The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Read online

  So though I still somehow enjoyed him physically in my cold-hearted fashion, for he was undoubtedly endowed with all the points of masculinity that are universally in request, I now hated him with far stronger intensity After that first display of vitriol, there came others, until it happened that every word he said, even on neutral subjects, fell vilely on my ears. By then his endearments were as welcome to me as if kicked up from a puddle of street slime; yet if they did not come, then I fell into a despairing panic that I might never leave San Zaccaria by his agency.

  When he waxed vicious, I just stood dumbly, listening to things about myself that my bitterest enemy could not hope to devise. He insulted my appearance so intimately that I bit my cheeks to stop myself from crying out. When he hated me I was always, at some point, “dowdy.” I realized he probably did not know the true meaning of the word in Italian, well though he spoke our language, but I imagine he knew it was an evil thing that women said of one another, so it must be eviscerating.

  There were times when he lost command of himself. Strangle-eyed and teeming with spleen, baffled in all his schemes, his resentment was also expressed in shoes, bottles, and other missiles.

  “Not my face!” I begged him at times like that, for I could not endure to be humiliated in the convent. The bruises on my hips and thighs were bearable because they were invisible to others.

  What I could not withstand were the threats. When he was beast-eyed and breathless, numb-toothed with all the poison that had spurted from his mouth, that was when he began to speak dangerously, in a low voice, of how—very soon—he would not want me any more. This was my undoing, for it robbed me of my prospect of escape. Then I gasped and wept honest tears, and then he strode about the room, shouting that he saw through my melodramatic trickeries and that I should be not in a convent but on the stage.

  When I sobbed a protest, he snarled, “Why don’t you set it to music?” His lips disappeared and his eyes became opaque.

  But I do not doubt it was a kind of love we had for each other. What the poets call “love” is made up of need and desire, is it not? And ours was that. I needed him. He desired me. But it was also the kind of love that when he raised his hand, I knew not if it was to strike or caress me.

  He found yet another device to humiliate me. When, in a roundabout way I was making for the vital subject of our marriage, he would always say, with a perfectly controlled expression, “We don’t talk about that.” In this way he made himself the emperor, inquisitor, judge, and lord of all the emotional commerce that passed between us. And like all people who live under the yoke, I felt a bitter resentment toward the person who had set me in this position of inferiority.

  Were all women as loathsome to him as I was now, I wondered, once their brief mystery had been exposed as mere coquetry and their fears as melodrama and their insecurities as selfishness?

  He had tactlessly talked of a few of my predecessors when his gullet was silked with wine and his brain addled with repeated spendings. At first, listening to tales of these unworthy women, I had felt it my place—and my only path to my own salvation—to soothe his way forever forward. He certainly believed the world owed him something. Were these women really such shrews? Did they truly commit these grave offences? Or had they in fact merely responded in kind to the disparagements he dished up for them? A little respect and a great deal of pity for those unknown women began to throb in my thoughts.

  Eventually, at the end of each of his broadsides, I would apologize, and he would tell me how unhappy he had been feeling, and I would comfort him until he snored. And I would slip back to the convent.

  In terms of a great love, it was a mockery, but until he took me to a priest and married me, then this was how it would have to be.

  But after we married, what a luxury of revenge I planned for myself. What foul epithets I had stored up for him, what cold shoulders I would turn upon his pestilential caresses, what sluttish housekeeping would I inflict, and what violently laxative juices would I slip into his drinks! For every offence I had its just dessert planned out in the same minute.

  And these fantasies took away the sting of every blow and insult, until he did the one thing that I had not planned against.

  • 6 •

  A Consolating Mixture

  Take Sherry Wine half a pint; strong Cinnamon Water 4 ounces; Rose Water, white Sugar Candy, each 2 ounces; Juice of Kermes strain’d 1 ounce; Species called Laetificans Galeni 2 drams; Leaves of Gold 4; Oil of Nutmeg 4 drops, mix.

