The Mourning Emporium

by Michelle Lovric

  “So they’re planning to get to London by magic means,” guessed Renzo.

  “Baddened magic,” Teo whispered.

  Signor Alicamoussa agreed. “The Ghost-Convicts gossip exactly thus. And also they chatter of their secret ally, who will provide the means for their soldiers to cross the English Channel.” He lowered his voice, “This bloke, they call him Signor Pipistrelly.”

  “The bat!” exclaimed Renzo and Teo with one voice.

  Renzo produced a piece of paper from his jacket and began scribbling. Teo, biting her lip, explained, “It is as a bat that Bajamonte Tiepolo shows himself when he does not choose to be—or cannot be—human.”

  “So,” Renzo was businesslike, “we must ask the mermaids to print warning bills on the Seldom Seen Press. We’ll urge Londoners to leave the city. So at least if … when … those criminal soldiers arrive here, there will be no victims waiting for them. Here’s something I drafted while we’ve been talking.”

  Everyone clustered around Renzo’s piece of paper. For the benefit of those who could not read, Signor Alicamoussa tested the words in his beautiful voice.

  “Clever you, Renzo,” breathed Sally Twinish.

  “If they’ll believe it.” Pylorus’s voice mixed doubt with hope.

  “Excellent!” Teo enthused. “I’ll take it straight to Lussa. No, Renzo, you can’t come.” She pointed to his portrait on the WANTED poster. “It’s not safe. You’re not between-the-Linings.”

  Signor Alicamoussa mused, “Reckon it cannot hurt our prospects, nor those of Londoners, if they are forewarned. Give ’em a chance to shoot through, at least. Tommaso, the pumpkin-sellers can distribute the printed papers in their barrows, yes!”

  The District Disgrace pleaded, “And Teo, can you askth them pretty ladies if they kin help Tobias? Tell ’em we kint do wivout him.”

  “Course I will.”

  “Run like the wind in the fur of a cheetah-cat, Teodora,” implored Signor Alicamoussa, “and be careful, dearest girl. Youse’ll know why.”

  “Why?” asked Bits. “No grown-ups can see her.”

  “But ghosts-in-the-Slaughterhouse can,” explained Renzo. “And they’re looking for her.”

  “The water is melting! The ice, I mean!”

  In the cavern’s pool, all the icebergs had dissolved and a pleasant steamy atmosphere made Teo feel as if she was inside a ROYLE’S PATENT SELF-POURING TEAPOT.

  Lussa looked somewhat smug, insofar as smugness was compatible with her royal demeanor. “It came to a little Altercation betwixt our Venetian Selves & our London Sisters. My own Pretty Ladies, I fear, lost their Heads & their Tempers, and They emptied all the PATENT NOSTRUMS FOR WOMEN’S WEAKNESSES into the Water.”

  Flos took up the story. “And da water fizzed like we’d dropt acid in! Yoiks! Ye shoulda heared dem girlies bemoaning what we’d did.”

  “So we dropt some more,” chimed in Marsil.

  And the misbehaving Venetian mermaids had in this way made a most useful discovery, as Lussa now explained. DR. WORDEN’S WATER FOR WEAK WOMEN, DR. BOWDER’S COMPOUND SYRUP OF INDIAN TURNIP and DR. WYNKOOP’S KATHARISMIC HONDURAS had one thing in common: the ability to melt ice.

  “So we can kill two birds with one stone,” Teo realized. “Protect the poor human ladies of London who have been ruining their health with that rubbish, and at the same time save the Thames from freezing over!”

  Lussa agreed: “So runs our own Thinking.”

  Teo explained Signor Alicamoussa’s discoveries and Renzo’s idea. “Have you fitted up the Seldom Seen Press, Lussa?”

  “It is indeed assembled, yet our London Sisters are against our employing It. They claim that the Ink releases Noxious Fumes that—”

  “I can guess,” sighed Teo. “But you can print the handbills to warn London?”

  Flos was already floating the beautiful press over to the walkway. Teo’s heart leapt with homesickness for Venice. Only a Venetian printing press could look like this: an airy construction of bone, carved oyster shells and pearls. She handed Flos the piece of paper on which Renzo had written his message for London. Flos busied herself composing type with expert fingers, swearing lightly at some of Renzo’s more florid grammatical constructions.

