Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  – Is it … the plague?

  The doctor pries open her mouth and peers in.

  – Thank Providence, no. She has an inflammatory condition of the skin which I do not think to be contagious. These eruptions, I am certain, break out in response to the vaporous, cloistered air in the house. We will begin with bleeding and a cooling astringent, say vitriolated zinc with camphor, or white calx of quicksilver. Or perhaps cold water. If by morning the symptoms have not lessened, take her up to the highest garret in the building, strip her naked, and throw open the shutters to let the winds in.

  – Such idleness, doctor, would be worse for her well-being than the disease.

  – Then have her practice her scales or whatever it is your musical young ladies do.

  – She is no longer in the orchestra. Instead she shall take up other useful arts.

  – It matters not what she does, Sister Beata, as long as she stays exposed to the air for at least an hour a day.

  She sits on the edge of a cot, a frayed blanket tugged around her, embroidering a handkerchief with tiny roses and raising her eyes now and again to gaze out the window at the snow-cloaked roof of San Giorgio across the canal.

  The garret is high in the draughty upper reaches of the Ospedale. Pica shivers, sets her work down beside her, gets up and wanders the room, slapping her hands together to warm them.

  Broken and unused instruments hang from the walls. High in one corner is a dusty, battered violin with a single intact string. A jagged crack has split its soundboard. Pica returns to her work, but she cannot keep at it long without stealing another glance at the violin. At last she drags a chair over to the corner, stretches and lifts the instrument from its peg. Sitting back down on the edge of the cot, she turns the violin over and over, traces the purfling with her finger, sniffs the darkness of the sound holes, ponders the odd mark burned into its back:

  The Maestro, in a priest’s black cassock, stands by the window, his hands clasped behind his back.

  – I played that one so hard it cracked. In Milan, I think it was. Yes. Right in the middle of the Great Mogul

  Pica holds out the violin and the Maestro takes it, cradles it like an infant or a rare bottle of wine.

  – They brought me another instrument, but I could not go on. The audience stared, and then someone laughed. The critics said, Vivaldi’s pact with the devil is expiring at last. They had no idea what had come over me. I had suddenly understood my own heart.

  He tucks the violin under his chin, plucks the string, turns the tuning peg, plucks the string again.

  – Cento donzelle festose e belle. A hundred maidens cheerful and fair. My joy at being with you each day. Hearing your innocent thoughtless chatter in the morning as you came down for your lessons, beholding your freshly scrubbed and shining faces gazing up at me as I explained harmony and figuration and ritornello. Fool that I was, I did not understand. I played my violin and did not hear my own heart singing out its delight. The world heard, though. The world said I played in a fever, like a man possessed. The world wanted to hear more. Il prete rosso! people cried. We want the red priest! They clamoured for me, and so I left the Ospedale, lured away by the promise of gold, fame, love. Everything I thought I wanted.

  Far below them in one of the music rooms of the Ospedale a solo voice begins haltingly to climb up and down the scales.

  – All your beautiful names. Arcangela dell Cornetto. Lucia Soprano. Anna Maria of the Violin.

  Pica steps forward.

  – I used to play the violin. I couldn’t keep time and the concertmaster dismissed me from the lessons. Now they just call me Pica.

  The Maestro returns the violin to her.

  – Once I understood where my heart lived I dared not return. I knew that such perfect joy is not permitted a man in this world. Instead, I sent this beauty here, with instructions to the sisters that it not be repaired but put away. I was sure it would betray me, you see. That anyone who heard its music, the music of broken things, would know.

  Pica runs her fingers over the crack in the soundboard.

  – Yes. I saw it was broken, and I knew there was a story.

  The Maestro’s black cloak is the curtain flapping at the edge of the open window. Pica sits up, the violin clutched in her arms. The doctor is bending over her, his sausage fingers on her brow.

  – The child is on fire.

  Sister Beata sits beside the bed, her hands entwined in the beads of her rosary.

  – She lapses in and out of this. Speaking to someone who isn’t there. I fear the child is … possessed.