  It helps Concoction, corrects Crudities, dissipates Flatus, cherishes native Heat, specifically recreates Women with Child, when drooping and languid, comforts the weak, feeble Foetus, prevents Miscarriage from dejection of Spirits, and cold flaccidity of the Womb, and supplies desir’d Strength, Vigour and Ability for the happy performance of the great work of Child-birth.

  I was a poor species of idiot not to guess that it would happen.

  I was so green that when he failed to call for me one night, I was genuinely surprised and shocked. My former procuress was no longer required to urge me to the grille, and I was glad she was not there to witness this first instance of my abandonment and humiliation.

  I stood for a long time, listening for the steps that did not materialize. Alone, in the shadows, my self-assurance soon faltered. After a small half-hour I knew in my stomach that he was not coming.

  I imagined all kinds of reasons: a business meeting, an encounter with a bravo, an acqua alta in the parts of town he must traverse. But the image that I settled on was of him at the grille of another parlatorio, in another convent, choosing another young nun to amuse him now that I had ceased to do so. I was ill-tempered, and I was already swelling with his child, so that soon I would cease to be a lover and become more of a mother in his eyes. There was a vacancy for the lover. Perhaps he had already filled it. Perhaps he was filling it now.

  So long as he set me free, I did not care how he amused himself. It occurred to me that he did not even have to marry me, so long as he left me a purse to endow my freedom. It was the least he could do, especially if he planned upon leaving me here with his child in my belly. He could afford it; I knew little of his business, except that it thrived, and entailed many visits to the apothecaries, wine shops, and boatmen of Cannaregio.

  Waiting by the ruota, I wondered if he would long punish me like this. I decided not to wait for him, and so preserve the fragments of my dignity.

  On my way back to my cell, I noted bitter smiles in my wake. How quick were the other nuns to mark my misfortune! I whispered unconvincingly, “I have mistaken the night. It was to be tomorrow.” Yet still I heard a little knot of gossipers confer in the hall outside my cell, and my name mentioned, and one long, dry laugh. I had not made any friends among the nuns: There was no one to defend me, even among those who had shared their amatory adventures with me. We were only coconspirators; there was no warmth between us. In the refectory next morning, seventy pairs of eyes were lifted triumphantly above my head to gaze at a point just over my left ear.

  My status would dimmish fast if I did not quickly recapture my lover’s affections. By our usual messenger, the butcher’s boy who came daily to the ruota for his orders, I sent him a tender letter. I promised to do better. I assured him of my passionate, faithful, subordinate love. But still the next night I waited in vain. And the morning after that the butcher boy stammered the news that my lover would not pay for the delivery of another letter from me.

  On the third night I crept out, making my way out of the gate and disappearing to the Riva degli Schiavoni. My lover had long since arranged things so that I had my own key, and could meet him in the shadow of the church. But I had no safe haven in which to pass the requisite hours. I could hardly go all the way to his rooms at Rialto. I had no money for a gondola, and I flinched at the thought of what might await me there. So I walked up and down the street, pausing to watch the monster-mongers and the retailers of strange sights touting their hermaphrodites, pygm
ies, mermaids taken on the coast of Acapulco and ambulant Egyptian mummies, all such things that appealed to the imagination of the Venetian crowd. My spirits, however, were too low to be enticed into credulity, so this entertainment soon palled, and I turned my attention to the mountebanks selling their nostrums from their swagged and painted platforms.

  I felt nostalgia for my old life, when my parents dressed me up like an elegant doll to attend the theater, where we sat in the family box, attended by livened servants. Now I was reduced to seeking free amusement from the theatrical charlatans of the riva, just like any poor peasant or foreigner newly arrived in Venice. Yet I stayed out among them for three hours, enjoying the shows, even forgetting myself as I listened to the quacks’ speeches about their Balsamick Dew brushed from a banana in the Gardens of Babylon, or their vials of Restorative Snow collected in the crags of the Caucasus. One brandished a pure white candle, embodying, so he declared, some precious oils extracted from a Royal Spermaceti Whale that had sacrificed itself upon the shore of the River Thames in far-off London, at a place charmingly denominated Blackfriars. Some of these nostrums had even attained the dignity of printed handbills, which I collected with relish and stuffed into my pockets. It was a long time since I had been given anything other than religious tracts to read, and I looked forward to the diversion that these ridiculous high-flown texts would afford me later in my cell.

