Marco sighed and padded down the last three stairs to wait for Tonio to toss him a cold, stiff line.
“Ciao, Tonio,” he greeted the canaler, once he’d gotten the gondola tied. “Got another one for me?”
Tonio nodded, his face a comical mixture of relief and reluctance. “Her Papa says her ear hurts—she’s been crying since yesterday and he can’t get her to stop. Her name’s Leonora.”
No last name. Not that Marco was surprised. He rather doubted that Tonio was even telling the parents exactly who he was taking their sick kids to. They probably suspected Strega. That would be bad enough. But to take them to see one of Maria Garavelli’s pet bridge-boys, who were probably thieves, or something worse, and were definitely going to come to no good end? The idea would have appalled them. They would have laughed at Tonio for the very suggestion.
The ragged little girl huddled on Tonio’s halfdeck was still crying; the kind of monotonous half-exhausted sobbing that tore Marco’s heart right out of his chest. He eased down onto the gondola in the over-cautious fashion of one not very used to being on a small boat, then slid along the worn boards and crouched beside her so that his face was level with hers.
“Come here, little one.” He held out hand coaxingly. “It’s all right, Leonora. I’m going to make it better.”
She stopped crying, stared at him for a minute, then sidled over to him and didn’t resist when he gathered her into his arms, trying to warm that thin little body with his own. Children trusted him. So did dogs.
He murmured nonsense at her while he gently felt along the line of her jaw and checked for fever. Relief washed over him when he found neither a swollen gland nor a temperature elevated beyond what he would expect in a kid who’d been crying in pain for a day or more. With every kid brought to him, he expected to find one too sick for his knowledge or experience to help. Then what would he do?
Ah, he knew what he would do. Tell Tonio the child needed real help—and if the parents couldn’t afford it, tell him about Claudia and her Strega healer. And let the parents decide whether it was worth the risk of having Strega strings attached to their child’s soul.
Or maybe kidnap the child and take it there himself, and take the damnation onto his own soul . . .
This one—like all the others so far, thank God—was an easy one. Infection. A scratch just inside the little ear gone septic. He went back up to his rooms and fetched some dead-nettle tea. He mixed it with a little of Tonio’s grappa, poured into a spoon and heated it to just-bearable over Tonio’s little boat stove. This he poured into Leonora’s ear. She cried out briefly, but then was still. Then he heated a small pot of dead-nettle tea, along with a pinch of aromatic pine resin, scrounged from the timberyard.
He gave her a pebble. “Now, honey, you suck on this pebble, and sniff that steam up.” Her nose was a bit stuffy, but the inhalation would clear that if he was right. The ear would drain and the pain would suddenly go. He and Tonio watched.
He could see it in her face—the sheer wonder of the moment when the pain went away. Looking at him like he was an angel. He blushed and his heart melted a bit more.
“Now,” he said softly and mock-sternly, “you have to promise me something. When the wind blows and it’s cold, you will keep your scarf tied around your ears good and tight, you hear? Otherwise your ear’ll start to hurt again.”
The tiny girl gazed at him from eyes so big they seemed to take up half of her tear-streaked face. “Don’t got no scarf,” she protested.
He sighed again, and reached under his coat collar to pull yet another of Benito’s “souvenirs” off his own neck. That was the fourth one used so far—two gone for bandages and one as a sling. Benito must surely think he was eating the damned things—it was a good thing they weren’t the silk ones Benito liked to sport; his brother would have strangled him in his sleep.