‘No – look!’ Ambrogio pointed to the view below them. The fire had already burned everything that was flammable. Quintavalle’s one street was clear of blue flames.
‘And Ambrogio, can you find someone to fetch the grannies? They’ll have floated to Malamocco by now. Their lanterns will be running out of oil.’ She glanced up at the sky, ‘Though dawn is on its way.’
She pictured the grannies bobbing tranquilly in their boats, busily clicking away at their knitting with their cats on their laps.
‘First fisherman I see,’ promised Ambrogio, racing down the stairs.
Watching him from the window, Talina saw that Ambrogio had already returned to completely human form by the time he reached the bottom of the tower. He galloped down the street, palely lit by the first rays of the sun, and was lost to her view at the first corner.
She turned back to the injured man, and resumed the pressure on his wound with a hand that was restored to its normal, hairless dimensions. The bleeding was less, but his agony was evidently greater now that the shock was wearing off. Talina knew she should feel pity for her Guardian, but Ravageurish brutality still seemed to have the upper hand in her nature, even though she was rapidly returning to human form. She snarled, ‘You could always regard this pain as research! You can pretend it is a child wounded like this. You can call it How Uberto got his Jugular Unplugged’.
The Guardian flinched. He stared at her in fear and astonishment.
She demanded – shocked at herself even as she uttered the words – ‘Surprised to see me? I guess you hoped that I was dead – like all the other children you write about. Tell me, why do you hate children so much? Do you suppose it’s because you never had any of your own?’
Tears trickled from his eyes. He moaned. He tried to shake his head, but the movement caused a fresh flow of blood.
The Guardian’s tears roused Talina’s fury more than his pathetic silence. ‘Tears!’ she raged. ‘Tears! For yourself. You, who never spared any compassion for anyone else! Certainly not for those children destroyed in your books. And what about me? You never showed a drop of pity for what had happened to me, or a speck of interest in what had happened to my parents! But then again – of course, you knew what had happened to them all along.’
Her outburst only made her angrier. Talina treated him to the full extent of her ‘beastly tongue’, all of which the Guardian accepted in passive silence, though tears continued to course down his pale cheeks. ‘Where are my parents! Tell me! Or you deserve to die!’ she screamed at him.
Talina burst into tears.
She had suddenly seen herself, as if she was a stranger witnessing this scene.
She fumbled in her pinafore for her Thaumaturgic Handkerchief, which was already twitching.
Then she saw that Professor Marìn had been right about the little square of fabric. She had no sooner thought, ‘I must wipe those tears from his eyes’, than the handkerchief flew out of her hand and gently dabbed the streaming face of her Guardian. Then it wrung itself out, and hovered up to her face to dry her own.
Downstairs at the drawbridge, the cat woman’s face was tortured. She trembled as she stood on the rickety bridge that led to the tower. A canopy of sparrows wheeled overhead. Albicocco and Bestard-Belou wound their tails around her legs sympathetically. But Brolo and Drusilla nudged her sternly towards the door.
‘Hurry up,’ urged Brolo. ‘The wind is wheeling round and all. Those flames are getting up again. What a downer!’
‘I never thought I would come back here again,’ Signorina Tiozzo whispered. ‘This place is the scene of a terrible crime. The poor, poor man.’
‘What?’ demanded Ambrogio. ‘You’re sorry for Talina’s Great Uncle Uberto? The writer who kills children in his books? Who betrayed his own kin? Who hates cats, I may add.’
‘Well, of course he hates cats,’ mumbled Signorina Tiozzo mysteriously.
‘Huh?’ snorted Albicocco. ‘There’s no “of course”s about it when it comes to cat-hating.’
But Signorina Tiozzo clamped her mouth shut, threw her shoulders back and walked through the door.
Professor Marìn and Giuseppe Tassini each took one of her arms and helped her up the steps. They passed the dead dogs in silence, broken only by Signorina Tiozzo’s sobs when she reached the office with the pictures of the babies.
‘My little darlings!’ she wept. Albicocco and Bestard-Belou nudged her knees hard.
When they reached the room where the Guardian lay bleeding, it was to find a Talina silent with her eyes downcast, her hand carefully but gently fixed on the wound to his throat.