  When I slipped back into the convent just before midnight, I made sure that my happy sighs and yawns could be heard all down the corridors. I washed noisily and I cried out my lover’s name, as if in the ecstasy of a dream, in the middle of the night.

  And so I did for the next three evenings, trying to forget my plight among the crowds of the riva, mingling with the strangers and Venetians, taking solace from the unaccustomed press of carefree bodies and the colorful entertainment on the mountebank stages. On the third night I took some coins with me and bought a Consolating Mixture against the troubles of childbirth. I knew that it was unlikely to help me, but the fact of having bought it was consoling in itself. I hid the bottle behind a curtain on my windowsill.

  On the fourth night I was followed. Someone must have learned something or perhaps I had performed my part with too much feeling. As I slipped out, I felt a shadow detach from me and when I entered the narrow calle that leads to the riva, I heard the unmistakable slither of discreet feminine footsteps behind me. It had to be pure coincidence; no one suspected me. But all evening, as I wandered among the tooth-pullers and fortunetellers and those colorful purveyors of magical potions, I had an uneasy sense of company. And when I returned to the grille, the abbess was waiting for me there, with a contingent of her flunkeys. Her face was grim, and without ceremony she gripped my shoulder and rubbed a rough hand over my belly.

  “I thought as much,” she said, coldly, and then she kicked my feet out from under me so that I fell forward on to the stone.

  It was then I knew that he had betrayed me. My heart fell immediately into that state that cannot be repaired, and it continued to beat only by grace of mechanical habit.

  • 7 •

  A Julep for Child-Bed Women

  Take waters of Baulm, and Black Cherries, each 3 ounces; of Barley Cinnamon, and Dr Stephens’s waters, and Syrup of Meconium, each 2 ounces; Liquid Laudanum 40 drops, mix.

  It’s a blessed and well-experimented Remedy for Puerperal After-Pains: And none here need fear stopping the Lochia, for that most frequently is occasioned by intense Pain, which by troubling the orderly Motion of the Spirits, convulsing the Fibres, constringing the Membranes of the Uterus, and Vagina, and pursing up the Mouths of the Vessels, suppresses the efflux by these ways: And therefore. Opiates that take off those Pains, hurry of Spirits, and Constrictions of Fibres, must needs promote the Purgation, and render it placid and plentiful.

  My belly swelled hard as a barrel and my complexion flowered, my right nipple turned darker first, and I also favored my rig ht foot when walking. All this confirmed what I already knew: The baby was a boy. When my time came near, the midwife told me with evident relish that my natal passage appeared too slender to allow the great babe an entrance into this world. The nuns threw up their eyes and clasped their hands piously, as if it were a godly act for me to sacrifice my life for his brat.

  I gulped my sweet Consolating Mixture the night my pains began, hoping for oblivion.

  I remember little of my travails, for they continually spiced my water with more sedatives, hoping to quiet my screams. In the end I fell unconscious, and believed, on leaving the bloody scene in spirit, that I would never again wake up in the flesh.

  My thoughts were confused and angry. I had not seen my lover again, after our last great fight. He had evidently “handled” the problem of me remotely, paying the nuns to shelter and midwife me, and to keep my condition secret from my parents. Instead of springing me free from the convent, he had me imprisoned there in a worse state than before. Even so, I could not renounce hope entirely. Every day of my pregnancy I had asked the nuns: “Is there any message? Do I go to him today?” They pursed their lips and looked away, until I ceased asking.

