The Undrowned Child Read online

  At last Fate intervened. (Or so Teo whispered to herself when her parents couldn’t hear. They were scientists, and prided themselves on being thoroughly modern and rational. In other words, they weren’t great believers in Fate.) During the last few months Venice had been engulfed in a wave of strange and sinister events. Teo’s ticket here came in the form of an emergency meeting of “the world’s greatest scientists,” who had been summoned to save the threatened city. An invitation to her parents had fluttered into the letterbox.

  To think they had still tried to keep Teo at home! At first, they had insisted that she should not miss any school. Although it was nearly summer, it was still term-time, and the examinations were looming. But her teacher had given permission instantly, saying in front of everyone, “Teodora’s excused the exams. She’s going to write me a lovely story about Venice instead.” No one likes a teacher’s pet: naturally the other children had glared. Teo was mortified.

  Then her parents declared that the situation in Venice was so very dangerous at the moment. As if that would keep her away!

  “No one has actually died yet,” she had told them.

  They’d had to admit that was true.

  So finally she was here, and the real Venice, despite or perhaps precisely because of its tragic situation, seemed at least twice as precious as she’d imagined.

  Almost more than anything else she had seen, Teo loved this old Venetian bookshop. She liked the stone mermaids carved above the doorway, the reflections of water playing on the walls. She liked the old bookseller too, with his creased-up face, velvet breeches and waistcoat, and his scent of talcum powder and candle-grease. He sometimes peered at her with a curious expression, as if he knew her from somewhere but could not quite place her. He never told her not to touch. And even warned her to keep a grip on Smooth as a Weasel and Twice as Slippery by Arnon Rodent.

  “It has a tendency to fly out of people’s hands,” he mentioned kindly.

  She looked at him closely—or rather, just above his head as he spoke. For Teo had a very unusual gift. When people spoke, she saw their words actually written in the air above them. Also the manner of their speaking: some with the curt efficiency of typewriting machines, some like laborious handwriting, others with flourishes and heavy underlinings. The old bookseller spoke like a scroll of parchment unrolling, each word beautifully distinct and old-fashioned.

  Teo didn’t really know what she was looking for on those bookshelves, but she had the strongest feeling that there was something marvelous here, if she could only find it.

  “Teodora! It really is time to leave, sweetheart,” her father called from outside. Tommaso and Aurelia Naccaro, friends and fellow scientists from Naples, were waiting for them back at the hotel. With their daughter Maria. At the thought of Maria, Teo’s face knitted into a rather unbecoming frown.

  Teo’s parents were heartily fed up with this decrepit, dusty old bookshop. Being scientists, they liked things that were shiny and new, like the laboratory where they worked, and their home in Naples, which was a masterpiece of modernity.

  “Just a minute,” Teo called to them. “Just give me one more minute, please.…”

  And that was when it happened.

  Teo was standing on tiptoe to reach for Lagoon Creatures—Nice or Nasty?, yet another volume by the busy Professor Marìn. Suddenly she felt a rush of air, and a sharp blow to the head, an intense pain and the feeling of warm blood falling down her face.

  Then nothing at all.

  “Is this what it’s like to die?” was her last thought before she fainted away completely. Teo was not a melodramatic sort of child, but nothing like this had ever happened to her before.

  That is, as far as she knew.

  When she woke up, her parents were kneeling beside her, desperate worry written all over their faces. Her mother was wiping blood off Teo’s face with the hem of her pinafore. The bookseller hovered with a silk handkerchief so worn that it looked like the wing of a white butterfly against the sun. But Teo herself was still remembering what she had seen while she was unconscious—vast beautiful fish-tails thrashing around, a sinister white hand, something dark and oily swimming right over her head, the creaking of wood. The face of that princely, fair-haired boy frowning at her. And a … dwarf? Yes, most certainly it was a dwarf, but a familiar-looking dwarf, as if she might know some dwarves in her real life!

  What had happened was simply this: a book, a solid little book, had fallen from the top shelf directly onto Teo’s head and knocked her unconscious. When she came to, she was clutching that book in her hand, and her father was trying to pry her fingers off it. The fair-haired boy had vanished.

