The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 5

  They took me to an antechamber, and pushed a chamber pot beneath me. While I sat on it they filled a large tub with jugfuls of warm water and gently removed my clothes. They washed my aching limbs and my matted hair, leaving me to soak for many minutes. The warmth of the water rinsed all thoughts from my tired mind, and soon the room grew dim about me. I smelled the rich clot of an ointment gently rubbed into my wound. I closed my eyes then and when I opened them again, the water had grown cool, and the room had been lit with dozens of candles.

  Twelve men surrounded me. I felt their eyes on my nakedness, on the pale curls that had dried in a cascade that spilled over the edge of the bath. My nipples, rising above the water, were puckered in the cold air. I was unable to move or speak.

  Among the men I detected my recent companion. He told me: “You have no reason to feel afraid.”

  I said nothing. How could I answer such a patent he?

  Part Two

  Sweet Glyster

  Take New Cows’ Milk 6 ounces; Melassos 2 ounces, mix.

  This Glyster is to be made use of, before the bitter one, whilst the Worms lying in the small Guts bite and gnaw and cause the Belly-ache. For they will greedily make to the Milk, which is sweet and delicious to them, and so leaving off biting, will come out of their lurking Holes, and crawl downwards and lie ready easy to be cast out by Siege.

  When they murdered my Pa, that was a good day for me.

  For a start, I was made ward of the handsomest man in London, my Pa’s best friend, Valentine Greatrakes.

  And after that there were plenty of treats with Uncle Valentine, very nice indeed, even with his long face about my Pa’s passing.

  He kept all the details prodigious snug, as if I were a little girl. So, soon as I could, at Don Saltero’s Coffee House, I went foraging in the pockets of his greatcoat while he went out to buy a newspaper, and that’s when I found the letter from Smerghetto, the man who conducts the Venetian end of their business.

  Smerghetto had identified my Pa’s body on the slab in Venice, and this was his report.

  I scanned the letter quickly and replaced it in the pocket before my guardian returned. I resumed cheering him with choice conversation. The day proceeded to our joint satisfaction, including a vastly good spread of cakes and two cups of spiced chocolate. Then we went to Madame Cornelys’ in Knightsbridge for some sweet Asses’ Milk, which is always so renovating to the appetite. Afterward we ate cutlets and damson pudding. I like to think that I consoled Uncle Valentine considerably. He really was very finely cut up about my Pa’s death.

  “Poor little Pevenche,” he whispered sorrowfully, when he took me back to the Academy. For some reason he had not invited me to go to the theater with him. Yet it seemed to me that he could scarce stop himself weeping at our good-bye. You see, they were of the same age, and my Pa’s cut-short life must have made him think to himself. Also, my Pa was in Venice on their mutual business. You could say Uncle Valentine had sent him to his death. I saw all these thoughts soaking through that remarkable face of his when he turned it in my direction.

  Then he was gone, not before thoughtfully reminding Mistress Haggardoon to administer my Sweet Glyster without fail.

  Later, over supper, I reviewed the contents of the letter, which listed every wound on my Pa’s body in a businesslike way.

  Only the last words puzzled me: “And his face was raped with fish.”

  Smerghetto wrote as if it was clear, but for me the words conjured only blurred visions of thrashing fins and white eyes marbled with blood. I supposed that Smerghetto had botched the translation.

  He did not put forward any theories about why anyone would want to do away with my Pa. But that didn’t require too much thinking about. Apart from the matter of the fish, this kind of end is not uncommon in his line of business, which of course they all think I know nothing about, living genteelly as I do at Marylebone, in Mistress Haggardoon’s Academy for Young Ladies.

  I know plenty. I know about the rolls of nun-made lace smoothed inside the packets of chocolate. The wax figurines faintly gurgling with stashes of taxable liquors. The glass daggers verte-brating candles in wooden boxes. The hollow glass eyes, the painted bottles of holy water, the finest nostrums quackery can distil, cunningly packaged. All these things pass through Venetian hands before they make their way to the grand depository of Valentine Greatrakes at Bankside, on the wrong side of the Thames.