  The doctor makes a throaty noise of annoyance.

  – With all due respect, Sister Beata, we are no longer living in the Dark Ages. The girl is suffering from fever-induced delusions and nothing more. The fresh-air treatment can have that effect, although it has been infrequent in my experience. But to the point: I have consulted with various colleagues and I believe I have isolated the cause of the symptoms. She has an extremely rare condition known as batrachia, which involves waxy glandular secretions and excessive porosity of the skin.

  – Will she die of it?

  – Not likely, though the irritation may drive her mad. The symptoms are generally most pronounced in children, and then gradually lessen by the time the sufferer reaches adulthood, rather like the pimples one sees so often on the faces of adolescents. I suggest bathing her in warm, watered-down milk three times a week. And mind, she must stay immersed for at least an hour each time if this remedy is to be efficacious.

  In the garret she strips naked and climbs wincing into the steaming, silken liquid. Sister Beata stands in the doorway, arms folded, lips pressed bloodless with restraint.

  – I haven’t the time to watch you loll in a bath all day like the Queen of Sheba. The other girls shall take on this duty.

  Night. White sheets hung from the roofbeams to keep out the wind stir gently above her like sails. She is drifting out …

  – Wake up, magpie.

  Francesca enters with her permanent frown, hefting a basin of hot milk. Pica, sitting submerged to her neck in the wooden tub, watches her approach through half-closed eyes.

  – Do this, Francesca, do that. What do they think I am, their Nubian slave? I’m the daughter of an archbishop.

  Pica’s eyes open wide.

  – How do you know?

  – I know. Sister Beata knows. The Pope himself probably knows.

  – How did you find out?

  – The way you find anything out, dummy. First you find out who knows what you need to know. Then you find out what they want for it.

  – What do they want?

  – Money, sometimes. And other things. Sometimes you have to do the other things to get the money. (She curses and cuffs Pica on the back of the head.) Why am I telling you this? You get everything done for you, poor sick baby.

  She dumps what’s left in the basin on Pica’s head, kicks the side of the tub, and stalks out. Watery milk sloshes over the rim of the tub and drips, lento, on the floorboards. Pica sinks down further until she is completely submerged in a warm, white silence. She opens her eyes.

  Francesca returns later with another basin of milk. She stops, glances quickly around the room, bends closer to the tub and lets out a shriek. The basin falls with a crash, a comet of milk shooting across the dark floor.

  In the dormitory later that night, she listens, pretending to be asleep, while Francesca whispers to the girls gathered at her bedside.

  – Prudenza, Zillah, I’m telling you God’s truth. She was sleeping like a baby. I could see the bubbles coming up.

  Zillah’s voice: She was playing a trick on you, idiot.

  – I thought of that, hag. I pulled her hair. Shouted. Banged the tub. She didn’t budge. I didn’t know what to do, I was scared to death, so I hauled her out and all of sudden she started gasping, as if I was drowning her, in air. She puked a pailful of milk onto the floor, opened her eyes, and looked at me like she had no idea what ha
d happened. (She glances over to Pica’s blanketed form.) I’m telling you, that one can breathe underwater.

  Prudenza: Maybe she’s a changeling.

  Zillah: Or a sorceress.

  Francesca: I don’t care if she’s the daughter of the devil himself. All I know is, we can make use of this.

  They climbed stiffly from the coach onto the pier, the carpenter eyeing them in suspicious silence. Rightly, Flood thought, if you look at the three of us. A greybeard afraid of his own shadow, a brown man with twelve fingers, a girl in the dress of a boy. Now, as always, he expected a heavy hand on his shoulder, an inexorable summons.

  Turini suddenly stepped forward and bowed.

  – Countess, I did not know. The Count sent me here to tear up the ship’s planks, just before he died. I disobeyed. If you wish us to leave …

  Pica twisted her hat around in her hands and shook her head.

