The Mourning Emporium

by Michelle Lovric

  “This could turn out uglier than the food,” thought Teo.

  Miss Uish added, “And as of today all parrots are to be trained in English, even as you are. I daresay some of the birds shall show more aptitude than you brats, as they certainly have better brains.”

  “Maybe that’s ’cos they’re better fed,” murmured Giovanni behind his hand.

  Peaglum had set up a blackboard on the deck. Now he drew the frozen chalk shrieking across the surface, writing out words in Venetian and then English.

  The Scilla, with a nervous Renzo at the wheel, edged her way through the pockets of water and tufts of salty land known as the barene. As each Venetian species, be it plant or animal, hove into sight, the sailors were obliged to chant its name in English.

  “Lattuga di mare—sea lettuce!”

  “Zostera marina—grass wrack!”

  Even Teo’s clever tongue tripped up on those English words. One of her talents as the Undrowned Child was that her memory functioned like a photographic apparatus, taking pictures of whole pages at a time. For her, to see a word was to memorize it—she wasn’t afraid of that. Yet how to pronounce them? Unlikely consonants were all jammed together with snipped-up vowels, like a painful tangle of hair in the teeth of a comb. The other sailors stood peering at the board in perplexity, tears sneaking into their eyes.

  “Enough greenery!” barked Miss Uish. “And now we shall be concerned with marine creatures. The ones that are fat and greasy are of particular interest.”

  “Why?” Teo could have kicked herself, but the word had slipped out.

  “History does not relate. However, it shall relate that the Nestle Tripe holystones the deck tomorrow. You vermin speak only when asked a direct question, understand?”

  For an Englishwoman, Miss Uish was astonishingly well informed about which birds wintered in the Venetian lagoon.

  “Tuffetti—grrrrebes!”

  “Lombardella—white-frrrronted goose!”

  Miss Uish mocked their pronunciation. “Don’t roll your ’r’s like waiters, you offal! And stop waving your hands around. Proper British people keep their arms to themselves when they speak. Malfeasance, get the cat-o’-nine-tails out of the bag. Anyone who rolls their ’r’s gets a stripe. Hands out, ready!”

  Peaglum drew a large whip with nine plaited ends out of a baize bag and dipped it in a flagon of vinegar.

  “Fòega—coot!”

  “Svasso maggiore—grrrreat crrrrested grrrrebe!”

  That earned them all a stripe of the cat. They also realized why Peaglum dipped the whip in vinegar. When their skin broke, the vinegar sent a fiery thread of pain through the cuts.

  At four o’clock, the light was already dim over the lagoon. The Scilla was surrounded by the evening flocks of birds, chirping and calling through the mist.

  Miss Uish ran nimbly up the companionway, dimpling that impish smile they had learned to fear. She pulled a slender black pistol out of her belt, and shouted, “Examination time!”

  The sailors gasped and took a step backward.

  She laughed with delight. “Oh, the pathetic little cowards think I’m going to shoot them if their tongues get twisted! Let me tell you now, brats, just at this moment, you are worth more to me alive than dead. Now, what’s that?” she rapped, pointing to a svasso maggiore in the mud.

  “Grrrreat crrrrested grrrrebe!” rang out the voices of Teo and Renzo, the only two who never forgot a word once it was learned. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for their pronunciation.

  Miss Uish aimed the pistol and shot the bird with deadly accuracy. “I told you not to roll your ‘r’s,” she remarked casually.

  Teo began to weep unashamedly. She, who never ate living things, had now caused the death of an innocent bird.

  There was a creaking of davits and then Peaglum was to be seen approaching the lifeless creature in a coracle. He tossed the corpse into the boat and looked back up toward his mistress, calling out, “A fine plump one, mistress! You’ll get a whole cup of marrowfat out of this one!”

  “A second chance, brats. Now, I do declare, what a surprise. What’s that?”

  A monk seal swam into view, making a slipstream through the water.

  “Una foca …,” cried Massimo, quickly drowned out by the other children who screamed, “No! You have to say it in English!”

  Teo leaned over the taffrail. She was sure she knew that motherly whiskered face. Sure enough, a pup was swimming behind the seal.