  There must have been one among them who thought his palm not greased as fatly as it should be?

  On the other hand, knowing my Pa, it was as like to have been a husband.

  London, late November 1785

  • 1 •

  A Traumatic Infusion

  Take green Twigs of woody Nightshade (cut like Sarsaparilla) 4 ounces; Cochineal 1 scruple; White-wine 1 quart; infuse hot and close, all Night; then, having strained out the Liquor, add Syrup of Ground Ivy 4 ounces; Venice Treacle half an ounce, mix.

  It’s a singular Experiment in a Contusion; for it dissolves extravasated Clots of Gore, after a marvellous manner, drives it again into the circulating Mass of Blood; and there, partly by Diaphoreisis, partly diuresis, and sometimes by Purging, throws it out of the Body.

  Sometimes a man goes to the theater just to bury his troubles for the duration. And sometimes he comes home with new ones.

  Valentine Greatrakes, poached in hate and no wonder, cuts through the throng. Toes wince under his ebony cane. Theatergoers flitter like ashes in front of his livid eye. Yet what he wants is to inter his raving self, every Irish atom of it, among living souls.

  Like when a man whispers a blade between two ribs and lets it lie quiet there awhile in the meaty midnightish redness.

  There’s nothing else to be done with his great heart-broken self tonight. He needs the close company of others to sheath the stinging vision that’s driven him out of the house.

  “The wounds were not done with artistry.”

  That’s how Smerghetto, sparing of sentiment, phrased it in the letter that still stiffens the pocket of the heavy coat Valentine presently drops upon the buckling cloakroom attendant. He disdains the proffered ivory ticket. The clerk will not be forgetting him.

  That final insult Tom did not deserve. His own finesse with the knife is living legend round Bankside.

  Yes, several’s been the funerals of one of our enemies where the widow shyly complimented me on his neat work.

  One such once-wife had caught Valentine’s eye this May past and he had an entire mourning bed delivered to her, black posts, black pall, black blankets, even black sheets, and before long he his own great self was enjoying the black pleasures between them with her. But a widow is an exacting species of woman, and when that one grew needsome, not to say a little venal, he’d had the bed removed to the house of a pretty wife Tom had more freshly bereaved for him.

  Tom.

  There were no cuts on the dorsal plane of Tom’s right hand: He had not even tried to fend off his assailant. Nor were there lesions to his palm: So after the murderer fell on him, he had no time or power left for plucking out the knife himself. The fatal wounds to his neck and side were both inflicted while he was still alive, for there was a fast flow of gore and a rim of coagulated blood between the lips of each incision. Blood stops flowing after death, Smerghetto explained.

  As if I did not know that for myself.

  Tom was probably two days in dying.

  And all that time he was alone, behind the bridge at Rialto in the desert wakes of a Saturday night. So the body lay undiscovered until Monday morning, hidden under fish waste and, by that time, mingling with it. The sepsis, the report continued, started slowly and then came the gangrene, which requires no air to breathe but obstructs the blood to the affected organs. And then the mortification, the discoloring of the skin flagging the massacre of Tom’s inner particles.

  When they had finally found him, he was melting into the canal. Drop by drop, the gangrene had liquefied his flesh. No one could say, Sme
rghetto had written, when he had lost consciousness, for how long he suffered the pain of his wounds, if he could smell his own putrefaction, if he had time to ponder on his murderer’s identity or motive. Evidently, he had been too weak to scrawl the name in his own blood, the code of their kind, to help those who will avenge him, not least of whom is Valentine Greatrakes. No one could tell Smerghetto what poison was used on the tip of the blade: the murderer must have pulled the weapon out and made off with it so that it could not be examined.

  Valentine flows with the crowd into the gilded barrel of the theater.

  It simmers hot as a glassworks inside. The lace at his wrist wilts, embracing his fingers in a corpse’s handshake. Gasping candles dispatch gouts of wax down the walls, clotting the carpets below. The mumble of voices hustles the air around in clammy arcs. Upstairs in the five-and three-shilling galleries they must be fainting like flies. The ladies and the so-called ladies flap their fans with such hectic energy that the stalls look like the breeding grounds of an enormous species of moth. The fans throb the faint stink of theater drains into a living pungency. Something is on the fret deep below the stalls.

