundabout ways. Mathematics was taught by stacking and measuring supplies. They studied geography by poring over charts. They learned how to mend ripped sails, darn nets and, finally, to sew shrouds. That last lesson was accomplished in a subdued mood, with several boys—those freshly orphaned by the ice storm—quietly weeping while Professor Marìn explained how the last stitch was to pass through the nose of the corpse. This was done in order to avoid any chance of throwing a body overboard while life still remained in it.

  “Remember, boys,” urged Professor Marin, “the pain of having a stitch passed through the nose can be depended upon to rouse a barely living sailor.”

  Rosato demanded, “Why can’t you take a dead person home to his family?”

  “A ship with a corpse aboard will always sail more slowly,” responded Professor Marìn gravely. “A dead body is thought to bring bad luck. Crews have been known to mutiny if one is kept aboard.”

  Fresh air and physical activity made the young sailors strong and rosy-cheeked. Luncheon and dinnertime found them hungry as piranhas. Even over the well-laden mess table, lessons continued. They learned the names of the traditional naval dishes prepared by Cookie, the Scilla’s jolly chef, an old merchant sailor too plump for active duties these days. Most often requested were schooneron-the-rocks, a joint of meat with roast potatoes around it, and bloodworms-in-the-snow, which consisted of thin and extremely tasty sausages with creamy mashed potatoes. Cookie’s galley calendar was splattered with gravy.

  The more frightening lessons took place late at night, by candlelight. Then Professor Marìn gathered all one hundred boys (and one girl) together to hear him read from his own stories of pirates’ devilry and murder. These savage tales were somewhat softened by being delivered in the professor’s kindly voice, and accompanied by deep mugs of hot chocolate and thick slices of Cookie’s excellent spicy ginger cake.

  Sometimes Professor Marìn read to them in English, explaining, “Queen Victoria’s Royal Navy rules the seas—it behooves us to understand her language, though we must never lose our own Venetian tongue. Our words are ourselves, and they must survive flood, ice and loss.”

  The young Venetians nodded gravely.

  And it wasn’t too strenuous or boring to learn English from such exciting volumes as Captain Mayne Reid’s Ran Away to Sea, and Captain Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy, or the general favorite, Marryat’s masterpiece, Rattlin the Reefer.

  Other nights, Professor Marìn read from his own books about the monsters of the deep, including the giant squid and its even bigger cousin, the colossal squid. He also taught the boys about every kind of shark. At these lessons, Renzo and Teo drew instinctively closer together, for they knew what it was to come face-to-snout with one of those ruthless monsters.

  Teo didn’t truly relish it when Renzo’s high scores in astronomical calculations nudged her own out of first place. Renzo found it ever so slightly irksome to be trounced in an exam on Venetian sea-life by a girl who hadn’t even been brought up in Venice.

  With an amused eye on the young rivals, Professor Marìn taught a special lesson on the more subtle aspects of shipboard comportment. “It is by no means enough that a sailor should be a capable mariner; he must be that, of course, and also a good deal more. He should be, as well, a gentleman of unfailing courtesy and with the nicest sense of personal integrity. A Venetian sailor should care more for honor itself than for carrying off the prize in petty competition.”

  Then Professor Marìn introduced singing lessons. Apparently, any sailor worth his salt had to know a great many sweetheart songs and sea shanties. In this, Renzo, with his beautiful voice, shone. He was never embarrassed at how romantic the words were. When they listened to him, all the young sailors fell silent. Teo was defeated. Her own voice might be compared, unfavorably, with an untuned piano.

  Renzo was also best at the wheel, and indeed took his place there unquestioned for every excursion into the lagoon. He had a natural coordination of hand and eye, always kept his weather eye to the windward side of the ship and seemed to know instinctively when to meet and when to slide against a wave. Everyone jumped to when Renzo called, “Give that keel a bite of water.”

  And Professor Marìn would lay a proud hand on Renzo’s shoulder, saying, “Well done, son.”

  And so the first five days aboard passed in a blur of cold, salty busyness. Professor Marìn had a way of making the young sailors regard sailorliness, shipshapeliness and spick-and-spanness as points of pride and not a chore. At night, they slept like dormice: even Teo. Her night-nagging dream seemed to have washed away.

  As, perhaps, had the bodies of the missing children and men of Venice. The Gazzettino—now in print again and delivered daily to the Scilla—mused gloomily, All the adult female victims of the ice flood have been recovered. But the children’s corpses, being lighter perhaps, must have floated away on the tide. However, we cannot explain the loss of at least three dozen men.

  The Gazzettino wrote of funerals held for the lost children, with flowers and their favorite toys buried in their empty graves. With so many missing, the disappearance of Teodora Stampara rated only the barest mention. Teo noted indignantly, “All it says is that my funeral was conducted at municipal expense!”