  They could see little of the ship’s exterior in the rainy gloom. Turini’s wife, Darka, and the children, the twin boy and girl, greeted them on the quarterdeck with respectful bows, which embarrassed Flood but did not seem to bother Pica. Like the carpenter, the woman and children did little more than stare, especially at the girl. Their new mistress. Darka took Pica’s hand and kissed it. She stepped back, her mouth moving silently, her hands clutched together.

  – She wants you to know, Turini said, that she loved your mother very much.

  As it was late, the carpenter showed them to the cabin that had been prepared for their arrival and brought them a late supper of bread, cheese, and wine.

  Instead of eating Pica explored the cabin, peered under the bunks, opened the drawers in the rough deal table, investigated the wardrobe. She found a narrow horizontal slot in the bottom of the cabin door, slid her hand through it and back out again.

  – Do you know what this is for? she asked Turini.

  The carpenter shrugged.

  – There are many things the Count did. No one knows why. One thing is for certain: you will get lost on this ship. We all did when we first came aboard.

  When he had gone, Pica sat down on the edge of her bunk and pulled off her shoes. Flood watched her drift away into her private thoughts. Since they had left the castle she had been their spur and goad, driving them onward. Now that she had reached her destination she suddenly seemed lost.

  Djinn sat at the table, gnawing at his bread in gloomy silence. Flood studied him, baffled as always as to what was going on inside the compositor’s head. Djinn spoke even less now, if possible, than he had as a boy, and seemed to take everything that happened in his stride, as if this journey into foreign lands was no better or worse than the long years he had spent in the castle. A laugh never escaped him, as far as Flood knew, and rarely even a smile. Djinn had grown into a beautiful young man, and it was clear from her shyness around him that Pica thought so too, but still he seemed to look out at the world with the watchful, innocent eyes of a child.

  Flood shivered, took a gulp of wine, and fought back a spasm in his throat. The cabin was cold, damp, ill-lit. Strange lodgings, though the bump of the hull against the pier reminded him all too keenly of the pulse of the castle’s machines.

  He glanced at Pica tugging off her soiled stockings and suggested that Darka might be able to find her some girl’s clothes.

  Pica frowned and Flood saw a blush steal into her cheeks.

  – I like these clothes. They’re loose. My skin is waxy, it needs to breathe. That’s what the doctor said.

  – Then there is something we have in common.

  She looked at him with a sudden eagerness.

  – So you can do this?

  She jumped up and placed her hand over the candle on the table. Flood gaped, too startled to act, as a filament of greasy smoke threaded upward from her index finger.

  – Don’t! he shouted, crossing the room.

  She glanced back at him with a look of mingled surprise and disappointment, and took her hand away slowly from the candle. A faint blue emanation haloed her fingertips.

  She shivers.

  In her shift she stands on a stone abutment under a bridge, cradling in her arms a basket weighted with stones. Prudenza ties a thick rope around her waist and knots it tight. She places a hand on Pica’s shoulder.

  – Pull once on the rope when you want to come up. Pull twice if you get into trouble.

  Francesca shoves Prudenza aside.

  – Don’t get into trouble. And don’t come up empty-handed. We’ll send you right back down.

  Francesca lifts the handle of the basket around Pica’s neck. Slowly she crouches and climbs backwards into the freezing water, pausing when she is half-submerged, her fingers frantically clutching the slimy stone of the abutment. The basket is too heavy and she loses her grip, plunging under the surface into a world of echoes and cloudy green light.

  She touches bottom, her feet sinking into gelid ooze.

  Fear urges her into motion and she begins to walk along the bottom, stirring up plumes of sediment. The sluggish water, warmer now, is still threaded with icy currents that brush against her like ghosts.

  She stoops now and again, picks up faceless coins, a rusted rapier hilt, a lady’s silk damask shoe embroidered with sequins. Anything that winks at her from the mire.

  As the rope goes taut she reaches the piers of another bridge, where the current grates through narrow stone arches with the moan of a bassoon. Beside the bridge lies a skeleton, half-buried in the muck, wrapped in chains. Shreds of lace and the remains of a velvet coat tell her that this was a nobleman. She finds a few coins in a buttoned pocket of the coat. In the cage of the ribs something gleams: a turquoise brooch.

