Salamander (18 page)
Authors: Thomas Wharton
He held up the raw potato she had bought from a roadside peddler and peeled to share with him.
– Pretend this is a piece of copper.
In his other hand was a piece of type.
– The type-founder strikes the steel punch into it. There, like so, a sunken impression of the letter
a
.
A raven croaked close by and Flood looked up expectantly into the sombre wet trees along the roadside. The coach had gotten stuck in the mud a few miles outside Buda. Djinn had gone with the postilion to fetch help and had not yet returned. The sky, which had been clouded over all day, was now brightening, and Flood felt the familiar anxiousness squeeze his heart and the thought of that limitless sea of blue. He turned back to Pica, who was gnawing a carrot and gazing distantly out at the hills.
Was she even listening?
– The copper matrix is placed in a mould, he went on, and into the mould is poured the molten alloy. The metal fills the impression, hardens, and there is your piece of type, with the raised letter backwards again on its surface, like the original punch.
– Then why not just use the punch, Pica said, to print with? Wait, I see. You need lots of
a’s
on each page.
– Right. This way the type-cutter can cast as many of each letter as desired, each one exactly the same. Any other questions so far?
– Are you going to eat that potato?
– Take it. Now we place our piece of type, our finished letter
a
, in the composing stick, this way
– That’s upside down.
– The printer’s first lesson, Flood said, nodding. Sometimes you have to sneak around your common sense.
He heard a shout from down the road and looked up to see a haywagon pulled by a pair of oxen, and Djinn beside the driver, waving.
She is sitting up in bed with her shift pulled over her shoulders, leaving her back bare. The doctor’s fat, greasy fingers probe her ribs, tap her breastbone, squeeze her neck. Sister Beata’s horrified whisper slithers out of the shadows behind him
.
– Is it … the plague?
The doctor pries open her mouth and peers in
.
– Thank Providence, no. She has an inflammatory condition of the skin which I do not think to be contagious. These eruptions, I am certain, break out in response to the vaporous, cloistered air in the house. We will begin with bleeding and a cooling astringent, say vitriolated zinc with camphor, or white calx of quicksilver. Or perhaps cold water. If by morning the symptoms have not lessened, take her up to the highest garret in the building, strip her naked, and throw open the shutters to let the winds in.
– Such idleness, doctor, would be worse for her well-being than the disease.
– Then have her practice her scales or whatever it is your musical young ladies do.
– She is no longer in the orchestra. Instead she shall take up other useful arts.
– It matters not what she does, Sister Beata, as long as she stays exposed to the air for at least an hour a day.
She sits on the edge of a cot, a frayed blanket tugged around her, embroidering a handkerchief with tiny roses and raising her eyes now and again to gaze out the window at the snow-cloaked roof of San Giorgio across the canal
.
The garret is high in the draughty upper reaches of the Ospedale. Pica shivers, sets her work down beside her, gets up and wanders the room, slapping her hands together to warm them
.
Broken and unused instruments hang from the walls. High in one corner is a dusty, battered violin with a single intact string. A jagged crack has split its soundboard. Pica returns to her work, but she cannot keep at it long without stealing another glance at the violin. At last she drags a chair over to the corner, stretches and lifts the instrument from its peg. Sitting back down on the edge of the cot, she turns the violin over and over, traces the purfling with her finger, sniffs the darkness of the sound holes, ponders the odd mark burned into its back:
The Maestro, in a priest’s black cassock, stands by the window, his hands clasped behind his back
.
– I played that one so hard it cracked. In Milan, I think it was. Yes. Right in the middle of the
Great Mogul
Pica holds out the violin and the Maestro takes it, cradles it like an infant or a rare bottle of wine
.
– They brought me another instrument, but I could not go on. The audience stared, and then someone laughed. The critics said,
Vivaldi’s pact with the devil is expiring at last
. They had no idea what had come over me. I had suddenly understood my own heart.
He tucks the violin under his chin, plucks the string, turns the tuning peg, plucks the string again
.
–
Cento donzelle festose e belle
. A hundred maidens cheerful and fair. My joy at being with you each day. Hearing your innocent thoughtless chatter in the morning as you came down for your lessons, beholding your freshly scrubbed and shining faces gazing up at me as I explained harmony and figuration and ritornello. Fool that I was, I did not understand. I played my violin and did not hear my own heart singing out its delight. The world heard, though. The world said I played in a fever, like a man possessed. The world wanted to hear more.
Il prete rosso!
people cried. We want the red priest! They clamoured for me, and so I left the Ospedale, lured away by the promise of gold, fame, love. Everything I thought I wanted.
Far below them in one of the music rooms of the Ospedale a solo voice begins haltingly to climb up and down the scales
.
– All your beautiful names. Arcangela dell Cornetto. Lucia Soprano. Anna Maria of the Violin.
Pica steps forward
.
– I used to play the violin. I couldn’t keep time and the concertmaster dismissed me from the lessons. Now they just call me Pica.
The Maestro returns the violin to her
.
– Once I understood where my heart lived I dared not return. I knew that such perfect joy is not permitted
a man in this world. Instead, I sent this beauty here, with instructions to the sisters that it not be repaired but put away. I was sure it would betray me, you see. That anyone who heard its music, the music of broken things, would know.
Pica runs her fingers over the crack in the soundboard
.
– Yes. I saw it was broken, and I knew there was a story.
The Maestro’s black cloak is the curtain flapping at the edge of the open window. Pica sits up, the violin clutched in her arms. The doctor is bending over her, his sausage fingers on her brow
.
– The child is on fire.
Sister Beata sits beside the bed, her hands entwined in the beads of her rosary
.
