The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Read online

  The

  Remedy

  A novel of

  London & Venice

  Michelle Lovric

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  Love lends its name to countless dealings which are attributed to it but of which it knows no more than the Doge knows what goes on in Venice.

  FRANÇOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (1613–80), Maxims

  As far as I am concerned, no sweet thing is evil.

  AVICENNA (973–1037)

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  1 - An Anodyne Epithem

  2 - An Emmenagogue Decoction

  3 - Emmenagogue Pills

  4 - Balsamic Lozenges

  5 - A Refrigerating Expression

  6 - A Consolating Mixture

  7 - A Julep for Child-Bed Women

  8 - A Camphorate Electuary

  9 - A Draught for a Bruise

  Part Two

  1 - A Traumatic Infusion

  2 - Spleen Ale

  3 - Horse-Dung Water

  4 - Antiphthisic Decoction

  5 - Consummate Broth

  6 - An Electuary of Satyrion

  7 - The Decoction Called Sacrum

  8 - Analeptic Electuary

  9 - An Antiloimick Decoction

  10 - A Cataplasm in a Quinsy Sore Throat

  11 - A Traumatic Decoction

  12 - Wafers of Tamarinds

  13 - An Alexipharmac Draught

  14 - Diuretic Ale

  Part Three

  1 - A Warm Cardiac Electuary

  2 - A Golden Julep

  3 - A Gargle with Myrrh

  4 - An Hysteric Electuary

  5 - A Cordial Epithem

  6 - A Cephalic Julep

  7 - A Litus for the Face

  Part Four

  1 - A Cephalic Electuary

  2 - An Icteric Decoction

  3 - An Electuary of Mustard

  4 - A Cataplasm of Herrings

  5 - A Consolatory Draught

  Part Five

  1 - A Solid Errhine

  2 - A Cordial Julep

  3 - Pectoral Snail Water

  4 - A Quilt for a Cap

  5 - An Expression of Millipedes

  6 - A Paste for Aphthae

  7 - A Sweetening Scorbutick Ale

  8 - A Decoction of the Woods

  9 - A Temperate Pearl Cordial Julep

  10 - A Pacific Mixture

  11 - A Cataplasm of Bitters

  12 - A Comforting Glyster

  13 - A Cordial Caudle

  14 - An Hysteric Nodule

  Part Six

  1 - An Hemoptoic Draught

  2 - A Balsam called Mirabile

  3 - A Foment for the Pain of Haemorrhoids

  4 - A Draught for a Catarrh

  5 - A Balsamic Bolus

  6 - Peruvian Antihectic Lozenges

  7 - A Peruvian Epileptic Electuary

  8 - Splanchnic Powder

  9 - Sternutatory Powder

  Part Seven

  1 - Chalybeate Syrup

  2 - A Cataplasm of Webs

  3 - Unguent for Shrinking of the Sinews

  4 - Restorative Caudle

  5 - A Pacific Foment

  6 - An Alexiterial Julep

  Epilogue: Venice, March 1787

  Powder of Crabs Eyes Compound

  Historical Notes: London and Venice, Winter 1785/6

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  So at fifteen, spread belly-down upon the floor, a black sheet hunched over me and candles at my foot and head, my lips pressed on stone, litanies in my ears, as the priest broke and entered my shocked fist to slide the ring on my finger, I promised to take no other husband than Christ. I almost meant it. In that heady moment the vow itself seemed no great sacrifice: I’d never known a man, but I had tasted chocolate.

  Venice, 1768

  • 1 •

  An Anodyne Epithem

  Take Brandy 4 ounces; Camphire half a dram; Opium 2 drams, dissolve.

  It comforts the Nervous parts, by its warmth appeaseth the raging Spirits, penetrates deep, sets open the Pores, attenuates, dissipates, obtunds the dolorific Matter, and drives it off by Diaphoresis.

