Drowsiness tugged at Talina’s eyelids. She settled back under the fraying quilt, rearranging her tangle of corn-husk hair like a sleeping-cap.
Talina’s huge bed was nothing more than a straw pallet supported on four piles of encyclopaedias. The counterpane was covered with books three layers deep. This left just a narrow channel in the middle, into which Talina inserted herself and Drusilla, like two letters in an envelope. Spring was running desperately late that year, and the tower seemed to soak up the cold of the lagoon through its walls. The Guardian, however, had not provided anything more than a thin, hairy blanket, and the ancient patchwork quilt. Drusilla could lie against only one side of Talina at a time, comforting her with body heat, a soft, fast heartbeat and a sensation of being still at home. So Talina had to keep the other side warm with books.
Interestingly, some books were warmer than others. She’d banished the chilly binding of the thrilling Adventures on Snow-Capped Peaks from the bed, in favour of a cosy old cookbook called Warm from the Oven and Professor Marìn’s latest volume, Midsummer Sprites, which was just like a hot-water bottle.
Much as she despised her Guardian’s books, Talina was determined to be a writer too. She’d been writing stories since she was five. She’d been sending them off to book publishers and magazines since she was eight. She had written more than five dozen stories about ghosts, cats, castles, monsters and extremely clever children. She was always halfway through one, with three others simmering, and new ideas thickly scribbled on the flyleaves of old books.
Some of her most vivid ideas came from her dreams, especially since her parents had disappeared. She was so afraid to lose a brilliant thought in the night that she’d hung hundreds of pencils and pieces of paper from the roof’s beams on lengths of string. So, without even lighting a candle, she could always find a pencil with her fingers and make notes on the nearest scrap of paper. Some mornings, she woke up to find all the pieces of paper covered with scribbles. Sometimes she’d written ten different things one over the other on the same piece of paper, which was very irritating. Talina was an exceptionally tidy little dancer but her handwriting was not neat, even in daylight, even on lined paper, even when done under the teacher’s nose. Done blind, in the middle of the night and half-asleep, Talina’s handwriting was frankly rune-ish and rumpled.
Despite all her brilliant ideas, Talina had not managed to sell any of her stories to The Wonderful World of Girls or The Young Ladies’ Literary Gazette or any of the other publications that so frequently printed her Guardian’s terrible tales.
Whenever Talina received a rejection letter, she always sent one right back, rejecting it: ‘Your lack of imagination staggered me sideways till I realized that a person of your limited sensitivity could not possibly understand work as complex and subtle as mine. So go and boil your boots in ginger beer and stop using them to stamp on budding talent.’
She’d received so many rejection letters that she used them to wrap her snack for school every day – after she’d used the backs of them for writing her own ideas in the night.
But in the last month, Talina had finally found secret employment and a small income as a writer. By pretending to be a noblewoman of thirty-five with a ‘nervous debility’, she’d secured a job writing testimonials for a patent medicine known as Manitoba Gargling Oil. Talina’s letters were printed in advertisements in the paper, just as if they came from a real woman.
Dear Sir, – Forgive my humble missive but nothing could stop me from expressing my gratitude. I was racked by a sick-headache: such a grip did it get upon me that I was obliged to take to my bed. This was my shipwrecked state when I first sampled your excellent preparation, Manitoba Gargling Oil. Not only did it cure me of the pain in my head, but also of warts, eyestrain and toothache. In short, I should long since have been dead but for your life-saving product. I shall, at all opportunities, recommend Manitoba Gargling Oil, which I believe to be of general benefit to mankind.
Talina signed herself ‘Principessa Paulina Pessel’.
‘Principessa Paulina Pessel’ received 100 lire for every letter that was published, and a free sample of the oil. She used it to clean her boots.
She didn’t want her Guardian to know about her job, so for all correspondence with the Manitoba Gargling Oil Company, Talina used what she still considered her ‘home’ address in the Calle del Teatro. She went there whenever she could to check for letters stuck into the grates of the oval windows on the ground floor. She couldn’t get inside any more: lately, her Guardian had ordered the front door sealed with a chain, ‘to prevent looting’. But who, Talina thought scornfully, would want to loot her tiny, shabby home, which had more books than silver forks?
