The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Read online

  It reprimands the Animal Spirits when too furious, and ready for Tumult and Explosion, disciplines them into order again, shakes off their heterogeneous Copula, and sometimes expels it quite. Upon these Accounts, it’s found by Experience to be very serviceable to Hysteric Women, howbeit some cannot away with the odious Ructus, which Oil Amber causeth.

  I myself cared little whether I lived or died, but the pull of life was not to be resisted.

  When my brain recovered some of its vitality I acted frailer than I was. Mutinous thoughts were stirring. I was not going to be confined in the convent forever, despite what they told me. I lay on my pallet, pondering a viable plan for my subsistence in the world outside.

  My lover had frequently taunted me that he had rarely seen better melodramatics on the stage. As I had indeed manufactured much of my behavior in his presence, I confess I fancied myself a very adequate actress.

  So this was my hazy ambition: that I would escape the convent—the walls of which had already proved themselves porous to such plans—and become an actress at one of the theaters in Venice. It seemed ludicrously simple. When I regained my health I would slip out on the pretext of an errand, or secretly, using my key. My accent and aristocratic features would ensure me any theatrical interview I desired. I thought my charms invincible and my confidence remained boundless despite the painful setback I had just endured.

  I had reckoned without my new loss of status. While other sportive nuns might quite easily leave the convent for their adventures, I alone was now guarded every hour of the day and night. My key to the outside world had disappeared during my confinement. I was given to believe that my parents had somehow been informed of my recent adventure and had commanded more rigid supervision. I did not believe it. There were times when I asked my guards if my lover had paid them for their vigils, and they always shook their heads.

  “It is your Mamma and your Papa,” they grinned. “They are worried for their little girl.”

  Then they saw tantrums that were real: screams, tearing of my clothes, even the beating of my head against marble door frames. They remained impassive, turning the vast rusty keys in the three locks that were thought necessary to contain me. There were never fewer than two nuns outside my door, and, when they came to bring me food and water, they were always attended by a third.

  And I never heard a word from my lover. I guessed that without the baby to bind me to him, I was even less safe in his regard. I was just another troublesome lover. Perhaps he even resented me for the incompetent birth that had robbed him of an heir.

  Whatever his motives, he never manifested himself in person or by letter. Yet still I talked of him brightly, as if this temporary absence had been agreed between us. I saw them shake their heads, which were split with bitter little smiles. I informed them loftily that my key to the gate by the ruota had been stolen by some jealous nun while I slept. When I asked for it, they met my imperious request with pitying smiles that raised a turmoil of bile and fear in my stomach. When I screamed insults at them they told me they were not sorry for me personally, but, from the superiority of their virgin state, they pitied foolish, weak womankind, prey to debilitating lusts and therefore clever men. I was an example of such a degraded object, wasting my shuddering heart on a man with all the tenderness of a brandished hammer. How they enjoyed their righteous miniature sermons! How I abused them, and with what foul language! Until they backed away, blushing and tearful.

  After that, they sent a conversa to lie in my cell with me, presumably to report on the words I muttered in my dreams. I could not sleep with her in there. I found loathsome both the idea and the very odor of her.… She was not a kinswoman, the conversa, and, being of the lower class of sisters, she wore no perfume or pomade. Her naked smell of milk, soap, and musty skin operated repulsively upon my nerves: I told her so. I demanded exclusively Golden Book women around me, insisting that I was used to a greater refinement. My guard slipped away, mouse-snouted, to inform on me. The abbess herself came all the way up to my cell to lash me with her tongue.

  “There is a difference between being exclusive and being refined,” she told me, her voice flat and harsh. “These humble women are of good character. You, who have been docile to every vice, have no pretensions to being their better. It ill behooves you to demand company that smells sweeter than your own conscience.”

  I thought I had nothing left to lose: I was not afraid of her.

  “Are we not in Venice?” I asked sarcastically “Have we been transported to Heaven, where blood counts for nothing and all women are equal, and none more noble than others?”

