Talina in the Tower

by Michelle Lovric

  Also by Michelle Lovric

  The Undrowned Child

  The Mourning Emporium

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Michelle Lovric

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1. On the night of the full moon

  2. Rune-ish and rumpled

  3. A brief note about Talina’s bad habits, concluding with the trouble they led to

  4. Cats in a sack

  5. The Company of Christ and the Good Death

  6. Ostello delle Gattemiagole

  7. Whys & wherefores

  8. So close

  9. A strange one

  10. ‘If in doubt’

  11. Two transformations

  12. The cat’s whiskers, the bee’s knees and the spider’s ankles

  13. Off with their heads!

  14. Frimousse and Rouquin

  15. At the court of the Ravageur Lord

  16. Sweeter with dessert

  17. In the Ravageur kitchen

  18. Conversation with a rat

  19. The return of the not-quite-cat

  20. ‘Hidden where any creature may see it’

  21. Just one small person, standing on one leg

  22. Human wine, human cheating

  23. The Terror of the Neighbourhood

  24. In the harem of the Ravageur Lord

  25. Funeral for a city

  26. Town without a face

  27. Not-Quite-Setting Toffee

  28. The Chamber of Conversation

  29. A French exam and a history lesson

  30. The Great Fire of Venice

  31. The grannies of Quintavalle

  32. Dead dogs and dreadful doings

  33. The Guardian’s secret

  34. Burning and roasting, both

  35. A sweet salivant

  36. A final ruling

  37. Strawberry birthmarks

  38. The Ravageur Lord’s bargain

  39. Finding the pot of hatred

  40. Talina in the Tower Part II

  What is true and what’s made up

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Venice, November 30th, 1866, Saint Andrea’s Day

  AS THE MOON rose, so they came.

  Eyes cast down, the water-rats rowed their fearsome passengers, easing the boats through ink-dark canals without so much as a creak of an oar. Those rats knew it would be death to make a noise: instant death by blow and claw, with a clean skeleton floating on the morning tide like a white flute-shell surrendered to the battering ocean.

  Their passengers disembarked without a backward glance. The rats kept their heads bowed. The creatures’ claws rasped on mossy wooden steps and clicked on Istrian marble, a stink of old meat and wine sauce floating behind them. They padded along narrow streets where the windows were tightly shuttered against the ferocious cold.

  The only sounds, apart from the click of claws, came from fretful children and their lullabying mothers. Hearing a little girl’s cry, the creatures paused a moment, looking up. They scratched a sign on the door. Then they moved on, stopping only if they noticed a cat cowering in the shadows.

  ‘Ze Venetian cats are too thin,’ they complained. But they took them anyway.

  When each slope-backed creature reached the bell-tower of its assigned church, it began to climb. From lintel to sill, they swung their darkly furred limbs. From stone to brick to wood they moved, too self-assured to hurry and yet too powerful to be slow.

  It was exactly one minute before two in the morning when each beast finally mounted the spire of its tower. The moon hung low in the sky like an over-ripe apricot, illuminating a sudden, terrifying change to the silhouettes of one hundred and seventeen Venetian bell-towers from Santa Maria Valverde to Santa Chiara. Instead of pretty finials and angels, the tops of those towers now bore the shapes of shaggy creatures with long jaws and pale opal eyes aglow above the matted darkness of their muzzles.

  The bells tolled. As the two rich, sad notes faded, each creature pointed its snout to the moon and howled in a strange language. It sounded like Venetian distorted by an exaggerated and quite unconvincing French accent.

  ‘GIVE EET BACK!’

  The howls echoed down the Grand Canal, across to Giudecca, and then rolled off into the lagoon.

  ‘Give eet back!’ demanded the echo, ‘Give eet back! Give eet b … a … c … k!’

  On top of the magnificent onion-domed bell-tower of the church of the Madonna dell’Orto, the greatest of the creatures drew his jaws back in a ghastly grin, spat out his sage-leaf cigar and shook a huge clenched paw.

  ‘GIVE EET BACK!’ he howled, louder than all the others.

  Then the Lord of the creatures added, with the strongest and worst French accent of all, ‘OR WE SHALL COME AND GET EET.’

