The Undrowned Child (4 page)

The parents, of course, did not have much idea of the undercurrents of schoolgirl life. The adults innocently assumed that their daughters would amuse themselves together in Venice while the scientific gathering was in progress. No suitable replacement had yet been found for Teo’s poor Nanny Giulia. Maria’s always gave in their notice soon after arrival: Maria’s tantrums were legendary among the nannies of Naples.

In a whispered conference in the corridor, as their train approached Venice, Teo had convinced Maria that it would be far better if they were to secretly spend the days ahead separately: “You can do what you want. I can do what I want. We only need to meet up in the evenings when our parents come home from their meetings.”

“You’d really, really like that, then, Dora?” drawled Maria.

Teo nodded fervently.

“Then it’s goin’ to cost you something, ain’t it?”

“But you want it too.…”

“Or I could stick to you like glue, Te-Odore.”

And so Teo was forced to bribe Maria with a great deal of her allowance. Maria seemed to spend all their joint pocket-money on scarves, belts, beads and Venetian slippers. It was the height of fashion that summer to wear crests: on scarves, printed all over skirts and even leather shoes. By the end of the second day in Venice, Maria was already covered head to toe in crests.

“How exceedingly subtle,” Teo had observed sarcastically.

Maria, with characteristic brilliance, riposted: “Go and boil your head, Dora.”

Astonishingly, Maria’s parents didn’t notice the profusion of crests at all. It crossed Teo’s mind that Maria might be trying to attract their attention. That, as usual, failed miserably. Maria’s parents prided themselves on being far more interested in the next professorship than in what their foolish daughter wore. Maria’s father was highly competitive, and talked out of the corner of his mouth like a robber, and wore shiny suits like one too. Aurelia Naccaro barely spoke to her daughter. If Maria wanted their attention she would need to come home with an essay marked A.

And that—given that Maria’s head seemed to Teo like an empty church where dust streamed in the sunlight—was not likely to happen in the conceivable future.

at the hospital, the evening of June 1, 1899

“Warm as blood,” Teo murmured. She was awake, she thought, but she could not open her eyes. She smelt carbolic soap, heard the brisk tap of shoes on a polished stone floor. Distant voices echoed down long corridors. Teo felt oddly separate from her own body, as if she hovered a few inches above herself.

The last thing she remembered was tucking the old book into her pinafore before the doctor picked her up from the hotel bed and carried her down to his boat. Later, much later, she would recall shreds of the journey, the long black boat rocking under the stars, the moonlit windows above as they passed through the looming canyons of floating palaces, her mother’s frightened eyes gazing down on her, the rain falling quietly and persistently, a tall gray fin following them all the way down one canal, the back of a shop hung with sinister white masks like skulls, each with a single black spot by the nose.

Then a gondola stacked with ivory tusks and black wood had sidled past them, followed by another, draped in black crêpe, bearing a tiny coffin covered in white flowers. Her mother had clutched her father’s arm and pointed at the coffin.

“The mayor promised this city was safe for children, Alberto,” she had whispered. “Is it really? Is it?”

Teo came slowly back to consciousness in a brightly lit room with a high ceiling, a porcelain stove and a grated window, down which the rain continued to cascade. She was lying fully dressed on a simple iron bed. When she finally opened her eyes, an ugly nurse in a blue cap was looking down on her with ferocious disapproval.

The doctor was trying to persuade Teo’s parents that they should go back to their hotel. “She’s in the best possible hands,” he added firmly.

“And that’s a fact,” added the nurse, thin-lipped, as if to say, “There shall be no mollycoddling of little girls here.”

To hurry everyone out, Teo obediently swallowed the hot tisana that the nurse held up to her lips. It left a bitter, chalky rime on her tongue.

“Now I’m so sleepy.” She yawned hugely at her mother, who finally seemed to be on the point of leaving, though with many anxious looks back.

“Do turn off the gas-lamp as you leave, Mamma.” Teo forced out another yawn.

The moment her parents’ footsteps had faded, Teo leant over and relit the lamp beside her bed.

