The Mourning Emporium (31 page)

Renzo protested, “I was there, but …”

“You just stood and wrung your hands, did you? Like now?” mocked the barrister, imitating Renzo with deadly accuracy. “So you not only perpetrated the shameful act, but you are also too cowardly to admit it.”

To be accused of shameful cowardice was too much for Renzo. “You’re being used!” he cried. “Someone is manipulating you into commiting a crime on his behalf.”

“Contempt of court,” snapped the judge. “Added to the charge sheet.”

The prosecution barrister continued smoothly, “As I was saying, savage murder …”

“But I didn’t want to attack the Rose la Touche. My friend Teo was noosed—”

“Yet you did. Set that down, clerk! Confession at the dock. Guilty as charged. And therefore guilty of attacks on diverse innocent French, Spanish, English and Dutch vessels. Also note that this testimony incriminates that other Venetian pirate, Teodora Gasperin. I put it to you, Lorenzo Antonello, that you two hardened criminals have come to London, intent on land-piracy upon the citizens of this city!”

Someone in the crowd shouted, “String ’im up, the little tyke!”

The judge slapped his gavel on the bench and nodded approvingly. The prosecution barrister winked at him, lightly tapping his hip pocket. The court clerk busied himself at the silent typewriting machine.

The barrister snapped, “Now, boy, what do you know about the Half-Dead disease that now rages through the innocent population of London?”

“I—I know nothing …,” stammered Renzo.

“Boy claims to be a cretin. No defense.”

A lamb wriggled out from between the legs of a man with a corked hat and stampeded around the courtroom.

Amidst the chaos, Renzo was swiftly convicted of “piracy on the high seas” and for “contaminating the Jewel of the British Empire with a wasting disease.”

The judge announced, “One week from today Lorenzo Antonello shall be taken to a place of execution to be hanged by the neck until dead. Then his corpse will be exposed to three high tides and buried in an unmarked grave, so that no trace of his wicked existence on this earth shall be left behind him.”

Renzo swayed in the dock, and the parrot lost control of itself for a moment too. Looking down at the warm green splatter on his shoulder, Renzo whispered aloud, “It cannot, cannot get any worse.”

Teo climbed halfway up the ladder and threw the sack of day-old bread over the Scilla’s taffrail. No one called down to greet her: she guessed they were all keeping warm belowdecks. Why wasn’t Renzo there waiting for her, though? He always seemed to sense when she was coming back from one of her errands ashore.

Was he playing at rhapsodomancy with Sibella?

No, he hadn’t done that since Teo had mocked him for it. But something wasn’t right, she thought.

A newsboy ran down Clink Street shouting, “Read all about it! Venetian pirate captured! Newgate gallows to swing for Venetian boy a week from today!”

“Gristle and guts!” cried Teo, sliding down the ladder.

One of the useful documents stored in Teo’s brain was a map of London Town, published by Appleyard and Hetling of Farringdon Street, a copy of which she had once gazed at in the school library. One quick look was of course enough for Teo’s photographic memory to capture its every street and street name. Newgate Prison appeared in her mind, set in a web of lanes. The map in her head propelled her through the winding streets of Southwark, toward the wide expanse of Blackfriars Bridge and the misty huddle of London’s roofs beyond it.

Teo’s nerves did not really catch up with her until she’d left the Embankment and was running up to the very gates of Newgate Prison. Then, at the sight of so much black iron and grizzled stone exuding such rampant wretchedness, Teo stopped short, her heart thudding with terror. Newgate was exactly as Miss Uish had so happily described it during that mock trial on the Scilla: brooding, malignant and windowless. And Teo now had to get herself inside it.

“I’m between-the-Linings,” she reassured herself. “I can get past the guards.”

And so she did, passing through the gates among a crowd of visitors. The first thing that struck her about the place was the lack of light. She felt as if she were moving through a dark, flooded cellar: flooded not with water, but with a deep, liquid-seeming misery. A few miserable lamps not so much relieved as highlighted the darkness. By listening to dismal conversations, she discovered the way to the condemned quarters.

Two minutes later, she was looking down into the pathetically bare cage of a solitary cell. Her lower lip wobbled when she noted that even in his state of utter hopelessness, the sleeping Renzo contrived to look elegant in some strange attire that reminded her of nothing so much as the rags of the Ghost-Convicts from Hooroo.

Then she noticed the parrot perched on Renzo’s foot.

“What’s that doing there?” she wondered.

The bird cocked his head at her and nodded, before bending down to bite Renzo gently on the toe.