  The basket is upended onto the wet stones. Pica sits nearby, soaked and shivering, hands tucked under her arms. With her sleeve Prudenza wipes at a lacquered snuffbox encrusted with yellow grit.

  – Look at this. It must be older than Sister Beata.

  Francesca laughs. And just as mouldy. We’re going to be rich, ladies. As rich as the Doge. As rich as Medici.

  Zillah slips a ring on her finger. As rich as Solomon.

  – It’s as wise as Solomon, dolt.

  – Who cares, cow. With this stuff we can buy … we can buy …

  Francesca snatches an ivory comb from Zillah’s hands.

  – Anything we buy, the nuns will take from us. No, we have to hide our loot for now. Hoard it up until we can think of a really good use for it. We’ll get the magpie here to take the basket back down and hide it for now.

  Prudenza gestures at Pica and speaks in a whisper.

  – We should give her something, shouldn’t we?

  Pica is handed the dead man’s weathered coins.

  – Here’s to the magpie!

  While Francesca and her friends squabble over their haul, Pica, her back turned, spits the brooch into her wrinkled palm and closes her fingers around it, the pin biting into her cold and trembling flesh.

  A sound woke him. A low, tremulous note, like the wind through the hollow of a wave.

  He lifted his head and collided with something soft, silk and embroidered. For a moment he breathed in the faint scent of the perfume sachet he had taken from around Irena’s neck, heard her breath in his ear as the bed shuddered beneath them.

  He opened his eyes. A cushion had been tied with sail thread to the slats of the bunk above his.

  He was on the ship. They were heading out to sea. He lay still, his mind struggling upward out of the pool of time in which he had been submerged.

  There it came again. That grave, inhuman whistle.

  He rose from the bunk and crossed the room unsteadily, his bare feet feeling their way across the uneven planks. The door of the cabin was unlocked. He hobbled along a short passage to a blank end wall which slid aside at his approach. In the centre of a long, low-ceilinged space stood his printing press, braced with timbers and bolted to the deck with iron bars. Setting it up, Turini had suggested, was the only way to keep the press safe f
rom the tossing and pitching of the ship.

  Against the hull sides of the room, fastened by huge iron brackets, stood the type cabinets and stout ink casks with huge brass stopcocks in their bellies. Ludwig hung from his hook in the corner, his glassy eyes fixed on the press.

  At the work table sat Djinn, cleaning the long-unused type with a brush, a bottle of solvent at his elbow.

  – Did you hear that sound? Flood asked.

  The compositor glanced up in surprise and then shook his head.

  Flood came into the room and looked around with mingled delight and guilt. While he lay curled up in his bunk the first few days, overcome with seasickness, Djinn had obviously been busy. Everything was spotlessly clean. Everything in place and, he realized with a tremor in his heart, ready for work, if he so wished. Printing at sea. He shook his head at the thought, and then the memory came to him of his platform at the castle, shuddering to a halt at the striking of the hour.

  He noticed then that as Djinn finished cleaning each piece of type he set it into his composing stick.

  – What are you working on? he asked.

  – Remembering.

  Flood followed the elusive sound through the belly of the ship. Climbing the ladders up through the decks, he rose into the glare of sunlight, the flap of canvas, the smells of tarred rope and freshly stone-scrubbed planks. Dread shot through him when he saw that they were out of sight of land.

  On the quarterdeck, Turini was down on one knee, knocking together a pair of boards. With his root-like beard and callused hands, the carpenter reminded Flood of a tree, as if in his features one could see the knotty, living wood that became the smoothly planed chairs and shelves he had been making for their use and comfort since they came aboard.

  Darka stood beside him at the helm, as unlike her husband as it appeared possible for someone to be. Like water she flowed rather than moved, her supple body seemingly able to take any shape needed, so that it was she who slipped down into the tight spaces her husband could not reach in his endless hunt for loose planks and leaks. When she saw Flood she slid a leg out and nudged her husband with a toe. Turini hastily stood.