The Blackhope Enigma

by Teresa Flavin

  “Soranzo is out for your blood, Fausto.”

  The candles in the astrologer’s study flickered as he spoke, sending light dancing over a table covered with star charts and calculations.

  “I know, Vito,” said the man with the hooked nose and dark eyes. “You are the third friend to warn me.”

  “I fear for your safety, Fausto. Soranzo is not a man to be toyed with. He did not become one of the most powerful men in Venice without destroying the lives of those blocking his way.”

  “And he is also greedy.” Fausto Corvo paced back and forth as he spoke. “I fulfilled my contract with him for four new paintings. I wanted that to be the end of my dealings with the snake, but he wants others — paintings he has heard rumors about.”

  “Enchanted paintings?”

  Corvo came to an abrupt stop.

  “Yes, enchanted paintings — those that by their very nature challenge all that we once understood. And I wonder,” he added, turning to stare deep into the eyes of his old friend, “who might have started such rumors.”

  The astrologer looked at him steadily. “None of our friends would do such a thing. We are all sworn to protect the ancient knowledge — and the way you have used it to bring your artwork to life.”

  “I know that.” The painter’s eyes were like flint. “But there is a traitor among us who has whispered a tale to Soranzo about my work. I have my suspicions about who it is, but no proof. I am not sure I can trust anyone, Vito, not even my apprentices . . . and they are like sons to me.”

  “The enchanted paintings,” asked Vito, “are they safe?”

  “Yes, they are well hidden, but I dare not leave them for long.”

  “That is a relief,” the astrologer said with a sigh. “Such enchantment is not meant for the likes of Soranzo, who would use it only to gain more power for himself at the expense of others. If he were to get hold of the paintings, who knows how he would twist your knowledge for evil means?”

  “Rest easy, Vito. I will not allow the paintings to fall into the wrong hands, and neither will I allow that villain to learn how they were made. But his spies now watch my workshop at all times, day and night. I realize that the time has come for me to act. That is why I am here today.” Corvo waved his hand over Vito’s table of papers. “Have you examined the portents, as I asked?”

  The astrologer stirred himself and held a magnifying glass over a complicated chart. “Yes, yes. The heavens will look favorably upon travel by water for the next three days. The moon is strong and will aid you. But after three days, there is major opposition from the planets. I fear the stars will then favor spies and traitors instead.”

  Corvo let out a long breath. “So be it. We must move quickly.”

  “Do you have all your arrangements in place?” Vito asked.

  “Yes. My apprentices and I will scatter to the four winds, though I have not yet revealed their destinations to them. We will be transported beyond Soranzo’s long reach. That is all I can tell you. Vito, say good-bye to our friends for me. I will miss our discussions. But they know as well as I that my work must be protected at all costs.”

  Vito embraced the painter. “Godspeed, Fausto.”

  Corvo pulled up the collar of his cloak and smiled.

  “Thank you, Vito.” Moving quietly and swiftly, he closed the door and descended the stairs into the darkening Venice night.

  “That’s where they found the skeletons. Right where you’re standing.”

  Startled, Sunni Forrest whirled around and found a lanky dark-haired boy smiling at her from a bench by the wall.

  “Blaise! You scared the life out of me!” Sunni hopped away from where she had stood, in the center of a large, rectangular labyrinth picked out in black tiles on the stone floor. “Try saying hello next time.”

  “I’ll just start over.” Blaise said, looking sheepish. “Hey, Sunni, how are you?”

  “Fine. Just waiting for my heart to stop pounding.”

  “I’m really sorry. You walked past without seeing me.”

  “I’ll live.” Sunni let out a long breath. “I came in to look at the painting and didn’t notice anything else.”

  She nodded at the picture on the wall behind her. A medieval city, crowded with twisting lanes and buildings, sprawled across the huge canvas under a sky of robin’s-egg blue. From the sailing ships moored in the foreground to the craggy hills behind the city, every inch teemed with tiny, brightly dressed figures. The plaque on the elaborate gold frame read, “Fausto Corvo, The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia, 1582.”