The first part of Renzo’s brain to awaken fully was unfortunately his sense of smell: the straw on which he lay stank of every possible vile thing. Retching, he kept his eyes screwed shut and tried to drift back to sleep.

The next thing he heard was Teo whispering through the bars at him.

“Renzo! Renzo! Wake up!”

Renzo opened his eyes. “Teo,” he cried, “you have to be careful. Newgate’s crawling with Hooroo criminals dressed up as guards!” His voice was not quite steady as he added, “But thank you for coming.”

“If they’re human, they can’t see me. Of course I’m here.”

“Well, I haven’t been such a good friend to you, lately, have I? You’ve had every reason to turn your back on me.”

Neither of them mentioned Sibella, but her shimmering presence and tinkling laugh hung in the space that separated them.

Renzo began again. “I thought you would come for me. It would be so like you to put yourself at risk.”

Teo wondered silently, “Would you rather have seen Sibella’s face at these bars?”

As if she’d said the words aloud, Renzo whispered, “There is no one I would rather see than you now, Teo. I would wish that your face, above all others, was the last face I saw before I died.”

“You’re not going to die!”

“It doesn’t seem very likely that I shall still be alive next week. You know the penalty for piracy.” Renzo snapped his fingers with a grim humor.

“Oi!” A guard, mercifully a real one, stumped up to the cell. Teo moved hastily out of his way. “You, Venetian pirate boy, stop talking to yesself! It hain’t allowed! It’ll rouse up the blood of the other prisoners. Shut yer filfy foreign mouf!”

Renzo blanched.

Teo whispered, “I’m going now, Renzo, to get help. I’ll work something out. I promise.”

Renzo watched Teo’s narrow back retreating down the corridor. Then he looked at the three walls of his cell, and up and down the bars. There was no possible way of escaping. “Maybe if I had five years and a sharp instrument I could weaken a single bar,” he groaned. “But I have nothing.”

“Nothing,” chirped the parrot.

Renzo stared at the bird. Now that he really looked at it, he could see that it was the most intelligent breed, an African gray. Of all the parrots they trained on the Scilla, the African grays were always the quickest to absorb new phrases and even whole sentences.

He laughed softly. “You have given me an idea and the means of carrying it out.”

“Carrying it out,” repeated the parrot, word-perfect.

Renzo stroked the parrot’s feathers and got to work.

When Teo arrived back at the Scilla, she found the ship in an uproar. Somehow, despite a general understanding that she was to have an eye kept on her, Sibella had managed to slip away, taking the pillow box of her remaining leeches with her.

The boys and girls were confined to the ship. Signor Alicamoussa and Uncle Tommaso were out on the streets searching. Turtledove and Pattercake were sniffing all roads leading away from the Scilla. They were desperate to find her before she could alert anyone to the existence and exact location of an invisible boat full of runaway London street urchins and juvenile Venetian mutineers at St. Mary Overie Dock.

“And it looks loik that Renzo’s gorn off wiv her!” muttered Tig aggrievedly. “They prob’ly worked it all out beforehand an’ met up somewhere, an’ now … Where you bin anyway, Teo? We found the bread an’ we was worried summat ’ad happened to you. We can spare that Renzo orl right, but not you.”

Teo opened her mouth to speak, but Pylorus rushed in, “They makes a fine pair, Renzo an’ Sibella. Bet they’s saunterin’ up Mayfair arm in arm right now, lookin’ at the Paris fashions!”

“Be quiet!” screamed Teo. She put their mistake to rights in a couple of short, pointed sentences. The Londoners clutched one another.

“Newgate!” breathed Hyrum.

“The Old Bailey!” shouted Thrasher in despair.

“The beak was rotten?” Bits drew in his breath. “My pa got sent down by one o’ that sort. My late pa, that is.”

“Renzo’s a goner,” groaned Pylorus Salt. “I’m right sorry I were a bit sharp ’bout him jist now.”

“He prob’ly wernt spoony on that Sibella at all,” moaned Ann Picklefinch. “He were prob’ly jist keeping an oiy on ’er. To protect us all, loik. And all that while we was moongin’ on about him.”

“It’s obvious,” Giovanni spat. “Sibella’s gone to the Bombazine, to tell Miss Uish where we are. Isn’t that just what she would do?”

Teo resisted the temptation to say “I told you so,” yet her face ached with the unspoken words.

“And our poor Greasy and Marg’rit might be on the pye-rat ship too,” called Bits. “And they’ll be wantin’ savin’, urgent. Plus whoever’s got our Renzo trapped loik a rat—that villain will be on that boat.”