  Valentine makes his way to a ten-shilling seat in the front of the aristocrats’ enclosure. Who would dare deny him? His new neighbors flick him uneasy glances and then gaze intently in another direction, hiding the nervy drumming of their fingers in down-turned palms. Even this, inaudible beneath the whining and cavilling of stringed instruments tuning up, feeds Valentine’s fury. He loathes all these people calling out to each other in stage whispers, stupidly lifting their heads like birds drinking to gaze round the honeycombed galleries, or prematurely becalmed in slack-mouthed spectators’ passivity.

  Why don’t they ever get started on the stage? It’s well after seven.

  He’s sweating like a tumbler of iced beer, rubbing his back against the seat like a riggish dog. A woman behind him sniffs and he turns to fix her with a look that makes her recoil in her chair, her cheeks sucked in like paper bags and the whites straining out of her eyes.

  This is of course by no means the normal state of play with the ladies. It’s just that Valentine’s pleasing features are temporarily deranged. Otherwise she, like all women, would have grown astoundingly fond and flirtish merely at the sight of that lean face and the shapely nose that lists very slightly to the right. The amiable slant of his eyebrows lends him a habitual expression of irrepressible good humor, and he can arch them independently, and frequently does so, in a way that never fails to endear. He wears his own auburn hair, even to the theater, and it grows so fine and gleaming soft that no one misses the wig. The offended woman is already hoping that he can feel her regretful sigh caressing his neck.

  At last the velvet shuffles up on the stage. A breath of dusted air belches out from a radiant slit in the pall. The first true note of a violin makes a wet punch through the flabby chatter of the theatergoers. Officious people start shushing, and others mock the shushers with exaggerated shushes of their own. The curtain lifts on a rustic Italianate scene and the actors burst into ragged song and shabbier dancing.

  Now he’s more than willing to be pleased, but this is not enough for Valentine, not by a long way. He shifts endlessly in his seat, unsticking his thighs from its hot embrace.

  It’s the usual mediocre fare, he thinks, there’s no relief to be had here.

  He’s about to rise and push his way out of the stalls when the leading lady makes her entrance.

  She does so as the virgin of the piece. This is spelled out, as if in a printed caption, by the fact that she’s dressed in white gauze (fitted to her body with the utmost niceness), fever-spotted in the lily cheek, and subtly rouged at the tender point where her breasts meet. Each step is hesitant, childlike, but all the same avid. And every male actor she now encounters, for she straightaway does the rounds of them on a pretext of some inquiry, is pictured in the minds of the audience violently astride her. Yes, definitely the maiden: This does not happen in the case of actresses impersonating married women or widows.

  At first sight I cannot endure her looks, she’s nothing to me, I wouldn’t go next or near to her, and nor would Tom have given her a second backways glance, much less the clicket she’s offering gratis to every man in this hall with that look over her shoulder.

  The thought of Tom affixes Valentine to his seat again.

  Is Tom’s murderer still at large in Venice or has he come to London now to continue his massacres? Does Valentine himself know the poxed dog that did it? Will his revenge be more savory if he does?

  You’ll not be going on alone, Tom.

  He scans his memory for sundry Venetians black-affronted by any of their little enterprises or by Tom’s being so very nimble in the act of friction with their ladies. But no known face, merchant, spouse or father, is conjured in Valentine’s mind by these ruminations: just the anonymous silhouette of a monster raising the dagger again and again over Tom’s cringing form.

  From up on the stage the Italian actress tugs at his attention. Suddenly, she has it all. The jaws of the music are snapping around her. Now she parleys with the man who will save her from ravishment. And there’s the would-be ravisher himself, a fine pinguid specimen, hair black as a sooty raven, staking his claim with a lewd motion of the hips, forcing into Valentine’s unwilling mind the memory of those inexplicable and unbearable words in Smerghetto’s letter: “And his face was raped with fish.”