  Trembling with rage, the abbess regarded me. Her mouth moved, but no words came out. She swept out of my cell, and I heard her galloping with undignified haste down the corridor, a noise accompanied, as ever, by the rasp of poor nuns chafing with rags at the wainscoting already bare with such punishment. No doubt the abbess wished she might put me to such ignominious work. But no matter how bad my behavior, my family name set me above that fate. After this confrontation, I was left alone in my cell, dwindled to a creature that was fed and watered, but ignored.

  Soon a new torture emerged: When I asked after my lover, they shook their heads as if they did not know what I was talking about.

  I screamed out his name, again and again. They mimed complete ignorance of him, smiling as if I played some childish same with them. I screamed more, and they turned away, saying, “There is no such man.”

  They would not allow me to purge my bitterness by expressing it to them. As soon as I began to bewail my situation they disappeared, and I was left to tell my sorrows to the damp, leprous walls, down which indeed clammy tears trailed in the only semblance of compassion I ever saw at San Zaccaria.

  As soon as I was well enough to walk, I was dragged before the capitolo delle colpe to confess my sins of lust and disobedience. I shouted at the sisters, “When I was committing them, you never bothered to caution me!” When they moved to silence me I hissed, “It’s only now I’ve stopped that you condemn me. How much did he pay you? Did you turn away the money?”

  A gag of linen infused with bitter herbs was put over my mouth, and I was led back to my solitary cell. From that day forth my one remaining pleasure was denied me: No more sweet food was brought into my room. Just unsweetened porridge, salty bread, and unspiced meats. But I could smell the convent kitchen and I could still make out the fragrant steam of every different cake as it billowed through the air. Those cakes became my calendar for I had no other way of marking the days. On Mondays there was panpepato, on Tuesdays marzipan cakes, on Wednesdays tarts made with fruit preserves, on Thursdays biscotti with honey and pine nuts, on Fridays ginger wafers, on Saturdays fritelle. On Sundays, there was no smell at all, except of candle grease, and just one cruel Sabbath, the warm perfume of chocolate, when some giggling sister left a cup of my favorite beverage on the deep sill outside my window, just beyond reach.

  My baby died in the spring.

  Summer passed, then autumn, and I never left my cell. I never ate anything that was not merely a tasteless fiber. I drank only water from a chipped cup. My own Murano glass goblet had disappeared. I never spoke to anyone except purse-lipped nuns who clapped their hands rather than speak to me, as if my breath contaminated the air. I amused the gloomy hours of my incarceration with practicing my pretty voice. I sang all the songs I knew, dwelling bitterly on those that spoke of betrayal. My voice grew sweet and strong, its echoes haunting the corridors. Draped rather than dressed in white rags, I sat hunched in my cell like a mummy, my head down, my mouth open, my eyes blank, singing my unholy dirges. I frightened myself to think how I looked: a specter of evil and misery, inhuman and repulsive.

  Winter came, sealing the convent in snow. My cell was icy When I beat the door, screaming for blankets and a fire, they whispered through the keyhole that my parents had refused to spend on such trappings for my cell, in order that I might learn humility through fortitude.

  I shr
ieked until a delegation of nuns came and opened the door, ready to chastize me. Even that they did in whispers. No one knows how to whisper like a nun. No woman can make her face as immobile, her eyes darting all the while!

  “We will make you behave like a proper nun,” one simpered, and pulled her habit open a little to show me the hair vest she wore.

  “Whatever gives you pleasure,” I suggested maliciously, and they filed out in silence, giving the key an extra turn as they left.

  As the metal groaned in the lock, I snapped an icicle from the window of my cell. I cut open a vein in my calf and let a pool of blood throb into my water cup. I tore the linen from my bed, dipped my forefinger in the cup, and wrote his name in blood, in letters as long as my arm. Then I bound up the wound with a strip torn from the same sheet.

  Still clutching the icicle in my hand, I screamed at the top of my voice.

  When the nuns came bustling through the door they were confronted with the banner draped over my window, with the faint light behind it blackening the blood that spelled out my lover’s name. Then they showed some emotion. One cried out and another fainted. The third stood rooted to the spot, mouthing the word I had written.