  “I know — it’s like a magnet,” said Blaise. “Gets me every time. It had you in a trance, too, didn’t it?”

  “A trance bordering on panic,” said Sunni. “I was wondering how I’ll manage to copy the whole thing into my sketchbook.”

  “You just have to draw everything really small. That’s how I’m doing it, anyway,” said Blaise.

  “You’re copying it, too?” A feeling of dismay crept over Sunni as she noticed the open sketchbook in his lap.

  “Yep. I’m doing my project for art class on Fausto Corvo.”

  That was typical. Blaise Doran would have to choose her artist. Sunni’s afternoon was going from bad to worse.

  “But I’m doing Corvo for my project,” Sunni said. “It’s probably not allowed, two people doing the same topic.”

  “No, it is. Mr. Bell said it was OK for some of the others to do the same artist,” said Blaise. “Anyway, so what if we both do Corvo? Our projects will still look totally different.”

  And yours will totally look better than mine, Sunni thought. She pictured Blaise leaning over his drawings in their art classes, his hair falling in front of his face. Drawing, always drawing, even during break times and in the dining hall. Last year her project would have been the best, but then he had to sweep in from America. Now Blaise was always in the spotlight while she was shunted off to the wings.

  Sunni dragged her shoe along the edge of a black floor tile. “But I wanted Corvo as my artist. I’ve loved his paintings forever. There’s no other artist I like as much.”

  “Then I guess we’ve got a problem.” Blaise tapped his sketchbook with a stubby pencil. “I’m Corvo’s biggest fan. I couldn’t believe it when we moved to a town that has one of his paintings in its castle. I’ve been here every afternoon working on my project, so I’m not changing artists now.”

  “Well, I’m not changing either,” said Sunni, tossing her honey-brown ponytail over her shoulder. “I’ll leave you and come back another time.”

  She was stalking toward the door when Blaise said, “Wait a minute, Sunni. Don’t get all upset.” He moved over on the bench to make room for her. “There’s space for both of us.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “I can show you my sketches so far. They’re not that great.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Sunni pulled off her school backpack and sat down beside him, unable to resist a closer look at the competition.

  She looked carefully at each drawing, her spirits sagging even further when she saw how much he had already done. There was one of Blackhope Tower, the sixteenth-century castle they were in, its silvery stone walls and turrets surrounded by skeletal trees. And another sketch of the two stone lions at the gate, dusted with snow.

  “You stood outside and drew these?”

  Blaise nodded.

  “Are you crazy? It’s freezing!”

  The American boy just grinned. “Fingerless gloves,” he said.

  The next pages in Blaise’s sketchbook were crammed with drawings of armor, statues, and portraits from around Blackhope Tower. The unfinished last sketch was of the Mariner’s Chamber, the room they were in. Blaise was painstakingly copying the painting and
the tiled labyrinth on the floor. He had even drawn a section of the ceiling’s wooden beams, decorated with mermaids and sea monsters.

  Sunni handed his sketchbook back. “You’re right,” she said. “You have done a lot already. More than me.” She halfheartedly offered him her sketchbook in return.

  She cringed inside as Blaise studied her pencil portrait of Sir Innes Blackhope, the rich sea captain who had built Blackhope Tower. It had taken her an hour to copy his stern face and the white ruff around his neck.

  “It’s terrible,” Sunni murmured, snatching the book back.

  “No, it’s good,” said Blaise. “As usual.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “No way. I don’t get you, Sunni. You want me to say it’s bad or something?”

  They sat, silent and vaguely embarrassed, until Blaise began sketching again. Sunni made a tentative pencil mark on her blank page, but her eyes kept drifting over to watch him draw. She could sort of see why other girls thought he was cute. Several even went out of their way to be around him, but Sunni was most definitely not one of them. Blaise Doran already got more than enough attention from everyone else.

  He caught her looking and grinned.

  Don’t think I was looking at you, Blaise! I am not one of those giggly girls who always try to sit next to you in Art. “So, what do you know about the skeletons you mentioned when I came in?” Sunni asked hastily. “Blackhope Tower’s big claim to fame.”

