The Mourning Emporium

by Michelle Lovric

  “Including your darling Sibella, I suppose?” said Fabrizio.

  Renzo flushed, but ignored that. He said somberly, “And the Half-Dead disease will surely have put the whole town into quarantine now. If not worse.”

  Teo jutted out her chin. “We’ll have to agree to Professor Marìn’s plan. We are trapped on this ship and we must act as one.”

  “So do we have to kill them? Miss Uish and Peaglum?” Giovanni whispered.

  “We have to do whatever it takes,” responded Teo.

  “Wouldn’t we be as bad as them, then?” asked Rosato.

  A rat trotted into the cabin and stared intently at Teo, as if it too hung on the answer that she did not know how to give.

  Renzo said pointedly, “She said tomorrow it’s two lashes each for the stolen fruit. And we can’t tell her it was actually Sofonisba who did it, can we?”

  “Tomorrow we put an end to the bullying,” vowed Teo, meeting his eye. “And the lying.”

  The rest of the night passed in furious planning.

  But first Renzo made his way to the ship’s medicine chest in the galley, prising its old padlock open with a fork. He groaned. His first glimpse inside revealed only antique cauterizing irons, forceps and grippers for extracting teeth. Raking through the box, he selected a few items, decanted some brandy and boiled a small pan of water to take down to Professor Marìn.

  At the pitiful sight of the professor, Renzo stood trembling and uncertain in the doorway.

  “You see me in reduced … circumstances, son.” Professor Marìn’s voice was so weak as to be almost inaudible.

  Renzo steadied himself. Using a tooth-gripper, he extracted the bullet, mopped the blood with clean rags and bandaged the wound, having first splashed it with brandy to disinfect it. Then he carefully washed the blood-matted hair, cut off the filthy shirt, and replaced it with a clean nightshirt he’d found in the medicine chest. The professor twice fainted from the pain during this procedure. But he gripped Renzo’s hand gratefully at the end of it, whispering, “Thank you, son. Now go! You must not be caught down here! … Spare the boys the awful truth, Renzo, as much as possible.… The more they know, the more dangerous it is … for them.”

  The next morning dawned fair, except for the blot of the cobwebbed black ship on the horizon.

  The sailors crept up on deck. Sibella never showed herself before midmorning. Miss Uish was nowhere to be seen.

  “Nursing a terrible headache in her stateroom,” guessed Teo.

  Peaglum was bustling about, happily stirring the cat-o’-nine-tails in its flagon of vinegar. He was looking forward to the punishments, singing a nasty sea shanty at the top of his untuneful voice. In the lyrics, a young sailor was slowly lashed to death over five verses and finally thrown to the sharks.

  So it was relatively easy to sneak up behind Peaglum and run a thin black trip-rope from the hawse to the base of the mast. Hearing Rosato’s whistle, Peaglum promptly turned and took an ill-fated step. Once he was flat on his face, three boys jumped on his back, just as they’d rehearsed down in the cabin. Fabrizio, Emilio, Massimo and Rosato each took a foot or an arm. Peaglum was trussed up like a goat. Teo dipped a rag in Peaglum’s flagon of vinegar and stuffed it into his mouth.

  Then it was a question of waiting till Miss Uish emerged. The sailors stood warily on deck, alert to every creak from below. An hour passed; a second. Finally, her harsh voice called up the stairs. “Malfeasance! Come clear my room!”

  Peaglum grunted inarticulately.

  “Malfeasance! Malfeasance! You’ll pay for this!”

  Miss Uish tottered up into the daylight. Her face was pale, her eyes dull. They fell on the captured Peaglum. Her mouth opened, but before she could speak, Rosato sent the boom spinning across the deck to smack the back of Miss Uish’s head. She fell forward like a stone, her revolver hurtling across the planks. Teo caught it and tucked it into her belt.

  “Good work!” shouted Sebastiano enthusiastically.

  “Is she dead?” asked Giovanni nervously.

  “No, just winded. Quick!”

  They piled on top of Miss Uish and lashed her feet with bits of oakum. Emilio was attempting to bind her hands when Professor Marìn limped on deck, his eyes screwed up against the sun he’d not seen in weeks. Miss Uish gasped in disbelief. The boys cried out in alarm at the dreadful color of his skin. Renzo rushed to his side, slipping his arm under the professor’s to prop him up.