‘Signor Flangini!’ gasped Signorina Tiozzo. ‘What have they done to you?’
‘You two know each other?’ said Talina amazed.
‘This is the cat hater?’ asked Albicocco. ‘Not much left of him. He’ll be going out with the ebb tide, that one. Call the florist. Where’s me black gloves? Shame there’s no good eatin’ on him, but.’
‘Stringy and skinny both, anyways,’ said Bestard-Belou.
Ambrogio swiftly applied a handful of Venetian Treacle to the Guardian’s bloodied neck. The blood evaporated, the torn flesh hissed and fizzled and invisibly reknitted itself in a moment. It was as if he had never been hurt, physically at least. But his pallor was still deathly and his face distorted with misery. He opened bloodshot, tear-swollen eyes, and whispered, ‘Tell them about my wife, Signorina Tiozzo. About my babies. For I cannot bear to say their names.’
‘You had a wife?’ cried Talina.
Signorina Tiozzo began at the beginning.
‘That would be,’ she sobbed, ‘when Uberto Flangini’s young bride, whom he adored, died in childbirth.
‘Twins, she had, two boys. The babies both survived, though they were weak. I thought Signor Flangini’s heart would mayhap be broken by the loss of his darling Annamaria. But it wasn’t like that at all. It might have been broken, but his heart was still full of love for their babies. How he worshipped them! He was forever cradling them in his arms, kissing the tops of their little heads. But then he got a fever and he resolved to keep himself away from the babies until he was better. He could not bear to lose the boys too. So he took to his bed, which was damp with his fever, and the weight dropped off him in lumps. Mayhap—’
‘What about the babies?’ asked Talina.
‘He’d no choice but to entrust them to a flighty young maid from Chioggia, just fifteen years old. She had been a favourite of his wife, without ever deserving to be, I’ll add. You know the kind of girl – always doing three things at once, all of them badly. That’s how it happened.
‘It was a dreadfully parched, cruel summer that year. There was no relief from the heat anywhere, particularly not in the kitchen, where the maid was obliged to look after the babies while she did all her other chores at once. In those days the kitchen was up on the eighth floor of the tower. There was a huge cooking range in there, and a stone sink … and baskets of vegetables. And always a nice warm jam sponge – that was the one thing the maid was good at – jam sponge. And – that day only – the cat was there too. The family cat was a very mischievous creature – a terror to the poor sparrows – and he was usually banned from the kitchen. But on that day, everything was in a muddle, with the master sick, and the maid was trying to cook a lovely pot-roast with gravy to tempt his appetite … and the babies were fretting for their dead mother. They didn’t understand, poor angels. Their little faces were red with crying and they were burning up with the heat.
‘So the maid put the babies in a basket, and tied a rope to it and lowered it down into the water, just enough to fill the basket with cool—’
‘She did what?’ Ambrogio cried.
Professor Marìn interrupted, ‘Ah, but where she came from, Chioggia, sometimes mothers would do this, if their babies were very, very hot. The water was cleaner in those days, and it gave the babies a bit of relief.’
‘Yes, sir. So the maid dipped the little babies in the
water two or three times. Such perfect little boys,’ wept Signorina Tiozzo, ‘identical twins with dear little strawberry birthmarks on their wrists. Even those birthmarks were identical! They loved to dangle in the water, kicking their fat little legs and grabbing at the fish. The maid always said that they would grow up to be fishermen one day. That’s when she thought they would grow up.’ Signorina Tiozzo’s tears flowed again. ‘If only …’
‘Please continue,’ urged Talina. ‘Don’t leave those poor babies in the water!’
‘Magari! If only she hadn’t. The maid was just about to pull the basket back up to the kitchen when she saw what the cat was up to. He had knocked the lid off the stockpot and had got his head deep inside, taking a great, long drink of your great uncle Uberto’s pot-roast gravy.’
‘Had dat stoopid maid forgot to feed da pore cat?’ asked Albicocco defensively.
Talina quickly asked the same question in somewhat more polite Humantongue.