  On the morning of December 1st, 1866, the Venetians woke with a terrible sense of something wrong. It was not just that their cats did not come home for breakfast. The Venetians felt guilty, as if they had forgotten their mothers’ birthdays. No one talked of seeing or hearing the creatures on the bell-towers. Or at least, if they did remember some howling in the night, they put it down to the habitual groans of the pipes in their ancient houses, or to the shrieking bora wind that haunted the city in winter.

  ‘Tempo da lupi,’ people called it. ‘Wolf weather.’

  But every night after that, the creatures would mount the bell-towers and howl their demand. And their threats. And shortly afterwards, they began to act on them.

  Now it was not just the cats. Each night, another Venetian disappeared: men, women, children. A curfew was imposed.

  Of course, there were whispered rumours of wild, shaggy creatures rowed in gondolas by rats. The street-cleaners complained that in the early hours a dreadful smell permeated the air: something that stank like meaty, rotten dog-breath. One man even claimed to have heard the creatures talking in rasping voices under his window. In French, he said.

  But Gianni Nanon, pale and wild from lack of sleep, was dismissed as a fantasist by the editor of the newspaper, who printed the story simply as a joke:

  ‘FRENCH GHOST-CREATURES’ OVERHEARD BY ‘IMAGINATIVE’ VENETIAN. PLAGUE OF KIDNAPPINGS CONTINUES. MORE CATS MISSING. NEW RAIDS ON VENICE SWEET SHOPS. CHIEF SUSPECTS: PASTRY-BANDITS FROM ROVIGO. RANSOM NOTES AWAITED.

  Rovigo was a shabby town on the mainland. Her unruly citizens were famous (and much mocked) because every single one of them was cursed with an incurable sweet tooth. Why cursed? Because every single bakery in Rovigo was afflicted with an inability to cook a cake that would rise or a cream pie that didn’t curdle. Of course, this might be explained by the rats who infested every flour sack and butter churn: no town ever needed cats like Rovigo did. The cake-starved Rovigans had earned their nickname ‘Pastry-Bandits’ from greedy raids on nearby Venice, famous for the genius of her bakers. Blaming Rovigo for the kidnappings of humans and cats suited most Venetians, even though it hardly explained why the raiders were also stripping the bakeries of every single pan, fork, knife and ladle.

  Yes, people said, it was all Rovigo’s fault. But that did not get the crimes solved or the lost Venetians back. Despite the complete lack of ransom notes from Rovigo, the alternative explanation for the kidnappings and catnappings was simply too terrible: no one wanted to believe a bespectacled, curly-haired boy called Ambrogio Gasperin, who had crept out in the night in his dressing-gown to sketch the silhouette of a savage creature on the very top of the dangerously leaning bell-tower of Santo Stefano.

  Ambrogio Gasperin labelled his picture ‘French Monster on the Crooked Campanile’ and brought it to school next day.

  Ambrogio’s French mistress, Mademoiselle Chouette, shuddered when she s
aw it. ‘Français! Neverrr! Des navets! Turnips! Non!’

  With a toss of her neat head, she gave Ambrogio one hundred lines: ‘I shall not make things up. I shall do my proper French homework, not drawings. And I shall not argue with my teacher.’

  Using a hand still sore from those hundred lines, Ambrogio defiantly nailed his drawing to a tree in the playground before he went home. But by next morning, it had been ripped away, violently. A shred of paper dangled from the loosened nail.

  The howling continued in the night.

  And Venetians, their cakes and their cats, continued to disappear without trace. After Ambrogio Gasperin’s drawing, more boys were taken than girls.

  It was some weeks before people began to notice that the doors of those who vanished were always defaced by a scratch of five long, sharp nails.

  Venice, January 30th, 1867, Saint Martina’s Day

  ON THE NIGHT of the full moon, Talina’s father did not come home from work. Well after dusk, when everyone else had gone, he sat frowning at a piece of paper on his rosewood desk behind the panelled door that bore the sign,

  Marco Molin,

  Keeper of Most Ancient Manuscripts,

  Department of Malignant Spells,

  Invoked Pestilences and Abominable Rites

  ‘It cannot be true,’ he said over and over again. ‘No! Such an unfair, frightful thing!’

