The Undrowned Child (8 page)

“Not stealing,” Teo told herself when the baker scratched his head at a sudden vacancy in his oven dish. “More like learning.”

But in the bakery at San Barnaba, the baker’s young apprentice shouted at Teo when she lifted a hot sugared bun from his tray, “Oi, you! Drop it!”

“You can see me!” Teo gasped.

“I see a thief,” the boy grumbled.

“Are you … a ghost too?” asked Teo.

“And are you mad?” he retorted, reaching out to grab her arm.

The baker loomed up behind his apprentice. “Talking to yourself again, scamp?” He boxed the boy’s ears.

Teo had run away with a lesson learnt. Children could see her. And they didn’t seem to see any difference between her and themselves.

Another thought crossed Teo’s mind. Perhaps it was only Venetian children who could see her? Now, that was something she could test on Maria. And if Maria could see her, well, then Teo could ask her to explain to her parents what had happened, insofar as she could explain it.

Then it struck Teo that in all the time since her … “accident” … she had never once laid eyes on Maria. What was Maria up to? Was she with the young man with the too-perfect face?

Teo sighed. Would Maria be any use, anyway? She might as well ask a pig to do algebra. “Can’t” and “shan’t” were Maria’s favorite words, unless it was some little thing she could do to ingratiate herself with the fashionable crowd. Teo turned back to the book and its comforting distractions.

All day she’d been soaking up dialect as fast as she could. She eavesdropped shamelessly. Having no one else to talk to, she spoke to herself in dialect all the time. Her trick with Latin and French was working well, and soon she found that it was relatively easy to talk and think in Venetian.

But when she helped herself to a little dictionary in a bookshop, she was put back in her place with a shock. The same fair-haired boy whom she had seen in the old bookshop at Miracoli suddenly materialized beside her. So she had not imagined him after all! He looked hard at the bulge in her pocket that marked the stolen dictionary, and muttered, “What can you expect from a foreigner?”

He was as smartly dressed as before, with a different linen waistcoat, shining boots and a crisp white shirt. At least the Venetian boy did not denounce her to the storekeeper. And his reaction proved her theory—children did not see her as a ghost, but as one of them, an inferior specimen, to be sure, but nothing to remark upon.

Outside the bookshop she winced at the sight of another of the LOST GIRL posters on a lamppost beside the canal. Her eyes slid to her reflection in the bookshop window. She was by now quite unrecognizable as the tidy little person in the posters. She looked more like an urchin who had been dragged by wolves through a forest.

“Don’t ye fret, young Teodora, yer a credit to yesself,” said a hoarse voice comfortingly. Teo turned, but all there was to see was a ripple spreading in the still water of the canal.

A hot wind blew a piece of paper around her ankle. It was the latest of Signor Rioba’s handbills.

Teo brought the handbill back to her room and studied it alongside the discarded newspapers she had rifled from the manager’s waste basket.

Apart from the gushing wells, the ghost bells, the floods and the sharks, there was a new problem, this time with Venice’s lighting. Each night, without fail, all the gas-lamps in the city flickered and then slowly spluttered out. Every expert in the Veneto region had been called in, but, night after night, just after ten, the lights died and the city was plunged into blackness.

Even handheld lanterns appeared to be affected by whatever mysterious force had extinguished the gas-lamps … they never lasted long, and tended to fail just as people were making their way over bridges or walking near the edges of canals. From the black water came the ominous sound of loud splashing every time someone lost his footing.

The newspapers were full of it—CITY ON ITS KNEES!—without its faithful gas-lamps. Even more sensational was the appearance of a ghostly light in the palace known as Ca’ Dario, which enjoyed the reputation of being the most haunted house in Venice.

Ca’ Dario was a gigantic hunchback of a building, lurching sharply to the right, its foundations clawing into the bank of the Grand Canal. Funnel-shaped chimneys were clustered like toadstools on the top. No one had lived there since the most recent owner had committed suicide, the last in a long string of suspicious deaths inside. No Venetian wanted to enter its grim gates, not even the city rat catcher. Not even the city rats. The Key had taught Teo that these vast and fearless creatures were known to the Venetians as pantegane.

Signor Rioba had plenty to say on the subject. Beware Ca’ Dario! Only evil flows out of that palace. Evil. And sickness. And death. Oh, ye could not be counting the number of lies they’re telling ye. More than the hairs on the poor flayed skin of Marcantonio Bragadin. More than the hairs up the nose of your great left-legged baboon of a mayor.

