He busied himself with the COMMODIOUS CABINET, asking Sibella, “What are your deathly symptoms? Do youse have the not-far-from-the-chamber-pots? Are youse qualmish in the belly parts?”
Teo’s eyes ran blurrily over the word “COMMODIOUS” painted on the cabinet. It was at that moment that the page of the book that Teo had wanted to consult all these weeks finally flashed up involuntarily in her mind. It was page 245 of Diseases of Childhood, 1889, a Commodious Compendium for Caring Parents. She had memorized that book several years ago, lying in bed afflicted with the mumps.
And there it was on page 245, the one fact that revealed the great lie of Sibella’s existence and identity. Teo read aloud: “ ‘Females may carry the hemophilia gene to the next generation, yet they do not suffer from its fatal symptoms themselves.’ ”
“Beg yours?” whispered Signor Alicamoussa.
Fabrizio shouted, “I knew it! I always thought it was strange. Why should a girl with a dangerous blood disease want to play with leeches, of all things? It was obvious; we just couldn’t see it.”
Surprisingly, Teo’s first emotion on hearing her own words aloud was pity for Sibella. She spoke slowly: “You were never sick. But you were told that you were by those who were supposed to take care of you, in order to keep you frightened and passive, and to make you act as a spy.”
Signor Alicamoussa whispered, “Now the gatto is out of the sacco!”
Sibella sank to the floor. The blood on her hand was already dry—it had clotted perfectly well. She looked at the rusty stain on her skin, and then at Teo, and back at her hand again. She opened her mouth, but could not speak.
“I suppose,” thought Teo, “it is a big thing to be given your life back.”
And surprisingly, she was happy to have bestowed that gift. Even more so because now Renzo, instead of embracing Sibella, was folding Teo herself in his arms in a long, warm hug. Her dizziness returned. She felt dreadfully hot and cold, as if her skin was a glacier covering a deep vein of hot lava. Renzo too swayed, looking white as mozzarella.
From inside Renzo’s arms, Teo cried, “The fact that Sibella’s not a hemophiliac means she really was as much the victim of Miss Uish and Bajamonte Tiepolo and her horrible father as any of us!”
Renzo added in a muffled voice, “And it also means that Harold Hoskins double-crossed Il Traditore. He gave him a hostage for whom he cared absolutely nothing. The cruel hemophilia trick proves that. Harold Hoskins never intended to keep his promise to attack Venice!”
Signor Alicamoussa said wonderingly, “So the Pretender played dingo on his Signor Pipistrelly! Infamous doings all round!”
“And even more infamous,” answered Renzo sadly, “is that we have the Pretender’s vile Half-Dead disease.”
“You don’t have to,” said Sibella.
The Venetians looked up, a faint hope stirring in their slow-beating hearts.
“Are you really an enchantress?” asked Fabrizio. Sibella shook her head.
Renzo urged, “Sibella, did they give you some secret recipe for curing the disease? In case you contracted it yourself while you were a hostage?”
She nodded. “Please bring me my leeches. And some lemons. And a mortar and pestle.”
“So that’s what you were doing when I saw you in your cabin?” Teo asked.
“I’d been told to make them excited before I crushed them. The blood is better aerated.” Sibella screwed up her pretty face.
Now all the sailors lined up to swallow spoonfuls of the medicine Sibella prepared using extracts of leech and citrus. Within a few hours, the pink was starting to return to their cheeks and their swollen gums were less excruciating to the touch.
“Let the rest of those nice little leeches stay up on deck,” suggested Teo generously. “Give them a bit of fresh air, do!”
It was then that Sibella confided her deepest ambition. “I never wanted to learn wortcunning and leechcraft at all. They made me do that … they threatened.… I don’t like magic! I hate insects! I detest everything slimy! I just want to be a dressmaker. It’s all I ever wanted. Yet no matter how much I begged, they never let me touch a needle, because of the hemophilia they were pretending that I had. I just wanted a haberdashery cabinet, not a pillow box, you know, with cotton reels, egg-eyed needles, Ne Plus Ultra pins, marking cotton, mending cotton, enamel-lined thimbles, pearl buttons … a crystallized metal needle mill …”
Sibella’s voice grew dreamy. Signor Alicamoussa chortled approvingly, “Is no snoot to her at all now! A seamstress will suit nicely. And look at youse soft-hearted boys! Not a dry nose in the house!”
