Maddie Hatter and the Timely Taffeta

by Jayne Barnard

  After ten uncomfortable minutes, she picked it up to return it to the wardrobe. That’s when she realized what it was weighing down: a stack of images from TD’s night-sight camera. He’d learned from his experiments with the waterfront rat last week, and could filter out the green gloss. The resulting images were done in thinned, coloured inks, giving the printed results the appearance almost of watercolour paintings. Fascinating! She must remember to tell Madame Taxus-Hemlock. And wouldn’t Serephene be pleased at this one of Scottie on the stage?

  That was right before Scottie had vanished. She scanned such of the crowd as TD had captured. In the earliest image, there were six familiar Cat heads in a cluster, all staring up at Pinocchio. Not far behind them, three Fox heads huddled together. Two images later, the Cats and the Foxes were both moving toward the stage. And there was Arlecchina, waving one long, white sleeve to catch Pinocchio’s eye. So, she’d been right there, waiting her chance.

  Maddie flipped through image after image, following the chase. If TD had not conveyed the rust-red of the Fox heads and the brown-black of the Cats, their presence might have gone unnoticed. She certainly hadn’t noticed them at the time. But there they were, hunting Scottie even while Maddie and Serephene had been desperately trying to reach him. They’d been so close together that two Cats were in the pile of fallen revellers after the flatfish incident.

  She shoved that image aside and went on. She’d not been conscious of TD leaving her neck last night, but a couple of images showed he’d gained a modicum of height while she and Serephene were struggling past the clog in the lane. Obedient to her last command, he had kept right on recording images of Scottie, up to the moment when Pinocchio was surrounded by rust-red heads and hustled down the side of the very bridge she and Serephene had reached mere moments later. She sat back, thinking furiously. The Foxes snatched Scottie. Not the Cats. Were they different groups or simply different costumes? If she knew their allegiance, she stood a chance of tracking them down. But how?

  As she started around the bedchamber for inspiration, her eye fell on the mud-stained, damp, faintly scented Arlecchina costume draped over a chair. She would surely end up paying Zaneta for it. And the white porcelain mask of Serephene’s had a starburst crack where she’d run into the wall. Another item to replace. Could she claim the costume costs on her expenses to CJ Kettle?

  She was examining her bruised cheek in the washstand mirror when her eyes lit on the mask again. Masks! Somebody made those sets of Fox and Cat masks. If she could track down the artisans, she could find out the buyers. Maybe even their addresses. Maybe she’d find Scottie before the day was out.

  Filled with new energy, she hurriedly emptied the pockets of her costume and cloak. Scottie’s precious packet of samples slithered into her hand. She stared at it, then opened the wardrobe, picked up the rat, put down the packet and set the rat on top of it.

  “Guard that,” she said loudly, and then, for insurance, “Tweetle-D: say: Guard that.”

  For a wonder, the rat appeared to obey. At least, it looked at TD, then down at the packet. Then it lay flat, hooked its wicked bronze claws into the four corners of the silk wrappings, and closed its eyes.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE MORNING WAS crisp and bright. Fanto sang lustily all the way to the Rialto bridge, the city’s busiest shopping area. “My cousin Luigi,” he said, “has a mask shop there. To help you is he molto felice. Most happy.” Happy if she bought things from him, Maddie was sure. Well, she would need a new mask for herself, and a replacement for Serephene’s. If buying those got her the information she needed to find Scottie, it would be money very well spent. “He speak no English,” Fanto went on. “I come to translate to you.”

  As the sleek craft settled against the canal wall, clicks and whirrs began behind Maddie’s head. She turned. Four slim, metal legs were telescoping down from Fanto’s pedestal. From their ends, articulated digits splayed like the skeletal remains of a giant bird. Fanto leaned hard on his oar and lifted himself off his swivel-pedestal completely. The feet took his weight. The gondolier neatly stepped, one foot and a second and a third, onto the bank, leaving one foot on the gondola for stability while he leaned down to offer Maddie his hand. He grinned.

