The Undrowned Child Read online

  “Look at that!” breathed Renzo. “It’s supposed to be uninhabited.”

  Yet white steam poured out of Ca’ Dario’s chimneys into the black sky. When the children stood in the Campiello Barbaro, gazing up at the palace’s tall windows, they heard a rhythmic thumping and intermittent sawing. There was a strong scent of something that definitely resembled furniture varnish, overlaid by a smell of sawdust.

  On the Grand Canal outside, a whole flotilla of gondolas passed, each bearing yet another little coffin. Teo gasped—at least twenty dead children tonight.

  “What is it?” Renzo asked impatiently. She pointed to the grim procession.

  “Worst-kept secret in Venice,” barked Renzo. “At school there are empty places in every classroom. Let’s get away from here.”

  A heavy dew had fallen and the streets were slippery. Teo walked only on the gray stones, avoiding the stripes of white marble that decorated every pavement in elegant patterns, even in the humblest quarters of Venice.

  “How do you know to do that?” asked Renzo suspiciously.

  “To do what?”

  “Avoid the Istrian marble?”

  “You mean the white stone? My feet just do it automatically. Why?”

  “It’s one of our private Venetian things, to know that the Istrian marble is more slippery than the granite when it’s humid.”

  Teo shrugged. “Had you considered the possibility that there might also be the odd fragment of marble in Naples? The city has some history, you know.”

  Renzo was adamant. “Not Istrian marble.”

  Teo gave up. It was true, she had been bluffing. She didn’t actually understand how she knew to avoid the slippery stones.

  The book was leading them towards one of the quietest parts of the city, on the northern fringes, a long way from San Marco and Rialto. They crossed the Fondamenta della Misericordia, turned right into the Campiello Treviani, then passed over the bridge to the Calle Vechia and under a crumbling archway made of bricks and holes—mostly holes.

  Teo exclaimed with surprise. Through the archway, the labyrinth of Venetian streets suddenly opened up into a breathtaking panorama of a high sky, islands, stars and sea. On their right a basin of water bobbed with little boats. Beyond it lay the lagoon. On their left, a tall, achingly lonely building jutted out into the waves. To its rear loomed a line of five black cypress trees, stretching up like huge goose feathers into the midnight blue sky. The vast garden was entirely walled in. Teo had not seen a garden of that size anywhere in Venice before.

  “This is the Sacca della Misericordia,” Renzo whispered in an awed voice. “I believe the book is taking us to the House of the Spirits!”

  As if in agreement, the great bell of the Church of Madonna dell’ Orto suddenly and very emphatically struck midnight.

  midnight, June 7, 1899

  “House of the Spirits, what’s that?”

  As she uttered the words, Teo’s tongue stretched out along them and she wanted to repeat them over and over again. She was quite sure she’d never seen it before. Yet she felt that odd sense of familiarity again, an emptiness in her stomach and a fullness near her heart.

  Renzo drew himself up for another of his history lessons. “It was originally part of a noble palace, the Contarini del Zaffo. Sixteenth century. The House of the Spirits was a kind of pleasure pavilion. Built at the end of the garden. It was supposed to be for parties and entertainments, and other more secret things.”

  “Secret things?”

  “People met there to discuss unconventional or magical ideas. Especially during the Inquisition, when the laws on free speech were terribly tight. A band of intellectuals called the Academy of the Incogniti, the Unknowns, held their illicit meetings there. Even our famous artist Titian and his poet friend Aretino …”

  Renzo paused to explain these two geniuses, but Teo interrupted, “I know perfectly well who they are. And Pietro Aretino, by the way, fled here from Rome in 1527. He wasn’t born Venetian.”

  She resisted the temptation to say “So there!” and stamp her foot. It was time Renzo understood that she also knew what the inside of a library looked like.

  Renzo whistled under his breath and continued, “Now it’s a place for old nuns who’ve spent their lives looking after the poor, handicapped and deformed. They pass their last days here, in the House of the Spirits, on the edge of the lagoon.”