She climbed down and walked unsteadily to the door. Peering around it, Teo had a glimpse of endless corridors, nurses passing with lamps from room to room, from which came the faint sounds of children moaning. A little girl cried out, “Leave my hair alone, you brute!”

All the nurses had their backs to Teo. She closed the door and wedged the handle with fire-tongs from the porcelain stove.

Returning to the iron bed, Teo stumbled. She was still a little dizzy. And how long before the tisana started working? Quickly, she pulled the book from her pinafore.

The beautiful sad girl on the cover had changed her position. She was now gazing down intently with her head a little on one side, as if encouraging Teo to open the book and read its contents.

The thick paper inside was a dark cream color, like milky breakfast coffee, but with a pearly sheen. The inscription to Teodora-of-Sad-Memory was still there. She told herself, “But of course, it could be another Teodora. There must be thousands of Teodoras. And I’m from Naples. No one in Venice remembers me, do they?”

How could they?

She turned the page. There was an illustration, of another young girl operating a small hand-cranked printing machine. She was drawn only from the waist up. Above the engraving were some words about the book. The thing was, the book didn’t seem to think that it exactly was a book. Instead, it introduced itself as:

The Key to the Secret City for the Children of Venice

Below that was printed what must be the publishers’ name: the Seldom Seen Press.

Teo cast a knowing eye over the engraving of the printing press. She liked everything to do with books. The best lessons at school this past term had been about Johannes Gutenberg, who had invented the printing press four hundred years before. The teacher had brought in a working model of Gutenberg’s machine. Then she had shown the children how to slot individual letters into wooden forms to “compose” a page, to brush ink over a metal plate, then run them through a heavy mangle … all this to produce a single shaky but real printed page.

“Like magic!” Teo had marveled at the time.

And there had been the added joy to it that when Maria had taken her turn at the press, her new mousseline de soie dress had been splattered by a slick of ink that had coursed off the roller while Teo turned it. Teo hadn’t meant to do it. It had just happened.

Grinning at the memory, Teo turned to the next page of The Key to the Secret City. This was set in large type with many curly decorations. It was hard to understand, and Teo realized that the words were written not in Italian but in old Venetian dialect, which was more like Latin or French. This was a word game. Teo loved word games. And indeed, when she put half of her brain into Latin mode, and a quarter into French, leaving the rest for Italian, and squinted with one eye, reading aloud and hearing the sounds of the words—then she discovered that she could understand the Venetian dialect quite easily. Well, almost easily.

The page said, We will show you our city, we will show you our heart.

“Oh yes, please!” whispered Teo, feeling warm with pleasure.

A strong smell of wet varnish filled the room. Teo glanced up as the window rattled violently. The storm was gathering force. Then she looked again, and a scream tore out of her throat. The Key to the Secret City slid to the floor as Teo leapt up and clutched her pillow in front of her.

A dark figure stood hunched by the window. He had twice the bulk of an ordinary man. His bare arms were grooved with muscle and sinew. He was like some kind of monstrous joke, a crude sketch of a Blackamoor from a Penny Dreadful magazine: his skin was blacker than coal and his eyes bulged white in his broad, furious face. Broken chains dangled from his neck and legs.

A groaning creak came from his joints and a thin stream of blood fell from his lips as he began to move towards her.

around midnight, June 1, 1899

“It’s a statue, you foolish child!” The nurse was shaking Teo harder than was really necessary. What harsh breath the woman had!

The nurse had hurt her wrist wrenching the handle of the door that Teo had wedged with the tongs. And now the other children on the wards, woken by Teo’s screams, were wailing in a dismal chorus down every corridor.

“But it moved! There was blood in its mouth! And I know it wasn’t here before.”

“You know precisely nothing, young lady. You are indulging in an hysterical conniption.”

Having supplied her own excuse, the nurse slapped Teo’s face for good measure. The doctor hurried in and gasped at the sight of the vast statue, “Dear God, not here too!”

Teo, one hand on her smarting cheek, bellowed, “What not here too?”

The nurse threw her a threatening look as the doctor sank into a chair. “Child, I hardly know. Someone is playing a very silly and sinister joke on Venice, just at a time when laughter is quite uncalled for. These statues have started appearing in people’s homes, in bakeries, and now in the hospital. The strange thing is, they’re very like Brustolons.”