  I was an unwilling nun, bundled into the convent by a family that had briefly lost its head over a trivial adolescent melodrama. My ultimate crime was such a negligible one that it’s not worth the recounting. One day I was the pride and idol of my parents, roaming freely around the family palazzo with my tribe of high-bred she-dogs, having my hair dressed, clowning adorably at my dancing lessons, having my portrait painted. I believe I was a little willful with the artist. That’s all. Yet the next day I was in San Zaccaria, which was by way of being our family convent, as at least six unmarriageable aunts had been deposited there and a number of my plainer cousins. At first I thought it just a brief punishment, a warning, some time to cool my heels. There was no problem of conjuring a dowry for me, and I was far from ugly, being a piquant blonde of the kind that precociously detained male attention. But after a few weeks I began to suspect the dreadful truth: that my parents meant to keep me there.

  And I realized that it had been in the planning for some time.

  I already knew the inside of San Zaccaria all too well. And my parents had every excuse to feel satisfied in their consciences, despite my protests, with this destiny they had thrust on me.

  For the nuns had caught me early by my sweet tooth, hanging sugared almonds, balsamic lozenges, and candied fruit in the humid swoop of the orchard branches whenever we went, in my infant days, to visit two or three aunts Catarina, our family’s Christian name for girls. No one remarked upon the lovely crop or stopped me snatching jellies from their strings or cracking pink-nubbed nuts against my milk-teeth. So I was free to think that in convents such things grew on trees, whereas at home they must be prayed for. A happy mouth does not forget what once befriended it.

  In Venice, the noble dynasties were recorded in our so-called “Golden Book.” And each Golden Book family stored its female shadow, like its conscience, in a nunnery: seventeen Contarini at Santa Catarina, a score of Moresini at Spirito Santo, the Balbi at Sant’ Andrea de Zirada. And the unwanted Foscarini and Querini women were interred in our own living crypt at San Zaccaria.

  At ten, I’d joined the boat when my cousin Paola made her bridal tour of convents, to salute her sisters sealed in chastity. This archaic ritual was long out of fashion, yet my uncle persisted with it, for the sake of the family nuns who loved company and whose isolation was a constant source of inadmissible guilt. They’d been given to God, who asked the merest thousand-ducat dowry, this so my Uncle Paolo could spend thirty thousand on a Gradenigo bridegroom for Paola and a new infusion of old Golden Book blood into his grandchildren.

  Her confined cousins blessed Paola with dead eyes, forked almond crescents through the grille into her violable mouth, for while they might feed her, they were not allowed to touch the bride’s naked hand. Meanwhile, for me, there were buckwheat wafers thin as hosts but interleaved with honeyed whipped cream, still-smoking fritters brisk with powdered musk and spiced panpepato such as I was not allowed at home.

  When I was twelve, the nuns asked me would I like to see the kitchens? A noble girl, I’d never seen one, so why not? Down I went, and there I found such red-cheeked happiness pulling such trays of sweet warmth from gnashing ovens, such lucent bottles of Seville syrups staining the glass of the windows, such a hot and blissful hub of softening, folding, melting, lubricating, rising, turning, glazing, and stacking in pain
ted boxes destined for fine tables that I cried when they made me go home. I wasn’t bred for such low labor myself, but I was partial to watching it.

  And so I continued to visit San Zaccaria regularly and felt myself at home there. I even boarded at times as a schoolgirl, sleeping in the rooms of my aunts while my desultory education continued in a classroom next to the refectory.

  I called on the convent kitchens as a sparrow calls on a bird-table, taking what I wanted and flitting off. No one could bake marzipan cakes like those nuns at San Zaccaria, except perhaps those at Sant’ Alvise. Most certainly no one made such frothing chocolate or served it in such elegant caudle cups. I came so often to drink it that a special cup was reserved for me.

  It seemed such an agreeable place. One of the loveliest gardens in Venice was San Zaccaria’s. Still more pleasing was the orchard, with its delicate swathing of trees. The convent was more like a pleasure house in the country than a fortress for God’s brides. Terracotta enfilades laced with arches of white Istrian stone led to two graceful cloisters, one even ornamented with a loggia above. From the door of their cells the nuns saw the church cupola rising above them in harmonious composition with the apse and campanile. Just beyond our southern wall lay the Riva degli Schiavoni and the basin of San Marco: A fresh salt air purified the cloisters even in the summer, though in the winter, being at a low point of the city, they were sometimes briefly transformed into dismal lakes, and, once or twice, into mirrors of ice.

