If Romaso refused to help me, then I would offer the only thing I had as bargaining power, the opportunity to reunite him with Shirlyn. The diary and the travel glasses were the only proof I had. I hoped that they would be enough to convince Romaso to travel to Shirlyn with me. I also hoped he hadn’t already found another girlfriend.
MY LEFT knee smacked into something solid, while my arms and fingers closed in on the pockets of empty space where the black mare’s neck and mane used to be. I couldn’t stand up. My legs wobbled as the surface below me shifted with my weight. I gave up and sat down. I took off the travel glasses and shoved them in my backpack.
Then I smiled. Had it really worked? I looked out across the water at a fleet of gondolas that looked much like mine, the main difference being that my gondola had no gondolier. I’d entered Venice along the Grand Canal.
A single oar lay flat in the vessel, slightly to my right. I looked around to make sure no one was watching me before lifting the oar and dipping the blade into the water. The gondola bobbed forward as I pressed the water backward. Still seated, I lifted the oar and repeated the process until I reached a place where I thought I could step out.
Clutching both sides of gondola with my hands, I stuck my leg out and tapped the top of a wooden platform with the toe of my running shoe. As I leaned, the gondola leaned with me. I steadied myself and tried again. This time I drifted farther away.
Laughter echoed in my ears—the full, free kind that makes others want to laugh too. I looked up to find a short and way-more-attractive-than-I-thought-he’d-be Venetian standing on a platform above me. His face was a bit rounder than I expected and framed by dark curls that were similar to mine. He held out his hand to help me.
“Ciao, Siora!”
“How long have you been standing there?” I asked, completely embarrassed.
His large almond eyes narrowed. “Me scusa?”
“You’re Romaso, right? Hi, I’m Calla. Is there a place we can talk? I need your help.”
Romaso lowered his hand and backed away a few steps. “No capisso, Siora. Ti parli venessian?”
I looked at him pleadingly, worried that I’d scared him by using his name. The same thing would have freaked me out too, but I didn’t know how else to explain who I was or why I was there. With a deep breath I started over with what was essentially the truth.
“Shirlyn told me all about you. You speak English, don’t you?”
Romaso’s eyes widened again. “You are a friend of Shirlyn?”
I grinned. Shirlyn’s name, enunciated by Romaso, sounded more like Sheer-lean.
“Something like that,” I answered. “She basically adores you. Can we—”
“A friend of my Shirlyn!”
Before I knew what was happening, I felt two hands close in around my arms, lift me up out of the gondola and then steady me when my feet landed on the platform. Romaso wasn’t much taller than me, but I still had to look up to meet his eyes.
“Thanks,” I said. “I need your help. Could we—“
Romaso wasn’t done celebrating yet. He grabbed my hand and pulled me through a maze of tightly packed streets and bridges until we reached St. Mark’s Square, the Piazza. Every detail appeared before me, true to Shirlyn’s writing—the palazzos and churches and the ongoing construction of buildings along the canal. I was positive that he took me through the same streets where he and Shirlyn had said their good-byes or, rather, their until-we-meet-agains.
The marketplace roared with activity. Craftsmen of various trades attended their stalls in the square, punching their fists in the air as they yelled at dirt-faced children who were running after pigeons. Both the kids and the birds upset piles of goods and nearby customers. It was really noisy and I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying, but I really didn’t care—even if I was staring at everything with a stupid grin plastered on my face. I couldn’t help it. This was Shirlyn’s diary entries come to life.
Romaso laughed at my reactions as he pulled me back through the winding streets, away from the noise. Then he got very quiet. He let go of my hand.
“My heart aches, Siora.”
“You miss her, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“How long has she been gone?”
Romaso placed his hand on his chest and sighed. “A very long time.”
“Oh. How long?”
He squeezed my shoulders with his hands and searched my eyes as if trying to decide whether he trusted me. He lowered his voice. “Hours,” he said. “Two very long hours. I cannot bear it.”
Wow. He had it bad. Exactly as I’d hoped.
Shirlyn had left earlier that afternoon. I was relieved at this, having been careful not to search for Shirlyn there with Romaso, but with no way of knowing if the Romaso I would find would be dating someone else. I wanted to travel to Shirlyn at the time when she and her family had just returned to England from their vacation. For that, I needed Romaso’s help. Now I just needed to figure out a way to explain all of this to Romaso without scaring him out of helping me.
As I thought about this, it occurred to me that I must look very out of place in my sweatshirt and jeans.
“Romaso,” I whispered, “you haven’t said anything about my strange clothing. Do you think anyone else will notice?”
He gave me a wise and knowing look before he answered. “Shirlyn also does not wear the same clothes we do. A lot of trade happens here with other countries. I do not judge you, Siora. I will not,” he added as his eyes grew more intense, “let anyone turn away a friend of my Shirlyn.”
It became more and more obvious to me how Shirlyn had fallen for Romaso. I hoped that his charisma and passion for Shirlyn would be enough to help get past the story of the travel glasses, the news that I still needed to break to him. As we headed back to the canal, I decided to ask Romaso more questions, both to feel him out a bit and also because I was, unfortunately, stalling.
