The Undrowned Child (23 page)

“Children! We don’t often have children here. Children don’t like booksss, in our experience, and they leave their dirrrty little fingerprintsss all over them.”

Children! Not “child”! Teo realized with a shiver that this unusual woman could see her. Renzo, clearly sharing her anxiety, motioned to Teo to keep quiet.

The script that floated above the woman’s head was not like anything Teo had seen before. She could not make out the words. It looked like scratch marks in sand, not human writing at all. And her accent was slightly foreign, with a little burr on the consonants, as if she was from the East, or beyond.

Teo cast her eyes down on the desk, reading upside down the letter on top of Signorina Grigiogatta’s pile of correspondence. With a start, she made out the words “Bajamonte Tiepolo …”

Renzo asserted bravely, “Signorina, we love books. And our hands are clean. We’re working on a school project about Venetian history, and we want to see some of the real historical documents.…”

“Oh, ‘we want,’ do we?” Signorina Grigiogatta raised an eyebrow.

“Forgive me. We should very much like, if at all possible, to see them. In fact, we are also working on a—a—historical origami project, and we want to see how all the old letters and documents were folded up. Everyone wanted to do this project but we two were given the honor because we were voted the best students in the class. The hardest workers. Best at origami. We are very serious. If you please.”

Teo privately thought Renzo was laying it on rather thick here. Historical origami project! So this was the famous Venetian charm? It sounded a little oily to her.

“Indeed,” purred the Gray Lady, “And how verrry hard you are working now to impresss me.”

Teo found the lady’s smugness quite maddening. Ignoring Renzo’s warning glare, she asked boldly, “And have we succeeded?”

The Gray Lady wrinkled her small nose at the sound of Teo’s Naples accent, as if there was a bad smell in the room. “Frrrankly, my dear, no, not really, not yet.”

Renzo assumed a benevolent tone. “Yes, my companion is a poor Napoletana. The victim of a pitiably vulgar education. My school has founded a charity to help students from less fortunate areas. This girl has been forced to study in badly-stocked libraries in Naples, and now the authorities want her to have an opportunity to study in the … in the …”

“Yesss?” asked the Gray Lady, licking her lips with a small pink tongue.

“The cream of libraries!” exclaimed Renzo triumphantly.

“Oh, indeed, the verrry crrream of libraries,” declared Signorina Grigiogatta.

There was a long pause, during which the Gray Lady attended scrupulously to her cuffs, her hem and her very pointed nails. This she did by sharpening them casually on the outthrust arm of yet another Brustolon behind her desk. Teo winced.

“Well,” wheedled Renzo, in the end. “May we look? Please?”

“Well, I don’t see any harrrm, I suppose,” pronounced the Gray Lady. “Run along. Make sure you leave before closing time. You wouldn’t want to be locked in here at night. The mayor has not given us fundsss for a night watchman’s wages, so there would be no one here to let you out, no matterrr how much you mewed.”

“Mewed?” asked Teo.

“Howled, crrried for help,” said the Gray Lady, stiffly.

Renzo bowed like a courtier in front of a queen. “We shall not forget your graciousness, Signorina Grigiogatta,” he asserted humbly, with his head on one side.

Out in the corridor, Teo whispered, “Do you think she’s a ghost? Is she in-the-Cold? Or in-the-Slaughterhouse? Do you think she guessed what we are up to? You know she had a letter about Bajamonte Tiepolo on her desk?”

“How do you …? Oh, never mind. What did her voice look like?”

“Well, not quite … human.”

Renzo fretted, “And it’s uncanny that she could see you when you’re supposed to be between-the-Linings. And that she talked about us getting locked in at night—as if she could read our minds.”

For getting locked in at night was just what they had decided to do. Their plan was to creep back to the Archives when all the scholars had gone home. Then they could hunt through the shelves in private.

After leafing politely through a few boxes of files that the clerks brought Renzo, and making some paper models, the children made separate reconnoitering trips to the rear of the building. Ranks of Brustolons lined the corridors, filling them with the smell of varnish. They were useful for hiding behind, as it turned out. It was Renzo who found a suitable window at the back. Returning to the desk, he sent Teo to unfasten it.

“Close it, but not really,” he urged. “So it looks closed.”

That mission accomplished, Renzo made a great ceremony of leaving the place so that every possible guard noticed him depart.

