The Mourning Emporium (21 page)

In spite of the black birds spreading their wings on the masts, the sailors reboarded the Scilla, lighter-hearted for dispatching the guilty treasure and the violent memories it carried with it.

They needed all their renewed hope passing Erith Reach, which was haunted by the hulls of ghostly wrecks. Then a prospect of clamorous docks and towering warehouses opened up in front of them.

“Empire Mill, Premier Mill, Spillers’ Millennium Mill,” read Teo aloud. The other boys set about spraining their tongues by trying to do the same. Before they had mastered the words, the mills too disappeared into the mist. A paddle steamer, the Hutton, rushed breathily past them at close quarters a few minutes later, her decks crowded with black-clad passengers.

“The Woolwich Ferry,” guessed Renzo, pumping the steering wheel hastily to larboard to avoid one of the dozens of spritsail barges, cockleboats, houseboats, steamboats and naval vessels that had now joined the Scilla in this stretch of river. All were heading inexorably west, toward the capital.

They were taken by surprise at the sight of an elegant white palace with pairs of domed towers and gracious low wings clustering around a square.

“This means we are in the part of London called Greenwich,” Renzo said, consulting the map. “We are not far from Tower Bridge. The heart of London!”

“If London has a heart,” muttered Sebastiano, staring ahead. “It looks as if it’s made of fog and stone.”

The mist was lifting. They passed an enclosure signposted as London Docks, where they glimpsed men unloading puncheons of rum, rolled carpets and sacks of spices, whose scent floated out across the water. Massive doors gaped to show heaps of dyestuffs, and acres of mysterious barrels and bins of horns, sulfur and copper ore. Cork was piled in ribbed sacks. The noise was ferocious. Coopers hammered barrels; sailors yammered in a dozen languages. Clattering carts bore slatted boxes through which spilled vivid tufts of peacock feathers. The water bobbed with heavily laden vessels. A rich smell of coffee was emitted from one; a sour stench of hides from another.

A towering vehicle rolled down a road toward the dock. Drawn by horses, the black box was crammed with tiny people in two layers.

“A vaporetto?” laughed Emilio. “A land vaporetto with wheels!”

“A London omnibus,” corrected Renzo. “My father rode in one once.”

“Omblibus!” Sebastiano held his head. “I think my brain just died of one English word too many.”

“Never mind that—look at the horses!” exclaimed Fabrizio. The Venetian boys crowded to the taffrail: most of them had never seen a living one.

“No,” breathed Renzo, “look at that!” He opened his arms.

The heart of London! Retreating into an unimaginable distance, they saw the scribbled outlines of irregular buildings rendered almost transparent by the sighs of a hundred thousand chimneys. Some structures were so tall and narrow, and so closely perched upon the water, that Teo’s homesick heart was reminded of Venice. Yet all the great public buildings were on a grandiose scale that made Venice seem like a quaint colony of dollhouses. Even the smallest London warehouse loomed ten times larger than the biggest palace in Venice. Every bridge, chimney and arch seemed of heroic proportions. Between the great edifices, there were glimpses of medieval towers jostling against half-timbered mansions that seemed to be folded from crisp white paper. On higher ground, stone barracks, fitted with a fierce regularity of windows, glared in serried ranks. The Londoners, all dressed in smart black mourning, strode about their business, visibly quivering with energy, even at that distance. Thoroughly intimidated, the sailors fell silent and simply gazed.

Finally, Fabrizio whispered what they were all thinking: “Could human beings have built such a place? Londoners … must be formidable.”

Teo answered, “I see what Lussa meant now—if there was ever any magic here, it must have been crushed by the weight of industry. No wonder the Londoners don’t believe in ghosts anymore. They just believe in London!”

The Gothic battlements of Tower Bridge rose in front of them. Renzo was struck silent. Teo, remembering the money-box, stole close and put her hand on his shoulder.

“I’m thinking that’s from the Middle Ages!” breathed Emilio, but Renzo soon corrected him. “It’s only seven years old! They just built it to look that way. Look on the other side, that’s the Tower of London, and there’s Traitors’ Gate. They are really old. But the bridge is a marvel of modern engineering.”

“It’s so low! We’ll never pass below it with our mast!”

“Watch and see.” Renzo smiled mysteriously. “Hydraulic power!” and even as he spoke, the road at the center of the bridge suddenly jerked and then split in two, the two sides rising like a pointy hat. A huddle of tall-masted ships hurried through and then the bridge closed again. On the other side, they glimpsed smaller vessels and barges dodging between the greater ones, and whole clusters of boats moored in floating colonies in the middle of the river.