  It was the first time I had heard his name in a year.

  I could not breathe.

  But I hardened my heart, and I took my chance then.

  • 9 •

  A Draught for a Bruise

  Take Canary 4 ounces; Oil of Turpentine 10 drops; Sealed Earth, Dragon’s Blood powder’d, each 1 scruple; white Sugar 2 drams, mix.

  It absorbs acrious, extravasated Serum, preserves the due mixture of the Blood, impresses on it a Balsamick Consolidating Character, and stints inward Bleeding.

  I did not mean to hurt the nun. I intended only to terrorize her into immobility, to permit my escape. It was not my fault that she ran into the icicle I still brandished in my hand. It was to be a warning, not a weapon. But, in the dimness of my cell, the translucent ice must have been invisible to her when she ran toward me shouting threats. I felt it meet her eyeball and penetrate its jelly In God’s name, I did try to pull it out then. But it slid out of my hand and deeper into her eye until the makeshift hilt snapped off and fell to the floor. I was left looking only at my own finsers, slick with blood and melted ice.

  For a moment all of us stood motionless. But as she collapsed to the ground and the other two nuns rushed to her, I glimpsed the open door to the stairs at the end of the corridor, and I ran out of the cell before I even had time to think of what I had done.

  Trailing blood from my calf, weak from my long incarceration, I staggered down to the source of cold light in the first cloister and limped along its periphery. Seeing no one, I boldly ran across the second courtyard and rushed to the orchard of the convent. At the far end of the trees was another door, the one with the grille and the ruota beside it.

  There was the remotest chance that the door might be open. But I found it locked against me. I raked my hands over its surface, poking my fingers with painful splinters. I threw my weight against it. I beat my head on it. I knelt and scrabbled at its base. Finally I spat at it, again and again, as if some venom in my saliva might dissolve it. By then the throbbing in my leg had spread through my whole body, which was at the same time devoured by a fever.

  That was how they found me, spitting at a door and screaming. By then, they had summoned some serving boys from the nearby tavern. My pursuers had tracked me by the blood that gushed from my wound. I was soon restrained and tied to a wooden plank, which they rested between two tree stumps in the orchard. There they left me, in the cruel cold, for many hours, to cool my murderous rage, they said. They made no move to clean or dress my leg, perhaps hoping that I would die without their further intervention and that they might then say it was of natural causes, that I had hidden myself in the garden and frozen to death in the night.

  I almost wished to satisfy them. I felt no guilt for harming the nun, though she must have been suffering unspeakable agonies from the wound I had inflicted: Someone had come to whisper the news to me, to tell me that the contusion had spread and both eyes were thought beyond repair. My informant took this opportunity to empty a pitcher of foul water over my head. The water soon turned to ice, so that my hair hung down in whitened stalactites. Eventually the cold brought on a pleasant kind of delirium. I fancied myself toast-warm in front of a fire with my lover, and I murmured lewd words to him. I imagined us engaged in amorous congress and I raised my frozen hips to meet his again and again. Perhaps it is in this way, by keeping in motion, by not succumbing to torpor, that I stayed alive.

  As the birds began to open their throats in the pearly darkness just before dawn, I started to feel the cold again, and to ponder the consequences of my act. I was so young, so ignorant, that I had no idea if the nuns might commit me to a summary justice of their own, perhaps stoning me to death, or if I would be bundled into a carriage and sent to Rome to be quartered and burned in the Campo del Fiori.

  I began to be conscious of sounds and smells: the unmistakable rustle of a large rat, the stale stench of the dirty water thawing in my hair. The darkness was leaking by increments from the sky to reveal the black tracery of winter-stripped branches overhead, those same branches from which the nuns had hung sweet jellies to tempt me when I was a child. I licked my dry lips and tried to swivel my head, but they had bound me cruelly across the neck and forehead, even tying string, ignominiously, around my ears.

  I was falling into delirium again when five of the signori di notte came to take me away, four to carry me and one to guide our way with a flaming torch. They bore me, still on the plank, through the gate held open by the abbess and two of her hench-women, who saluted me with grim smiles.

