The Undrowned Child (3 page)

But the strangest thing was this: when she opened it up Teo saw that her own name was written inside the cover in an antique hand script that had already gone brown with age.

Welcome to Venice, Teodora-of-Sad-Memory, said the book. We have been waiting for you a very long time.

at the Hotel degli Assassini, June 1, 1899

Arriving back at the hotel, Teodora endured Maria’s mocking look stoically. At supper, Teo pushed her food around her plate. Bedtime had never seemed so long in coming. She’d not had one moment to be truly alone with her new book since they left the bookshop, and she was literally feverish with impatience.

It was towards the end of that interminable supper that Teo began to feel seriously unwell. Green and purple spots swam in front of her eyes. She kept shaking her head to clear the roaring in her ears. It sounded like the sea—no, an ocean!—in a shell. When the waiter brought the cheese-board, there was a large carrot carved in the shape of a mermaid sitting between the Dolcelatte and the Pecorino. Teo could have sworn that the carrot-mermaid flexed her tail and plunged her little hand inside a smelly Gorgonzola.

“Tyromancy, ye know,” remarked the mermaid. “The Ancient Art of Divination by Cheese.” Then she pulled her hand out and inspected the green cheese-mold on her tiny fingers.

“Lackaday!” she moaned. “Stinking! It goes poorly for Venice and Teodora, it do!”

Teo rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again, the carrot-mermaid lay still and silent on the board.

“How is your poor head, Teodora?” asked her mother as they left the dining room.

At that moment a violent and strangely prolonged clap of thunder made everyone jump. The lamps dimmed. The needle of the gramophone slid awry with a screech, and the silver coffee service shivered on its tray. There was a general chorus among the guests of “Oh my, the heat has broken!” and “At last!”

The lamps were still flickering as Teo’s mother lifted her daughter’s fringe with a gentle hand.

“My goodness!” Teo’s mother turned her around to face the mirror in the hotel lobby. A ragged purple bruise had bloomed all around Teo’s forehead.

“How revolting,” remarked Maria, looking at her own dainty reflection with satisfaction.

Teo muttered, “Not everyone wants to look like a pink rabbit in ruffles.”

Her words were swallowed up in the rain that now hurled itself against the windows as if it meant to shatter them. A glass ornament in the shape of a mermaid juddered towards the edge of a sideboard. Teo gently nudged it back to safety. As she straightened it on its lace doily, the glass mermaid opened her lips and tinkled, “Not much chop, your friend, aye! Nary a brain to rub together.”

Teo squeaked loudly and turned a shade paler, if possible. Everyone in the room twisted their necks around to stare at her.

“This won’t do at all. We must get someone to look at you,” worried Teo’s father, above the din of the rain. “I’d never forgive myself … Go and lie down, child. Maria,” he added, “you’re peaky too. Are you quite well?”

It was true: Maria’s peachlike complexion had turned a little greenish.

Outside Teo’s bedroom, her parents argued in whispers that were perfectly audible from Teo’s position at the keyhole.

“I told you we shouldn’t have brought her. Something was bound to happen.”

“But she has no idea …”

“No idea about what?” Teo wondered. Then the handle started to turn and she had to run back to bed. Her mother’s anxious face appeared around the door. In her hand was a familiar bottle of an English patent medicine, Velno’s Vegetable Syrup. Teo groaned.

It was agony waiting for the hotel to find a doctor who would come out on a wild night like this. Teo sat propped up on fat pillows, the book safely hidden under the lowest one. She could feel it, temptingly thick, in the small of her back.

The doctor was an elderly man on stilty legs, his sparse hair flattened by the rain. He made her look into the light of a candle, and gently swiveled her head around. His words appeared to Teo in a fussy, careful script when he murmured, “Strange, such green eyes in a girl from Naples … Any history of medical problems in the family?”

“I’m adop—” Teo started to say, but her mother shook her head slightly. “Why doesn’t she want the doctor to know?” pondered Teo.

He pushed an icy thermometer under her tongue, and listened to her heart, which was sometimes thudding like a steam train and then suddenly not beating at all for whole seconds at a time. He seemed to be far away, down the other end of a telescope, when he started to ask her questions. What with the roaring in her ears, and the pain in her head, it was impossible for Teo to concentrate. Odd, vague answers stumbled out of her mouth. “I see with my ears in Venice.” And “The bluest of fins!”