  IMMENSE DANGER TO LIFE AND PROPERTY …

  INEXORABLE FORCES OF EVIL … SAME WHO ATTACKED

  VENICE … THOUSANDS MORE IN LONDON, PERIL PROPORTIONATELY GREATER … THE FUNERAL

  PROVIDING AN OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE

  MAXIMUM CARNAGE …

  Teo turned to Lussa, raising her voice over the clicking of bone type. “Do you remember the boy Tobias Putrid? Who came with us on our first visit here?”

  “Not loikly to forget a boy who smells like dat,” muttered Flos.

  Teo explained his plight. The Venetian mermaids hubbubed in sympathy, “Poor laddie’s cabobbled.”

  “Bedlam,” sighed Lussa, “is beyond our Reach by Water. We dare not take to the River, for We have not yet discovered what Creatures killed the Melusine. For the Moment, Teodora, prithee take Comfort that the Insane Asylum has a fine tall Cupola, and does at least lie a little away from the Thames. Young Tobias may be Safer than any of You.”

  Marsil, busily ripping up rags, sighed. “And our London sisters woan help. They is took agin the boy because o’ the smell on ’im. They tink he carries the cholera in his pocket. Anyways, they is foolly occupied doing what dey do best, drinking Antispasmodic Tea and eatin’ sponge cakes. They say it’s critomancy—divination usin’ cake. S’far as I can see, it means they eat a lot of cake, they gets the bellyache, they swig down their soothin’ syrops and then they gets a bit giddy and sees things. No sign of their old famoused bows ’n’ arrows. No more use than a headache, any of them.”

  From an inner cavern came the sound of ladylike hiccupping and the clink of china.

  “Ain’t I tellin’ ye?!” Flos glared. “I’d like to stave in da ribs of whatever cannibal quack makes his moneys selling dat droffel stuff to innocent foolish laydies!”

  Teo asked, “What are you doing?”

  Not just Marsil, but all the Venetian mermaids were hard at work shredding rags and fashioning them into large nests. Stacked on the rim of their pool were the Venetian paintings they had saved and brought to London. The silken cocoons made by the Sea Spiders lay in wet heaps.

  “Dem cocoons has all shriveled up in da cold,” explained Flos.

  “Where are the Sea Spiders?”

  Flos answered indignantly, “Dem wibbling girls had conniptions ’bout da arachnids. Dey begrudged ’em even da dead flies inside this cavern—everythin’s droppin’ wiv da cold. We had to lodge da poor beasties in the tunnels o’ da ’oomin trains, long wiv all dem squished-up ghosts what lives dere. Poor thanks for all dere hard work, says I. Dat Pucretia! Dat Gloriana! An’ worst of all, dat Nerolia! Wouldn’t I love to settle dere hash with a nice little vindaloo! But dey just shriek like the girlies dey is at da tiniest whiff of a chili.”

  “They’re not niver gonna do nuffink,” muttered Marsil. “They’s about as useful as a trapdoor on a gondola.”

  An hour later, Teo was back at the Scilla, breathless from carrying the first sack of sea-scented handbills.

  While the pumpkin-sellers quickly stuffed them into their jackets, Teo recounted the melting properties of patent remedies for feminine weakness to the extended crew of the Scilla.

  Renzo was examining the handbills. “There’s a spelling mistake here … and look …”

  “Yer rattlin’ my reefer, boy!” In the last few days, a great deal of nautical lingo had cleaved to Turtledove’s fluent tongue. Now the dog’s rear leg lifted itself above the deck. Renzo hastily closed his mouth. Teo continued as if he had not spoken.

  “So,” she concluded, “all we need to do is get our hands on all the patent feminine medicines in London, and empty them into the Thames, and …”

  “All we have to do,” repeated Pylorus Salt dryly.

  “I ain’t sendin’ me childe
r out on the streets to rob the chemists,” said a concerned Turtledove. “ ’Twouldn’t be right. I dint raise a pack of thieves! An’ they might git caught. It’s broad daylight in Piccadilly! An’ there be Ghost-Convicts abroad!”

  Fabrizio held up his hand. “We don’t need to steal. To save London,” he asserted, “I think we can rightfully use some of our convict treasure. We still have three gold sovereigns.”

  The Mansion Dolorous gang were despatched to Heppell & Co. Chemists in the Strand. Teo, accompanying them, was astonished to see the undulating glass-fronted cabinets lining the walls floor to ceiling, all packed with patent remedies for female weakness.