  “A lovely reward for them,” reflected Teo. “The place is so beautiful.”

  “But other people say it is haunted. Because there’s a wind that whistles through the house like a banshee at certain times. It’s also said that the garden of the House of the Spirits has a strange echo, and that people talking or singing in there can be heard all over Venice. Listen!”

  When Renzo stopped speaking, Teo heard something that made her want to run away. It was a great chorus of whispering—hundreds of distinct voices, all pleading and calling at once. Most of them were men, many were gruff, and others tearful; still more, threatening. To Teo, the voices appeared in a jumble of antique scripts, some from the fifteenth century, some from the eighteenth and everything in between.

  “That doesn’t sound much like nuns,” she observed dubiously. It didn’t sound like anyone she’d be pleased to meet on a dark night.

  “If it’s not the nuns …?” Renzo’s voice rose uncertainly.

  As they moved a few steps in the direction of the noise, a sudden drop in the temperature confirmed it for Teo—the garden of the House of the Spirits was indeed full of ghosts. The book flew out of Teo’s hands and landed on the parapet of a bridge, where it spread itself open in a shaft of moonlight. The children ran up, half eager, half afraid.

  The Key to the Secret City immediately began to tell the stories of those voices crying out from the garden. There were murderers and misers; a wretch who’d set fire to an enemy’s house, only to burn down his whole street. It gave Teo a terrible pang to see among them children who’d willfully caused their parents unbearable grief by running away from home. Each face appeared briefly and confessed its sins, begging for forgiveness. Then it faded away and another pitiful face formed on the page.

  “We have to go in there?” asked Teo. “With them? Is the Butcher in there?”

  No! wrote The Key to the Secret City. Biasio is presently with his Master.

  Now that it had got them thoroughly terrified, The Key to the Secret City traced a little map. The footprints of two children, unmistakably Teo’s and Renzo’s, being marked T and R, marched alongside the tall, narrow seawall of the House of the Spirits. On the other side lay the lagoon—the home of large and hungry sharks.

  “How can we do that?” exclaimed Teo.

  Renzo studied the wall. “There’s some kind of ledge near the bottom, like a skirting-board.”

  “Never in a hundred years!” protested Teo. “It’s narrower than our feet!” The voices in the garden rose up in a mighty yowl.

  “Well, if you’re too frightened …,” challenged Renzo, “I’ll go by myself.”

  He set the ring of his lantern between his teeth and started to climb from the street to the corner where the ledge began. He immediately lost his footing, and had to swing for the mast of a nearby boat. He slid down into the boat, tumbling onto his back, his face as white as a pillowcase. He mumbled, “Not going to work.”

  “But that’s exactly the way to do it!” cried Teo. “Climb from boat to boat, until we get to the water gate. Unless, of course, you’re afraid of tearing your smart clothes.”

  She tucked the book into her bodice, hitched up her skirt, hung her lantern over her elbow and set about scrambling down into the first boat.

  Six boats along, they reached a tall gate fashioned from great loops of black iron. Grabbing a convenient drainpipe, they were able to lever themselves from the last boat to the wall, and then it was easy to gain a foothold in the ornate ironwork of the gate. In moments the children had scaled the gate and dropped down below into the garden of the Hous
e of the Spirits—where they straightaway tripped over the low inner wall and fell flat on their faces, all tangled up in each other, and in what seemed to be a rosemary bush, from the medicinal smell that arose from its needling crushed leaves. Their lanterns were extinguished in the fall. They had landed on the edge of a path paved with tiny chips of pale gravel, pieces of which had stuck to their faces, which in the moonlight, looked as if they were covered in carbuncles.

  Teo and Renzo scrambled to their feet and cautiously stepped out onto the path. They shivered. The air in the garden was freezing, as if it was midwinter inside those walls, while outside them the summer night held Venice in thick, hot blackness.

  The ghosts did not appear, nor did they utter a single moan. Yet both children felt distinctly that they were under the minutest observation.