  The convent was to the south of the church. At the necessary hours, the nuns filed there quietly and positioned themselves in severely grilled galleries. From behind those grilles they fixed their blinking eyes on the coal-black marble on the floors or rested them on Giovanni Bellini’s transcendent Sacra Conversazione. Or they sat in the wooden niches of the choir like so many carved saints, observing one another and the five gilded chairs which were reserved for the Doge and his party on their annual visit to the church.

  It was a small life, without privation but without any variation.

  It was not for a person such as me.

  When my parents delivered me to the convent after my misdemeanor with the artist, I was quite within my rights to assume the banishment was temporary and that shortly, after a period of demonstrable good behavior, I would be restored to my former freedom and privileges, with due reparations paid for the affront to my dignity To this end, at first I behaved as dumbly as a trained bear, docile as you please. It was hard to keep my temper; yet I did. I would earn my free passage home, no matter what. And there were those marzipan cakes to console me in the meantime.

  But the days flowed into weeks, and still I was at San Zaccaria. When I might not leave the place, it seemed suddenly far less attractive. I winced at the noise of keys turning in locks. I shivered in the shadows of the high walls that I had previously perceived as cooling refuges from the Venetian sun.

  I wrote to my parents, alternately apologizing, grieving, berating. They did not come to see me as the other parents did. I suspect that the sight of my misery would have shaken their resolve. Only once did my mother come, and I performed such a climacteric in front of her that she departed, biting her lip, without saying a word to me. I heard nothing from them after that.

  Yet still I hoped they would relent. How could they leave me there?

  The first sign of the finality of their decision was the arrival of my cassa. When the painted wedding box was delivered to my cell I lay on the floor and wept, for it meant that they had resolved that I was truly to be married to Christ. I wrenched open the lid, looking for the luxurious trousseau that had been accumulating for many years. My parents had replaced the gay silks and linens with cloth no humbler but in drab colors. There was one more thing: a gilded casket that was intended for my blonde hair.

  Even as a child, I had never thought my parents perfect in wisdom. Now I began to think them mad. Did they realize what they were doing, confining me against my will? Did they not realize how badly such an attempt must end?

  I had not a breath of a vocation for the Church.

  Until that moment the deepest religious experience of my life had been praying to God to uncreate Sundays, the most tedious day of the week. Now my every day was to become a Sunday, and repeated without mercy, not merely with the passive endurance of my previous life, but an active participation in rituals that I saw as degrading antics.

  Now, under the eye of the madre di consiglio, I was sworn in as a monaca da coro, a proper choir nun, and not a mere conversa, the lower order of sisters who acted as our menials, who ate only what the refectory supplied and were always given the dark meat of the chicken. The poor converge wore wimples and chafing habits taken from the communal wardrobe. They kept their hair lopped and invisible. But the Golden Book girls like myself might be regarded indulgently if we chose to display our curls about our temples, wear jewellery (if we cared to—I did not), and silk stockings. We adapted our habits to fashion.

  You may ask why I agreed to become a professed nun when I so hated my confinement at the convent. It was because I kept my eyes open and saw how the converge were treated. While I never accepted that I would spend the rest of my life in the convent, it seemed expedient to take my vows and exist on the superior plane. All Golden Book girls did.

  In the preparations for this moment, the convent’s rituals were truly bridal. Those of us about to take our vows were cherished, feted, the subject of whispered admiration. The atmosphere was heightened in those days; my own skin felt like fine glass bottling hot blood. There was breathless giggling in the corridor outside my cell, and fine white sheets were laid on my bed. In it, I fell asleep with the melt of special cakes, sent up expressly from the kitchen, in my mouth. I awoke to tender smiles and reverent fingers untying the ribbons of my chemise.

  I married Christ in a delirium spun of sweetened wine.

