Salamander (16 page)
Authors: Thomas Wharton
He went to the door and opened it. The court, the snow, Meg had vanished. He turned back to the shop and he was in his cell.
From time to time he was visited by people he had known. His rivals in the printing trade. Papa Martin, the playing-card maker, one of his father’s old friends.
And people he did not recognize. An elderly white-bearded man in a green cloak stood near him all one evening at his work.
– Do I know you? Flood finally asked.
The old man did not speak, but held up his large, powerful hands to reveal strange characters burned into his fingertips. Letters, Flood finally realized, of the Hebrew alphabet.
He awoke one morning to find that the space where his imaginary press stood was taken up by the wooden skeleton of a real press. He approached the empty frame warily, wondering if by relentless mental exertion he had imagined part of it into existence. He spent the rest of the day collating sheets rather than give in to the temptation to touch the apparition and have it vanish into nothingness.
The next day the impression assembly — the screw, the bar, the platen – had joined the frame. He could no longer resist, and smiled as his hands slid into their old familiar grip around the well-worn contours of the bar. This, his hands told him, was
his
press, the old workhorse of the House of Flood and Son.
The following morning the carriage assembly was there: rounce, coffin, tympan and frisket, the ink bats hanging from their hook beside the ink block. He set a forme of imaginary type and was about to lock it into the coffin when he stopped,
set the forme on the floor, and lowered his own face to the cold surface of the press stone. Like a rider greeting his mount he stroked the smooth, dark wood.
He slept fitfully that night, and was awakened at dawn by an unfamiliar sound. He sat up and peered into the corners of the cell, searching for the source.
A key, scratching like a mouse in the lock.
The heavy wooden door swung open with a faint squeal of hinges that told of the recent application of oil. A slender dark-skinned young man stepped warily into the cell, carrying a tray of type. He was followed by a girl of ten or eleven with pale russet hair, dressed in a boy’s waistcoat and breeches. Her eyes in the stark light gleamed a watery aquamarine. The young man and the girl stared at Flood for a moment, then at each other. Finally the girl stepped forward.
– Greetings, Signore Flood, she said in English. My name is Pica. I am your daughter.
S
ometimes the reader places her ear close to a book and hears a distant sighing of waves. In the crevice between the pages her fingers touch a wand of cold wet sand, studded with tiny fragments of iridescent shell. The ribbed and sloping paper itself seems to invite her
.
She wades in cautiously, her naked feet moving like snails over the sharp stones
.
HE
B
ROKEN
V
IOLIN
A
fter floating on the sea for days and days, she was washed ashore on an island where stood the palace of a beautiful but sad Queen. When the ladies-in-waiting opened the windows that morning, they saw the quaint little cask lying on the sand.
Your Highness
, they said, hoping to cheer her,
you should see the lovely little cask the waves have washed ashore
. The Queen ordered them to bring the cask to her, and when it was opened, out stepped the maiden, as radiant as the moon.
Where are you from
, the Queen asked her,
and why are you sailing the sea like that?
She has wet the bed again. Above her, the winged face of Sister Beata hovers in the blackness
.
– Filthy child. The third night in a row. Get up.
She must stand in the lavatory until dawn. Water trickles from stone spouts like gaping mouths. The unpassing night. Something scuttles over her bare foot. A rat, squirming itself into a crevice in the rotten masonry
.
The young novice who patrols the rooms every night with a shaded lamp looks in on her once each hour, on Sister Beata’s orders, to make sure she remains standing
.
The novice whispers from the doorway
.
– It’s no wonder you wet your bed all the time. You were born at sea, they say. On a ship.
Before sunrise the girls in their nightdresses drift into the lavatory, glancing at her with sleepy curiosity. One of the older girls steps up to her
.
– Hey. Pissalina. You’ve got funny skin. It’s shiny, like a frog’s.
Francesca is beautiful. Several times before this day she has caught Pica staring at her creamy skin, her long, lustrous black hair. Francesca is speaking to her, but her angry gaze burns through Pica to something else
.
– Your mother named you Pica? The magpie. So are you a magpie, then, or a frog?
– I’m not …
— The Maestro had red hair like yours. He died the day you came to the Ospedale. Maybe you’re the Maestro’s little secret, and that’s why he died. One look at you.
The girls laugh and turn away, tugging off their nightdresses. They chatter, shriek at the rats, shove each other under the waterspouts. Their shouts in the vaulted room slapping night awake. The bells of San Zaccaria sound the hour and voices rise in answer from the chapel:
Venetus surge, sta in excelso, et vide jucunditatem quae veniet tibi a Deo tuo …
Your name is a typeface, he told the girl. Except you pronounce it pike-a.
– I say it peek-a.
She asked him if there was anything he needed.
– A bath. Please.
He would not leave his cell, and so Djinn repaired one of the Count’s few useful contraptions, a tub that could fill itself with hot water from an adjoining boiler. Flood lay back in the scalding water, his armour of dirt dissolving. When he rose out of the bath and looked at the thick black film on the surface, he had the feeling he had left someone behind.
Djinn fetched a barber from the village who sheared off Flood’s matted nest of beard and trimmed his tangled mane. It had been getting so long, he told the girl, that it was starting to dip in the ink block.
She showed him the T-shaped piece of metal she had always had, carried around her neck on a ribbon.
– I couldn’t find anything in the castle to fit it.
– That’s a quoin key, he told her. For keeping a forme of type locked tight in a chase.
He studied her. She was here to learn the craft, he decided. That was why she had brought the quoin key. He scrabbled in his typecase and took up a lowercase letter
a
.