Now the morning light was seeping under her eyelids; the wet wrestling of the waves below washed into her ears. Drusilla licked her nose. There was no point in putting off the unspeakable moment. Talina was famished and no one was going to bring her breakfast in bed. No one was going to bring her breakfast at all, in fact. And she’d woken up with a better idea than breakfast anyway.
She leapt out of bed, planting her feet on the icy floor with a little shriek. She poured cold water out of her jug into a chipped basin and hurriedly washed all the important places, while hopping up and down to keep warm. Drusilla conducted her own more thorough grooming on the patchwork quilt. Talina cast a quick eye out of the window – another sunny, frosty day. The last few black-stalked apples glowed in the trees down in the Calle dei Pomeri. Across the lagoon, Talina could see a fresh fall of snow on the hills of the mainland. Immediately below her, in Quintavalle’s single V-shaped street, people’s shadows were growing blackly out of their feet, and even the pigeons had their dark twins. The orchards on the north side of the island glittered with frost. Snow and frost in late April! That was an unwelcome rarity in Venice. Everyone was complaining about it, especially Talina.
Now she wriggled into five layers of clothing – starting with cotton cami-knickers, continuing with two flannel petticoats, followed by a linen dress, and then a thick woollen one, finally covering the whole bulk with a pinafore. She slid into woollen stockings and laced her boots, still a little sticky with Manitoba Gargling Oil.
Then she hurried downstairs to the kitchen of her Guardian’s tower. She did not need to worry that he would be there. She seldom saw him, unless he required her to model as some wretched child in its death throes for one of his books. Great Uncle Uberto inhabited the upper storeys, where Talina was forbidden to go. Just occasionally, late at night, her door creaked open and she caught a glimpse of the thin silhouette of her Guardian, and felt his pale eyes staring at her.
‘No doubt hoping to find me weeping or foaming at the mouth in a fit brought on by awful impudence!’ Talina harrumphed silently to herself. She posted signs saying ‘Keep out!’ and ‘PRIVATE’ on her door, and always pretended to be soundly asleep, breathing deeply. Eventually, his light footsteps could be heard climbing to the remote heights of the tower.
Every child in Venice knew the fairytale tower where Talina now lived. Yet no one knew exactly when it had been made, though it must have been at least a thousand years before. And no one had ever taken care of it since. It was built of brick and pierced with arched windows on each floor until the belfry, which was topped by a pinecone spire. There was a risky-looking lean to the east, which partly accounted for the disappearance of the old bell – swept through the arches and down into the lagoon in a storm many centuries past. Missing bricks had made a honeycomb of its outer walls, in which thousands of sparrows built their nests, so the tower twittered quietly to itself from dawn to dusk.
The tower perched uneasily in the lagoon on the northeastern edge of the city. It was planted in the water, its base furrily mossed between the low-and high-tide marks. A cast-iron bridge, narrow and rickety, connected it to the land and its former church, Our Lady of the Sparrows, now ivy-clad and derelict. Just above the bridge’s rusted guard-rail was a loose brick, where the key to the to
wer was hidden.
From a distance, the tower looked cold and achingly lonely: inside it was colder and lonelier still. After three months’ residence, Talina felt a sharp pang every time she saw other girls holding their mothers’ hands. She hated to see fathers rowing their daughters to school. Even though the Guardian was famously rich, there was no jolly housekeeper, no maid, no valet, no butler and no cook. Instead, the three savage dogs, beaten into cravenness, fetched and carried. Drusilla catnapped in the kitchen at her peril.
However, Talina only had to step across the drawbridge if she wanted kind and gentle company. Talina may have been deprived of parents, but she was not deprived of grannies. Quintavalle was an island of elderly widows and their cats. No one knew why there were so many of them. Granny baking smells permeated the Quintavalle air. Granny-shaped underwear hung from cross-hatched clothes lines between the houses on the south side of the street. Grannies with baskets sat knitting while they waited for windfalls from the apple trees on the north side. And just as there were hundreds of old ladies on the island, so there was a complete absence of children, apart from Talina. She’d been joyfully adopted as an honorary grand-daughter by all the old ladies of Quintavalle.