“Do you have a big family, Romaso?”
He considered this. “Yes and no. I never met my mother and father. My family is very large, all brothers.”
“You’re orphaned?” This information made me less anxious about some of my plans.
“Yes. I have a family of gondoliers, my brothers. That is what I am also. A gondolier,” he said.
“Do you sing?”
“Sing? You ask funny questions, Siora Calla.”
Not sure where to go from there, I added, “Can you show me how to row the gondola?”
“Ah, yes.” Romaso grinned, his round face dimpling. “I can show you.”
“Do you think we could find the gondola that you found me in?”
“Yes, Siora, I can.”
Along the way, Romaso pointed out the various gondoliers who’d raised him. The water traffic had died down since I’d arrived. Several men lazing around the canal returned Romaso’s greetings. They did not seem surprised to find Romaso with me, a girl his own age.
Romaso found my gondola in a secluded area along the canal. I looked at it and the area around it warily, not seeing any signs of the impact of my arrival. I sighed in relief that the boat was not broken, assuming that the water absorbed most of the impact.
“Strange,” he said as he inspected the simple black vessel. “How did you come to find this gondola? It is not one of the gondoliers’.”
I stepped into the boat. “It’s quite a story, some of it very sad. I traveled here from pretty far away. I also have a different kind of family, but I’m alone now.”
Romaso took his place on the gondola and began to row. “A sad story? You are in trouble.” He frowned.
“Yes, Romaso, I’m in a lot of trouble. I’m being chased by someone named Valcas who told me he’d protect me, and now I doubt whether he ever really wanted to help me at all.”
“What happened to your family?” Romaso rowed with an ease revealing many years of listening to others’ stories, their happy ones and those that brought them pain.
I responded,
half to myself, “I think both of my parents are dead now. Or, no, maybe they aren’t born yet. This is so messed up. Oh, but my other friends, my new family, I left them with the creep who’s chasing me. They told me to run away and that’s how I came here.”
Romaso stopped rowing. “I do not understand all of this. How did you come here in this gondola?” He was completely confused.
And it was about to get worse.
“THIS GETS really screwed up…I mean, strange, Romaso. I ran from my friend Enta’s house to Edgar’s horse and buggy. When I tried to escape, I found the horse disconnected from the buggy, so I took the horse and rode it here by myself.”
Romaso’s eyes narrowed again. He rowed into an area that was more populated with other gondolas, his eyes focused on me the entire time. I still hadn’t really answered his question, which made it more difficult to tell whether he would believe me when I did. Future clothes were apparently not a problem for Romaso, but not providing direct answers to pointed questions was definitely not acceptable.
I cleared my throat. “So, anyway, I have these glasses.” I felt the blood rise to my cheeks. “I stole them from Valcas, actually…to escape”
“He chases you because you are a thief?” gasped a very shocked Romaso.
This really was not going well. Flustered now, I begged, “Romaso, please let me finish! It’s not like that—I had no choice. There’s more. He wanted me to pretend that I was going to marry him. He needed to marry to get to the throne. I…I couldn’t get away any other way. I tried!”
I had to stop and get a grip on things. This was a lot more difficult than I’d thought it would be. I had enough problems talking to my twenty-first-century peers about everyday things, and here I was clamming up in front of a teenager from hundreds of years ago, trying to tell him about a method of time travel that I still didn’t even fully understand. I blinked back tears of embarrassment and frustration.
Romaso nodded, his large eyes demanding further explanation.
“Anyway, back to the glasses.” I opened my backpack and unrolled the glasses from my T-shirt, lifting them up so that Romaso could see. “These help me to travel farther and faster than the horse alone. These glasses are what helped Valcas find me even though we lived worlds apart. I wish these glasses were never invented, but I need them now to find Shirlyn. I am from twenty-first-century America, Romaso. While riding the horse, a black mare, I put on these glasses and appeared here in a black gondola. I asked the glasses to bring me to you, here in Venice in the seventeenth century.”
Romaso’s face twisted in an unreadable puzzle of emotion. His lips quivered.
“Wait, before you say anything—please. I have one more thing to show you.” Out of my bag, I pulled out the red journal that I knew Romaso would instantly recognize. “Se vedemo,” I read to him from the cover. “Romaso, I need you to travel with me to England, to see Shirlyn again.”
“How do we get to England by gondola?”
Romaso’s response worried me, but at least he was off of the topic of where I’d found the gondola. He wasn’t really getting the role the travel glasses played in all of this, though.
I explained that in order to reach Southern England we would not need to guide the gondola down through the Mediterranean and around Spain. Our route would be much more direct because I would be using the glasses. The part that I should have thought out better involved something Shirlyn never told Romaso, at least as far as I could tell from her journal entries. This detail was far more significant than the geographical distance that Romaso was concerned about. The Folkestone that Shirlyn described in her journal was not from the seventeenth century, but from a much later era. I wasn’t sure how Romaso would react to this news, so I let it go, not having any idea what the effects of that would be.