‘Mayhap. It was so hot and she was in such a muddle that day. Well, truth be told, she was the kind to be in a muddle pretty much most days. The cat, of course, was just following his nature. When the muddled maid saw that cat doing its greedy business, she was so distressed that she forgot what she was doing. She accidentally let go of the rope, and the babies’ basket dropped back into the canal with the rope following it straight down into the water.’
‘No!’ whistled Talina and Ambrogio simultaneously.
‘Non!’ cried Mademoiselle Chouette.
‘Dear God, no!’ whispered Professor Marìn.
‘I’ll be guttersniped!’ said Albicocco.
‘Of course the maid gave one of those screams that starts in your toes and throws your whole soul out of your body. Then she ran right down the stairs, still screaming. But by the time she’d climbed down the one hundred and ninety-eight steps, the basket and the babies had disappeared. She called for boatmen, for fishermen, for gondoliers. But there was no one about who could help – you know what it’s like on Quintavalle. There were just widowed grannies, and what could they do but wring their poor old wrinkly hands? Eventually the maid found a fisherman who scrambled around looking for the babies, running his nets through the water. It was no use. The tide was fierce that day and it was on its way out. The poor mites had gone.’
‘So what did she do?’
‘What could she do? The poor brainless girl had killed two innocent children by her negligence. She went to face the music. She walked slowly back up the one hundred ninety-eight steps, sobbing all the way. Your great uncle Uberto was sleeping heavily: his fever had drained him of energy. She did not dare go and rouse him. But soon enough he rang for her, and she had to go and tell him what had happened.’
‘I don’t imagine ’e spared that maid a tongue-lash,’ said Mademoiselle Chouette.
‘In fact, he was silent as the tomb as she told him the whole story. Of course, she was gibbering like a monkey, hardly making sense. But he understood, when she got to the part about dunking the babies in the water … and the cat. Then he just made a quiet noise, like a draught in a chimney, and he ran to the kitchen, the maid following closely behind him.
‘The cat, poor creature, had his muzzle in the gravy again. The pot and the roast were nearly licked clean. Signor Flangini grabbed the cat and flung him out of the window.’
‘Bloody murder, that’s wot dat was!’ snarled Bestard-Belou.
‘True. But at least now we know why Talina’s great uncle Uberto hates cats,’ noted Drusilla.
‘Loik poison ivy,’ said Albicocco.
‘But why does he hate children?’ wondered Talina.
‘I always supposed,’ said Signorina Tiozzo, ‘he took to writing those horrible stories after his babies died. He was so bitter. His heart was riddled with it. Mayhap his feeling was … if he could not have a living child, then he didn’t want anyone else to have one either.’
Talina flinched with guilt. Her barbed remark to the Guardian, when he lay in agony, had been too close to the truth – and yet so far from it.
‘How do you know all of this, Signorina Tiozzo?’ asked Professor Marìn, gently.
‘I think I know,’ said Talina and Ambrogio in one voice.
‘Yes, I was that maid. And after that, I knew I was not fit to look after human babies any more. And I had to make it up to that cat your Guardian killed – it was not the cat’s fault that I was inattentive. The cat was only following his nature.’
‘She speak da troof,’ concurred Bestard-Belou.
‘So you’ve devoted your life to looking after us.’ Drusilla licked Signorina Tiozzo’s hand.
‘Well, that’s that sorted now, and all very fine and good. But can you smell burning?’ interrupted Albicocco.
‘Burning and roasting, both,’ said Bestard-Belou.
in the flaming tower, every moment hotter and bluer
THE LOWER PART of the tower had caught fire. Blue flames were sidling up the stairs, gnawing at the banisters, raising violent blue fists against the furniture.
‘The tower’s built of brick and stone, isn’t it?’ asked Ambrogio. ‘We’re safe for a while?’
‘But every ceiling is made of wood,’ Talina replied. ‘Anyway, this blue fire seems to eat even stone. It seems to hate Venice as much as the Ravageurs do.’
The Guardian’s face was still milk-white with his tragic memories. But now he sat up, explaining in deep shuddering breaths, ‘Blue fire – this is what the Ravageurs always threatened. That fire has been made by baddened magic. It cannot be doused by water. Only the Ravageurs know how to extinguish it.’