  “Is good, yes? I walk like the spider, but I walk.” Together they ambled off through the early-morning housewives out for the day’s shopping and a few last-night revellers plodding home with bent heads. Nobody blinked or looked askance at Fanto’s spidery legs, but several people called out greetings to him by name, a reminder that Venice was, at its heart, a community. They passed three shops selling masks and other costume accessories, but Fanto wouldn’t let her stop to ask about Cat and Fox there. “Luigi is better, you’ll see. We come back here if he is not answering all your questions.”

  Maddie was beginning to feel like she once had in a Turkish bazaar, with her guide pulling her into the shops of his “relatives”, who were most likely not relatives at all but shrewd merchants who paid him a commission on the purchases of the tourists he brought.

  Luigi, a middle-aged man with a face longer than a basset hound’s, was seated at a worktable in the rear of his narrow shop, painting golden details onto a purple fantasy mask. When Fanto scuttled in he leapt up. With practiced ease, he stepped between the two front legs and clasped the gondolier to him so hard his spectacles fell off over Fanto’s shoulder. Maddie caught them and handed them back. There followed much back-slapping and fast chatter sprinkled with words she recognized. Bambino, cugino, madre and zia were all family. Whether Fanto was getting a commission or not, he had been truthful about the relationship. It was a reassuring thought when her other allies—Serephene, Obie, Scottie, and even Zaneta—were beyond her reach.

  At last he turned to her. “I am telling Luigi your question, signorina. You have the images to show?”

  From her satchel, she unfolded the best three of TD’s ink-wash pictures. “Yes, here are the Foxes, from the side only. Sorry. This one shows the set of Cats, two of them facing us.” Luigi held out his hand for the papers. He studied them, took them to the doorway for better light, and then clipped on an oculus over his left spectacle lens.

  Rather than stand there watching him, Maddie looked around the narrow shop. High up the walls were all the traditional Carnevale masks: Harlequins both motley and monochrome, plague doctors, Pulcinello—who she knew in England as the puppet Punch—and a host of exotics including the set worn by the Tarot players in San Marco last evening. None of the Pinocchio theme. From a row of white porcelain faces painted with swirls of glitter and gilt, she pointed to a plain one to replace Serephene’s cracked mask and a white with black diamonds over both eyes to match the Arlecchina. She could give that to Zaneta when she returned the costume. For herself she chose a plumed black one, with gleaming bronze arabesques that reminded her of the Main-Bearing bronze on her family’s crest. Fanto brought them down for her, setting the last on the counter as Luigi returned.

  Luigi held out the papers. Pointing to a Fox, he spoke at length. Fanto, when he paused, translated. “He thinks this was part of a set made by his friend around the corner. We’ll ask him next. The Cats you should try at this other place he’s writing down for you; his son was apprenticed there. It’s owned by the cousin of that flirt, Zaneta, who works for the Frenchwoman.”

  “Zaneta the seamstress?” They’d have to arrange about the costume somehow. “Can you take a message to her later?”

  “Assi. Now Luigi asks which of these masks is for you special. The black one, I think, yes?” He spoke to Luigi, who brought from somewhere a beautiful black silk fan with wrought bronze sticks that swirled like the arabesques on the mask. Luigi spread it out to display for Maddie and then added it to the parcel he was making up.

  Maddie thanked Luigi in her best Italian. Glancing back as she left the shop, she saw his face had already settled into its drooping lines as he bent over his mask-painting once more.

  “I forgot to ask him about an En
glishman wearing a fancy Cricket head, from an earlier incident. And there was an Owl, too, a hood and mask together in one piece and a pair of giant, brown and white, feathered wings. Would he know who made those?”

  Fanto leaned back in and called down the length of the shop. After a moment, he pushed off from the doorframe and scuttled along beside her again. “He can’t think of any right now but he’ll send word if he does later.”

  The friend around the corner admitted to making the Fox masks, a set of five approximately identical ones. He refused, with much apologetic shrugging, to say for whom. One dead end. The Cat-mask place was further away, through narrow lanes, up and down steps, over a bridge barely one stride across, and into a tiny courtyard still in morning shadow. Maddie showed her picture, Fanto explained the question. The matron at the counter shook her head. She would not talk about customers. Fanto leaned an elbow on the counter and smiled winsomely, invoking the name of Luigi’s son. But still she shook her head.