I also let Romaso take a better look at the journal he’d given Shirlyn as a gift. He smoothed his hand across the pages indented by Shirlyn’s pen. Romaso, being illiterate to the language, was unable to read any of it. He was nevertheless thrilled that her souvenir had been so well used even though, from his perspective, he’d given it to Shirlyn earlier that same day.
I was also grateful that the journal was well used, but what really mattered to me was what the journal did not say. To continue with my plan, I still needed the details for my next search, the whole reason I’d come to Venice to seek Romaso’s help. I had no idea what Shirlyn looked like, and even though she mentioned Edgar in her diary, I couldn’t bring myself to ask Edgar because I knew that it would only bring up past grief that would make him sad and withdrawn. When I was convinced that Romaso had calmed down again, I asked him to describe Shirlyn to me.
“Ah, my Shirlyn…so beautiful! A blonde.” He beamed, “With eyes like spice.”
“Huh? Which spice?” I asked warily, hoping that gathering information about Shirlyn wouldn’t take as long as explaining how I showed up in Venice.
“You know, the one for bread and cake. The spice—”
“Nutmeg?”
“No, no, that’s too dark. The spice you use with sugar to make—”
“Cinnamon?”
“Yes, eyes soft and brown like cinnamon spice.”
“Okay, good.” I nodded encouragingly. “Is she tall…or short like me?”
“Something in the middle, I think.” Romaso wrinkled his brows together.
“Thin or thick?” I tried opening my arms in gestures to get us moving along.
“Thin, like you only more thin. She needs to eat some more I think.”
I laughed. “What else? Tell me about her skin, her face.”
“Ah, that. Thin again, very light with the small cinnamons on the nose.”
“She has freckles? Oh, she sounds so pretty!”
Romaso’s smile grew so wide that I almost didn’t notice that he was actually blushing.
“What is her voice like, Romaso?”
“It ring-a like the bells in summertime!” he sang out as he steered us around a bend in the canal.
Ugh, he really couldn’t sing. I rolled my eyes. I was happy for Romaso and Shirlyn for whatever feelings they had between them, but the way Romaso gushed over her was, well, embarrassing. I really hoped Shirlyn was as charming in person. I needed all the help I could get.
Since I had enough details to search for Shirlyn based on her name, when and where she lived and what she looked like, I attempted to walk Romaso through our travel plans. The thought crossed my mind that I could have traveled on my own without Romaso now that I had enough information, but he really was excited about seeing Shirlyn again, and I knew from Shirlyn’s diary that she’d like to see him too. Not to mention the fact that Romaso was still perched on my gondola.
The sun began to descend from the sky, taking its warmth along with it. I offered to row since I’d be wearing the travel glasses, but Romaso was adamant that he would command the boat because he was a gondolier. This worried me for obvious reasons. He would insist on rowing while standing because that was how it was done. I tried to warn him that it wouldn’t take long before he would be blinded by bright white light, but that didn’t seem to bother him.
It was clear that he wouldn’t really be able to understand what I was talking about until it happened. So we agreed that he would row as long as he could and that as soon as the light got too bright for him to see, he would close his eyes and stop rowing. We also borrowed a second oar so that, if necessary, I could continue to paddle from my seat.
With that plan finally in place, Romaso and I left Venice without delay. I reread Shirlyn’s description of Folkestone Harbour as it appeared in the 1930s when her family returned from their extended holiday. The Halls’ estate was, she explained, within walking distance from the harbor. Romaso whistled as he deftly guided the gondola forward. Once we were steadily moving, I slipped on the glasses and focused on the next destination.
“MAN OVERBOARD!”
“Help! Help us please!” I called out to the men on the dock.
> Our arrival and the resulting impact hit Romaso more strongly and much more quickly than I’d expected. He really should have been seated with me inside the gondola instead of standing facing the bow.
“That’s a fancy cruise liner,” one of the men responded. “How’d that boy manage to fall out?”
I ignored his question and frantically searched the water for Romaso. I disembarked and jumped onto the dock before the men had a chance to tie down the bloated black vessel.
“Romaso? Romaso!”
“He’s all right! We have him over here. The boy’s a good swimmer.”
I had no doubt about that. I carefully approached a very upset, drenched Romaso. He looked wildly about him, with his hands to his ears. Part of me had been afraid that something like this would happen.
“Does he speak?” the larger of the men asked.
“Thank you so much, sir. I can take care of him from here.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. Thanks again. Oh, wait, actually. Can you please point me in the direction of the Halls’ estate?”
“Oh, so that’s where you’re headed? Should have figured that out given the liner you two came in. I’m surprised you don’t have an auto waiting. There don’t seem to be any other passengers aboard, either. Huh. Must be nice to have money.”
I winced, remembering that now I would have to explain what autos and cruise liners were to Romaso.
“The Halls’ estate, sir?”
“Yes, all right, I’m getting to that. There’s a road just on the other side of the beach to the right. Follow that road right up to the estate. You can’t miss it. I can see the chapel steeple from here. Are you sure he’s up for it?” The man nodded toward Romaso. “It will take about a half an hour on foot.”
“Thank you so much. I’ll sit here with him for a bit first. We’ll be fine.” Please, oh, please just leave us be, I yelled loudly in my head.
Travel Glasses Page 8