Teo felt freezing and burning at the same time; her skin was a cold crust over boiling lava. Her forehead hurt as if it was about to split open.

“That’s quite a fever. It would be prudent to take her to the hospital.” The doctor’s tone was grim. “I suspect a concussion. And I don’t like to see that color in a little girl’s skin. I’m seeing too many children like this at the moment, and …”

Teo’s mother motioned him away from the bed.

“Is our daughter in danger?” she whispered, searching the doctor’s face. Teo took the opportunity to drag the book from under her pillow and slip it into the breast-pocket of her pinafore.

His answer was somber. “Madam, in Venice, at this moment, we are all in danger.”

“But the mayor says it’s safe here. We read it in the paper.”

At the mention of the mayor, the doctor’s kind face creased into a cantankerous expression. He said sternly, “I repeat. By bringing your daughter to Venice, you have tempted Fate.”

“But they’re scientists. They don’t believe in Fate,” whispered Teo, as she slipped slowly from consciousness.

The last thing she heard was a chorus of sweet, rough voices in her ear, singing like the choir she had heard in the street. This time she could hear the words clearly, as well as the accents, which were not exactly refined. None of those girls had been near a finishing school. Maria would have called them common.

To the tune of “The Jolly Roger,” they now sang,

“ ’Twas Fate what brung ye here, Teo-do-ra

’Twas Fate what called yer name

’Twas Fate what dropped that book on-yer-head

’Twas Fate what pulled the train …”

May 27, 1899

On the long train trip from Naples, both pairs of parents had dozed, worn out from nights in the laboratory preparing for the great gathering of scientists. When her father settled into an even rhythm of soft snores, Teo had gently lifted the slab of papers from his knee and delved inside.

Maria threatened, “I could wake ’em up and tell ’em what you’re doin’, if I had a mind to!”

“Absolutely right, all that you’re lacking is a mind.”

Maria opened her mouth and shut it again. In a moment, Teo had forgotten Maria’s sulky little face in the seat opposite. She read as fast as she could. Who knew when her parents might wake up and take the papers away from her? Some of it had been too technical to understand, but the main message was clear as cut glass. Venice was dying. And dying fast, like a patient in a hospital where the doctors know no cure, like Teo’s poor Nanny Giulia, who had wasted away from consumption.

Teo’s eyes welled up at the memory. The last thing she wanted was for Maria to catch her crying, so she dived back into the files. It did not make her feel any better. After a wretched hour’s reading, Teo had snapped shut the thick sheaf of notes, photographs and diagrams. She closed her eyes and let the clatter of the train fill her head. Outside, the hills of Tuscany softened into the orchards of Emilia Romagna. Teo’s memory, which worked rather like a camera, kept clicking back to certain phrases. “The inevitable conclusion is …” and “Venice cannot survive this.…” Her skin felt tight with misery; her nose prickled with tears. Teo had waited so long to come to Venice, and it seemed that Venice might not have waited for her.

Now everyone knew that Venice was sinking into the sea, a little more each year. But what Teo had just learnt was this: what held the city up was in fact … water. When the first Venetians built their town, they had rammed millions of poles into the mud to form the foundations for their houses. Beneath that mud was an aquifer, a cushion of water that pushed up against the mud, the poles and the buildings, and kept Venice afloat. Teo pictured a sky-blue cushion, softly bulging with water, with Venice resting on top of it like a comfortable cat in a basket.

But Venice’s aquifer, she had just read, was now mysteriously disappearing. As its cushion of water deflated, the city was capsizing into the lagoon. No one could work out where the water was going or why the lagoon had suddenly grown so very salty that many marine animals were dying.

Meanwhile the water temperature was also rising. It was as if there was something underneath the city, heating it up like a warming-pan in a bed. Diving parties had been sent below, but soon came racing back—the warm, soupy water had attracted a school of large sharks, some four yards long. Lately, their gray fins had been seen slicing down the Grand Canal. No one knew what those monsters were eating. But several tourists had disappeared without a trace, and the rumors were running wild.

