Alberto was a carpenter: the best in all of Allora. During the day he would build beds, tables and chairs for his paying clients, and at night he would build toys for his children.
With each new toy Alberto made, a new sound filled the house: squeals of delight as Anna Marie jumped off her spinning chair; screams of anger as Aida cried for Antonio to give back her favourite doll; and cries of “Gallop on! Gallop on!” as this same Antonio raced his wooden horse up and down the stairs.
Their house remained bright, loud and bustling for seven happy years until the sickness came.
The sickness appeared in the coldest month of winter, but it did not reach Allora until spring.
The first to fall ill were the men working on a new railway that linked Allora to the north, then the doctors who tended them and the artists who had come to paint the town. Only one family was wealthy enough to flee. The mayor took himself and his family on a long holiday to a place the sickness had not spread.
“Good luck!” he cried over his fat shoulder as a plush coach drawn by six white stallions carried them far away.
In the beginning, the dead were buried in the graveyard – one, then two, then three to a single plot – but as the sickness spread other measures had to be taken.
A gate was built at the back of the graveyard and a thin staircase carved into the stone with steps leading down to the water. No longer buried, the dead were wrapped in blankets and cast out into the violent, surging sea.
As the number of dead mounted and the number of living fell, the cobbled streets of Allora grew quiet. Houses went unpainted and shutters, once thrown open to greet spring, were pulled tightly closed. Even the Finestra sisters didn’t poke their big noses out.
Just like the unfinished paintings that lay abandoned in the streets, the town of Allora itself began to fade.
The sickness rose up the hill – house by house – until it finally reached Alberto’s home.
It took the eldest child first. Alberto spotted the purple mark behind Anna Marie’s left ear as she read a book in her favourite chair. Then, Antonio fell ill. While he was ailing in his bed, the mark came upon little Aida.
Violetta and Alberto tended to each child as they fell sick. They kissed them when they cried, hugged them when they whimpered and when the time came for each of them to go they answered, “Yes, of course: one day, we will meet again.”
Keeping her promise, Violetta joined them two days later. The plague bearers came to collect their bodies that evening, but Alberto wouldn’t let them.
“I can’t,” he had said to the two men waiting at the front door. “I can’t let you throw them away. Not into that cruel sea.” Even from where he stood outside the highest house on Allora Hill, Alberto could see foam shooting up from where the waves crashed against the grey stones below. He could not bear to think of his family thrown in there.
“You must get rid of them somehow,” the men had replied. “You can’t let them stay inside. It will spread the sickness quicker.”
“I’ll bury them.”
“All the coffin makers are dead. We collected the last one this morning.”
“Then I’ll make their coffins myself.”
And that is what Alberto did. He went into his workshop and for the first time built something for the dead instead of the living. He carved a coffin for his wife, a coffin for his eldest daughter, a coffin for his only son, and a coffin for little Aida. Each was smaller than the one before and, like Babushka dolls, could fit inside the other.
When the coffins were finished and his family buried, Alberto returned to his workshop and began to make his own. But by the time he finished, the plague had left the town. The mayor returned from his holiday, the Finestra sisters reopened their shutters and people passed gaily up and down the streets of Allora once more.
But instead of joining them, Alberto sat beside his coffin every day, waiting for the purple mark to come back and claim him too.
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2018
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