  Suddenly, Miss Uish laughed out loud. She slipped her fingers into a pocket of her dress and drew out a tiny pearl-handled pistol. “Here’s the weak point in your plan,” she chuckled, “a girl’s best friend, always willing and able when needed. Your best friend, the professor, on the other hand, has turned up at exactly the wrong moment, hasn’t he? Distracted you when you should have been tying me up properly! That naughty professor should be punished, shouldn’t he, brats?”

  She lifted her pistol and shot Professor Marìn through the heart. Then she pointed the pistol at Renzo, who was trying to lay the staggering professor gently down on the deck. Teo stamped her boot on Miss Uish’s wrist, pinioning the hand that held the pistol.

  The professor lay crumpled and motionless. Renzo leaned over him tenderly, examining the wound, stroking his bloodied hair and hollow cheeks.

  “Isn’t there anything you can do, Renzo?” pleaded Teo.

  Renzo felt for the pulse, and shook his head, white-lipped.

  “Is he really …?” Rosato wept.

  “Murderess!” Teo whispered. She drew Miss Uish’s revolver from her belt, and aimed it with a shaking hand.

  “You wouldn’t dare, Nestle Tripe,” sneered Miss Uish, trying to extract her wrist from under Teo’s boot.

  “Wouldn’t I?” Teo cocked the trigger, as she’d seen Miss Uish do a hundred times in front of a helpless animal. Her voice came out too high, too girlish. Miss Uish stared at her, with too much understanding in her eyes.

  “A-are you …?” stuttered Miss Uish. “Could you be …?”

  Sibella appeared above them on the forecastle, a vision in white satin.

  “If Teodoro shoots her, he’ll be nothing but a detestable common murderer himself,” she remarked.

  Teo took the opportunity to kick the pearl-handled pistol out of Miss Uish’s hand. The plan slipped smoothly back into motion. Sebastiano and Giovanni each grabbed one of Miss Uish’s arms, and Emilio tied them together behind her. Then Renzo quietly removed the revolver from Teo’s shaking fingers and threw it overboard, along with the pistol.

  “No! Give them a taste of their own medicine!” screamed Sebastiano.

  “Too late. The guns are gone. Treat them the way she treated the cat!” shouted Giovanni.

  “Yes! Like the poor cat! Make ’em walk the plank!” agreed Sebastiano.

  “That,” insisted Emilio, “would be too dignified for the likes of them. Remember Sofonisba.”

  “Yes, remember me!” Sofonisba herself now leapt up the companionway and looked down on them all from the forecastle, where she commenced a vigorous licking of her tail and whiskers. The sailors whooped joyfully. A look of anger and surprise swept across Miss Uish’s face.

  “With the ship’s cat safe, we’ll get our luck back!” cried Rosato.

  “Don’t count on it,” remarked Sofonisba. “Now, where exactly is my master?”

  Her eyes lit on the body of her beloved professor. She bounded over to him, licking his face, nudging him with her muzzle. When she discovered the new wound, she keened loudly, laying herself down upon his breast and curling up in pain. The boys’ tears overtook them then. For many minutes, they stood around their professor, shaking with grief.

  A scornful laugh from Miss Uish reminded them of what they now faced.

  “Even if we make it all the way to London, what are we going to do with them in the meantime?” Sebastiano gave the two captives a baleful look.

  Peaglum struggled furiously. Miss Uish now lay disdainfully silent.

  “Hung
ry!” whined Peaglum indistinctly.

  “Well, of course, you must both be absolutely starving,” Sebastiano answered. “Do you fancy a nice cup of warm marrowfat, perhaps?”

  “Now, that’s not an uninteresting idea,” purred Sofonisba.

  “Perfect!” approved Giovanni, rushing off to the galley. In two minutes, he returned with a jug of swarthy liquid still steaming from the cauldron. The spout was forced into the mouth of first Peaglum and then Miss Uish until each had swallowed a long, deep swig of marrowfat.

  Not quite swallowed, it turned out.

  For Miss Uish opened her rosebud lips and spat a gush of oil on to the ropes that bound her hands. Her wrists slid easily out of bondage. With one fist she grabbed Renzo’s ankle, tipping him backward on to the deck.