So now famous scientists were on their way to Venice from all over the world, to see what could be done. The train from Naples bristled with bearded men wearing monocles, each squinting over the same thick folder of notes that was now weighing so heavily on Teo’s spirits.

As the train rolled into the plains of the Veneto, Teo had opened the file again. However disagreeable the truth, it was better to know, surely? Maria rolled her eyes. She rearranged her pink silk skirt disdainfully on the train’s worn seat and retied the ribbon on her green travel cape into an even more ostentatious pussycat bow.

A moment later she whimpered, “Ouch! A horrid Venetian mosquito bit me!”

“Shame, how is the mosquito?” asked Teo, without looking up.

The first mystery the scientists would tackle was what had happened to Venice’s ancient marble wells. In the last few weeks the wells had started to burst their iron covers, and to send out great fountains of hot water. It all began in Campo San Maurizio, quite a surprise for some American students who were enjoying a late-night picnic of ham rolls on the steps around the well. For them a warm shower was rather welcome. But the well water was growing hotter by the day. When the well in front of the church of San Zaccaria sent up a steaming geyser, a whole wedding party was painfully scalded. And the water jet that shot out of the well in San Giacomo dell’Orio knocked the spire off the bell tower. Then the scientists had tested the water and discovered that it was not only at boiling temperature, but poisonous to drink.

“Dear me!” thought Teo.

But as she scanned more documents, she had been horrified to see that the Venetian authorities were stubbornly intent on pretending that nothing was wrong. The mayor of Venice had contributed a letter to the notes, in which he gaily insisted that it was a great deal of fuss over nothing.

“A temporary fault,” he called it. He smiled patronizingly from the handsome photograph he had somewhat unnecessarily included with his letter. “Our friends at the water company have the situation under control. All the tourists can still take a nice warm bath in the evenings in their hotels. No one should cancel their visit to Venice.”

Teo had impatiently turned the page on the luxuriant mustache of the mayor. She stared at sepia photographs of acqua alta. Now, this “high water,” as everyone knew, was perfectly normal in Venice. Many times each year the lowest points of the city, like the great square at San Marco, filled up with water that came gushing from under the stone paving. But in the last few weeks, the pictures showed San Marco dry as the Kalahari Desert. Instead, the highest parts of the town, the ones that never flooded, were suddenly filling with water for hours on end. People were left standing on chairs in their kitchens, or clinging to the branches of trees.

The firemen and the officers of the water magistrate rushed around, taking the wooden flood pontoons to places where they had never been needed before. But when the tide surged up, it arrived with such remarkable force that the pontoons just sprang up and floated off, sometimes with terrified people on board.

And the water that carried them away was always warm and dark as blood.

Maria was supposed to be Teo’s best friend; for this trip, anyway. But the truth was that Teo was as fond of Maria as she was of cod-liver oil.

Naturally Maria, with her perfect glossy hair and her chronically bored expression, had always been one of the “fashionable crowd” at school, the ones who cunningly adapted their hats and school pinafores to the latest style. The kind of girls who, even at eleven, could cause a carriage accident just by gazing at the coachman with their heads on one side.

The fashionable crowd took pride in being far too modern to show much interest in schoolwork. They affected drawls and babylike lisps.

Like Teo’s teacher, but for different reasons, Maria’s form-mistress had been quite content to let her pupil out of school to go to Venice.

“Perhaps it will put an idea in her head,” Maria’s teacher had sighed. “Perhaps a museum … a spot of art, some culture, you never know.”

Someone at the back of the room had called out, “Perhaps a spot of shopping!”

And everyone in the fashionable crowd had giggled or clapped then, betraying Maria for a cheap laugh. That, of course, is what the fashionable crowd is like in any classroom anywhere in the world.

Teo was most definitely not in the fashionable crowd. Well, a girl generally isn’t when she spends all her time in the library. (Teo even had a special library trick of being able to read books upside-down, which rather disconcerted the librarians.) To Teo’s lot had always fallen the schoolgirls’ full repertoire of nasty little tricks: the tea-party invitations ostentatiously handed out to everyone else but her, the mocking compliments on her clothes and the sudden silences or sniggering when she entered a room.