– She lapses in and out of this. Speaking to someone who isn’t there. I fear the child is … possessed.
The doctor makes a throaty noise of annoyance
.
– With all due respect, Sister Beata, we are no longer living in the Dark Ages. The girl is suffering from fever-induced delusions and nothing more. The fresh-air treatment can have that effect, although it has been infrequent in my experience. But to the point: I have consulted with various colleagues and I believe
I have isolated the cause of the symptoms. She has an extremely rare condition known as
batrachia
, which involves waxy glandular secretions and excessive porosity of the skin.
– Will she die of it?
– Not likely, though the irritation may drive her mad. The symptoms are generally most pronounced in children, and then gradually lessen by the time the sufferer reaches adulthood, rather like the pimples one sees so often on the faces of adolescents. I suggest bathing her in warm, watered-down milk three times a week. And mind, she must stay immersed for at least an hour each time if this remedy is to be efficacious.
In the garret she strips naked and climbs wincing into the steaming, silken liquid. Sister Beata stands in the doorway, arms folded, lips pressed bloodless with restraint
.
– I haven’t the time to watch you loll in a bath all day like the Queen of Sheba. The other girls shall take on this duty.
Night. White sheets hung from the roofbeams to keep out the wind stir gently above her like sails. She is drifting out …
– Wake up, magpie.
Francesca enters with her permanent frown, hefting a basin of
hot milk. Pica, sitting submerged to her neck in the wooden tub, watches her approach through half-closed eyes
.
– Do this, Francesca, do that. What do they think I am, their Nubian slave? I’m the daughter of an archbishop.
Pica’s eyes open wide
.
– How do you know?
– I know. Sister Beata knows. The Pope himself probably knows.
– How did you find out?
– The way you find anything out, dummy. First you find out who knows what you need to know. Then you find out what they want for it.
– What do they want?
– Money, sometimes. And other things. Sometimes you have to do the other things to get the money.
(She curses and cuffs Pica on the back of the head.)
Why am I telling you this? You get everything done for you, poor sick baby.
She dumps what’s left in the basin on Pica’s head, kicks the side of the tub, and stalks out. Watery milk sloshes over the rim of
the tub and drips, lento, on the floorboards. Pica sinks down further until she is completely submerged in a warm, white silence. She opens her eyes
.
Francesca returns later with another basin of milk. She stops, glances quickly around the room, bends closer to the tub and lets out a shriek. The basin falls with a crash, a comet of milk shooting across the dark floor
.
In the dormitory later that night, she listens, pretending to be asleep, while Francesca whispers to the girls gathered at her bedside
.
– Prudenza, Zillah, I’m telling you God’s truth. She was sleeping like a baby. I could see the bubbles coming up.
Zillah’s voice:
She was playing a trick on you, idiot.
– I thought of that, hag. I pulled her hair. Shouted. Banged the tub. She didn’t budge. I didn’t know what to do, I was scared to death, so I hauled her out and all of sudden she started gasping, as if I was drowning her,
in air
. She puked a pailful of milk onto the floor, opened her eyes, and looked at me like she had no idea what had happened.
(She glances over to Pica’s blanketed form.)
I’m telling you, that one can breathe underwater.
Prudenza:
Maybe she’s a changeling.
Zillah:
Or a sorceress.
Francesca:
I don’t care if she’s the daughter of the devil himself. All I know is, we can make use of this.
They climbed stiffly from the coach onto the pier, the carpenter eyeing them in suspicious silence. Rightly, Flood thought, if you look at the three of us. A greybeard afraid of his own shadow, a brown man with twelve fingers, a girl in the dress of a boy. Now, as always, he expected a heavy hand on his shoulder, an inexorable summons.
Turini suddenly stepped forward and bowed.
– Countess, I did not know. The Count sent me here to tear up the ship’s planks, just before he died. I disobeyed. If you wish us to leave …
Pica twisted her hat around in her hands and shook her head.
They could see little of the ship’s exterior in the rainy gloom. Turini’s wife, Darka, and the children, the twin boy and girl, greeted them on the quarterdeck with respectful bows, which embarrassed Flood but did not seem to bother Pica. Like the carpenter, the woman and children did little more than stare, especially at the girl.
Their new mistress
. Darka took Pica’s hand and kissed it. She stepped back, her mouth moving silently, her hands clutched together.
– She wants you to know, Turini said, that she loved your mother very much.
As it was late, the carpenter showed them to the cabin that had been prepared for their arrival and brought them a late supper of bread, cheese, and wine.
Instead of eating Pica explored the cabin, peered under the bunks, opened the drawers in the rough deal table, investigated the wardrobe. She found a narrow horizontal slot in the
bottom of the cabin door, slid her hand through it and back out again.
– Do you know what this is for? she asked Turini.
The carpenter shrugged.
– There are many things the Count did. No one knows why. One thing is for certain: you will get lost on this ship. We all did when we first came aboard.
When he had gone, Pica sat down on the edge of her bunk and pulled off her shoes. Flood watched her drift away into her private thoughts. Since they had left the castle she had been their spur and goad, driving them onward. Now that she had reached her destination she suddenly seemed lost.
Djinn sat at the table, gnawing at his bread in gloomy silence. Flood studied him, baffled as always as to what was going on inside the compositor’s head. Djinn spoke even less now, if possible, than he had as a boy, and seemed to take everything that happened in his stride, as if this journey into foreign lands was no better or worse than the long years he had spent in the castle. A laugh never escaped him, as far as Flood knew, and rarely even a smile. Djinn had grown into a beautiful young man, and it was clear from her shyness around him that Pica thought so too, but still he seemed to look out at the world with the watchful, innocent eyes of a child.