  First we crossed the campo of San Zaccaria diagonally. The church leered up like an Oriental ziggurat. There was nothing of Christian kindness in its barbarous frontage. We left it behind and proceeded into the throat of the calle that led toward San Provolo. Passing under the arch, I glimpsed the exquisite relief of the Madonna to whom I had once compared myself. After a moment, that was gone and I heard one of the guards grunt. The night sky then swung round and I was semi-upright, looking on stone: they were carrying me over a bridge. From the top of the bridge, where they levelled me again, I had a glimpse down the canal all the way to the lagoon, which loosed on me a spiteful tongue of gelid air. I was tipped backward as we descended again. My stomach rose up in rebellion and I choked on bile. Then I was righted, and we continued on our way.

  Above me the first tatters of dawn light struck the sneering snouts of stone lions on marble balconies. Beneath them the ivory-coloured teeth of the cornices gnashed in and out of the shadows. In serried stone arches, wrought-metal lanterns dangled from their chains like hunting spiders, as our silent passage disturbed the dead air around them.

  I stared on my city as if it was a dream. The dark canals, the Gothic windows, the courtyards, and the bridges all appeared unreal to me. I looked up at towering walls, everything distorted by my strange viewpoint so that the palazzi loomed over me like bewitched trees in the dark-hearted forest of a nightmare in which a black-clad, hooded troop of men carried a girl with frozen hair on a plank.

  The crust that had formed over my leg wound broke open. I felt the warm trickle of blood—we must have left a trail of drops in our wake. In time to the officers’ steps I whispered, “Please, please, please, please.” They looked away. I continued to keen, “Please don’t hurt me.” They marched on like enchanted toy soldiers. I soon lost my bearings and eventually closed my eyes.

  When I woke I was inside a large room and a man was looking down on me with a kindly expression. My leg felt tight: In the warmth the wound had sealed itself again.

  He must be the torturer, I thought, wary of his smile, for it is well mown that the se men love their work, and therefore the beings on whom they practice their arts.

  But he was elegantly dressed, well shod, and did not stink of beer or urine. His hands
were beautifully kept, I noticed, as he brushed the hair from my forehead. He was of my own class. I did not know if this was better or worse for me.

  “So this is our saintly little vixen,” he said. “You have put us in a considerable dilemma.”

  His voice was smooth, his accent patrician. I wondered how well he knew my parents. Did they wait outside to beg for my life? But if they cared not whether I froze to death in the nunnery, why should they want to save me now?

  I was soon enlightened. My companion explained that my parents were even now being woken with the news that I had died in the struggle with the nun I had stabbed.

  It had been decided that this was the best course. A Golden Book daughter, he told me sternly, could never be brought before the court for a violent act. The whole city would be destabilized by such an event. Golden Book daughters were not permitted to be guilty of such crimes. And if I were to be cleared: Why, that would be worse. Not just noble nuns but also the daughters of merchants and the daughters of glassmakers would get it into their heads that they might take a knife—or an icicle—to anyone who displeased them.

  My companion shook his head sadly. “You see what difficulties you present,” he said, gently.

  For the first time I spoke. “Why don’t you strangle me now and burn my body? It is the only solution.”

  I had blurted out my worst fears, hoping to have them assuaged. He smiled again to let me know that my fate would be otherwise.

  “It is not the only solution. We can offer you another.”

  The room was growing hot. My hair was melting and water trickled from it, noisily striking the floorboards, forming a glistening puddle that glowed like blood-flecked gold powder, reflecting the fire that roared menacingly in the grate.

  “But of course, you are in discomfort,” he said kindly, “and in no condition to consider our proposal sanely.” He rang a bell and two women appeared. They cut my bonds with little stiletto daggers and helped me rise. I stood unsteadily, and peered around the luxurious room, which was decorated with frescoes of a grandeur I had not seen since my parents expelled me from our home. Meanwhile the man gave instructions to the women, who regarded me with blank eyes.