  This quest too might have ended abruptly had not a voice called out, “Maddalena?”

  It was Zaneta, hurrying toward her with both hands held out. “I thought never would I see you again. La Frangetti, she told the porters not to let you in. And Sera, she can only come for the fittings, no more the work. What happened?”

  Lying to Zaneta, who had helped her so much at Madame Frangetti’s, seemed downright ungrateful. Part of the truth couldn’t hurt, surely? “Sera and I—well, I’m not her zia, just her friend. We pretended I was the chaperone so her Nonna wouldn’t find out she was learning the business. Then her father found out. It’s all over for us.”

  “Bouf! Such a scheme.” Zaneta laughed. “You spit in Madame’s eye, most polite like the English. Come, we have a cappuccino and you tell me all about it.”

  Maddie at first pleaded press of time, but Zaneta, when she learned of the hunt for mask-makers, at once volunteered to help. But first, cappuccino and pasticcino, because Maddalena was looking tired and pale and must be restored. Many mask-workers would soon have their break near the bridge. They could ask everyone all at once.

  Fanto shrugged; he would go back to visit with Luigi if Zaneta would bring Maddie back there when ready?

  Thus, Maddie found herself in the midst of a gossiping throng, all poring over her pictures in a heady scent-cloud of rich, dark coffee and fresh-baked pastries. Twenty minutes later, she and Zaneta strolled away, warm and content and with new leads to follow.

  “Madame, she gave everyone the day away,” Zaneta explained, “except for those needed to fit the last costumes. The top floor is all locked up now. The clatter of the looms goes on and on. She brought in weavers from outside, and sent ours home. French weavers; can you believe that?” Zaneta made her spitting face. “French, pah. That woman, she’s probably copying Venetian fabrics and going to ship them all to Paris.”

  More likely she was mass-producing Scottie’s spider-silk up on that top floor, and knew the regular weavers would gossip about it outside the workshop. “If that’s what she’s up to, she could buy samples and have them copied in France. Now, what about this place that might know about the Owl and the Cricket heads?”

  The streets were crowded, tourists and residents shoulder to shoulder, but Zaneta knew her way around and soon had them slipping in the back entrance to a costumier almost at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. She explained what they sought, appealing to Maddie for corroborative details, and then translated the reply.

  “The Owl with the brown and white wings sounds like theirs, made for a German company last year. The merchant stayed then at the German Consulate but nobody ordered anything new from there this year.” So, the Owl costume might have been taken home by a consulate visitor, borrowed by staff, or sold off as surplus. No help there. “The Cricket,” Zaneta continued after further consultation, “that’s maybe from this other place around the corner. Not so many Crickets are bought, and most from there. They are clumsy to wear except for performing.”

  Everything in Venice was “around the corner” or “across the water”, so Maddie was not surprised that it was around three corners in total, with a bridge thrown in. It was a wasted trip, too, as the friend Zaneta had at this costumier could only tell them that a Cricket like the one Maddie pointed to on the wall, except that it was topped by a bowler hat instead of the Venetian toque, was delivered to the English Consulate for some visitor a few weeks back. If Obie hadn’t been called away, he could have poked around there, but for now, the Cricket might be just what he’d appeared, a well-bred tourist who heard English voices and tried to help out when they were set upon.

  “What about the Cats?”

  “Oh, those in your picture?” Zaneta grinned. “My cousins made. They’ll tell me for who.”

  Back they went and the matron, much friendlier now that Maddie was with Zaneta, revealed she had made numerous Cats, all similar although not identical. Three were in the store-room, one was in the shop, and twelve had been boxed up and delivered last week to a fashion house, to accompany an order of costumes. A big order like that was probably going to a Consulate or a big commercial operation.

  “Which fashion house?” Zaneta demanded.