“Brusto …?”

“Andrea Brustolon. Venetian sculptor. Two hundred years ago he carved these Blackamoors with ebony skin and ivory eyes.… Once upon a time these people were … well, no, never mind what they were, child.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s a … long story, and not a very nice one.” The doctor wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Anyway, you used to see the Brustolons only in museums or the grandest palaces. Suddenly they’re appearing all over the place.”

“If they are antiques, why do they smell of fresh varnish?” queried Teo.

The doctor did not seem to hear her. He lowered his voice and grumbled to himself, “The mayor has insisted on keeping it out of the papers, but that only means that it’s more of a shock when it happens to someone.”

He rose and placed his hand on Teo’s forehead. “And indeed this shock has not done your fever any favors.”

Quickly, he felt her neck and under her arms, whispering, “Nothing, thank God!”

Teo persisted, “But there was blood in its mouth!”

“I know, I know. Our practical joker has a truly twisted sense of humor. Look.” The doctor pulled a scalpel from his pocket and poked about inside the mouth of the statue. Out came a fat sliver of wriggling red slime. The doctor opened the window and flung it out into the rain.

“Our prankster puts medical leeches full of blood inside the statues’ lips. They drip.… Anyone would think someone was trying to frighten Venice to death, or at least out of her wits.”

Teo had a hundred more questions to ask. Where did the blood for the leeches come from? Who would want to frighten a city … to death? And the doctor had a hundred reasons why Teo should lie back in her bed and rest quietly.

He picked up The Key to the Secret City, which had fallen on the floor.

“I believe you like to read, child? Read yourself back to sleep, then.”

The doctor seemed not to notice the girl on the cover giving him a smile and then nodding to Teo. But Teo did, and her hands tingled as she took the book.

The nurse harrumphed and stalked out of the room. Permission to read in bed was apparently her definition of spoiling a child rotten.

“But the … Brustolon?” pleaded Teo, pointing a shaking finger at the statue. “I can’t sleep with him looking at me like that, as if he wants to kill me.”

“Don’t tell Nursie.” The doctor smiled. He opened a drawer and pulled out two crisp white sheets. In a moment the Brustolon looked like nothing more frightening than a lump of rock under a picnic blanket.

A pale little boy in a nightshirt suddenly hurtled into the room. Teo glimpsed a nasty blackened swelling on his neck. His head had been cruelly shaved. The child looked wildly from Teo to the doctor and then fled back into the corridor.

“Aha!” the nurse’s voice rapped nearby. “Got you!” From the corridor came the sound of fearful sniveling, a thwack and then loud crying.

The doctor made for the door. “Now I have to go and stop Nursie from killing them with ‘kindness.’ They’re only children. And they’re frightened. She forgets that. We are overstretched, you see—so many children here with high fevers just now.”

The doctor’s face darkened and he mumbled to himself, “I have a mortuary full of dead children, and still the mayor insists on funerals only by night. All so that his precious tourists don’t see!”

When he saw Teo staring at him in horror, he patted her hand. “Don’t listen to me, child! How I ramble on! Anyway, you’ve not got whatever it is that ails the others. You’ve just had a blow to the head. Speaking of that, enjoy your book, dear. I’ll be off now.”

After a few wary glances at the shrouded Brustolon, Teo opened the book again at the place where she had left off. What she read next made her frown.

Venice is so much invaded by foreigners that we Venetians need to keep another city for ourselves, one that fits between-the-Linings, one that nobody else can see. This book is a key to that Secret City, a Venice that is private for Venetians alone. This book must never fall into the hands of foreign children or adults.

Teo was crushed. The book seemed to be saying “Keep Out.” Nevertheless, she turned back to it, and made a translation of the old Venetian dialect on the next page for herself, writing it down slowly on a piece of paper (naturally, in Teo’s pinafore there were always pencils and paper):

In Venetian we say “andar per le Fodere,” literally to “go between-the-Linings”—which means to follow secret paths. In these pages are ways for children to andar per le Fodere to places and stories in Venice, in and along ways that are not known to adults or foreigners, and which Venice herself has forgotten in the mists of time.