The police were ordered to break down the doors and find out what was causing the strange light inside Ca’ Dario. Even they dragged their feet, making excuses about paperwork and protocols, until the newspapers jeered at them as cowards. Eventually a squad of no less than thirty nervous policemen forced the door down. They found nothing inside, except shifting moonlight, a pile of ebony wood, a huge vat of varnish and a heap of elephant tusks.

Meanwhile the mayor, who fancied himself as something of an old-fashioned intellectual and a poet, sent a letter to the papers.

Teo scanned the swollen paragraphs: The collective imagination of the town has created this phenomenon of light in Ca’ Dario … architectural genius … Each of those funnel-shaped chimneys is an oculus to draw the light of the full moon straight down inside.…

“What is he going on about?” thought Teo irritably. She’d been to see Ca’ Dario glittering in the dark. “If that’s natural moonlight in Ca’ Dario, then I’m a polar bear!”

The minister for tourism and decorum took up the cause too: … time to bury all these ancient superstitions about Ca’ Dario … not a place of evil … the city’s lighthouse in our present little difficulty. Brava, Ca’ Dario! … encourage more tourists to come to Venice, just to see our splendid Ca’ Dario by moonlight. And by the way, whoever’s pretending to be Signor Rioba is a mischief-maker and a clown. And we’re on his trail too.

“Oh really?” Teo barked. There was something about the mayor that made her gnash her teeth.

Another fish-scented handbill from Signor Rioba fumed: Take care, Venetians! Have ye all been beaten with the stupid stick, like your mayor, who has the immortal gall to tell ye everything goes well? Which is pure, distilled Fool’s Talk. Your ancient enemy is here again. And your mayor is giving messages for him. Ca’ Dario is a sign. Take notice, while ye still can. Time is running out.

“Ancient enemy”? That was new.

Squinting at the lettering, Teo grew dizzy. She felt queasy and her head ached. It was hard to steal nutritious things like poached eggs or potted shrimps, which slid between her fingers and splattered on the floor, making the hotel cook swear horribly. A diet of cakes and fruit left her body as weak and disconsolate as her thoughts.

“What would my parents do to make me feel better?” It was a desolate notion. As was the answer: Teo dosed herself with Dottore Dimora’s Nerve Pabulum Pills, washed down with a swig of sour spirit of Scurvy Grass from the Morelli Pharmacy at Rialto. The only effect was to make her rather queasier than before.

By now her spirits had sagged so low that she was almost ready to welcome the sight of Maria. And in that forlorn state she made her way to Maria’s room. Her knock went unheeded. She opened the door and gasped. Even though it was late at night, Maria’s bed lay empty and untouched. A brown insect scurried across the floor on a hundred tiny legs.

Teo returned to her own bedroom. She stood by the window, gazing out at the black water lit only by a few wretched stars. A procession of funeral gondolas quietly slipped down the Grand Canal, each with one pathetically small coffin aboard.

the morning of June 5, 1899

It was then, as if sensing that Teo had reached her lowest point, that The Key to the Secret City began to introduce her to its own circle of acquaintances.

Those acquaintances were ghosts.

It started on the traghetto. Teo made her way unseen into the gondola that ferried people between San Samuele and Ca’ Rezzonico. The sun beat down on passengers crowded together like stalks of asparagus tied in a bunch. Venetians, the book had explained to Teo, always stood up in the traghetto. Only tourists and foreigners lacked the sea legs to balance as the boat crossed the Grand Canal.

“Move over!” The voice was gruff, and the nudging elbow cold as ice. Teo flinched away.

“I’m talking to yer, girlie! When Pedro-the-Crimp talks, yer listens, right?”

Teo turned to face a snaggle-toothed man in moth-eaten breeches and a velvet jacket that looked a hundred years old. His face was deeply etched with misery.

“You can see me?” she asked eagerly.

“And why not? I’s dead. I’s got the pleasure of watching all the living. Lucky sods. They don’t know they’s born. What I wouldn’t give for an hour in their sweaty shoes …”

At that moment Teo noticed that the man’s feet hovered an inch above the floor of the boat. She reached out a hand towards him. “Wait! So you’re a ghost?”