  The nuns concealed my stomach in shapeless gowns. I had no visitors in any case: My last tirade through the grille of the parlatorio had so offended my mother that she had decreed that none of our relatives might come to see me. My cousins and aunts within the convent shunned me entirely. When my pains started, I was as usual alone in my cell, and it was there that they brought the midwife, whose sweating, ugly face was the last thing I saw before I slipped from consciousness.

  When I awoke, I was again alone, weak and sore. There was a smell of blood, sweat, and soap in the room, all unpleasantly fused. I felt my belly: It was lumpy and tender, but clearly emptied of its burden. I raised the sheet and saw that my nether parts were bound up in tight clean linens from beneath, which bloomed great dark bruises halfway down my thighs. I looked around for the little creature that should be resting somewhere near by. There was nothing. Not even an empty cot, or swaddling clothes or a feeding horn, or any sign of maternity whatsoever. I could not raise my head. I tried to call for help, but my throat was raw and painful.

  I lay still, whimpering with resentment. How dare they leave me alone? And I a Golden Book daughter, owner of a name a thousand years old! I screamed piteously that they had stolen my child and intended to leave me to die. Eventually I wore myself out and passed into sleep again, still sobbing.

  When I next roused, they were changing the damp and bloody linens around my privities. To lessen the shame, I still pretended at sleep until the dry rags were fastened and my shift pulled down over my thighs. Then I opened my eyes and beheld the midwife and two nuns whispering by the door to my cell. I tried to speak but my throat was still constricted. I stared at them with imploring eyes until they noticed that I was awake. They began to speak to me in cool, impersonal tones. In chorus, as if rehearsed, they told me that my son was dead. They explained, all three looking at the floor, that he had tried to emerge with his face and not the crown of his head to the fore, increasing the difficulties of a near-impossible birth. With his large head he threatened to tear me in half. They had been instructed to spare me rather than the child, should the choice arise, and so they called in a doctor who had used the cranioclast on him.

  “What is that thing?” I croaked. “Cranioclast?” Still looking at the floor, they described the instrument, an iron tool used to reach into the birth cavern and break the skulls of mother-splitting babies. The doctor had pushed the cranioclast inside me, the pain being almost unnoticeable amid the tearing contractions. But in hearing of it, I thought I remembered a man’s voice and the sensation of cold metal inside me.

  “That was when I fainted?” I asked.

  They nodded.

  “What happened then?”

  Unwillingly, they told me. All within the theater of my womb, the doctor had sliced the child’s skull in two halves, sucked out the contents with a syringe, and squeezed the br
oken bones together. The crushed, dead baby was then pulled out with a hook. All this had happened while I was still unconscious.

  “And my throat?” I whispered. “Why does it hurt so much?”

  “We were obliged to insert a tube to keep you irrigated with laudanum. Had you woken or moved while he worked the cranioclast and hook then you would have been in the greatest danger.”

  My wits being capable of absorbing no more horrors, I fell asleep, for many hours, and when I awoke, I had been freshly dressed below. I licked my lips and found the traces of oat pap on them: They had also fed me while I slept.

  For days this was my life. Deprived of my own baby, I had indeed returned to being one myself. I allowed myself only infant feelings: those of heat, coldness, satisfaction, and voiding.

  Later they told me that my absent lover had returned to London, and I asked for the money he had left for my new life outside the convent.

  They claimed that these funds had already been exhausted in the care of me during the birth and after. The doctor with the cranioclast was the most expensive in Venice. He feed extra for such emergencies. The drugs lavished on me during my recovery were also of the costliest kind, they added coldly, as if they considered this a poor investment.

  “You have lived,” they told me sternly. “You may count yourself fortunate.”

  And so they robbed me of my last portion of freedom, having already murdered my son.

  • 8 •

  A Camphorate Electuary

  Take Conserve of Rue 3 ounces; Venice Treacle 1 ounce; Camphor 8 grains; Oil of Amber 16 drops, mix.