The Undrowned Child

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Michelle Lovric

  Map copyright © 2009 by Ian P. Benfold Haywood

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by Orion Children’s Books, a division of Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, in 2009.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lovric, Michelle.

  The undrowned child / Michelle Lovric. — 1st U.S. ed.

  p.cm.

  Summary: In 1899, eleven-year-old Teodora goes with her scientist parents from Naples to Venice, Italy, which is falling victim to a series of violent natural disasters, and once there she is drawn into a web of mysterious adventures involving mermaids, an ancient prophecy, and the possible destruction of the city itself.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89861-7

  [1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Mermaids—Fiction.

  3. Good and evil—Fiction. 4. Prophecies—Fiction. 5. Venice (Italy)—History—1866—Fiction.

  6. Italy—History—1870–1914—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L95949Un 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010022847

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  A case of baddened magic

  Some fragments of an antique Venetian prophecy

  1. A startling afternoon

  2. A puzzling evening

  3. What had happened a few days earlier

  4. A quick word about Maria and Teodora

  5. Too many children are sick in Venice

  6. An hysterical conniption?

  7. What Teodora had remembered just before …

  8. A surprising awakening

  9. A quick word about Signor Rioba

  10. A gruesome theft

  11. A poor welcome

  12. Life as a ghost

  13. Pedro-the-Crimp and Co.

  14. Campo San Zan Degolà

  15. The past is catching up

  16. That boy again

  17. Insiders and Outsiders

  18. An appointment

  19. The House of the Spirits

  20. Blood for breakfast

  21. A traitor’s tale

  22. A long, bitter grudge

  23. Ninny-broth

  24. To the Bone Orchard

  25. Fish food

  26. Who’s your friend?

  27. A sick day

  28. Beware Mahogany Mice

  29. A betrayal

  30. Green gelato

  31. Venetian Treacle

  32. Vipers and hot chocolate

  33. The Venetian Archives

  34. The enemy’s enemy

  35. Uncle Dog

  36. Consequences

  37. Persuasion

  38. Supposed to be a secret

  39. Night of the body snatchers

  40. Preparations for war

  41. The Cream of Cats

  42. The Games Pavilion

  43. Six hundred years’ hate

  44. Human plans

  45. The toenail spell

  46. Battle in the lagoon

  47. The Palazzo Tiepolo

  48. The trap

  49. Don’t worry

  50. History repeated

  51. A wedding with the waves

  52. How to destroy a spirit in-the-Meltings

  53. Loose ends and story-ends

  54. Awakenings

  55. A new discovery for the scientists

  56. A reunion

  57. And some farewells

  Places and things in The Undrowned Child that you can still see in Venice

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Venice in 1899

  The numbers follow the sequence of the story. The most important sites in the city are marked on the map itself.

  Where the ferry leaves for Murano

  The old bookshop at Miracoli

  The Hotel degli Assassini

  The hospital

  The square of Sant’Aponal

  The statue of Signor Rioba

  The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo

  Ca’ Dario, the haunted palace

  The traghetto between San Samuele and Ca’ Rezzonico

  The square of San Zan Degolà, where the Butcher Biasio plied his trade

  The Rialto fish market

  The House of the Spirits

  The Sottoportico del Cappello Nero, with its relief of the old woman with her mortar-and-pestle

  The two columns in the Piazzetta

  The Bone Orchard

  The Campanile of San Marco

  The Two Tousled Mermaids Apothecary

  The Venetian Archives

  The Hotel Danieli

  The Cavallerizza, the old stables

  The Church of San Geremia

  The Wolf-in-a-Crown Apothecary

  The Naranzaria

  The fog that fell upon Venice that evening was like a bandage wrapped round the town. First the spires of the churches disappeared. Then the palaces on the Grand Canal were pulled into the soft web of white. Soon it was impossible to see anything at all. People held their hands out in front of them and fumbled their way over bridges like blind men. Every sound was muffled, including the sighs of the steam ferries nosing through the black waters. It would be an exceedingly bad night to fall in the water, for no one would hear a cry for help.

  On the dark side of twilight, at the Fondamente Nuove, nine members of one family, dressed in their Sunday best, stood in the dim halo of a gas-lamp. They were arguing with an old gondolier standing in his boat below.

  “We simply have to get across to Murano. Our daughter’s to be baptized at San Donato during Vespers,” explained a studious-looking young man cradling an infant in a pink bonnet. Proudly, he held out the baby over the ledge for the gondolier to inspect. Being a Venetian child, she gurgled with delight at the waves crinkling beneath her.

  “Not in this fog.”

  “It’ll lift as soon as we pull away from shore,” insisted the young man’s brother. The whole family nodded vigorously.

  “No one is going anywhere in Venice tonight, signori.”

  “But the priest is waiting for us …,” pleaded a gray-haired woman, evidently the mother of the young men.