  “Not much,” said Blaise, sniffing the air. “Except it definitely smells like bones in here, all musty and moldy.”

  “Bones don’t smell.”

  “They do when they have rotting flesh on them.”

  “That’s disgusting!” Sunni’s short laugh echoed. “The skeletons they found didn’t have any flesh on them anyway. They were dressed up in clothes from centuries ago. They just appeared out of nowhere, right here in the middle of this room.”

  “Somebody must have dug them up from the cemetery and dumped them here,” Blaise said. He scanned the windowless chamber. There was nothing else in it except the painting, the floor labyrinth, the bench they sat on, and the door. “Someone with a key to this room.”

  “No, it couldn’t have happened that way. They appeared one by one over hundreds of years,” Sunni replied. Her grandmother had once told her that the skeletons were always laid out as if they were asleep — like they’d slipped from a long, deep sleep into death and all that was left was bleached bones and saggy old clothes. No one had ever even found out their names.

  At this thought, a pang squeezed her heart, but she kept her voice steady so Blaise wouldn’t notice. “They found the last skeleton in the 1800s. It was a man dressed in clothes from a hundred years earlier. He was lying in the middle of the maze like the others.”

  “Labyrinth,” said Blaise as he drew.

  “What?” Sunni was trying to swallow the lump in her throat from thinking about Granny and lonely skeletons.

  “That’s a labyrinth, not a maze. A maze has a lot of dead ends and you have to hunt for the right path to the center. A labyrinth has one path that twists and turns through all four corners, but if you stay on it, it takes you to the center eventually.”

  “Oh, right. I stand corrected,” said Sunni sarcastically.

  “Sorry,” said Blaise. “But I’m kind of interested, especially since Fausto Corvo designed this one. You knew that, right?”

  “Yeah. Who doesn’t?” answered Sunni.

  Blaise pulled a leaflet from his back pocket and handed it to her. Its title was printed in bloodred letters: The Blackhope Enigma.

  “I read about it in here.” He rubbed his hands together. “The enigma of the skeletons — the mystery that can’t be solved. Excellent.”

  “Horrible, more like.” Sunni skimmed the leaflet. “I probably already know all this. ‘The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia was Sir Innes’s prized possession.’ Yeah, I knew that. ‘He wouldn’t ever let anyone take the painting down’ . . . blah, blah, blah . . . ‘Sir Innes stated in his will that nothing in this room could be changed’.” She stopped and looked up. “That’s kind of weird. It’s not like there is a lot you could change, unless you take out the bench and the painting and chisel the labyrinth out of the floor.”

  “Maybe he just wanted to keep everything the way it was . . . to protect it.”

  “Of course he wanted to protect it. It’s worth a lot of money,” said Sunni.

  “Yeah, but maybe Sir Innes didn’t want to disrespect Fausto Corvo and his work. I wouldn’t want to. Corvo could do everything: paint, invent things, speak a bunch of different languages, fight with swords, ride fast horses, write poems. . . .”

  “Poems?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Blaise cleared his throat. “They were all for this one lady. But her family made her marry someone else. Apparently he was pretty cut up about it.”

  I can’t believe it. Blaise Doran is blushing. Sunni suppressed an amused smile. “Really? Corvo doesn’t seem like the poetry type. She must have been something special.”

  “Guess so.” He suddenly slid from the bench and went up to the canvas. “You know, whenever I think I’ve seen everything in the painting, I catch something I missed.”

  “Me too. It’s going to take me at least two weeks to copy it all.”

  “See this guy?” Blaise pointed to a man on one of the ships in the harbor. “Do you think that’s Sir Innes Blackhope?”

  Sunni shrugged. “Well, he’s much bigger and better dressed than everybody else around him. Sir Innes paid for the painting, so maybe it was part of the deal that Corvo put him at the front.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.” Blaise’s voice trailed off as he examined the picture, his nose practically touching its surface. “But something’s really been bugging me about this painting.”