  But his disbelief failed to make the piece of paper any less real.

  The door to his office rattled.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called into the empty air. ‘I can smell you.’

  He screamed once, before he was silenced.

  ‘Your papà must have forgotten the time!’ Talina’s mother said affectionately. ‘I’d best go and remind him. No, you can’t come, too. Remember the curfew!’

  She added darkly, ‘And remember why we have it.’

  Lucia Molin smoothed her daughter’s wild dark-gold hair, which tumbled from her head like a curtain of tangled corn husks, too full of life to ever be confined in a plait.

  ‘Go to bed, kitten,’ she urged. ‘We’ll be back before you fall asleep.’

  When her mamma failed to return by midnight, Talina lit a lantern and threaded her way carefully through the dark streets to the Venetian Archives. The city breathed its night sighs into her ears. Her cat Drusilla trotted alongside, casting suspicious looks into every dark corner.

  At the Archives everything was dark and locked. Talina inched her way around the building, checking for scratches on the door and the smell of rotten meat. She threw stones at a certain high window, shouting ‘Mamma!’ and ‘Papà!’ Finally she sat down on the marble steps, tucking herself, cross-legged, into the shadow of the lintel.

  Talina was just thinking about bursting into tears when Drusilla climbed into her lap, thrusting her soft black muzzle into her mistress’s face.

  ‘I’ve tried everything, Drusilla,’ protested Talina, stroking the cat. She was now only one prickly sneeze away from those tears.

  ‘Indeed, and all in vain, of course.’ A man’s voice fell like the winter’s night itself: bitter, cold and quiet. Talina looked up into a familiar face clad in skin as thin and grey as a dusty cobweb in a dark room.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered. ‘Breaking the curfew? Were you lying in lurk for me?’

  ‘Since I’m your Guardian, obviously, I’ve come to take you home with me.’

  ‘I am going to wait for Mamma and Papà. Not. Going. With. You.’

  He sighed, a small gush of cold air without the warmth of compassion. ‘In spite of your reputation as the most impudent girl in Venice, Talina Molin, that is exactly what you are going to do.’

  On days when Talina had achieved the very pinnacle of naughtiness, on days when her French mistress Mademoiselle Chouette, the neighbour Signora Cassian and the local policeman complained in outraged terms about her behaviour and what they described as her ‘beastly tongue’ – those were the days when Talina’s father had threatened, with a catch in his voice, ‘If you don’t behave better, kitten,’ – her parents always called her ‘kitten’ – ‘then we’ll be forced to send you to live with your great uncle Uberto in his lonely stone tower on the edge of Castello. He is your Guardian, remember. You know the way it works. One more little flouncy and …’

  The thought of going to live with her great uncle Uberto had been enough to make Talina rewrite her wickedly rude French essay and clean up the pool of fake egret blood outside Signora Cassian’s house. She’d even written a ‘sorry’ letter to Signora Cassian, with no ‘buts’ in it at all.

  Now, in the dim light of her lantern, her Guardian poked at Talina disparagingly with his pointed black shoe, as if she was something unpleasant he’d nearly trodden in.

  ‘Get up.’

  ‘No.’ Loyal Drusilla hissed in agreement.

  The Guardian bent over Talina. Their eyes met: his, small, pale and expressionless; hers, large, brown and glittering with rebellious tears.

  ‘Wilful, is it? I do not tolerate indiscipline. Neither in children nor cats. In fact I don’t tolerate cats at all. Vile, thieving beasts, without a conscience.’

  Drusilla leapt off Talina’s lap, erected her right back leg like a spear and showed just what she thought of the Guardian’s words.

  ‘I’m waiting for my parents,’ insisted Talina. ‘I’ll wait all night if I need to.’

  The Guardian’s hard fingers sought her shoulder, wrenching her out of the doorway and into the moonlight. He tugged her long hair until she moaned with pain and straightened up. Drusilla leapt into Talina’s arms, her teeth bared.

  ‘Evidently you do not have parents any more.’