‘You seem to know plenty of things about your friends, the Ravageurs,’ said Talina sarcastically. Her moment of sympathy was over. ‘How odd that you do not know how to put out their blue fire. Odd to the point of suspicious, perhaps?’
‘He’s still a cat-hater and all,’ said Albicocco with slitted eyes.
‘The Ravageurs are not my friends,’ the old man pleaded. ‘I hate them as much as you do. I had to do business with them. I could not afford to have Venice know what my ancestor had done, tricking the Ravageurs out of their land. The Venetians would have run me out of town … I needed time to find a solution, that was all.’
‘So you sacrificed my parents?’ cried Talina, ‘to save your precious reputation?’
‘No, I just agreed to let them be taken away somewhere so that I could find a way to solve the problem with the Ravageurs quietly, without publicity. Grignan promised me that your mother and father would not be killed.’
‘But he did not promise you that they would not be left to starve on an island, did he?’ Talina asked sternly. ‘An island of maggots!’
‘Every day that has passed, I have wondered about where they were, and how they fared.’
‘Wondering didn’t cost you anything. If they are dead, their deaths are on your conscience.’
‘Talina!’ reproved Professor Marìn. ‘Don’t you think your great uncle is suffering enough?’
But Uberto Flangini stopped the professor. ‘I deserve all the impudence in the world from this girl. Oh Talina … I am sorry. I have cost you so much.’
Down in the stairwell, the flames roared and another gas-lamp exploded.
‘I’ll have to go to the Ravageurs again,’ said Talina slowly, ‘and bargain with them, or trick them into telling me how to quench those blue flames before the gunpowder in the chimneys catches alight. Maybe the lady Ravageurs know? They’d help me if they could. So … how am I to get a message to Altopone and the rower-rats?’
‘Aren’t we forgetting something? Isn’t there something here in the tower that Grignan wants?’ Tassini reminded them. ‘Something we could bargain with, or pretend to.’
He turned to the Guardian. ‘Way back in AD 421 – according to Grignan – your ancestor had a vision of Venice as the richest city in the world. Grignan insists that old Flangini concealed this vision from Verpillion Grignanne during his negotiations to buy the city. Do you hav
e some evidence of it? Isn’t that why Grignan came here – to get it? Isn’t that why he was torturing you? Trying to make you tell him where it was?’
Uberto Flangini’s lips moved but no words came out.
‘Whatever it is, we shouldn’t be using it to bribe Grignan!’ said Ambrogio. ‘It should be brought as evidence at the Chamber of Conversation.’
‘Even if it damages our case?’ asked Talina. ‘Even if it ruins it?’
‘The Chamber of Conversation? The case is being held there?’ The Guardian’s voice was broken, his thin face suffused with shame. ‘Evidence? You must mean this thing.’
He walked unsteadily to his desk and lifted a small marble figurine. Under it glittered a paperweight made of rock crystal. ‘Look inside,’ he said.
Everyone gathered around the fist-sized object. A perfect miniature Venice was somehow carved inside it, complete with magnificent churches and bell-towers, merchant galleons and fairytale palaces.
‘No wonder Grignan wants this!’ said Tassini. ‘No doubt he was planning to present it as absolute proof of his case.’
The Guardian said, ‘But you don’t understand. My ancestor had no second sight. No vision of a magnificent Venice. It was not my ancestor who found this thing. My own father picked it up when he was digging in the mud to set a mooring for the boat. It’s less than a hundred years old. A tourist souvenir! Grignan saw it on my desk when he first came here to see me. I remember that he was fascinated by it. I knew his interest could mean no good. That’s why I hid it inside the figurine. And that’s why I refused to tell him where it was, even with his teeth in my throat. I shall take it to the Chamber of Conversation and give a full explanation.’
‘But we need bait for Grignan!’ said Talina.
‘Those Have-a-Voices are so easily distracted! If Grignan turns up with this beautiful glittering thing in his paw, he’ll be sure to convince them,’ said Ambrogio. ‘Is it worth the risk of letting it fall into his hands?’
‘I have to try,’ said Talina. ‘The paperweight will be my passport into his presence. The only thing I don’t know is … how do I make Grignan tell me the last thing he wants me to know – the way to put out the blue fire?’