  A terra-cotta–colored palace stood on their left. On their right, projecting out into the lagoon, stood the creamy House of the Spirits, looking more like a dream of a building than a real one, its arched windows reflecting the moon and clouds scudding across the sky. The path leading to it was bordered by the seawall, which, strangely, had windows through which they could see the boats, the houses and rooftops of Venice, and real life, ordinary life, insofar as life in Venice could be called ordinary at the moment. On the other side of the path stretched the garden, shimmering with ghostly outlines of clipped trees, statues and vines.

  The candles in their lanterns flickered back into life. The children raised them to look around. It was so beautifully neat, more of a giant, living chess set than a garden where children might play. And such a scent rose from it in the dark—of herbs and cut grass and … and on top of all these things Teo breathed in a powerful whiff of salty-sweet perfume like that of The Key to the Secret City.

  It took a good pair of ears to hear it, but suddenly there was a slight noise of snapping stalks of grass. Teo, her skin prickling, saw that Renzo’s face had grown taut with fear. The imprints of dozens of feet appeared on the immaculate lawn. All those empty footprints were moving in their direction.

  Suddenly, wispy faces and ragged bodies appeared luminous against the darkness, all hovering a few inches above the ground. The clamor of ghostly voices filled the garden again. It seemed as if the ghosts had simply paused for a long, long intake of breath, all the better to howl louder.

  “Help me! For the love of all that’s good, save my soul!” cried an old woman in an apron. “Please tell me all is not lost, please, kind children. You look kind.… I am sure that you are kind … especially after what you’ve been through, little girl. And what you have witnessed.” This, from a man in prison pajamas.

  “What have you been through, Teo?” asked Renzo suspiciously. “What have you seen?”

  “Can’t imagine what they’re talking about,” Teo lied.

  “Tell us that Venice forgives us!” pleaded a child’s voice by her ear. Teo spun around. A little runaway boy hovered there, his hands clasped together beseechingly.

  “We would,” said Renzo in a tremulous but sympathetic voice. “We would, if we could, but we’re just ordinary children.”

  “If only,” thought Teo.

  There was a long chorus of heartbroken groans from the ghosts. The children stood silently, not wanting to disturb such terrible grief, not knowing what to do next.

  Now a new voice could be heard above the others. It was a rough, girlish voice, and it was singing. The book inside Teo’s pinafore lurched, pulling her in the direction of the song.

  At the same moment, the children’s lanterns went out with a conclusive little fizzle. Pulses of fear ran up and down Teo’s spine. She clutched for Renzo’s hand, to find his blindly groping around for hers. Discarding the useless lanterns, Teo and Renzo stumbled hand-in-hand towards the place from which the singing seemed to come. Four tall slender columns appeared in the gloom, then an arched doorway.

  “Where are they going?” cried the desolate voices of the ghosts. “Oh, don’t leave us, never leave us!”

  It was as if the voices had fingers and that they pulled at Teo’s shoulders and feet. She was so sorry for them, but the power of their misery terrified her, and she was afraid, more than anything, that they would claim her for their own.

  “Put your hands over your ears,” whispered Renzo.

  The keening of the ghosts grew dimmer when she did that, but she could not quite block out their cries. The last thing she heard was, “No, do not go down there, never down the-e-e-re.… Stay with us.…”

  Teo and Renzo shuffled into an old chapel, covered with dim frescoes of a stormy, foggy sea, which were illuminated by the moon reflected in the water. For although the garden outside was perfectly dry, inside the chapel the floor was covered with water and seaweed that wrapped around their feet and threatened to trip them up at every step. The Key to the Secret City started to vibrate wildly in Teo’s bodice until she exclaimed, “I was definitely planning to open you sometime very soon!”

  As soon as she did so, a great silver key jumped out. Teo, clumsy as ever, missed it. Dappled moonlight lit up the key as it arched and dropped into the water, to be immediately hidden among the dense seaweeds. Renzo sighed.