“There’s a convent on Giudecca where the orphan girls are taught exquisite needlework,” Renzo said. “They make the wedding dresses for all the high society in Venice. We know the Abbess at the House of the Spirits. She will arrange everything in a moment, won’t she, Teo?”
“Wedding dresses!” marveled Sibella. “With guipure lace and insertions …?”
“All that.” Teo smiled. “Valenciennes edging, duchesse flouncing and all the novelties in veils. Ruching of tulle and satin ribbon. Broussa brocade. Genoa velvet with a glacé frill. Plus, I think we’ve a new best friend for you.”
“Maria?” Renzo smiled. A boarder at the Giudecca convent, Maria was every bit as interested in fashion as Sibella was, and possibly even more expert.
“So you won’t hand me over to the Mayor and have me put on trial when we get to Venice?”
“Of course not,” said Teo stoutly. “You’ve lived your trial already. It’s time someone was kind to you. And no one knows how to be kind like Venetian nuns, let me tell you.”
All at once, Sibella’s perfect porcelain skin grew blotchy. Her lovely blue eyes screwed up. Her poised shoulders crumpled.
Teo rushed over and put her arms around the girl.
“Sibella,” she observed softly, “at a moment like this, it would be detestably banal not to cry.”
“Is there a Young Master or a Miss Alicamoussa?” asked Sibella, sewing away, seated cross-legged on the scuttlebutt.
Signor Alicamoussa looked sad, a feat he managed picturesquely. “My wife, Mercer, and myself have been blessed with infant squirrels, lion cubs and even bare-eyed cockatoo chicks, yes. Yet thus far our fecundity does not extend to human progeny of our own.”
Sibella nodded toward the Venetian sailors clustered fondly around him.
“I’d say these boys would rather have no other father but you, sir. Given a choice.”
“Ah,” sighed Signor Alicamoussa, “that possibility is tempting as a dripping honeycomb to a spiny anteater, yes. Yet I am not adopterating any boy, not without that boy being agreeable to it.”
The sailors rushed to enfold the circus-master in a wordless hug.
Signor Alicamoussa burst into tears of delight. Instead of growing red-nosed and swollen-lidded, he simply looked even more dazzling than usual: his blue eyes glowing like dewy sapphires and his skin blooming a fresh rose color. “And nor shall they have any other father,” he declared. “Why, I already nourish the most hopeful hope! The Mayor shall be made to sign over these children to us.”
Renzo raised his eyebrows. “The Mayor?”
“Ah, but Mercer shall see to it upon the instant. My wife has the lingua biforcuta, the forked tongue. If anyone razzles her ribbon, it is as well to advise everyone in the vicinity to lie down in the dry grass and watch for the fireworks. No, I do not see the Mayor presenting any difficulties when she gives him her gobful.”
The sailors threw their hats in the air and cheered.
“Now,” asked Signor Alicamoussa, “where’s the bunting? Is it already forgotten, everything our dear Professor Marìn taught youse? Reckon that remembering him is how we’ll keep the dear fellow alive! When a ship returns home victorious, she should be snickered out in every color. Let’s see the Scilla dressed to the nines, yes!”
Renzo and Teo shared the predawn watch. The remnants of Miss Uish’s clothes were festooned on every
pole from the bowsprit to the sternpost. “More colorful than a corroboree frog in the mating season,” as Signor Alicamoussa put it. The wind riffled through them now, so that they sparkled like tinsel in the moonlight. How the sailors had enjoyed ripping those dresses and petticoats into rags! Then Sibella had set to, sewing them into neat bunting as deftly as if she’d been born with a needle in her hand.
Teo checked the barometer—without Sofonisba to predict the weather with her tail, the Scilla’s sailors had to rely on the glass. The pressure was rising fast. Teo was already looking forward to interviewing a kitten for ship’s cat when they arrived home. She’d been promised the choice of the most seaworthy felines.
From the way that Renzo was kicking the companionway and avoiding her eyes, Teo guessed he had something to say to her.