  Matron shrugged. “Ma, yours. La Frangetti.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  AFTER A QUIET luncheon in the Hotel Gritti dining room, Maddie retired upstairs for the usual hour of riposo. She had seldom felt less like taking a nap. Yet she knew Fanto and Zaneta were correct to counsel delay. She would do no good by storming into Madame Frangetti’s demanding to know why the Cats had been following Scottie last night. He’d already delivered the formula for his fabulous fabric; would Madame dispose of him rather than pay him for his work?

  The fabric! She had the samples. If she knew what was so special about them, she’d see why someone would want Scottie. She flung open the wardrobe door and grabbed the inert automaton rat. It came up with Scottie’s silk-wrapped packet in its claws. She detangled the claws, set the rat on the desk, and unfolded the package. Inside were a handful of the slender cloth strips woven on the miniature looms. These were taffeta: one black, a primrose yellow, a navy blue, a moss green, and a plain white. Pretty, but only taffeta.

  She felt the strips, bent them to the light, turned them this way and that, but there seemed nothing special about them. Spreading them out darkest to lightest on a white sheet of hotel stationery, she tilted the desk lamp down and examined them individually and together under a magnifier. Nothing resulted but eye strain; eventually the cloth seemed to shimmer and she gave up. She went to sit on the window seat beside TD, who was watching the pigeons waddle around the next rooftop. If one of Madame Taxus-Hemlock’s long-distance message hawks had flown past, they would have scattered in mindless panic. But none was, and no messages came, and she was alone. Serephene was under house arrest, Scottie was in danger, Obie was at a funeral, and she had no way to help any of them.

  Or did she? Twice before she had tracked down people who didn’t want to be found, exposed villains, and then written up the stories as W.Y. Knott, investigative reporter. Each time she had come to a dead end, and each time she had found a way forward by re-examining what she knew and by seizing chances. Well, once the business closed for the day, she would chance sneaking back to Madame Frangetti’s. Maybe there was an invoice showing who had ordered the Cat costumes.

  Meanwhile, she shook herself, strode back to the desk, and was reaching out to sweep the samples into a heap when her hand paused, hovering. The strips had changed. They’d been black, blue, green, primrose, white. Now they were red, purple, teal, pink, and sky blue. Nobody had been in the room. TD was on the windowsill; the rat was doing its paperweight impression. The strips were in exactly the same positions on the page.

  Had the light affected the colours? She turned it off, laid the silk wrapper over the strips for extra darkness, and walked away to the window. When it was ten minutes later by the desk clock, she walked back. She gently peeled away the silk laid over the colours
.

  Now they were, in order, deep rose pink, lavender, aqua pastel, ivory, and a delicate tea green. Was the darkness responsible?

  She left them uncovered on the table and walked away again, watching intently from across the room until another ten minutes had passed. The taffeta strips had returned to their original shades: black, navy blue, green, primrose, and white.

  The only thing that had changed in the room, besides the colours of the taffeta strips, was the time.

  Chapter Twenty

  SCOTTIE’S SPIDER-BAT-and-silk taffeta continually changed its appearance over time. The fabric remained smooth and sleek, but its colour was in a state of constant change. Maddie could not pinpoint a single moment of transition when she stared, but let her look away, even for a few minutes, and she looked back at something completely different. It was magical.

  And these were only the samples, the most obvious of colour changes. Likely there were several other combinations. Madame Frangetti, and Scottie himself, might have believed they were making a silk to take the fashion world by storm, but only think how a scout balloon, for example, could blend into the sunset if it was sheathed in gossamer-light silk that shifted steadily between blue, pink, and lavender? Or a sniper in a tree blend into the leaves with a suit of subtly altering greens? Indeed, the military applications were legion. Which put a whole new complexion on the question of who wanted Scottie, and why.

  Maddie listed the suspects. The Owl suit—was the wearer a mugger in a secondhand costume or a German industrial spy? Were the Cats using Madame Frangetti for costumes only, or so they could grab her inventor at the optimum moment? Who were the Foxes: another country represented? Who was the Cricket, and why had he helped drive off the Cats? That made four possible groups. Was Sarah working for one of them, or for someone else entirely? The first time, she’d lured Scottie out to a group of Cats. The second time, it was Foxes who hustled him away.