  “I’ll eat my oar if he is, signora. He’ll know that only a fool and his dog would set out in this.” The gondolier gestured into the whiteness.

  Then the baby’s mother spoke out in a low sweet voice. “But are you not Giorgio Molin, signore? I believe my second cousin is married to your uncle’s brother?”

  The gondolier peered under her bonnet. “Why, Marta! The prettiest girl in Venice and you went off and buried yourself in the Archives,” he clucked.
“Imagine, a vision like you working there! Enough to give the librarian palpitations.”

  At the word “Archives,” a look of anxiety crossed Marta’s face. She quickly glanced around, murmuring, “Pray, do not mention that place here. Especially on this day.”

  In the mist, the water stirred uneasily.

  Suddenly the baby chuckled, stretching her tiny hands out towards the gondolier.

  “Look, the little one knows her kin!” he grunted.

  “I’m forgetting my manners, dear Giorgio,” said Marta, and she introduced her mother, her father, her cousin, her uncle, her brother-in-law and parents-in-law. “And this”—she smiled adoringly at the studious young man—“is my husband, Daniele—that librarian you mentioned.”

  The usual pleasantries were exchanged.

  “So won’t you take us, Cousin Giorgio?” asked Marta Gasperin, finally. “It would mean such a great deal to me.”

  “Family is family,” sighed the gondolier.

  “Family is everything,” declared Marta Gasperin, bending to kiss the old man on the cheek, at which he flushed. She added, mischievously, “Family and books, of course.”

  “You’ve still got that teasing tongue, I see,” Giorgio Molin grumbled, handing her down into the gondola. “You be careful or that baby of yours will grow up clever. And that’s no good in a girl.”

  “Thank you, thank you kindly,” whispered each uncle, aunt and cousin as they climbed into the boat. Ten was a heavy burden for a gondola. But the Gasperins were a tribe of low height and delicate build. They arranged their party clothes carefully as they sat down.

  The fog did not lift as Giorgio Molin kicked off from the seawall. He set his face grimly in the direction of Murano. It would be kinder, he supposed, not to share his misgivings with the family who were now chattering about the supper that would be served after the baptism.

  The thick white air churned around them. The waves swallowed up their words and laughter. The words and laughter sank all the way down to the seabed, where a certain skeleton had lain twisted in chains for nearly six hundred years.

  A tremor rattled through the bleached limbs. A red glow lit up the empty rib cage. Bony fingers twitched, and an emerald ring sent a green light searching through the waves and shifting seaweed. Soon a dark, sinewy tentacle, long enough to encircle a house, came creeping over the floor of the lagoon.

  Picture those gentle people in the gondola, warming up the mist with their laughter, handing the little baby from arm to loving arm, kissing her toes and fingers, whispering her name like a prayer.

  They had but a few seconds more to live.

  No one saw the seagulls approach. They cruised in silently from the lagoon islands, looking for trouble and carrion. If they could not find something dead to feast on, then they were not too squeamish to kill. These were the birds known as magòghe to the Venetians, ferocious gray-backed gulls of terrifying size.

  The birds crested the rooftops of Murano and swept in over the cemetery island of San Michele. Their beaks twitched as they smelt the bodies freshly buried there. For a moment they hovered overhead, bruising the water with their shadows.

  Then a voice stole inside their heads. It howled, “Minions! We have new corpses to make tonight!”

  Foam flecked the yellow beaks of the magòghe. Their cold blank eyes rolled up in their heads.

  “O Master,” they thought. “Tell us what to do.”

  Now, from the soul of the bones beneath the water, came orders that soaked the gulls’ brains with hunger and fury. They wheeled above the waves, shrieking with every breath. But out in that fog-swaddled lagoon, the harsh screams of the birds were swallowed up in an instant. No one on Steam Ferry Number 13 heard a thing.

  The ferry had left the Fondamente Nuove just one minute after the gondola bearing the family Gasperin. It should not have set forth in the fog. But the captain himself was from Murano, and eager to get home that night. He had made this trip a thousand times. He knew that if he set course northeast across the lagoon and kept a steady speed, he would skim the jetty at the Murano side in just six minutes. There would be no other craft in his way, not in wicked weather like this.

  If the captain had held up his lamp at exactly the right moment, then he might have seen the slender black gondola weaving across the water just in front of him. But exactly at that right moment the lamp was knocked out of his hand by the first gull. Then a dozen others swept into his cabin, ripping at his eyes and his hair. He fell against the tiller and slumped on the floor. The magòghe swarmed over his body until they covered it entirely. Mercifully, he was unconscious when they started to feed.

  Back in the passenger cabin everyone felt the lurch as the captain lost control of the tiller. Perhaps somebody heard the faint crunch of wood as the prow of the vaporetto sliced through Signor Molin’s gondola like a sword. The passengers’ own shrieks drowned out the pitiful sounds of the Gasperin family crying out for one another as the ferry passed over them and a vast green tentacle threw itself around the ruined prow of the gondola and dragged it deep down below the waves.