A small iceberg nudged against the side of the Scilla, making everyone jump. Until this moment, excitement had kept their minds off their numb hands. But now Sebastiano blurted, “London’s cold is as bad as anything we had in Venice!”

Their eyes were drawn to the white rim of the river: the edges of the Thames were starting to ice over just like the Grand Canal. In the distance, the dome of St. Paul’s rose like a jeweled egg in a pillared cup. Yet even its grave magnificence glittered with a crusting of ice. Ahead of them, a long yellow-brick building boasted gilded-fish weather vanes shimmering with frost.

“Billingsgate Fish Market,” said Renzo. “Oh, look, Tower Bridge is opening again. Our turn now!”

The bridge passing was accomplished without incident, thanks to Renzo’s quick thinking and firm hand at the wheel. Then they plunged into the maelstrom of river traffic. After weeks at open sea, this was almost as fearsome as a colossal squid, for everywhere fast vessels loomed up at desperately close quarters, their captains yelling threats and insults. The Scilla was soon buffeted out of Renzo’s control.

As the Scilla lurched toward the low arches of London Bridge, Fabrizio cried, “We’re definitely going to lose our masts this time!”

His words were drowned out by a sound of splintering wood. Teo felt as if her own neck was being wrenched from her shoulders. In a cloud of sawdust, the taller masts crumpled in two, their upper halves hanging down like half-sawn trees.

Then, to the south, just past London Bridge, a slender opening in the river appeared, its gray water lapping delicately almost at the feet of a pretty Gothic church. A sign read ST. MARY OVERIE DOCK. REASONABLE RATES. FOREIGN SHIPS WELCOME.

As one, the sailors nodded. There was something so cheerful about that sign: something that seemed specifically designed to welcome a mortally damaged ship of shivering Venetian orphans, with little money apart from a couple of sovereigns kept back from a few days of involuntary pirating.

Renzo, grunting with effort, pulled the Scilla away from the Customs House. By inches, they avoided a Norwegian ship from which an overpowering smell of fish floated.

Zigzagging through barges, square-sterned American half clippers, lumber schooners and men-of-war, Renzo maneuvered the Scilla neatly into an empty berth at St. Mary Overie Dock, shouting, “Get the anchors off the bows and let them hang by the cat-stoppers and shank-painters!”

The sailors had not finished hugging each other when an old man appeared. He looked at their flags. “Eyetalian, eh? How long you stay-ee here? You pay-ee now-now in advance, all good, bene? You have gold guineas? No? What’s that? French coin? Is all right. I take two for now, you decide later how long you stay. Good, yes? Fresh water well there. Clink Street thataway. Horses—gee-gees—thataway. Hatton Garden, all your Eyetalian friends, over river. Food, beer. La Gazzetta Italiana di Londra for read! You got barrel organs, bene? You got monkeys? You play good? Good, good. Ropes you tie here.” He indicated an iron ring on the wharf. He was still muttering instructions as he walked off. The Venetians had not needed to say a word.

Clink Street was a dark canyon lined with warehouses. Dank cobbles threaded with mud meandered drunkenly down the middle. Dismally thin horses clopped down the sides, pulling shabby carts.

Rickety structures, darkly varnished with wet soot, seemed to prop one another up like wounded soldiers returning from a war long past. People hurried back and forth, hunched in threadbare clothes. Several children scuttled in front of the boat. At least, they had the dimensions of children. Their faces were prematurely aged and their limbs wizened.

Renzo lifted the telescope to his eye, searching the grim streets for some sign of the promised wonders of London. “Where are the moleskin waistcoats, greatcoats with velvet collars and twenty-five-shilling hats? And the silk umbrellas that Miss Uish said everyone carried …?”

“Same place as all the other lies she ever told us,” answered Fabrizio bitterly. He peered with his sharp eyes into the street. “Look at those bundles of rags lying in the alleyways. Those are people. Beggars! Miss Uish said that even the poor of London lived in palaces. It doesn’t look much like, does it?”

“What’s that terrible smell?”

Unlike the other London odors they’d briefly picked up in passing, this one seemed to wrap itself around the boat. There was no sailing away from its sourness. Renzo glanced at the map propped by the wheel. “Ah, we’re at Southwark. So that’ll be the smoke from the chimneys of the brewers, the leather-tanners and the soap-boilers.”