  ‘Liar! Liar! You’re a forty-faced liar, each one of them ugly!’ Talina finally succumbed to the tears that so badly wanted to come out.

  ‘All writers are liars. And you shall soon become accustomed to the sight of this face, girl. It’s a matter of indifference to me whether it appeals to you. Or not. But let me have a look at you, quickly. I may find those tears useful.’

  ‘Useful?’ sobbed Talina. ‘You are a monster! And I hate all your stories, particularly The Orphan-Eaters and The Rack & Ruin of Raffaele Rasa, The Dire Deaths of Daniele Dario and The Miseries of Maria Montin. And worst of all Talina in the Tower. How dare you use my name? I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read all those dreadful stories. Why do you always kill off the children or the parents in them?’

  ‘I notice you’ve read all those stories. Good little girls usually die. They must do, as one so rarely hears of them in real life. And parents generally disappear …’ His voice was chill and light as mist, ‘… one way or another.’

  ‘Mine are coming back, I tell you,’ sobbed Talina.

  ‘I don’t believe so. If they would insist on going out at full moon, what could they expect? And I must have my dues, of course.’

  He pulled a notebook from the pocket of his long black coat and turned Talina’s face from side to side, swiftly noting down how her tears shone dimly like moonstones in the lamplight and how her shoulders trembled when she sobbed.

  ‘Now come,’ he snapped the notebook shut. ‘Quickly. We’ve tarried long enough.’

  Talina said, ‘If I can’t wait here, then I’m going back to my own home.’

  ‘You don’t own your home. You are a child. You own nothing in the whole world.’

  As he spoke, a dense, jagged shadow traced the ground in front of them, and a sudden look of terror contorted his features. Above, large wings flapped.

  ‘What bird could be so big?’ wondered Talina.

  The Guardian seized Talina by the elbow and dragged her through the dark streets, over the Rialto Bridge, through San Marco and all the way to his tower at Quintavalle at the far end of Castello. Talina struggled in the Guardian’s bony grip. Drusilla followed at a wary distance on silent paws. The flapping shadow was never far away, swooping across buildings in their path.

  Suddenly the tower lurched out
of the water in front of them, slapped by shafts of moonlight, which revealed tall pocked walls studded with sparrows’ nests. The shadow swooped up the wall, and a cloud of sparrows skittered upwards, shrill with fear.

  Her Guardian unlocked the door and pushed Talina inside. Drusilla slunk in too, before he had time to slam the door in her face.

  ‘Enter at your own risk, cat,’ Great Uncle Uberto hissed. From behind him came a cacophony of growls and snapping jaws. ‘May I present my wolfhounds, Razin, Futfallo and Gierch-it.’

  Drusilla leapt up to the mantelpiece, where she stood with her tail plumed and her eyes narrowed. The dogs scrabbled on their back legs, baying at her.

  ‘Accredited cat-killers each and every one.’ The Guardian’s pleasure was chilled by bitterness. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bought them.’

  ‘Just one night! That’s absolutely all we’re spending here,’ shouted Talina.

  the tower at Quintavalle, three months later: April 29th,1867,

  Saint Caterina’s Day

  TALINA SAT BOLT upright in bed, woken by the howling. She cried out, ‘Mamma! Papà!’

  But somewhere at the back of her sleep-muzzy mind lurked the sad awareness that no one had seen a trace of her parents in the last three months. And behind that lay the knowledge that the howling happened every night at two o’clock. She reassured herself that no paws had left scratches on the door of the tower. She was scrupulous about checking every evening before going to bed, just as the chittering of the sparrows grew drowsy and soft.

  None of the other stolen Venetians had come back. But this didn’t mean that Talina was going to give up on her parents. Giving up was not in her nature. She had written out a hundred ‘WANTED’ notes with sketched likenesses of her parents. She had pinned them on street walls, sent them off on home-made kites on windy days and launched them down the Grand Canal in bottles. She pushed them into the hands of tourists in San Marco and into the handbags of old ladies waiting for trains. But there had been not one single reply. So all these weeks later, Talina was still waking up every morning in the twittering tower at Quintavalle, longing for the touch of her mother’s hand and the sound of her father’s voice.