  The last person to drown was Marta, and her last words, floating out over the heedless water, were “Save my baby! Please save my baby.…”

  At this, a disembodied laugh rattled out across the lagoon, a sound even bitterer and uglier than the shrieks of the magòghe. That noise alone rose above the fog, and echoed around the shores of Venice like the snarl of an approaching thunderstorm.

  The ferry plowed blindly into the jetty on Murano, splintering its rickety poles to matchwood. The passengers scrambling ashore soon discovered their dead captain. For the first few hours everyone was occupied with spreading the news of his unspeakable death and blessing their stars that they had all survived what might have been a dreadful accident.

  No one was waiting for the gondola on Murano. Giorgio Molin had been right about one thing: the priest had long since given up on the baptism and the festive supper he had hoped to join. He assumed that the fog had changed all the plans. The gondolier’s wife thought nothing of her husband’s absence: he often slept on his boat during those hot June nights.

  It was only when the fog finally lifted, a whole day later, that questions began to be asked as to the whereabouts of the Gasperin family. And almost at the same time the first body was washed ashore at Murano. It was Daniele, still clutching the bonnet of his beloved Marta. She was found a few hours later, her skirts billowing like a beautiful jellyfish, in the bay of Torcello. Her father-in-law floated facedown close by.

  They found all the bodies in the end, except that of the baby.

  Stories flew about. “Such a tiny little mite, the fish ate her,” people whispered.

  Some fragments of an

  antique Venetian prophecy

  … When Rats flee town on frightened paws …

  … Come to life are Black Death’s ancient spores

  … Who shall save us from a Traitor’s tortures?

  That secret’s hidden in the old Bone Orchard.

  June 1, 1899

  The blow came without warning and from nowhere. Just one second before, Teodora had been happily browsing in an old-fashioned Venetian bookshop, a dim, crumbling building that spilled out onto a square with a canal at one side. This was no ordinary bookshop. For a start, it was lit only by whispering gas-lamps and yellowy candle-stumps. A large brass mortar-and-pestle stood on the dusty counter instead of a till. There were no piles of famous poets, or detective stories or fat novels for ladies. In fact, there was just one battered copy each of all manner of interesting books like Mermaids I Have Known by Professor Marìn. And The Best Ways With Wayward Ghosts, by “One Who Consorts with Them.”

  And the bookshop was empty of other customers apart from one fair-haired boy no older than Teo herself. He was elegantly dressed with a linen waistcoat, spotless boots and a cap at a rakish angle. He stood at a lectern, reading The Rise and Fall of the Venetian Empire, which was as big as a safe and had no pictures at a
ll. Occasionally he looked up to give Teo a princely, disapproving stare.

  For Teodora was not just gazing but sniffing at the tall shelves. Those shelves were like coral reefs, looming far above her head, full of deep, mysterious crevices. The shelves went so high up into the painted ceiling that Teo (being the kind of girl who liked to imagine things) could imagine fronds of seaweed waving up there. But down at her level—and Teo was embarrassingly small for eleven—somewhere between the books, and even over the tang of mold and the sweetish whiff of dust, she could definitely smell fish.

  Indeed, she’d been smelling fish since she arrived in Venice three days before. She would not eat fish, because she believed it was cruel to kill them (Teo was a vegetarian), but this fish smell was so delicious, so fresh and alive, like perfumed salt—that she suddenly thought to herself: “This is what pearls would smell of, if they had a smell!”

  The fair-haired boy harrumphed and looked down at his book. In Venice, he seemed to be implying, one reads books, one does not sniff at them.

  Teo lived in Naples, hundreds of miles to the south. Her parents—that is, the people who’d adopted her—had brought her to Venice for the first time, and with the utmost reluctance, as it happened. Teo had been told that she was adopted as soon as she was old enough to understand it. But she’d never known any other family or any other home but Naples, and she’d always been perfectly happy with both. At least, until she was six years old. That was when she had found a book called My Venice at the library. Leafing through pages illustrated with oriental-looking palaces floating on jade-green water, Teo had felt a lurch just like hunger inside.

  To get to Venice had taken Teo five years of skillful and dedicated nagging, with postcards of Venetian scenes left on the top of the piano, a Venetian glass ring for her mother’s birthday and other hints that were far from subtle. Her parents, who normally loved to think up treats for Teo, had always seemed oddly unwilling to bring her here, offering one unconvincing excuse after another.

  There had been moments when Teo daydreamed of doing something outrageous, such as running away from home, and making her own way to Venice. She might even have done it, if only she’d had a friend to share the adventure with. But bookworms like Teodora are not generally known for their wide circle of adventurous friends. So they tend to have their adventures in their minds’ eyes only.