– On the bottom are the feet and the groove. On the body is the nick, here, and the pin mark. At the top, the shoulder, the neck. And lastly, the letter itself. The face.
He looked up. She was gazing around the cell, not listening.
– Who was your mother? he asked
– The Countess, she said.
She returned to his cell in the evening, bringing him a supper of bread and beet soup. When she set the tray on the press stone, he stepped up close to her, reached out, and touched her face.
– You’re cold. Porcelain?
She backed away.
– No, signore. It’s cold up here. That’s why I thought you might like some hot food.
– How old are you?
– Eleven. Or twelve. I’m not sure.
– Those are boy’s clothes you’re wearing.
– I ruined my own clothes getting across to the island. Djinn gave me some of his.
– You … swam here? Why didn’t you take the ferry?
– It was full of people.
– People coming here?
She looked away as if embarrassed.
– To see the castle, she said. They pay to see …
– The freaks, he said. And the madman.
He looked up at the gear in the ceiling, its teeth rusted to stumps. The machinery had been silent for so long.
– She’s dead, isn’t she?
– No, the girl said fiercely. I don’t know where she is. No one does.
A grey, gusty morning, the torn sky sending down a few stray pinpricks of icy rain. This is the hour they take the air in the walled
corte,
watched by the novices, older girls who had been accomplices until their heads were shaved and their bodies swathed in black. The younger girls are not supposed to speak to anyone who comes to the gates, but men stop there often, to watch them and sometimes call them over to talk. When this happens, the novices turn away and say nothing
.
She cannot remember ever having been outside the Ospedale. The map of Venice in her head has been constructed of rumour, stories, vague scraps of knowledge that might possibly be clues to the world outside, like the sign set into the wall threatening parents with dire consequences should they try to pass their own children off as orphans
.
Most of the girls will become the wives of merchants and tradesmen. Sometimes the nuns decide that a girl should be married to God and become one of them. And there are a few girls who one day are just gone, and no one says anything. Francesca is sure they are sold like slaves to rich men
.
Pica catches sight of a shard of blue glass lying on the cobbles. She halts, wondering how it got here, how it escaped the sweeping-woman’s broom. She stoops swiftly, plucks the
bit of glass from the ground, slips it into her apron pocket. Later she will hide it with her other treasures, in the secret hollow in the wall beside her bed
.
She hears a sound and quickly straightens up. A red-faced old woman in a frayed cloak is watching her through the bars of the gate. The midwife who brought her to the foundling home. They have met at the gates before. The old woman tells her stories
.
– I wanted to see how you were getting on, mouse.
– I’m well, thank you.
– You look thin. Are those stingy old women feeding you enough?
– Yes. I don’t eat sometimes.
– Why not?
– I put the food in my pockets for later, but I forget about it and it goes stale. The girls say that’s why I was named Pica.
(She will dare a question she has never asked.)
Did my mother name me?
The midwife heaves a deep sigh and Pica catches the faint vinous reek of her breath. She loves the smell, like the wine they sip at Mass from the gold chalice. The old woman’s stories, breathed to her on this dark incense, hold the same
mystery as the words the priest intones over their bowed heads on Sunday
.
– The poor dear was so weak, all she could do was whisper.
She’s so small
, she said, and then,
Pica. Call her Pica
. I’d never heard such a name for a girl, and I wanted to ask and make sure, but they hurried me out of the room with you squealing in my arms.
– Does my mother send you here to see me?
– No, child. That was the last time I saw her.
– Why did she give me up?
– Oh, mouse, she didn’t. They took her away. They broke her heart.
– Who?
Tears glitter in the midwife’s bloodshot eyes. She strokes Pica’s cold hands through the bars
.
– You’re so tall, mouse. And so pretty. Just like the princess in the stories you used to like. You won’t be caged in there much longer, that’s for certain. There’ll soon be rich young men stopping here instead of foolish old women.
– They say I was born on a ship.
The midwife sobs, exhaling another sacramental gust
.
– She had a hard time of it, poor thing. You were not going to come out, I thought, and then when you did you were all black and curled up and I thought,
The little tadpole is already finished before she’s hardly begun
. Then you gave a slippery little kick in my hands and started bawling.…
– This was on a ship.
– Oh, mouse, I swore –
– Tell me, please.
The midwife glances around, and Pica is startled to see fear in her eyes, fear of someone or something other than the nuns. Finally she moves closer to Pica and speaks in a hurried whisper
.
– It was the oddest thing I’ve ever seen. High at the ends, like castle towers, and made up of different sorts of planks, as if it had been knocked together from a hundred shipwrecks. Steam billowing out of the portholes, and all these frightening rumblings and other noises too. I got a good long look, you see, because they rowed me to it. The ship was anchored in the lagoon, out past the Lido.
– Here in Venice?
– Yes. I thought it was strange they wouldn’t just bring your mother to the lying-in hospital, and then when they hauled up the side, all of a sudden I thought,
The plague
. I was sure that’s why they were bringing me out in secret, and I started blubbering and carrying on. Then the man in black sticks a gold coin under my nose and says,
You see this? This is all you need concern yourself with
. He takes me in to the locked room where your mother is already well along, and the last thing he says to me is,
You will not speak a word to her. She is not to know where we are
. That was when I knew the poor girl was their prisoner —
Sister Beata appears on the steps of the Ospedale, glaring at the midwife, who moves away from the gate
.
– Now you’ll be in for a hard time of it, mouse. I’m sorry.
– I don’t care. Just come back again, please.