  The Mayor had also succeeded in hushing up news of
the kidnapping of the two scientists from the island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio.

  Fortunately, the Scilla’s sailors were too absorbed in their tasks and homework to notice when Teo stole away to a quiet part of the boat to wash and change in privacy. The heads had a door, so Teo was spared the dread embarrassment of the glass tube. She tried to keep her voice low. And she never, never cried, no matter how much it hurt when, with her native clumsiness, she got tangled in a bowline bridle or skidded on a slippery deck.

  The worst thing about keeping her cover was that she had to sleep in a hammock in the forecastle cabin putrid with snoring boys who were under no compulsion to wash their socks, and whose favorite after-hours conversations were about the stupidity, vanity and general uselessness of girls. Renzo, she noticed, never said anything to defend the species—or to help her out.

  “Sorry, can’t be gallant. You’re supposed to be a boy,” Renzo whispered, when she sprawled flat on her face in front of him after yet another mishap with a mop and a bucket of water.

  “Don’t need your help,” declared Teo. “Thank you very much all the same.”

  “For now,” remarked Sofonisba, who happened to be passing.

  On the fifth night in her hammock, Teo lay awake, trying to work out the tune for “Bobby Shaftoe” and a way to anchor her voice to the melody.

  That was how she came to hear what she would only later understand was the noise of a bullet meeting human flesh, just above her on the deck. And then a faint, low scream. She lifted her head and sniffed the air—what was that acrid smell like burning metal?

  “Cookie must be preparing something new for tomorrow,” she told herself. “Not one of his better efforts, I’d say. Hope there’s ginger cake for afters.”

  With that comfortable thought, sleep at last overtook her. And once more it happened, after the welcome peace of the past five nights: her dreams were invaded by that dreadful night-nagging voice breathing hotly in her sleeping ear.

  “Death and worse to all Venetians. Death to Venice. Blacken her very image. Death to her memory.”

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

  Teo saw sharp staccato letters slashed in the air above the beautiful lady. It seemed impossible that such unpleasantness could issue from those rosebud lips. The woman’s skin was downy as a white peach. Her big brown eyes danced with pretty mischief under glistening curls piled high above her head.

  The beautiful lady now smiled like an angel. Then she reached out and slapped the nearest child, Alfredo.

  “Stop making those big, round, wet eyes at me. You look like a kitten on its way to the bucket.” An impish giggle intruded; then her voice flattened back to harshness: “No one cares. Do you understand?”

  Alfredo bowed his head and bit his wobbling lip.

  The smile sparkled like sunlight, but the cut-glass English accent was as cold as the frost on the Scilla’s rigging. The woman was dressed at the height of fashion in a sharp tailored jacket with naval trimmings. From her shell-like ears dangled earrings in the shape of tiny iridescent hummingbirds. Leg-of-mutton sleeves sprouted from her shoulders. Beneath the dress, her willowy body was encased in a corset that bent her back into an S-shape. Below the cruelly cinched waist, her skirt stuck out, rigid as a mountain.

  Professor Marìn was nowhere to be seen. Sofonisba crouched by the water barrel, swearing terribly at the interloper.

  “Miss Canidia Uish,” the woman introduced herself. “It is pronounced like ‘wish’ in English.”

  “As in ‘wish we’d never met you,’ ” muttered Teo inaudibly.

  “Henceforth,” continued the woman, “you will address me as ‘ma’am.’ Or suffer for it.”

  The faces of the assembled boys expressed one single thought: “Who is this unpleasant female landlubber, and what is she doing on the Scilla?”

  “Brats,” recommenced Miss Canidia Uish, “it has come to Queen Victoria’s attention that there are some poor wretched Venetian orphans who need taking in hand after the ice flood that devastated your city. So Her Majesty has decided to extend her patronage to those unfortunate orphans who exist outside the benevolent protection of her great Empire.”

  She beamed. Then her expression changed dramatically, a vicious glance clattering down like a guillotine upon the young sailors’ feelings. “Stand up straight when I address you, you insignificant pieces of offal!” she shouted. “Where’s your gratitude? Don’t you know that you are privileged to be under my protection?”

  They shook their heads humbly.

  “I have been sent here on the express instruction of the prime minister of Her Majesty’s government, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, ninth Earl and third Marquess of Salisbury, who is my personal friend and a great favorite of the Queen herself. Which means, brats, that I represent Queen Victoria’s interests”—she looked around her disparagingly—“in this dismal corner of the globe. Do I not, Malfeasance?”

  An ill-favored man of middle years stepped out of the shadows. Dark stripes of discontent furrowed his cheeks.