  “At least I’ll have the Studious Son’s life!” she shouted, producing a vicious little dagger from a hidden pocket in her skirt.

  “The Studious who?” asked Fabrizio.

  “Rush her!” shouted Teo. “I’ll go for the knife.”

  “Watch me!” cried Sofonisba. In the scrum of boys, whalebone corset, cat-fur and brown curls, the blade of the dagger caught Teo’s fingers in a stripe of pain, but she managed to send it flying through the air. It impaled itself in the mast just as the sailors pushed the professor’s murderess and her assistant up against the taffrail, which groaned under their combined weight. Sofonisba leapt to Miss Uish’s head and wrapped herself around it like a furry mitten.

  “Tie the prisoners together!” ordered Renzo. Over his voice could be heard the sound of metal shrieking.

  “That’s the stanchion that broke when the cannon went through it,” shouted Teo. “Move them to the mast and lash them … Oh no!”

  As she spoke, the weakened stanchion broke neatly away and the taffrail exploded into metal fragments. Sofonisba jumped clear of the widening gap and onto Teo’s shoulder.

  Miss Uish and Peaglum tumbled into the sea.

  The crew stood in awed silence.

  “What have we done?” whispered Renzo.

  “We didn’t do anything!” shouted Sebastiano. “The stanchion smashed, and they fell.”

  “We can’t leave them to drown.” Renzo was unrolling the rope ladder. “Throw a barrel down to them. They can swim to that and keep afloat until …”

  “I ca-a-a-a-a-n’t swim!” The waves had whipped Peaglum’s gag off his face.

  Miss Uish floated easily on her back, her eyes full of malice. She ignored the barrel that Fabrizio and Teo pitched into the water. Nor did she make any attempt to rescue Peaglum.

  Peaglum was mumbling on mouthfuls of sea, screaming and jerking. Finally, his body stilled and dipped below the water.

  “Peaglum really truly couldn’t swim.” Rosato’s voice was awed.

  Sebastiano whispered, “I thought they were so strong, that they were … invincible.”

  They were wrong. Peaglum was just a man, now a drowned man.

  Miss Uish did not sink. Even with her legs still bound, she dipped and bobbed like a sea snake. The sailors watched her kick free of her ropes and pull herself gracefully onto a passing iceberg.

  “Let’s hope she freezes to death there,” cried Sebastiano, “like a codfish!”

  “That’s not quite gentlemanly,” Renzo reproved.

  “And what if she did?” asked Sofonisba, erecting her back leg like a spear and giving it a thorough licking.

  “Let’s vote,” insisted Marco. “Hands up who wants to rescue her.”

  Miss Uish did not appear to be interested in their help. She had gathered her sodden skirts about her and produced a small mirror from a pocket.

  Renzo alone lifted his hand. Then he lowered it. “Now we really are outlaws and fugitives. And killers,” he blurted.

  Sibella appeared on the companionway, her pale blue eyes wide with accusation. “Did you just do what I think you did?” she asked.

  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.

  Massimo was set to sewing Professor Marìn’s body up in their least-patched hammock. He asked Renzo to put the last stitch through the nose of the professor. “You knew him best, Renzo. He was like a father to you, wasn’t he?”

  All the sailors watched hopefully, but the professor’s face did not twitch as the needle passed through his nose.

  “He’s really, really gone,” said Rosato dolefully.

  As Renzo tied off that wretched stitch, a black blur skimmed overhead.

  “What was that?”

  “Someone’s firing cannons at us?”

  Another black blur collided violently with the mast. A tar-colored parrot slid down the pole to the ground, where it lay feebly flapping a broken wing.

  “Whoever it is, they’re shooting parrots!”

  “Poor thing.” Teo stroked the wounded bird. “Perhaps you can set his wing with a splint, Renzo?”

  But the parrot then propped itself on its undamaged wing, and delivered a message in such a perfect rendition of Miss Uish’s frigid voice that everyone recoiled.

  “I have joined a band of Ghost-Convicts from Hooroo on the Bad Ship Bombazine,” it announced.

  “The Bombazine,” hissed Teo. “That’s the black ship that’s always on the horizon. Whoever’s on board—they must have saved her.”