  Once Teo was on her feet again, her parents started to fuss. In an effort to calm them, the old man handed Teo the book that had hurt her. “Here, a gift. It is,” he told them humbly, “extremely valuable. Indeed, I never saw one like this before. I can see your daughter truly loves books,” he added, pleadingly, to her parents. “A true young scholar, you know, in the old-fashioned way, like the scholars I used to know. They all came here.…”

  The bookseller was lost in his memories for a moment. To call Teo “a true young scholar, in the old-fashioned way” was quite blatantly the biggest compliment that he could offer.

  The book was positively the oldest she had ever seen, the leather all discolored and the binding soft as velvet with age. The pearly, fishy smell hovered around it like a halo. Strangely, there was no title, just a vivid little colored picture inset on the front cover. It showed the face of a lovely girl or very young woman, just her head and the tips of her pale, bare shoulders. Her hair was brilliantly shiny, almost as if wet. She seemed so sad that it hurt to look at her.

  But as Teo gazed at her face, the girl in the picture winked at her.

  Teo’s skin suddenly felt fragile and powdery, as if it could break up at any second, as if she was made of meringue. The girl had resumed her still, sad pose on the book’s cover, but her cheeks were definitely flushed now. Teo quickly glanced around. No one else was watching. Her parents were still talking severely to the unfortunate bookseller.

  “I’m perfectly well, Mamma,” she interrupted. “Really! My head doesn’t hurt at all” —which was not exactly true. It ached horribly, as if a vast bell was tolling in her brain, and her vision was more than a little cloudy. Nevertheless, she looked at her mother in her most determined manner (usually reserved for people who wanted to copy her homework). “This book is wonderful. Please mayn’t I just take it?”

  She held it up to her mother’s nose. “What do you think of this smell? Isn’t it amazing? Like fish, only lovely.”

  But her mother could not smell a thing. “It must be the blow to your head, my love. Only you could get knocked unconscious in a bookshop,” she chided gently. “Let me have a look.”

  Teo flinched away in pain. It hurt far too much to put her straw hat back on. Her parents hustled her outside before she could even open the book. Her mother’s arm was around her, protectively, but Teo turned and gave the bookseller a little wave, keeping her fingers discreetly by her waist. He was standing in the doorway, gazing back at her with an uneasy, slightly guilty look. His hand was on his heart, as if he was trying to calm its beating.

  “Where did the boy go?” Teo asked, as her mother opened a parasol over her head. “That very serious boy?”

  “What boy?” Her parents exchanged worried glances. “We didn’t see anyone.”

  They walked slowly through the clammy streets to San Marcuola to catch the steam ferry to their hotel, which was just opposite the Rialto fish and fruit markets. A simple building set back from the Canal, it went by the strange name Hotel degli Assassini, which means “Hotel of the Murderers.”

  As they passed a toy shop at Santa Fosca, Teo heard music behind her. It sounded like a choir of rollicking schoolgirls singing lustily at the tops of their voices, but at a little distance, as if behind a pane of glass. The jaunty melody was familiar but Teo could not
quite make out the words. She felt as if she should know them; she felt sure that she did, but they evaded her, like the threads of a dream that you struggle to grasp after a heavy sleep. She twisted out from under her mother’s arm and spun around. The music stopped dead. The street was deserted. The toy shop was closed. Nothing stirred, not even a rat, for which she was rather grateful, as the Venetian rats famously grew as big as cats.

  “What is it now, Teodora, pet?” her father asked.

  “Didn’t you hear that singing?”

  Her parents looked at her with deepening distress. Her father growled, “What singing? It must be this infernal heat, Leonora, on top of that blow.”

  “Figure of a pig! Utter bilge and old tripes too!”

  The rough, girlish voice came from behind Teo’s parents. It was obvious that they had heard nothing. Teo peered over their shoulders into the toy shop window. Inside, a wax mermaid doll rudely mouthed, “Slow as slime on the uptake! Ain’t got a noggin’ idea, ’ave they?”