“And why has the sky turned that color? It looks like …”

“London is famous for its sudden deep fogs. There are different kinds—a cold ‘hot-chocolate’ fog, a mint-green fog, a turmeric-yellow pea-soup fog.”

“You’re making me hungry,” moaned Giovanni. “Let’s go and find some food. Then we’ll have the strength to look for those mermaids and Incogniti. Didn’t you say they sell hot sliced pumpkin?”

“Any volunteers for a reconnoitering party?” asked Renzo.

Not a single hand was raised.

“It have got to be the ones what spake the local lingo the bestest, hain’t it not?” suggested Sebastiano in his worst possible English.

Eight pairs of eyes turned to Renzo and Teo.

Renzo pocketed the telescope and shinnied neatly down the ladder to plant his feet on the cobbles.

Swaying slightly, he looked up at Teo. “You coming?”

Teo joined him promptly below. As the two stepped unsteadily into the gloom of Clink Street, an officious-looking man in a serge suit bustled onto the quay.

Renzo whispered, “I don’t like the look of that.”

He pulled Teo behind a post.

“Eyetalian, is she?” the officer muttered, staring at the broken masts and the Scilla’s flags, the green, red and white stripes of the Italian one, and the Venetian winged lion.

“Worse and worser! Venice. Dear me. Oh, dear me. Tsk tsk tsk.”

He produced a long roll of tape from his overcoat and proceeded to drape it around the quayside. He announced, “No exit from this ship, or entry upon it.”

A small knot of bystanders gathered to hear him intone, “All ships from the afflicted city of Venice—where the Half-Dead disease rages—are to be quarantined until further notice. London must be kept safe from the Venetian sickness.”

“Guards!” he called.

And two officers marched to the quayside, thrust their rifles across their bellies and took up their posts in front of the Scilla.

“Pssst!”

They’d hardly walked a hundred yards before four pairs of hands seized Teo and Renzo from behind. Another two pairs of hands covered their mouths and eyes. They were propelled around a low wall, and then pushed to the ground on their bellies. Teo rolled over, escaping the blinding hands for a moment. She just had time to glimpse a sign that said NAKED BOY YARD before her face was slapped hard enough to make her eyes water. She could hear Renzo getting the same treatment.

“This is our pitch, unnerstand? Hands off! Sling yer hooks and doan come back. Got it?”

“I thinks they’s on a doings. Look at ’em. Sneakin’ around.”

“Is they on the cadge? They is thin ’nough for to do that.”

“On the cadge?” asked Teo.

“Beggars! Is you shipwrecked mariner beggars, or blown-up minin’ beggars, or distressed-author beggars, or starved-out bakers’ apprentice beggars? Or none of the above?” The boy counted off the possibilities on his fingers.

Teo and Renzo stared helplessly up at their inquisitor, a plump boy of their own age. Their English was adequate for piracy on the high seas, but they were in difficulties with these strange words. Teo’s head was jumbled with the uncertain scripts she’d seen above the Londoners’ heads. Most of these boys and girls had only a vague grasp of the alphabet, it seemed.

“Or is you thumble-screwers, sawney-hunters, or drag-sneaks?” demanded another boy, this one thin and freckled.

“I cannot be sure,” replied Teo, “however, I think it unlikely. Please to explain what those things are.”

“Watch-thieves, or bacon-stealers, or robbers what help thesselves to goods wot is on carts?” The boy’s voice was stern.

With relief, Teo cried out, “Oh, definitely not. We are …”

Her voice trailed away as more small figures slunk from the shadows until a circle of a dozen skinny, dirty boys and girls surrounded them, staring with narrowed eyes. All were clad in the deepest black from head to toe, except where dirt and dust had lightened their somber uniform with smudges of gray. Their faces, incongruously, were shining pink and clean.

“Why doan they say nuffink?” asked a girl with overly short arms hanging uselessly from thin shoulders.

“Cat got yer tongues, then?” demanded a boy coated in mud up to his knees.

With dignity and in his very best English, Renzo replied, “We are in full possession of our tongues. The feline race does not in general consume human organs of elocution.”

“Wot? ’E’s speakin furrin, ain’t he?”

“No, that were English, jist pumped fulla pompous.”

“La-di-dah!”

The muddy boy drew in his breath, wheezing. “Wot if they’s spies for the mendicity officers?” He poked his finger at Renzo’s face. “Or is you truancy officers for the London School Board? Talkin’ loik that!”