  Miss Uish cocked her pistol and stared at the sailors with a triumphant smile.

  “It’s not fair, we haven’t learned that poor creature’s name in English yet!” called Massimo.

  “Who said anything about fair?” inquired Miss Uish, taking aim. “Full of marrowfat!” she remarked joyfully.

  “No!” cried Renzo, raising his hand toward Miss Uish’s wrist. She sent him flying with a blow to the side of the head.

  The shot rang out through the blank white lagoon. The baby seal squealed in terror, and rushed to the inert body of its mother, snuffling desperately around her motionless head.

  “The baby will die without its mother,” whispered Teo.

  “Fair enough,” chuckled Miss Uish, and shot the baby seal too.

  Then there was silence, except for the oars of Malfeasance Peaglum, sculling toward the corpses of the seals, a dagger in his belt and a rope coiled in his lap.

  All through the night, great cauldrons were set over the fire in the galley. The sailors’ throats burned with the sickly, sour smell of marrowfat being pummeled out of the dead birds and animals by boiling water. Cookie’s miserable face was seared scarlet. The corpses were gradually reduced to bones and pots of grease, which were stacked neatly in a locked compartment that Peaglum had constructed in the hold.

  The smell of death clung to every board of the boat, every sail, and to the clothes of the sailors.

  Teo and Renzo woke next morning to flashes like lightning and the sound of sniveling on deck. Rushing up, they found Miss Uish forcing Alfredo, whose head had been roughly shaved and whose ear was bleeding heavily, to pose in front of a black device consisting of a dark box with a black-shrouded concertina beak, apparently standing on two human legs and three wooden ones.

  “It’s a monster!” cried the boy as he wept. “It will explode the eyes out of my head!”

  Renzo called out, “Don’t worry, Alfredo, it’s only a photographic apparatus. It won’t hurt you.”

  Malfeasance Peaglum’s monstrously ugly head emerged from under the black cloth, and Renzo almost revised his opinion.

  “Why are you taking our likenesses?” Teo dared to ask Miss Uish. “Ma’am.”

  “Put Teodoro Ongania’s name on my list again. Not that I owe your impudent Nestle Tripe curiosity an explanation, but I need your pictures for the school records. Malfeasance, do this pair immediately and then deliver the pictures … you know where.”

  Their eyes were still dazzled by the photographic apparatus when another scream drew Teo’s and Renzo’s attention to the aft deck. More sobbing shaven-headed boys were lined up there. A bat-faced nurse pulled Giovanni close to the rocky breast of her pinafore. Then she plunged a needle unceremoniously through his earlobe. Once the hole was made, she shoved a thin gold earring through it, paying absolutely no attention to Giovanni’s pleading and sobbing. Then she sheared off his hair, finishing the job with gray suds and a dirty razor.

  Miss Uish explained, “I can get good money for that hair. And these earrings will pay for your funerals if your worthless dead bodies get washed ashore in a shipwreck. Don’t want you being a burden to some poor foreign parish, do we?”

  Teo was gazing at the nurse. Where had she appeared from? And why was that craggy face familiar? Beside her, Renzo whispered, “Where is Peaglum going in the coracle with those photographic plates on his lap?”

  The nurse departed midmorning, by which time each of the sailors sported a gold earring. Teo’s curls were gone and her head was b
leeding from a dozen small razor cuts. And now she knew where she’d last seen that gargoyle of a woman—in the hospital in Venice, eighteen months before. The nurse had helped Bajamonte Tiepolo infect the children of Venice with bubonic plague. And Il Traditore had used an emerald earring to drip poison into the ear of Teo’s friend Maria, turning her into a spy. Were these earrings also poisoned? If this same nurse was assisting Miss Uish, surely that proved that Miss Uish was somehow in league with Bajamonte Tiepolo?

  As they scrubbed the deck together, Teo confided her fears about the nurse and the earrings to Renzo.

  “Too cold for our ears to get infected,” he reassured her. “Miss Uish just wants to humiliate us, make us look like cutthroat pirates instead of civilized Venetians.” He pointed to his shaven head with shame.

  They fell against each other as another iceberg thudded against the Scilla’s prow.

  “The ice is eating up the lagoon,” breathed Renzo.