  Three gold sovereigns effectively emptied those cabinets. The astonished assistant at Heppell & Co. kindly threw in a wheeled delivery cart as a gift. The boys and girls returned to the mermaids’ cavern staggering under their load of DR. BONKER’S CELEBRATED EGYPTIAN OIL, RAMSEY’S TRINIDAD AROMATIC BITTERS, BEGG’S ALOCASTER BALM AND VELVETINA, PAWNEE LONG LIFE BITTERS and THE GREAT SHOSONEES REMEDY OF DR. JOSEPHUA.

  “Not enough!” barked Flos. “Ye has to go to da source.”

  But their first sight of the mermaids had reduced the Londoners to speechless awe.

  “You mean the Farmysootical Society in Bloomsbury Square?” breathed Tig eventually. “That’s ever so grand. And rich. I doan fink they needs our pye-rat money.”

  “Anyway,” said Teo, “we’ve just spent the last of it.”

  “Den ye’ll jest have to take it,” attested Flos. “Da Farmysooticals will be saved by dis jest as much as da rest of London. I would guess as some of ye ’oomin infants knows how to get into a locked storeroom if ye has to?”

  Thrasher and Pylorus hurried off.

  Turtledove, in the meantime, had paid a visit to Harrods. He returned with a small metal object in his mouth.

  “DR. WRINCH’S DEW DROP REVOLVING LAWN SPRINKLER.” He grinned. “We can take it in a skiff along the Thames, de-icin’ to suit.”

  Renzo was tired of defending his courage. Teo had done her best to stick up for him, yet everyone persisted in seeing her as the heroine and him as her somewhat foppish and useless sidekick with the unnecessary vocabulary. Renzo was fed up with skulking about the Scilla, hiding away like a coward. Anyway, he’d just composed an eloquent new handbill urging Londoners to empty their own medicine cabinets into the river. Why shouldn’t he deliver it to the mermaids himself?

  “I can take care of myself,” he muttered.

  Having tucked his ferro penknife into his shoe and pulled a black mourning beret over his head, Renzo quietly climbed down the ladder and stole into Clink Street. He pressed his back against the dank bricks, breathing in the humid air. The stone seemed to stir behind him, as if making a comfortable niche for his shape.

  “Ghost-breath!” he whispered, hastily moving away.

  A few of the original handbills blew down the street. Renzo saw one affixed to a lamppost. Five London children were standing beneath it, laughing.

  “ ‘Dreadful disaster coming!’ ” quoted one mockingly. “ ‘Evacuate London!’ ”

  “Wot pompous rubbish, eh! This is just the nobs’ way of clearing the poor people out of London for the old Queen’s funeral, hain’t it? A trick. No way I’m missing that show!”

  Renzo groaned quietly. He turned up his collar and blew on his hands.

  “When I go back to the Scilla,” he reflected, “I’m going to tell them that we must paint the parrots black. We can call them mourning birds and teach them to sing hymns, and maybe I can go and borrow some jet beads from Tristesse and Ganorus for Rosato to decorate the cages.… And while I’m there,” he thought, “perhaps I’ll just borrow some of that best mourning licorice that I tasted there, and those tasty aniseed comfits.…”

  Renzo was embroidering on this idea when two bobbies approached him from behind. They were rather strange-looking policemen, for their skin was deeply tanned and their wrists were scarred with the rusted imprints of shackles. One was missing an ear. Neither was correctly buttoned into his stiff blue serge uniform. Both scratched and pulled at their cuffs and helmets.

  Too late, Renzo caught a glimpse of them.

  The suntanned bobbies were on him in a second. Renzo was bundled into a black growler that was waiting on the street corner.

  Renzo struggled and kicked as ferociously as he knew how. One of the bobbies dealt him a dizzying blow to the side of the head, shouting, “Ya little bunyip!”

  “Newguyte Prison!” the other bobby snarled at the driver. “Fast as ya like, mate.”

  Three hours later, Renzo was led into a courtroom at the Old Bailey.

  He had passed the intervening hours in a crowded cell that ran with excrement and tears. No one had given him anything to eat or drink.

  He had plenty of time to ponder what had happened to him.

  “Those bobbies were Harold Hoskins’s criminals,” he concluded. “Not ghosts, because the driver could see and hear them. But why didn’t they take me straight to Bajamonte? And why all this piracy rigmarole?”