  Teo thought the better of mentioning the bad-mannered doll to her parents, who were now tut-tutting at the salt-eaten bricks falling out of walls and the blistered paintwork dropping off in pieces from the beautiful palaces they walked past.

  On the ferry, Teo placed the book carefully on her knees. The pearly smell was really quite powerful now. Her parents sat beside her, absorbed in the program for the gathering of scientists. Teo glanced around. Not one single passenger was sniffing or looking in her direction. It was safe to have a good look without drawing attention to herself.

  The beautiful girl on the cover kept her eyes downcast. For the second time Teo wondered why the book had no title printed on the front. “What kind of book,” she wondered, “doesn’t tell you its name?”

  But the strangest thing was this: when she opened it up Teo saw that her own name was written inside the cover in an antique hand script that had already gone brown with age.

  Welcome to Venice, Teodora-of-Sad-Memory, said the book. We have been waiting for you a very long time.

  at the Hotel degli Assassini, June 1, 1899

  Arriving back at the hotel, Teodora endured Maria’s mocking look stoically. At supper, Teo pushed her food around her plate. Bedtime had never seemed so long in coming. She’d not had one moment to be truly alone with her new book since they left the bookshop, and she was literally feverish with impatience.

  It was towards the end of that interminable supper that Teo began to feel seriously unwell. Green and purple spots swam in front of her eyes. She kept shaking her head to clear the roaring in her ears. It sounded like the sea—no, an ocean!—in a shell. When the waiter brought the cheese-board, there was a large carrot carved in the shape of a mermaid sitting between the Dolcelatte and the Pecorino. Teo could have sworn that the carrot-mermaid flexed her tail and plunged her little hand inside a smelly Gorgonzola.

  “Tyromancy, ye know,” remarked the mermaid. “The Ancient Art of Divination by Cheese.” Then she pulled her hand out and inspected the green cheese-mold on her tiny fingers.

  “Lackaday!” she moaned. “Stinking! It goes poorly for Venice and Teodora, it do!”

  Teo rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again, the carrot-mermaid lay still and silent on the board.

  “How is your poor head, Teodora?” asked her mother as they left the dining room.

  At that moment a violent and strangely prolonged clap of thunder made everyone jump. The lamps dimmed. The needle of the gramophone slid awry with a screech, and the silver coffee service shivered on its tray. There was a general chorus among the guests of “Oh my, the heat has broken!” and “At last!”

  The lamps were still flickering as Teo’s mother lifted her daughter’s fringe with a gentle hand.

  “My goodness!” Teo’s mother turned her around to face the mirror in the hotel lobby. A ragged purple bruise had bloomed all around Teo’s forehead.

  “How revolting,” remarked Maria, looking at her own dainty reflection with satisfaction.

  Teo muttered, “Not everyone wants to look like a pink rabbit in ruffles.”

  Her words were swallowed up in the rain that now hurled itself against the windows as if it meant to shatter them. A glass ornament in the shape of a mermaid juddered towards the edge of a sideboard. Teo gently nudged it back to safety. As she straightened it on its lace doily, the glass mermaid opened her lips and tinkled, “Not much chop, your friend, aye! Nary a brain to rub together.”

  Teo squeaked loudly and turned a shade paler, if possible. Everyone in the room twisted their necks around to stare at her.

  “This won’t do at all. We must get someone to look at you,” worried Teo’s father, above the din of the rain. “I’d never forgive myself … Go and lie down, child. Maria,” he added, “you’re peaky too. Are you quite well?”

  It was true: Maria’s peachlike complexion had turned a little greenish.

  Outside Teo’s bedroom, her parents argued in whispers that were perfectly audible from Teo’s position at the keyhole.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have brought her. Something was bound to happen.”

  “But she has no idea …”

  “No idea about what?” Teo wondered. Then the handle started to turn and she had to run back to bed. Her mother’s anxious face appeared around the door. In her hand was a familiar bottle of an English patent medicine, Velno’s Vegetable Syrup. Teo groaned.