“I wouldn’t want to get locked in here,” he said loudly. To Teo, he whispered, “See you tonight.”

Back at the hotel, it was too painful for Teo to watch her parents toy with their food in the dining room. She lifted a bowl of fruit and a tall jug of orange juice, and carried them up to her room. She drained the jug and wolfed down the fruit. She didn’t bother to take off her clothes, waiting fully dressed and wide awake on top of the covers until sunset. Before the moon was high in the sky, Teo was out of bed, pulling the fish-kite out of the back of her armoire.

Down in his courtyard Renzo was already waiting, his face tense and pale. They walked in silence through the deserted city, towards the Archives. Their fish-kites floated above them, casting a comforting bluish light.

They were in luck. No one had discovered the open window. The children hauled themselves inside and clapped their hands to extinguish the fish.

Even in the sinister moonlight, Teo loved the Archives: that beckoning scent of old books, and the tweedy smell of old scholars, and the tall shelves making order of the chaos of all Venetian knowledge.

“When I grow up,” she thought, “I want to work somewhere like this.”

The stolen jug of orange juice had its effect on Teo. Noticing the door marked Ladies, she waved Renzo on and slipped inside. Teo dared not turn on a light, so she felt her way around. She was washing her hands when she heard footsteps coming in her direction. They were not Renzo’s—too light. In fact, they pattered like two pairs of delicate feet.

No one should be in the library now! Signorina Grigiogatta had said there was not even a nightwatchman. Trembling, Teo hid in one of the cubicles.

The door creaked slowly open.

Teo drew in her breath.

late at night, June 11, 1899

It was the Gray Lady.

Signorina Grigiogatta did not light the lamp. She looked in the mirror, seeming quite at ease in the moonlight. She licked her wrists and ran them over her face. And then she bent her head and licked each of her shoulders.

Lastly, she pulled a long gray tail out from under her petticoat and licked it thoroughly, and then tucked it back into her voluminous skirt. She turned her attention to her fingers. Long glinting nails like little scimitars popped out. She curved her fingers around and they retracted. Then she drew a large satin purse from her handbag and reapplied a thick layer of white cosmetic paint to her face. Finally, she left.

Outside the ladies’, Teo heard a curious sound, as if the graceful Gray Lady had fallen lightly to the ground. Perhaps she had dropped something? When the Gray Lady started walking there seemed to be enough footsteps for two light pairs of feet.

When the Gray Lady’s many footsteps had faded away, Teo rushed out to tell Renzo about the furry tail and curious behavior.

“Where is she now?” asked Renzo.

“I think she went back to her office. I heard the door shut down there.”

“Perhaps she’s just working late.”

The children tried to put Signorina Grigiogatta out of their minds. Lighting up their fish-kites, they roamed up and down the corridors.

The trouble was, clever as they’d been to get into the Archives, they had not really thought about how to find what they wanted. This was made all the more difficult because they didn’t have any idea what it would look like. The mermaids had warned that the Almanac might even be disguised as something other than a book.

“But,” reasoned Teo, “it must be rather like a book, or it couldn’t be in the Archives, could it? Not without sticking out a mile.”

They went hunting along the shelves till they found the department for the fourteenth century. The Tiepolo boxes were sealed with fearsome padlocks and labels inscribed Most Secret and Non Toccare, Pena La Morte, “Don’t Touch on Pain of Death.”

The children clambered up the shelves on a pair of library ladders and forced open one of the locks with a corner of The Key to the Secret City. The lid of the box rose up with a groan like somebody dying.

“Watch out!” yelled Renzo, as dozens of sheets of parchment flew out and formed themselves into arrowheads, with points sharp as needles.

The parchment arrows wheeled around in formation, like a flock of white bats. Then they swung into the direction of Renzo and Teo, gathering speed for an attack. The children cried out as sharp paper cut their ears, their eyelids and mouths.

“It’s worse than the sharks!” screamed Teo.

“Shhh!” whispered Renzo. “No noise! Signorina Grigiogatta will hear us.”

It was too late to be quiet. The ladders on which the children perched were already teetering dangerously. One more assault by the parchment arrows and they tumbled noisily to the ground. Teo fell on top of Renzo, who grunted in pain. The white arrows were now zooming straight down at them.