  After a few minutes’ thought, Renzo answered his own questions. “This must be what he intended all along. Il Traditore’s getting someone else to do his dirty work, as usual. In this case, British justice. And it isn’t enough just to kill me. Bajamonte Tiepolo knows how to hurt me in the most painful way. He wants me utterly dishonored and my name blackened, and Venice’s too, before I am put to death.”

  “Lorenzo Antonello!” a suntanned guard shouted in a broad Australian accent. Renzo approached the cell door apprehensively. The guard unlocked the door, grabbed his ear and propelled him into a side corridor, where three men in their underwear struggled in ropes. Their mouths were gagged with tufts of wool.

  The false guard jammed Renzo against a wall. Another man, whose slashed face was barely hidden by his scarves, tied a pirate bandanna around Renzo’s head, forced his lips open with a filthy hand, and blacked out two of his teeth with a piece of bitter coal. Finally, the first man clapped a patch over Renzo’s eye and a worn-out-looking parrot on his shoulder. Its poor feet were wound around with cruelly biting wire, the ends of which the guard fastened under Renzo’s armpit so the parrot could not fly away. Now Renzo looked horribly and humiliatingly like the WANTED poster.

  He was dragged into a room arrayed in elegance and blazing light. The public seats were occupied by an ugly-looking mob.

  A woman yodeled in a deep, coarse voice, “Speed the wombats, what a shameless bast …,” but was quickly hushed by her companions.

  “They’re Hooroo criminals, every one of them,” Renzo realized. “Even the ones dressed as women!”

  The face of the prosecution barrister shone with intelligence. His wig was so angular and his vivid green eyes so wide apart that he had the appearance of a praying mantis—and indeed, his black tailcoat hung stiffly, like the carapace of an insect. In front of him lay a pile of documents bound and sealed in red ribbon and wax. Renzo’s name was written in stabbing capitals on the front of each one.

  Renzo’s own shabby lawyer hiccupped as he rose unsteadily to present his client, whose name he could not quite remember.

  The judge glowered from his bench.

  When asked how he pleaded, Renzo asserted sturdily, on each count, “Innocent, sir.”

  “If you are not a pirate,” demanded the prosecution barrister, “how do you account for that parrot on your shoulder?”

  “I didn’t put it there. Actually, it’s tied on with wire.”

  Renzo started to lift his arm to show the wire tied underneath, but the barrister shouted, “Do you see that? The incorrigible criminal raises his hand against our judge! So young, and yet so wicked!”

  The crowd chanted, “Wicked as a rattlesnake’s wattle!” and “Stump me, too right!” Amid the clamor, a peevish “Baa!” was also audible.

  Renzo hastily lowered his arm. Meanwhile, the barrister continued smoothly, “The Admiralty has plentiful records of parrots correctly identifying pirates.
Now, Lorenzo Antonello, do you deny that on January sixteenth of this very year you made a raid upon the Rose la Touche, a raid in which you inflicted savage murder on the crew while her passengers were stripped of their valuables? Call the Frenchman!”

  A man shuffled into the witness dock.

  “Can you identify this boy?” the barrister demanded. “Is he the one who attacked you?”

  “Oui!” The Frenchman shuddered. “C’était lui, certainement.”

  Renzo protested, “I was there, but …”

  “You just stood and wrung your hands, did you? Like now?” mocked the barrister, imitating Renzo with deadly accuracy. “So you not only perpetrated the shameful act, but you are also too cowardly to admit it.”

  To be accused of shameful cowardice was too much for Renzo. “You’re being used!” he cried. “Someone is manipulating you into commiting a crime on his behalf.”

  “Contempt of court,” snapped the judge. “Added to the charge sheet.”

  The prosecution barrister continued smoothly, “As I was saying, savage murder …”

  “But I didn’t want to attack the Rose la Touche. My friend Teo was noosed—”

  “Yet you did. Set that down, clerk! Confession at the dock. Guilty as charged. And therefore guilty of attacks on diverse innocent French, Spanish, English and Dutch vessels. Also note that this testimony incriminates that other Venetian pirate, Teodora Gasperin. I put it to you, Lorenzo Antonello, that you two hardened criminals have come to London, intent on land-piracy upon the citizens of this city!”

  Someone in the crowd shouted, “String ’im up, the little tyke!”

  The judge slapped his gavel on the bench and nodded approvingly. The prosecution barrister winked at him, lightly tapping his hip pocket. The court clerk busied himself at the silent typewriting machine.

  The barrister snapped, “Now, boy, what do you know about the Half-Dead disease that now rages through the innocent population of London?”