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 by Michelle Lovric

Map copyright 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.

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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.

eIBN: 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.

PZ

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

A case of baddened magic

Some fragments of an antique Venetian prophecy

6. An hysterical conniption?

7. What Teodora had remembered just before …

13. Pedro-the-Crimp and Co.

14. Campo San Zan Degolà

21. A traitor’s tale

26. Who’s your friend?

34. The enemy’s enemy

43. Six hundred years’ hate

49. Don’t worry

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.