“Can paper kill you?” gasped Teo.

“I don’t know,” moaned Renzo. “But I think that can.” He pointed.

A colossal gray cat had hurtled into the room. It was bigger than any cat Teo had ever seen. Outside of the tiger-cage in the zoo, that is.

The cat arched its back like the Rialto Bridge and hissed. Then it crouched on the floor, waving its tail violently from side to side. Its rear quarters trembled as it coiled up all its energy to pounce on the children.

Springing high into the air, it howled at them, “The papers of Bajamonte Tiepolo arrrre touched only on pain of death. Pre-parrrre your horrrid little selves to die!”

Even as the cat sailed through the air towards them, Teo recognized that voice and the writing above the spitting creature’s head.

“Signorina Grigiogatta!” she shouted. “Don’t hurt us!”

The cat dropped back down on her haunches, her tail still lashing. She looked at Teo through eyes narrowed to glassy green slits. “How do you know who I am? And, morrre importantly, why shouldn’t I kill you?”

“I … saw … you in the bathroom,” stammered Teo. “And your voice …”

“One point to you forrr observation. But that’s not nearrrly enough points to save you. Can’t you read, children? ‘On pain of death.’ And a painful death too.”

She flexed her claws.

Renzo spoke up bravely, “We are here because all of Venice is threatened with death, Your Grace.”

“Your Grace?” Teo started. But Renzo’s respectful tone seemed to give the cat pause for thought.

“In what way is the city threatened?” she asked Renzo in a menacing, cynical tone. “Make this good, little boy, or it will be the lassst thing you say.”

Renzo fell silent. Teo understood: their mission was supposed to be a secret.

“Well? Is it death, then? I sssuppose it shall have to be.”

“Was that a purr?” wondered Teo. The Gray Lady seemed uncommonly happy to do them the service of slaughtering them.

“There is … something you should know,” faltered Renzo, looking at Teo.

“Yes,” Teo realized, “we have to tell the truth. It is the only thing that can save us. Plus, if this cat is angry with us for looking for the Almanac, then she must be against Bajamonte Tiepolo.”

Teo gabbled, “Bajamonte Tiepolo is abroad again. We need to find his Spell Almanac before he does. We think it might be here.”

“In that case it may interest you to know,” remarked the Gray Lady, “that I myself am entrusted with protecting the Spell Almanac of Bajamonte Tiepolo.”

“So you see! We are on the same side!” cried Teo.

The misunderstanding was explained in moments, and Signorina Grigiogatta turned herself back into a woman. At least, her human face reappeared on top of her cat’s body. “Tell me everrrything,” she commanded.

The children took turns to explain about the hot fountains, the chimneys, the sharks, the Baja-Menta ice-cream, the Creature, not in any particular order but just as they remembered it. The Gray Lady listened with her head on one side. Occasionally she interrupted with a question.

“To think that it is a pair of children who come to enlighten me! Never liked the little beasssts before. Tail-pullers! Yet now …,” she marveled. “So it’s true about what is happening in Venice. Sequestered here, I am never sure what to believe when I hear humans jabberrring. They are ssso unsubtle and they exaggerate ssso.”

Lastly the children told her about the mermaids and The Key to the Secret City. Teo produced the book from her pinafore, and Lussa smiled from the cover. This news brought a little wobble to the Gray Lady’s deep voice. She stroked the book with a reverent paw.

“Ah! Ssso I am not alone after all!” The cat had tears in her beautiful almond-shaped eyes. “Merrrmaids in a secret cavern!” she exulted. “Ha! Bajamonte Tiepolo shall never know of them, till it is too late! Please tell your mermaid friends that the Spell Almanac is safe. They sound like sssplendid creatures. If it were not for the mutual incompatibility of our elements …”

“I beg your …?” asked Renzo.

Teo explained, “She means that mermaids live in water, and cats cannot bear water.”

“As I was sssaying, were it not for that mutual elemental incompatibility, I would adore to visit the dear merrrmaids and ssstrategize with them. One candle does not hurt itself by lighting another, as we sssay in Venice.”

A fleeting greedy look crossed the Gray Lady’s face. “Mermaids are a little like fisssh, yes? Like a very large tuna? Fisssh is verrry good for catsss.…”

The Gray Lady shook out her ears. “But no, they are my allies! My sissters!”