Walking home from school took a great deal of time, as she stopped to have her cheeks pinched, her nose kissed, an almond comfit pushed into her mouth, or she was asked to wind wool, or hold a naughty cat for its nails to be clipped while listening to a story told by a granny with a face as soft and lined as a bunched-up silk handkerchief. The grannies taught her the dances of their girlhoods: the Furlana, the Fancyman Jig and the Fascinating Stoat, accompanying her on the country bagpipes. Nonna Meghin giggled, ‘You know how a stoat mesmerizes its prey by dancing? Well, the Fascinating Stoat will confuzzle any male!’ Talina didn’t really know what confuzzling was, but she loved the rippling, frenetic dance. In church on Sunday mornings, Talina’s sure treble mingled with the sweet warbles of the grannies. Afterwards, she’d come home with one granny or another for milk and cake.
‘Dear, dear,’ the old ladies clucked, as Talina, petted to pieces, finally left for the lonely tower. ‘That little girl is too thin, and too wild, and too lonely. I hope there’s a good hot Sunday lunch waiting for her.’
Talina didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth. There was never a hot meal waiting for her. She assembled her own meals from the ingredients that were provided without her ever asking for anything. Every morning, food appeared in a spotted swag on the doorstep. The dog called Futfallo stood on his back legs, nudged open the door bolt, picked up the swag and dumped it, snarling, on the table. Gierch-it delivered the post. If either dog even hinted at usurping the other’s role, there were bared teeth and lunges. Talina was most afraid of the dog named Razin. He always came unnecessarily close, and breathed on her for an unnecessarily long time when he delivered her pocket-money in a yellow leather pouch. Everything, from The Young Ladies’ Literary Gazette to onions for the stew, arrived at the tower with a thin coating of dog saliva.
Talina never saw her Guardian eat. Even on Easter Sunday, Talina and Drusilla had shared a tearful supper alone in the kitchen, remembering her parents and festive feasts past.
She wondered what her Guardian dined on.
‘Small children, probably,’ she muttered to Drusilla as she clattered pots and bowls onto the kitchen table. ‘That’s what he eats. He certainly enjoys killing ’em off in his stories, so he must do something with all those corpses. Or perhaps he feeds them to the dogs.’
‘Too much imagination and not enough discipline,’ the French mistress, Mademoiselle Chouette, had scribbled on Talina’s essay on the subject of creatures who howled in the night, their pedigree in literature, and in Venice, to which she had added an eye-watering account of the evil doings of an old man who lived in a lonely tower. Many were the French mistress’s underlinings and capitals. ‘Ravenous reading without discrimination is NOT advisable, particularly in a child with FLOUNCING tendencies.’
‘Poor style, exaggerated and ineffective,’ commented Talina, correcting the corrections at the kitchen table while she ate. She could just imagine Mademoiselle Chouette shaking her surprisingly pretty turquoise earrings in horror as she scribbled out the red wiggly lines under some colourful words and reinstated the exciting adjectives that had been crossed out. In Talina’s opinion, the woman misguidedly thought it her duty to correct every child who ever opened her mouth.
The French teacher had insisted, ‘As if it wasn’t tragique enough trying to make sense of your appalling handwriting, petite Talina, but you also insist on these ridiculous fantasies! You must try to confine your stories to things that might actually happen. Dogs do NOT deliver dinners. Nasty old men do NOT eat children.’
There was an extra line, scribbled out, at the end of these comments. Talina, surrounded by cooking ingredients in the kitchen, held her essay up to the lamplight, and read the words Mademoiselle Chouette had written but then tried to hide beneath slashes of ink, ‘By the way, those vile creatures are NOT French. They have the most appalling mockery of a French accent that I have ever heard. C’est abominable!’
Talina marvelled, ‘Oh my! So Mademoiselle Chouette has seen them. Or at least heard them. She knows it’s not Pastry-Bandits from Rovigo taking the people and the cats.’