“Teo, you know I didn’t really care for Sibella ever. Not in that way. I was just being a gentleman. It is a gentleman’s duty …”
“What were you doing on your knees in Sibella’s cabin on Valentine’s Day then? Your duty?”
“Oh, Teo, no! It’s not what you imagine at all. I was sick—as sick as you were. She’d called me in to ask me about her trial in Venice. She was suddenly terrified that her father would somehow hear about it—and of what would happen if he found out that she was alive after all, and in Venice. I found myself asking if she really loved her father. And she said no, he’d sent her away to the Swiss finishing school when she was a baby, had refused to let her know who her mother was and so, as far as he was concerned …”
“ ‘My heart is as lead,’ is what she said,” Teo recalled. Yet she could not resist adding, “I hate to remind you, Renzo, but rhapsodomancy??!”
Renzo blushed like a Sicilian tomato. “Perhaps I did lose my head slightly. But when I saw Sibella so composed, so lacking in any emotion …”
“Like a beautiful icicle?”
“I realized that I enjoyed myself more with …”
“Untidy, clumsy, emotional …”
“Argumentative …”
“Venetian …”
“People,” concluded Renzo.
The horizon stirred with the faintest of gray light. Soon it would be dawn. Guttering night-lights spat quietly in the lanterns on the companionway. Just before the last one extinguished itself with a sigh, Renzo held out his hand and Teo took it.
The bell towers of Venice stood like pale pencils on the distant horizon as the Scilla plowed past the islands of the lagoon. Everyone leaned over the taffrail, eagerly breathing in the faint woody smoke of Venice’s chimneys. Just an hour away were the streets where they had once played; the home of Mercer and Sargano Alicamoussa, where they would now live; Ca’ Foscari University, which Teo and Renzo hoped to attend; the Archives, where Teo one day planned to work; and the canals, where Renzo would follow his father’s and all his grandfathers’ profession of gondolier.
The lagoon in no way resembled the frozen wasteland they had left on their journey to London. The mantles of ice had slipped from the islands of the barene. Tips of green pushed up through the dark earth.
Over a loud quacking and flapping of wings, Giovanni called, “And look, the alzavole have come back! That must mean winter is nearly over.”
Indeed, the ice was breaking up. The Scilla steered a careful clattering course between translucent sheets that were slowly melting as they drifted toward the deep sea.
Teo was worried. “If the ice is melting, then the Vampire Eels will be set free. You know they prey on … mermaids. What if Lussa and Flos …?”
“The mermaids knew what was awaiting them in these waters,” Renzo reminded her. “No more ambushes, except of the Eels by the mermaids, perhaps.”
“Look, marsh marigolds are blooming!” Teo pointed to a tiny island. “The first sign of spring!”
“Don’t you mean la calta, Teo? We are free to use the Venetian words again.”
“And don’t they feel good on the tongue? Can you see the salice?—the catkins are blossoming like white stars!” Teo turned to Renzo, “Let’s stop and pick some. We’ll be passing San Michele very soon. We can take them to your mother’s grave.”
Officer Gianni had been true to his word: he must have gone to the funeral that the Mayor had prevented Renzo from attending. For it was the little bunch of violets, carved and painted by Renzo, that helped them find his mother’s tomb among the hundreds of fresh mounds of the ice flood’s victims. The violets were carefully placed beside a simple stone that read Vittoria Antonello, January 1868—Christmas 1900.
Seeing Renzo’s anguished face, Teo asked, “Do you need to be alone awhile, Renzo? To say goodbye properly?”
He nodded gratefully. Teo squeezed his shoulder. “You know where I’ll be.”
Walking east and then south, Teo found and then parted the bushes that hid the graves of her real parents, Marta and Daniele Gasperin, murdered by Bajamonte Tiepolo when she was still a baby. She kissed the cold stone, and laid a calta upon it. Then she placed her hand on the grave and pressed it there, closing her eyes and listening intently. Once, she had felt the stone heartbeat of the statue of Signor Rioba. Perhaps …? But that was back when she’d had the comforting weight of The Key to the Secret City in her pinafore, and everything had seemed possible.
“We’ve lost so much,” she murmured sadly, thinking of Renzo’s mother, Professor Marìn, the wrecked streets of Venice, and the magical book that had led her and Renzo into and out of so many perils.