  Teo thrust the book back into the top of her bodice. The children knelt down in the water, combing their fingers through the soft fronds, trying to find the key. All the while the singing voice grew more and more urgent. The strangest thing was that it seemed to be rising up from underneath them. Eventually Teo’s hand closed around the key, just as pain tore through her knee. She cried out, feeling her skin open up in a deep cut. The moon must have emerged from behind a cloud, for suddenly the chapel became clear as day and the water grew transparent.

  Teo could see her own blood wafting out around the dark green seaweed. She had shuffled straight onto the sharp hinge of a great lock.

  “Blood,” she thought in a daze of pain and shock. “Do ghosts bleed?”

  Renzo and Teo saw a beautifully carved door shimmering beneath the shallow water, placed flat in the floor, as if it opened straight down into the sea. Teo pushed the key into the lock and pulled at the door with all her might. It gave a little, just enough to let her know that it might possibly open.

  Renzo had put his hand on her shoulder. She could feel him trembling. Clearly, he shared her own fear, that they would be sucked into some kind of deep pool below the lagoon. If even the ghosts were afraid of what was down there …

  “I’m not …” Renzo struggled to admit it.… “not really a good swimmer. You see, we don’t always learn to swim in Venice. It’s an old superstition we have here: ‘What the sea wants, the sea will have.…’ ”

  “Don’t worry, I am.” Teo was a surprisingly good swimmer, happily in her element and graceful as a ballerina underwater. Her adoptive mother sometimes called her “my water-baby.”

  Renzo intoned, “A drowning man should not be helped, for the sea will only claim another victim in his place. It is considered by some scholars that this belief dates back to pagan times, when the gods of the sea had to be appeased by occasional human sacrifice.…”

  “What nonsense!” Teo said briskly. “Now, we need to pull this door up together.”

  Embarrassed, Renzo knelt down in the water beside her and took hold of the other half of the handle. Teo held her breath, closed her eyes and wrenched. She waited for the big wave, the swell of cold water, the blackness pulling them down.

  When she opened her eyes, instead of darkness and sea there was light and music and a dry stone staircase that descended steeply to what distant echoes told her was a vast chamber far below. The walls of the staircase were covered in frescoes of underwater scenes and lit up with candles in sconces made of scallop shells that had been dipped in gold. The perfumed salt smell wafted around them, as did snatches of song, both stronger than ever. There was no doubt that they were coming from wherever the stairs ended, somewhere deep below the garden of the House of the Spirits. The children hesitated at the top stair.

  “
Renzo!” urged Teo. “We’ve come this far.…”

  The stairs wound down and down. The frescoes were replaced by gilded shields, each showing a mortar-and-pestle, and the scallop sconces by exquisite candelabra decorated with all kinds of sea creatures made from glass, glittering in the light and tinkling slightly as the children passed. Teo’s injured knee throbbed with every step, and the blood straggled down her leg. The smell of perfumed salt had given way to something else, something warm and spicy, something that didn’t really seem at all possible.

  “Can you smell … curry?” asked Renzo.

  “Well, something very like it.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Well, it’s definitely not a curry house, not down here.”

  “Seriously, do you think The Key would take us anywhere dangerous?”

  “Everywhere is dangerous in Venice now.”

  “That’s a comfort. Thank you for that. Oh, can you hear something?”

  A thumping noise grew louder and louder as they descended.

  Finally, the roof gaped open into a great archway, from which they could see a larger space blazing with light.

  At the bottom of the steps was a broad stone balcony that rimmed a vast pool, which resembled a Turkish bath. It was tiled all over with tiny gold mosaics like the Basilica of San Marco. Arches opened in all directions to more golden caverns and canals. The golden walls were lined with airy shelves hung with garlands of flowering seaweed thick with pearls. Above the garlands, in neat rows, glittered hundreds of golden mortars-and-pestles. The cavern was lit by enormously thick and tall candles dripping white wax tears, which every few seconds floated away as discs of light in the still, clear water.

  The chamber was not empty. It was full of clattering life and song. Rainbow-colored parrots squawked in gilded cages. And someone was exceedingly busy down there.