  It was agony waiting for the hotel to find a doctor who would come out on a wild night like this. Teo sat propped up on fat pillows, the book safely hidden under the lowest one. She could feel it, temptingly thick, in the small of her back.

  The doctor was an elderly man on stilty legs, his sparse hair flattened by the rain. He made her look into the light of a candle, and gently swiveled her head around. His words appeared to Teo in a fussy, careful script when he murmured, “Strange, such green eyes in a girl from Naples … Any history of medical problems in the family?”

  “I’m adop—” Teo started to say, but her mother shook her head slightly. “Why doesn’t she want the doctor to know?” pondered Teo.

  He pushed an icy thermometer under her tongue, and listened to her heart, which was sometimes thudding like a steam train and then suddenly not beating at all for whole seconds at a time. He seemed to be far away, down the other end of a telescope, when he started to ask her questions. What with the roaring in her ears, and the pain in her head, it was impossible for Teo to concentrate. Odd, vague answers stumbled out of her mouth. “I see with my ears in Venice.” And “The bluest of fins!”

  Teo felt freezing and burning at the same time; her skin was a cold crust over boiling lava. Her forehead hurt as if it was about to split open.

  “That’s quite a fever. It would be prudent to take her to the hospital.” The doctor’s tone was grim. “I suspect a concussion. And I don’t like to see that color in a little girl’s skin. I’m seeing too many children like this at the moment, and …”

  Teo’s mother motioned him away from the bed.

  “Is our daughter in danger?” she whispered, searching the doctor’s face. Teo took the opportunity to drag the book from under her pillow and slip it into the breast-pocket of her pinafore.

  His answer was somber. “Madam, in Venice, at this moment, we are all in danger.”

  “But the mayor says it’s safe here. We read it in the paper.”

  At the mention of the mayor, the doctor’s kind face creased into a cantankerous expression. He said sternly, “I repeat. By bringing your daughter to Venice, you have tempted Fate.”

  “But they’re scientists. They don’t believe in Fate,” whispered Teo, as she slipped slowly from consciousness.

  The last thing she heard was a chorus of sweet, rough voices in her ear, singing like the choir she had heard in the street. This time she could hear the words clearly, as well as the accents, which were not exactly refined. None of those girls had been near a finishing school. Maria would have called them common.

 
To the tune of “The Jolly Roger,” they now sang,

  “ ’Twas Fate what brung ye here, Teo-do-ra

  ’Twas Fate what called yer name

  ’Twas Fate what dropped that book on-yer-head

  ’Twas Fate what pulled the train …”

  May 27, 1899

  On the long train trip from Naples, both pairs of parents had dozed, worn out from nights in the laboratory preparing for the great gathering of scientists. When her father settled into an even rhythm of soft snores, Teo had gently lifted the slab of papers from his knee and delved inside.

  Maria threatened, “I could wake ’em up and tell ’em what you’re doin’, if I had a mind to!”

  “Absolutely right, all that you’re lacking is a mind.”

  Maria opened her mouth and shut it again. In a moment, Teo had forgotten Maria’s sulky little face in the seat opposite. She read as fast as she could. Who knew when her parents might wake up and take the papers away from her? Some of it had been too technical to understand, but the main message was clear as cut glass. Venice was dying. And dying fast, like a patient in a hospital where the doctors know no cure, like Teo’s poor Nanny Giulia, who had wasted away from consumption.

  Teo’s eyes welled up at the memory. The last thing she wanted was for Maria to catch her crying, so she dived back into the files. It did not make her feel any better. After a wretched hour’s reading, Teo had snapped shut the thick sheaf of notes, photographs and diagrams. She closed her eyes and let the clatter of the train fill her head. Outside, the hills of Tuscany softened into the orchards of Emilia Romagna. Teo’s memory, which worked rather like a camera, kept clicking back to certain phrases. “The inevitable conclusion is …” and “Venice cannot survive this.…” Her skin felt tight with misery; her nose prickled with tears. Teo had waited so long to come to Venice, and it seemed that Venice might not have waited for her.