Suddenly, Renzo was at her side, his eyes still wet, but his face composed.
“What do you think it will be like, living with Signor Alicamoussa’s menagerie?” he asked her in a bravely neutral tone of voice.
“Noisy,” answered Teo. “But his wife, Mercer, is exceedingly clever, they say. She’s writing a novel, you know. It will be fun to talk English with her. And I expect you’ll travel with the menagerie. Go back to London, even. I wish I could …”
“Your adopted parents are not going to give you up again.”
“They’re Incogniti now. They’ll understand if I ever have to …”
“Save Venice again?”
The coracle slipped back toward the Scilla.
They were almost alongside when Fabrizio called down from the crow’s nest. “What’s that, in the water? Behind you! Something swimming.”
Renzo and Teo blanched. The last time something had swum toward them in this stretch of the lagoon, it had been a pack of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s sharks. They stared anxiously behind them. Something was ruffling the surface of the water, just below it.
Fabrizio shouted, “I should just about think … but I don’t believe … the thing is, it looks like … a book.”
Teo peered down into the green-purple water. A leather-bound volume was propelling itself toward them, opening and closing its pages like a creamy butterfly.
Signor Alicamoussa’s joyous face appeared over the taffrail. “I think youse’ll find that’s not just any old book, ragazzi. Pearler!”
“The Key to the Secret City!” breathed Teo. “It’s found us again. It knew we’d come to visit your mother.”
Renzo stood up, flung off his jacket and dived.
“Renzo!” screamed Teo. He was, like many Venetians, a remarkably poor swimmer, and the water was as yet only slightly less cold than solid ice. Teo kicked off her shoes and dived in after him.
Renzo, struggling to keep his head above the water, was already cradling the book in his arms. “It is The Key!” His teeth chattered inside his smiling mouth. “It really, really is.”
“Let’s get it out of the water and see what it says!”
Teo was half eager and half afraid. The Key had always written its very specific, though sometimes mysterious, instructions for them upon its blank pages. Those instructions had already led them into encounters with a cannibal butcher, a headless Doge and a number of hungry winged lions, not to mention Bajamonte Tiepolo himself.
“I suppose we’ll open it and it’ll say, ‘Well
done, Undrowned Child! Fine work, Studious Son! Now go and have a good long rest.’ ” Renzo’s smile was perhaps a tiny bit smug as he hauled himself up the Scilla’s ladder with The Key under his arm.
“Only one way to see,” said Teo with a grin, climbing up behind him. Seizing the book, she spread it out on top of the water barrel and opened to the first page.
“Oh, gristle and guts!” she exclaimed.
Bajamonte Tiepolo
The life of Bajamonte Tiepolo, the Venetian Traitor, is explored more fully in my previous book, The Undrowned Child (see undrownedchild.com). After a failed conspiracy against the Venetian state in 1310, the real Bajamonte Tiepolo, a proud nobleman, was sent into perpetual exile, his palazzo was razed, and a Column of Infamy was erected to his eternal dishonor. He spent the rest of his life plotting against Venice. In The Undrowned Child, however, he is murdered by a state assassin, and his ghost returns nearly six hundred years later to wreak revenge on the city that humiliated him.
The Scilla
There really was a floating orphanage in Venice called the Scilla.
The philanthropist David Levi Morenos came up with the idea of “converting a warship into a peaceful shelter for the orphaned sons of seafarers and to educate them in the traditional profession of their family.” I took the liberty of setting my story a few years earlier than the real foundation date of June 1906.
The original Scilla was an old gray-painted sailing ship. Boys were usually taken in at the age of seven, and “graduated” when they had learned all the skills necessary to gain employment as merchant sailors, naval mechanics or fishermen.
The first intake was just half a dozen. By 1922, there were 102 boys living on board, while seventy-two younger children were housed in dormitories on shore at San Raffaele, not far from the Zattere, where the Scilla was originally moored.
Aboard, the young sailors slept in double rows of hammocks hung from metal frames and poles. They rose at five-thirty a.m., winter and summer. They tidied up their hammocks and washed ten at a time in big tubs (so in reality Teo would have had problems concealing her identity!). The boys then washed their underwear in the same water.
The Mourning Emporium Page 32