  It was true. That afternoon’s excursion into the lagoon had been slow, impeded by the ice floes. Out there, even the barene were decorated with icy ruffles sculpted by the wind. The delicate stems of the reeds were thickened with frost. The saltwort and sea lavender struggled to unfurl leaves weighted down with daily falls of snow. Even the sand on the shoreline sparkled with freezing crystals. Wisps of mist rose above the violet shadows and green frozen depths.

  The Scilla’s rigging looked like fairy necklaces, decorated with miniature gleaming stalactites. The sails might have been carved from white marble, so stiffly frozen were they.

  It would have been almost picturesque, if the cold had not been so cruel, and the boys’ sailor suits had not been so thin.

  “And Vampire Eels are waiting under that ice.” Teo picked up her scrubbing brush and started working again. Renzo caught the glitter of a cold eye on the forecastle.

  “Shhh, she’s looking at us. Move away from me!”

  That night, Renzo and Teo whispered while the other boys slept.

  “It’s baddened magic, I just know it is. And I’m sure she has something to do with it. We have to see inside that pillow box of hers,” insisted Teo. “It had better be me this time.”

  “It wasn’t my fault she came back just as—”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean I can memorize any documents in there.”

  “I’ll cause a distraction tomorrow,” promised Renzo.

  “You mean you’ll get yourself flogged? Have you lost your ballast, Renzo?”

  “Well, she always comes to enjoy that event, doesn’t she? And it’ll be a pleasure and relief to tell her what I think about what she did to those poor seals. And it’ll be worth it, Teo, if you find out what’s going on.”

  The lantern swung over them as a wave unsettled the Scilla. Teo recognized Renzo’s mother’s favorite blue shawl inside his hammock and the little money-box that was A PRESENT FROM LONDON. She reached across the space between them. For the first time in days, Renzo smiled at her properly, and took her hand. They fell asleep like that, their fingers linked.

  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.

  Expecting to find it locked, Teo was surprised to feel the pillow box respond to her tugging hand. The arched lid lifted easily. She peered inside.

  There were a great many bottles of a black liquid that looked like ink. Teo unscrewed one lid and breathed in a fishy smell.

  “Squid ink?” she thought.

  Below the bottles was something that astonished Teo: a technical drawing of a colossal squid. She was used to seeing such things, at home. Her adoptive parents always brought their work back at the end of the day, and the dining table was frequently buried under diagrams of marine creatures.

  The thought of Leonora and Alberto Stampara made Teo’s eyes water. But, absorbed in the drawing, she failed to notice the light footsteps behind her. She felt the blow to the side of her head, and she heard Peaglum’s triumphant snigger as she fell.

  Teo looked up dizzily. The first things she saw were Miss Uish’s calf-high spats rising over her lace-up shoes. Then she raised her eyes higher. Miss Uish’s face was distorted with anger. For once, she seemed unable to speak.

  Peaglum deftly trussed Teo in tight coils of rope.

  “Spy on me, would you?” sputtered Miss Uish eventually. “I know just the thing to cool the curiosity of an impudent Nestle Tripe. And as for the Nestle Tripe’s crony, the St—the boy Renzo, let us search his hammock! I’ve seen them whispering together. They’re up to something. Summon the boy! This Ongania brat can bear witness before we … dispose of him.”

  Bound and gagged, Teo was dragged below. Renzo was already in the cabin, facing a corner. Teo’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of the stripes of red on his right hand behind his back.

  “Stand beside your hammock, boy!” When Renzo was in place, Miss Uish ordered Peaglum to upend the canvas. Renzo cried out, reaching with his damaged hand. It was too late. There was a dull thump and a shocking explosion of china. The painted money-box that had been A PRESENT FROM LONDON lay in fragments on the floor.

  Miss Uish poked at the wreckage with her shoe. Then she picked up Renzo’s mother’s shawl and ripped it in half and then quarters.

  “Rags for swabbing the deck.” She thrust them into Peaglum’s arms. “Now take the Nestle Tripe … you know where!”

  “Teo,” Renzo whispered down to her. “Stay awake! You have to stay awake! It would be madness to fall asleep in the icehouse!”