Drusilla nudged Talina’s hand towards the mixing bowl. Breakfast’s pancakes had been a disaster rejected even by Razin. This evening Talina had a much more ambitious plan. She didn’t fancy the lamb chops Razin had brought her, so she’d laid them out as peace offerings on the floor. She felt like something warm and sweet for supper.
‘The oven’s hot?’ Talina applied her wooden spoon so violently that several spoonfuls of cake mixture departed the bowl in the direction of the walls, the sugar basin, the coal scuttle, the recipe books and Drusilla’s nose. ‘Nearly ready. We don’t want lumps, do we? I do so hate it when cakes go wrong. Now where was I?’
She lifted a floury hand to turn two batter-splattered pages simultaneously.
It never occurred to her that such a simple thing might change her life.
ONE THING WAS true about her French teacher’s criticism. Talina was a ravenous reader, and did not much care what she read. The problem was getting enough to read. For Talina had a very special skill. She could read two books at once: one with each eye. So she needed twice as many books as even an ordinary bookworm.
Only Signorina Tatti, the school librarian, suspected something was afoot, though she’d never actually caught Talina in the act. Talina had scraped the shelves of the library to the very furthest reaches, taking home even Analytical Chemistry of Venetian Drains 1832 and the Library Catalogue when all else had been consumed by those avid eyes of hers. When Talina had read the library dry, Signorina Tatti was obliged to ask the School Board for an increased budget for book acquisitions. The librarian grumbled to Talina, ‘They threatened to take it from my wages next time!’
Talina had kept her two-books-at-a-time talent a secret from her parents, knowing that her appetite for reading would quickly outstrip her father’s earnings at the Archives. She did not want them to go without just to keep her in books. She found other ways of feeding her reading habit. Lately, she had used her earnings from Manitoba Gargling Oil to pay for new books by instalments. She had accounts at all the Venetian bookshops. Discreetly, with the help of her schoolfriend Ambrogio Gasperin, she borrowed the latest novels from his parents’ fashionable bookshop near San Marco. Those she kept out of the kitchen, returning them immaculate. If she saw notice of a death in the Gazzetta, she would always present herself and her condolences at the bereaved house. Grieving relatives, faced with a house crammed with memories to clear, were only too happy to let Talina take away an armful of heavy books.
Talina would read anything: encyclopaedias, veterinary manuals, romantic novels and children’s fairytales. The only exception was anything written by her Guardian. She had no need to re-read such horrors as How Rodrigo Lost his Le
gs or Whatever Happened to Enrico? Unfortunately, every household in Venice seemed to have several of them. For generations, Talina thought sadly, so many lively Venetian children had been terrorized into dull good behaviour by those dense little volumes.
Talina was not one of them. Her parents were too kind to mention her Guardian very often, so most of the time Talina was indeed the most impudent girl in Venice, and sometimes referred to as ‘The Terror of the Neighbourhood’.
It wasn’t just what her parents described affectionately as ‘Talina’s having a little flouncy’ – when she lost her temper and spoke ‘in beastly tongues’. Talina went in for a lot of campaigns. For example there was the one against killing egrets for their feathers. Fashionable women liked to wear the delicate white plumes in their hats, not caring that the beautiful birds had to die in order to provide them. Talina had climbed in through a window to ‘borrow’ the egret-feather hat of her modish neighbour, Signora Cassian. She dipped the feathers in red paint. Then she put the hat on, with a carving knife added at a rakish angle, and danced around Venice, letting the egret ‘blood’ drip behind her. The Gazzetta had published a picture of Talina, standing on one leg to perform her scintillating egret dance in a pool of fake blood, with a sign on her pinafore that read,
EGRET FEATHERS ONLY LOOK BEAUTIFUL ON
EGRETS. STOP THE SENSELESS SLAUGHTER.
Talina’s famous egret dance was in fact rather similar to the Fascinating Stoat, those looping, weaving and ‘confuzzling’ steps she would soon be taught by the grannies of Quintavalle – which perhaps explained how well she took to it. But the egret dance had led to trouble: Signora Cassian recognized her missing hat in that picture, and there’d been a note on Talina’s report card from her French mistress Mademoiselle Chouette that asked, ‘Why must the most intelligent girl in my class also be the most bad, the most nearly mad, and the most impudent?’