  I was only bitter later, when I saw little girls dreambound in the smell of almonds and burnt sugar in the orchard. For by then of course I knew full well that real nuns might not freely come and go from there and that God did not make such trees.

  • 2 •

  An Emmenagogue Decoction

  Take roots of Smalage 2 ounces; Calamus Aromaticus, Bay-berries, each 2 drams; Zedoary, Cubebs, each 1 dram and a half; Mace 2 scruples; Galingale, Grains of Paradise, each half a scruple; Dittany of Creet, Pennyroyal, each 1 handful; boil in Water 1 quart and white Wine 1 pint to 28 ounces; when it’s strained add Tincture of Saffron (made in Treacle Water) 1 ounce; Syrup of Stechas 3 ounces, mix.

  It excites a new Orgasm in the Mass of Blood; and forcing it briskly into the Uterine Arteries, opens the Extremities of the Vessels.

  Other girls of my blood and station found the life of the convent quite convivial.

  Not I.

  I soon found out my mistake and regretted it bitterly. The seductions of God were short-lived in my hard little heart. Worse, I realized now that I had professed myself as a nun my parents had every excuse to leave me there. I lacerated myself with rabid recriminations. How had I been so stupid? So blind?

  Despite my high status and kind treatment I chafed against everything. I could not bear to be there. I began to play them up, to behave as badly as I dared. I was forcibly escorted by different nuns to Prime, Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. Impeccably devout nuns were made responsible for shaking me awake in the dead hours for Matins. The nuns who accompanied me to the choir-stalls chanted continuous, breathy meditations on the glories of the virginal state.

  Some had their hair cut off and kept for them until their death in caskets such as my parents had sent me. I shuddered to conjure the image of that moment, when the nuns’ aged corpses would be reunited with their young hair, for it would be buried with them. This so that they might go to their wedding night with God all intact. I could not rid myself of the grotesque vision of their avid, aged faces, toothless as lampreys, curtained by their thirteen-year-old curls, awaiting their deflowering at His hands.
/>   They were all thirteen, in their minds, forever, sealed into adolescent behavior. The natural appetites that were arising in them then were trapped just at the moment when they should be set free. With their primal urges stoppered up inside them, and not even softened by familial affections, they lived the rest of their lives enacting highly charged little melodramas, setting up rivalries and unleashing trails of poisoned whispers, just like a cancerous cluster of spiteful schoolgirls.

  One morning, I lost control of myself and confronted two of the smuggest nuns, eyes uplifted and faces alight with their own superiority over fleshly things.

  I hissed at them, “Chastity! All it means is that you think continually about the opposite!”

  They cast their eyes down, refusing to meet mine. They exchanged glances under the demure shadows of their lids—they would take pleasure in reporting my unseemly outburst.

  Yet I knew that there were others like myself among these women: unwilling nuns who had taken no internal vow of chastity. And, like me, they were all perfectly aware of the fact that the sexual enclosure of the Venetian convents might, with a little cleverness, be ruptured; and in no nunnery more so than at San Zaccaria. The city would have preferred a little more virginity in her nuns, but shrugged her shoulders. Those unruly instincts, if they could not be contained, must be managed. Blind eyes were turned where open eyes might lead to inconvenient scandal.

  Everyone knows that a man is the only way out of a convent, and after two months as a monaca at San Zaccaria, with not the merest sign of mercy from my parents, I was already making my own plans. I would be happy to leave on the arm of the first man who proffered one. A Venetian, a Frenchman, a Turk, for all I cared, might own that arm. I would have tripped out of that convent even on the withered elbow of the dread Hermippus, rumored to have lived a hundred and thirteen years already by constantly inhaling the breath of young girls and who scoured Europe looking for recruits to his boarding school. It was being said in those days that he was in Venice, on the hunt for little nuns, for he wanted to indulge in a practice prescribed by Marsilio Ficino for prolonging youth: to drink from the opened veins of young women. Yes, I swore to myself, I’d open my veins to a blood-sucking old man, if it would get me out of the living death of the convent.