“Which bit of ‘dead’ are yer not understandin, girlie?”

“But I can see you.”

“Children can always see us ghosts. But it don’t bother ’em, not s’far as I can see. They don’t usually see any difference between grown-ups, living or dead. Children is always bound up with their own affairs—all adults is in another world, s’far as they’s concerned.”

“But you can see me. Adults … just … can’t at the moment. How is it that you can see me? Does that prove that I am a ghost?”

“Whoa there, girlie. Pedro-the-Crimp don’t know what yer is. There’s something missing about yer, s’true. Yer cold, but yer isn’t cold enough … how did yer die?”

“I didn’t die! At least, I don’t remember dying.”

“Doesn’t even know if she died, does she?” jeered Pedro-the-Crimp. “Is it mad yer are? Well, I can tell yer that yer’s not prop’ly alive, girlie, else the grown-ups would see yer. Yer don’t look much like an angel to me. Tell me what yer did, and I’ll tell yer if yer is a ghost.”

“What I did?”

“What bad thing?”

“You mean to be a ghost you have to do a bad thing?”

The thin man looked shifty. “Well, some people, the lucky ones, the simple ones, they goes straight to their reward when they dies. But some of us has a bit more … homework to do on earth before we can be at rest. A bit of straightening out, yer know. Now, I don’t suppose yer’d like to help an old man.…”

Teo felt uneasy. “What bad thing did you do? What’s a crimp?”

The man was suddenly furious. He flapped his hands, snarling, “He killed my horse! What could Pedro-the-Crimp do? I loved that mare! Let me show you her daguerreotype … it’s in me back pocket.”

Instead of reaching around to the seat of his trousers, Pedro-the-Crimp thrust his hand right through his body. It came back outside with a plop and a faded picture of a soft-eyed dappled mare was in his fingers. She stood beside a much younger version of Pedro-the-Crimp with the Church of the Mendicanti in the background.

Pedro-the-Crimp stroked the picture with a grimy finger. “That mare was my life,” he moaned. “She would of brung me a cup of hot chocolate in bed if she could. My neighbor poisoned her on account of his own nag losin a race to her on the mainland. Should that spiteful tick be allowed to live after that? Yet I’s sorry for what I did. I wishes I had not. I’s sorry as all-get-out, I am. I wishes I could get out of this cold.… So now yer know, girlie.…”

Suddenly his face contorted. He took a step towards her, his hands outstretched.

She could smell his rotten breath as she teetered on the edge of the boat and the shark-haunted water beneath.

Over the ghost’s shoulder, Teo saw the other side of the canal approaching fast. When it touched the poles at Ca’ Rezzonico, she leapt out ahead of all the other passengers and pounded down the narrow alley to San Barnaba, with Pedro-the-Crimp’s cries ringing out behind her.

“I’s sorry, girlie, I wunt hurt yer for the world, I wunt. I jest wants to get out of the cold.…”

What a sorrowful collection of faces came to inhabit Teo’s photographic memory in the next few days! She learnt to recognize that sudden chill at the back of her neck that meant a ghost was walking nearby. Like Pedro-the-Crimp, the other ghosts of Venice were sunk in their own miseries. Some, however, were curious about Teo.

“What are you? And why are you so sad-forlorn, girlie?” an old-lady ghost asked Teo. “That’s a bone-deep grief you’re carrying.”

Some ghosts patted her hand consolingly with their chilly fingers—or paws. Teo had a feeling that they were also checking to see how cold she was. When they found her skin still faintly warm, they always jerked their hands back, confused.

Then, if they noticed the old book under her arm, they nodded at her, and gazed beseechingly, as if she might be able to solve whatever bitter mysteries enfolded them. Teo wished with all her heart that she could do something for these unhappy creatures, but The Key to the Secret City did not offer any explanation. No matter how often she asked why the ghosts were sad, or what could be done for them, the book always wrote the same reply: This and many other things shall be revealed one day.

It was only on the third afternoon of her ghostly existence that Teo remembered that there was someone in Venice who might know what had happened to her. She mentally kicked herself very hard indeed for not thinking of him before. The old bookseller at Miracoli—he had given her the book! He must know something about it.

She ran directly to the bookshop. By now Teo knew the streets so well that she hardly needed to consult The Key to the Secret City for directions. Her heart was in her mouth all the way. At last she would have answers. She would insist on them!