There was a short silence, during which everyone looked at the deck, the lanterns, the mast, down Clink Street—everywhere except at each other.

“Well,” sighed Teo, “I guess it’s going to be me.”

“To do what?” asked Fabrizio skeptically.

“Who sculls over to the Bombazine to see what’s going on there.”

“Straight as a pound o’ candles, her!” chuckled Bits admiringly.

“Launch the coracle!” ordered Giovanni, and the Scilla’s crew rushed to undo its clove hitch and lower the boat into the Thames.

The District Disgrace quavered, “If Thignor Alicamoutha were ’ere, or if Turthledove were ’ere, or Huncle Tommy-tho, they wouldn’t let our Teo go on thuch a deadly mithion. In the middle of the nighth!”

“Good thing they’re not here, then,” muttered Teo, already halfway down the ladder to the coracle.

“Brava, Teo!” blurted Sebastiano dalla Mutta in a very small, frightened voice.

Skimming over the black Thames, Teo dodged miniature icebergs. As she stood poling with her single oar, she was grateful to Renzo for the gondoliering lessons in Venice. The coracle was easier to manage than a gondola, but the currents of the Thames were far more dangerous than the Grand Canal’s lazy swaying. The unpleasantly familiar shape of the Bombazine appeared ahead all too soon. Starlight showed the black ship looking distinctly worse for wear: the Sea Sorcerer’s storm had broken her back and slanted her masts. The pirate flag still hung in tatters.

“I guess that’s why she took so long to get to London. Must have limped all the way. But how dare she show those murderous colors?” thought Teo. Then she remembered that no adults in London could see the ghost-ship at all.

From fifty yards away, she caught a glint of the moon on the weapons carried by two guards. From twenty yards, she caught the sound of their snores and the faint baaing of sheep.

The cormorants were sleeping peacefully on the crooked masts.

Teo used a reliable midshipman’s hitch to secure the coracle to a ladder at the larboard side of the Bombazine. She climbed aboard, tiptoed across the empty deck and pushed her shoulder against the first sliding door she saw. It ran quietly along its grooves. There was no guard there either. Unobstructed, Teo entered the forecastle of the Bombazine thinking, “I guess no one needs to guard an invisible ghost-ship.”

Inside the first room, the feeble glow of a single lantern threw shadows upon three rows of sagging hammocks. Though a fierce draft rustled Teo’s hair, those hammocks hung eerily immobile, as if they were tenanted by stones.

Gingerly, she pulled down a fold of one of the hammocks. Inside, the remains of a swan lay crumpled like a wad of white paper. The hammock to its left held the wan skin of an antelope. On the right hung a hollow baby hippopotamus, drained of all its marrowfat.

“The animals from the zoo!” Teo backed out of the room and up to the deck.

There was another sliding door on the larboard side of the mast. It was locked. Putting her ear against it, Teo heard a breathy voice singing. She pulled away, chilled to the core. There was something terribly wrong about hearing “Silent Night,” the loveliest Christmas carol of all, rasped out in a voice that oozed such wickedness. And in January—a month late. What kind of creature was that? And why had Miss Uish got it locked up on the Bombazine?

The booby hatch gaped open. Over the dreadful whispered singing, Teo became aware of a rumbling cacophony below, a pounding noise like wooden cogs turning, the cries of children and the howling of dogs.

Not a fiber of her being wanted to go down there.

“But,” Teo reproved herself, “this is why I’ve come.”

Belowdeck, the Bombazine’s walls were lit by ornate lanterns inlaid with colored glass in poison green and bloodred. The walls and windows were hung with velvet curtains and ancient tapestries, slashed as if by swords. The last time Teo had seen such tattered luxury and such violent hunting scenes had been inside the ghost-palace of Bajamonte Tiepolo in Venice. And then her eye fell on a carved wooden crest painted in the Tiepolo colors of red, blue and yellow.

Trembling, Teo grasped the velvet curtain that hung between her and the source of the appalling noise. The dusty fabric crumbled like a cobweb. Peering through the hole her fist had made, Teo discovered the dreadful secret of the Bombazine.

In a cavernous wooden chamber, dozens of treadmills were walked by chained boys, girls and dogs. All were clearly at the final stages of exhaustion. Even as Teo watched, one dog stumbled and fell off its post, rolling to the floor, where it lay quite still. The eyes of the prisoners followed it and filled with tears, as did Teo’s, as a Ghost-Convict kicked it into a corner.