  The parrot tapped its beak impatiently against the mast and continued in Miss Uish’s voice. “Silence! Expect imminent and fatal revenge. Lieutenant Rosebud of the Bombazine is far less tender-hearted than I am. He has a laboratory on board this ship that positively manufactures death. Or, what is worse, half-death.”

  “Like the Half-Dead disease?” thought Teo. “Did the Bombazine bring the sickness to Venice?”

  They saw the Bombazine’s pirate flag looming larger on the horizon even as the parrot spoke. And then, before their eyes, the black skull-and-crossbones transformed into the deadly jolie rouge. Worse, the red slowly bruised through yellow to green—emerald-green, the color of Il Traditore’s ring and his poison.

  Renzo instinctively rubbed his shoulder, the one that had been injured in hand-to-hand combat with the Traitor’s ghost. Teo could see what he was thinking: could Il Traditore his terrifying self be aboard the Bombazine?

  And Teo’s own skin prickled at the memory of the green heart beating in his skeletal ribs when Bajamonte Tiepolo had snatched her up inside his cloak.

  A band of Ghost-Convicts swarmed onto the Bombazine’s deck like angry ants from their hill. To crown their pirates’ rags, the crew wore black felt hats with corks bobbing from the brims.

  Fabrizio, peering into a telescope, exclaimed, “Some of those fellows are half transparent. How could that be?”

  The other boys trembled, silent with terror and bewilderment. Teo wrestled the spyglass from Fabrizio’s hand. She had a particular reason for needing to see close up what these convicts looked like.

  Now, focusing the lens, she groaned. The Ghost-Convicts were spectacularly mutilated, some with deep cuts across their throats, others with the imprint of a shark’s jaws in their heads. All carried sturdy black tins with wire handles. The one who seemed to be their leader boasted a shark’s tooth curving out of his back. His lusterless black eyes were sunk halfway through his nobbled skull. His white lips seemed merely embossed on the leather of his face.

  Renzo asked quietly, “In-the-Slaughterhouse ghosts, I suppose?”

  Teo whispered, “Yes, unfortunately. And a few humans who look just as bad. Those ones must be the prisoners Harold Hoskins pardoned. To do his dirty work.”

  In-the-Slaughterhouse ghosts were a thousand times worse than the more common in-the-Cold ghosts, who had committed a crime in life and wished only to redeem their sins with some heroic act. In-the-Slaughterhouse ghosts were angry to have died, and they wanted to go on behaving as viciously as they had in
life.

  Renzo urged, “We need something magical from Professor Marìn now, Teo! Can you remember the right pages from The Best Ways with Wayward Ghosts? Specifically, we need one for escaping at high speed from Ghost-Convicts who want to slice us to pieces.”

  Teo mentally flicked through Wayward Ghosts as fast as she could. Two hundred and twenty pages in, she discovered a spell that could help them, but at a horribly painful cost. Reading the page aloud from the memory stored in her mind, Teo told the crew:

  “ ‘If you have need of strong winds at sea, you may summon up a Sea Sorcerer by the gift of an innocent corpse. When he arrives, you should buy a packet of the four winds from him. He will take the corpse in exchange, and be well happy with his bargain. Do not attempt to trick or cajole him of his booty, or he shall see you sorrier than you can imagine.’ ”

  “Professor Marìn’s body! We can’t! It’s too horrible!” cried Rosato.

  “He loved us. He’d want us to escape,” said Marco quietly.

  Silence fell. One by one, the boys nodded, Renzo last of all.

  Teo read the spell as she saw it printed on the page:

  “Come ye, Sorcerer, I entreat ye,

  Serve us in the ways of the sea.

  For us, four winds to speed our way,

  For you, a corpse with which to play.”

  There was a short, shocked silence. Then Emilio asked, “Where will the Sea Sorcerer come from?”

  “From the sea, I ’spect, stupid,” Sebastiano replied.

  “What will he look like?” whispered Massimo.

  Sebastiano answered with relish, “A horrible monster, I s’pose. With scales and horns and tridents and oysters growing out of his eye sockets. And terrible breath, like dead crabs.”

  There was another short, tense silence. All eyes swiveled to the Bombazine, visibly gaining on them.

  “No sign of ’im. P’raps Teo’s remembering the spell wrong?”

  “Perhaps there isn’t any such thing as a Sea Sorcerer.”

  “Or perhaps he looks a bit like that,” said Renzo quietly, pointing.