  “Why?” she yawned. “Miss Uish isn’t going to let me out. Ever. She wants me to die here. She’ll probably boil my body up for marrowfat.”

  “She wouldn’t dare!” hissed Renzo. “The school inspectors have our names.”

  “And mine is an invention. I don’t exist, officially anyway. No loss.”

  Teo had no feelings at all in her hands or feet. For the first hours, she had kept awake in the narrow pit by sucking ice, and nibbling on pieces of bread that Rosato and Sebastiano had furtively dropped down the hatch.

  But then she had stopped even feeling hungry. The silver-tongued waves around the Scilla seemed to whisper “Sleeeeep, sleeeep.” An almost pleasant torpor had stolen over her. Teo was happy to lapse into half-dreams in which her adoptive parents warmed her with hugs and a pink cashmere blanket. She even dreamed that her real parents came to visit her, and that her mother’s sweet breath wafted down the icy shaft to warm her cheeks.

  “Darling Teo,” whispered Marta Gasperin, “let me read you a story, my love.”

  Teo was almost angry when another crust of bread fell on her head, shattering the image of her mother’s face.

  Miss Uish was attending a gala at Lady Layard’s. That evening, Peaglum, left in charge of the boys, had roped them together in their hammocks and locked himself in his cabin, from where the clinking of bottles could be heard. As soon as snores reverberated through the ship, Renzo slit his bonds with his ferro pocketknife.

  “Where are you going?” whispered sharp-eyed Fabrizio as Renzo slid out of his hammock and crawled along the floor.

  “Going to get help for Teo,” he hissed back.

  When he’d taken her the bread he’d saved from supper, she had not even seemed aware of his presence. He suspected that she did not know who he was. Teo had crouched on the floor of the icehouse, talking softly to people who weren’t there. “Mamma,” she’d whispered, “tell me about the Gray Lady at the Archives, your friend in the old days. Did you know I met her too …?” Peering down, Renzo had seen that Teo had removed her boots and stood barefoot on the ice.

  “Help from whom?” Fabrizio was incredulous. “Miss Uish has got everyo
ne in Venice eating out of her hand.”

  For a moment, Renzo toyed with the idea of telling Fabrizio the truth. Fabrizio was a child—that meant he would be able to see the mermaids. It would be nice to have a companion on the long tramp through the ice to the House of the Spirits. It would be even nicer to share with someone their worst fears—that the vengeful spirit of Bajamonte Tiepolo was once more abroad.

  But if they were caught, the punishment would be dire. Fabrizio was thinner than any of them, slender as a weasel. Renzo could not bear the thought of what the whip would do to him.

  “Will you cover for me?”

  Fabrizio nodded. He pulled the blanket off his own hammock and leaned over to tuck it into Renzo’s so it looked as if someone were still inside. There was a tinkle of broken china. Renzo had sewed the pieces of the PRESENT FROM LONDON into his pillow.

  “Thank you,” Renzo whispered, creeping out of the cabin. He climbed up on the deck and slid down the ladder.

  The iced paving stones crackled like broken glass underfoot. Renzo sneaked through the quietest streets, avoiding the late-night cafés like agli Omnibus and Trovatore.

  Down in the cavern, Renzo was horrified to find the mermaids busily dismantling the Seldom Seen Press. They were carefully wrapping in dried seaweed the printing machine’s struts of fish bones, levers of oyster shells and pearl buttons. While they worked, they sang a sea shanty that sounded odd, until Renzo realized that the words were in English. Other mermaids floated in a torpid state, muttering and snoring, while thin crusts of ice formed around their tails.

  “You can’t be leaving us!” he gasped.

  “ ’Tis dat giddy kipper, the Studious Son, come among us!” called Flos. “Where’s the Undrowned Child, bless ’er ’eart?”

  Lussa glided forward, flicking her tail. The ice that coated it shattered and sprayed the gold mosaic walls with shards, ringing out like gunshot. “What has come to pass, Lorenzo?”

  He explained about the icehouse and Teo’s descent into semiconsciousness, lamenting, “Signor Rioba’s handbills haven’t worked—no one in Venice believes what is going on aboard the Scilla. There’s no one to help us against Miss Uish. She can kill Teo if she wants to. No one would ever know.”