  “What?”

  “You know how its title is The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia? Well, I looked up Arcadia, and it’s supposed to be a paradise, with mythical creatures and stuff like that.”

  “So?”

  “Look at this. And this.” Blaise pointed to a group of ragged, shackled men being marched onto a ship and a thief stealing oranges from an old woman on crutches. “Doesn’t look like paradise to me. More like the opposite.”

  Sunni crossed the chamber and peered at the place he was pointing to. “That is odd. And look there — a little girl alone, crying, and an old man lying in a gutter.”

  “The painting’s title doesn’t make any sense, but Corvo got away with it anyway, so Sir Innes must have liked what he did.” Blaise’s finger moved down to the painter’s signature: the symbol of a flying raven and the date, 1582. “Corvo painted this and made the labyrinth in the same year. But pretty soon after that, he disappeared.”

  “I already knew he vanished, but that’s about it.”

  “This book I read said he escaped from Venice, chased by some rich guy called Soranzo. He’d bought some of Corvo’s paintings, but then something happened between them, and all of a sudden Soranzo was out to get him. Corvo was never seen again.”

  “I heard something else about him,” said Sunni, another of Granny’s stories about Blackhope Tower coming to mind. I bet you don’t know this, Blaise. “They say that Corvo made magical paintings.”

  Blaise leaped on this idea. “You’ve heard about that, too?”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s another reason he had to disappear — to save his skin from people who thought he was a sorcerer.”

  Before Blaise could say anything, a figure in a padded jacket and red knitted hat clomped into the Mariner’s Chamber and planted himself between them.

  Sunni grimaced. She had forgotten all about her stepbrother, Dean. “Take him with you after school. He’s been spending far too much time in front of a screen, playing those games of his,” her stepmother had said. “I’ll pick you both up at quarter to five.”

  Sunni had been stuck with Dean more and more lately, as part of her stepmom’s quest t
o hook him on fresh air and educational pursuits. Her last good deed had been to take him to the Science Museum, where he’d hogged the interactive exhibits and trash-talked them loudly when he didn’t get the highest score. Later, in the café, he’d spilled his drink on her. At twelve years old, Dean was only two years younger than her, but to Sunni they seemed worlds apart.

  She braced herself for something embarrassing to come out of his mouth now.

  “You done, Sun?” Dean’s voice was like a horn blast. Then he turned to Blaise. “Who are you?”

  “This is Blaise, and no, I am not done. I’ve barely started,” Sunni said.

  “Huh? You’ve been up here for ages!” Dean sized Blaise up and said, “I’m Dean. She’s my stepsister,” in a man-to-man kind of way.

  “Hey. Nice to meet you.”

  “So, what’re you doing, supposedly?” asked Dean.

  “Drawing that painting, supposedly,” said Sunni. “Why don’t you go and look around somewhere else?”

  “I’ve seen it all twenty times before. Boring. I’m going to hang out here till Mom comes.”

  “You’d better be quiet.”

  “You won’t even know I’m here,” said Dean.

  Blaise was back on the bench, scribbling in his sketchbook. Sunni sat down next to him and resumed sketching in hers.

  Dean managed to be quiet for about two minutes, while he glanced over The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia. Then, in a mocking voice, he started reading the information card aloud.

  “Dean!” Sunni hissed. “Quit it!”

  “I’m helping you,” he replied, and kept reading. “‘Fausto Corvo was a prominent sixteenth-century Venetian artist’ . . . blah, blah . . . ‘This painting is a fine example of . . .’ Hey — how do you say this? C-H-I-A-R-O-S-C-U-R-O.”

  “It’s ‘kee-ar-oh-skoo-roh,’” said Blaise. “Mr. Bell says it means ‘light and dark’ in Italian. Like the way artists paint highlights and shadows. See how Corvo put highlights on the people and animals to make them pop out against the dark background?”

  “Don’t encourage him,” said Sunni. “You don’t care what chiaroscuro is, Dean. You’re just trying to get attention.”