  “Malfeasance Peaglum, my second-in-command, and now yours too,” announced Miss Uish. “Disobey him at your peril.”

  “Where’s Professor Marìn?” asked Teo boldly. She refused to add “ma’am.”

  “History does not relate.” Miss Uish gave another of her strangely poisonous yet radiant smiles. She bent her head to stare at Teo. “Write that boy’s name on my list, Malfeasance. What a poor specimen it is too. In England we have a name for weaklings like him—we would call him the Nestle Tripe, or runt of the litter.”

  Peaglum produced a black notebook from a crevice in his greasy waistcoat. He sidled up to Teo, nudging her with his elbow. “Well?”

  “Teodoro Ongania,” she said proudly, trying to keep her voice low. He scribbled it down with a grin. “You don’t want to get put on this list again,” he snarled, “Teodoro Ongania, Nestle Tripe.”

  “Venice,” Miss Uish continued, “is a backwater now. A Nestle Tripe among cities, as it were. Her glory lives only in the dim past. What pantaloons the Venetians are, preening and thinking that everyone admires them still! Believing that anyone cares about their flood? About their so-called history? Their gaudy art? Hardly!”

  Peaglum sniggered, a disgusting sound like someone treading fatally on a toad. Miss Uish pronounced, “Everything around here has to be tightened up, shipshape, British-style. Starting with the younger Venetians, who might have a hope of reform. The older ones,” she sneered, “are too idle and decadent to bother with. If they’re not drowned already. Queen Victoria is gracious with her charity, of course, but personally Her Majesty feels that if Venice had not deserved her present calamity, it would not have happened to her. Queen Victoria does not believe in magic, but she certainly believes in just deserts.”

  She giggled and whispered something to Peaglum that sounded strangely like “That old bezzom!”

  The young sailors were dumb with shock. Queen Victoria was known to be a bit of a dragon, but could she really be as cruel and unfeeling as that?

  Miss Uish rapped, “Now, stop pouting. Abandoned orphans cannot always have all things to please them. You think sympathy and sugared Earl Gray tea should be brought to you in china cups for free? Just because you’re orphans? Do you think life owes you a favor because you were so stupid as to have parents who floated out of your houses and drowned?”

  The hummingbird earrings quivered on Miss Uish’s earlobes. Teo realized: “They’re real! Or were. Poor little stuffed birds! How cruel.”

  Having silenced the Scilla’s crew, Miss Uish consulted a fob-watch attached to her left shoulder by a fleur-de-lis picked out in black brocade.

  “I must attend a reception at the Town Hall. On my return, I shall expect to find that mast revarnished in its entirety. Am I understood? First, a word about feeding arrangements.”

  “Feeding?” thought Teo. “Like animals?”

  “Cake is henceforward banned,” announced Miss Uish. “I
’m imposing a dietary regimen much more suitable for unwanted orphans. Have the cook brought forward!”

  Peaglum frogmarched Cookie in front of Miss Uish. The poor man shook uncontrollably. His waxen face was distorted, as if he’d been punched. He could not bring himself to look at Miss Uish, or to speak.

  “Here’s your new recipe book for feeding these whelps.” She threw a slim volume at his head. He ducked and knelt humbly to pick it up from the deck.

  “I believe you already have some idea of what might happen if you don’t follow my instructions?”

  He nodded wordlessly, clutching the book. Teo saw a tear slide down his plump cheek. “What’s she done to him?” she raged silently.

  Miss Uish fastened on her head a hat that looked like a tea tray with a vast meringue on top. Then she stalked away, slipping down the gangplank with grace, and leaving in her wake a cloud of expensive-smelling yet slightly metallic perfume.

  Over her shoulder, she called, “Malfeasance, count the brats and write down all their names. And what they’re good for, if anything.”

  While Peaglum busied himself bullying boys with his notebook, Teo and Renzo rushed to Professor Marìn’s poop-deck stateroom. There was no sign that he had ever occupied it. It was now overflowing with Miss Uish’s considerable wardrobe of clothes and accessories. An ornate black cuckoo clock ticked menacingly on the wall.

  The colors of Miss Uish’s clothes were strident: electric blue, magenta, purple, arsenic-green, acid-yellow. She favored shiny checks and stripes, made up into costumes with a faint naval flavor, grandly ornamented with frogging.

  Renzo’s eyes popped open wide at the sight of the stiff rows of corsets, all black, yet decorated with pink stitching and jaunty pink satin bows. The hooks and lacing grommets almost seemed to strain with the hidden presence of their owner. He did not feel comfortable turning his back on them.

  An open box on the dresser revealed a large heart-shaped locket on a chain, a link bracelet fastened by small heart-shaped padlocks; even her gloves had four heart-shaped celluloid buttons. Somehow, the effect was the opposite of romantic.