  A snake is eating his heart. He cannot bear it. He half-rises to leave.

  Then the heroine utters a raw-boned cry of agony and commences to weep utterly genuine and copious tears. Valentine drops back in his seat.

  Damn me if she’s not the most delectable woman I ever saw in a public place.

  In that moment, every flea, satisfied or not, departs from Valentine’s electrified body and finds other accommodation in the pit. He fumbles with the playbill, unwrapping the crushed ball of it in his hand. She goes under the soubriquet, he reads, of “Mimosina Dolcezza.”

  Well, she would, wouldn’t she? Her breasties mouthfulling even from this distance, neat as a bee’s toe in that dress. You could run a mill with those tears.

  By some freak of passage, a plump tear shaken from her lash flies suddenly across the pit and lands upon Valentine’s own mouth, slips in through that astonished hole, jackets his tongue in its salty melt, and kisses his tonsils like linctus.

  Would you listen to that lady? In the blue yonder of my wildest dreams I never heard a voice like that.

  The other actors on the stage are marionetting through their roles, and yet she puts flesh and blood into every word, butters every morsel of a body’s feelings with that creamy voice. Her song reaches out to Valentine and fondles his ears, runs a finger down his sensitive back. He feels a great heat in his heart and the parts adjacent to it.

  And his head’s a-smoke with the ember of an idea.

  His hands prickle as he looks back at the program. And by a grim and curious coincidence it turns out she’s Venetian herself, or so it suits the entrepreneur to style her in his fulsome biography of the actress.

  And when she must show herself unhappy, she makes like a cat that is unwell, a dolefulness that loses nothing of its grace. No, really, she’s too dear for an ordinary body.

  Something of her bearing brings to his mind the image of Tom’s orphaned daughter, now his ward, who Tom always insisted, had conversation so original as to still a party quite to rigor mortis, so intent did one become not to lose one mere word by interrupting the torrent with a reply. And such forest-floor ideas too as to give a body the lockjaw just to hear them. And she a large size of child and never let out of school to be interfered with by anyone!

  It’s going to stay that way, too. That, at least, I can do for Tom.

  The moustachioed villain menaces. There seems a real danger that the ingénue?, purity will be extinguished by the villain. Soft and languishing, she pleads her case, in breathy whispers and delicate coloratura. It is to no avail
. He will debauch her. The actress faints. Her torso dips into a spillage of petticoats, and she concludes with her head coddled in a hand, ringlets splayed about her so her face is like a luminous egg in a soft nest. Valentine suddenly feels the comprehensive sensation of lying behind her, cradling her hip against his own. Astonishing. He glances at his neighbors, both men breathing hard, gripped by the same fantasy.

  The difference between those chinless toothpicks and myself is that I could be there if I wanted. I know the manager of this place and it would be the work of a few minutes to have him owe me a tangible favor.

  The story onstage plays itself out to its inevitable conclusion. The heroine averts her sweet eyes as the hero delivers the villain, swaddled in chains, to her feet. She even throws herself on her knees to beg mercy for the man who had desired to ruin her.

  It must be the pain of Tom’s dying that has wedded my eyes to this woman, and it must be lust for life, provoked by his stark lack of it, that gives me such a sheer molten need to have her.

  After all, the preliminaries have already been played out on the stage. It but rests with him to conclude the act, to perform the act of generation itself upon the woman. It is natural; it is fitting. He is panting ripe to have her. He’ll briefly rub off the sadness upon this actress, this cunning little piece of Venice, this Mimosina Dolcezza.

  It’s a fine idea, with some handsome curlicues upon it.

  There’s the clatter of hands rising. The opera is over. Valentine simmers in his chair while his neighbors jump to their feet, clapping their hands at her like twinned castanets. They call the actress back, again and again. She feigns reluctance and the stage manager is forced to march her back onstage and to hold her in front of him, where she droops with downcast eyes, as if she is too fragile to withstand the power of their rampant adoration. Yet, from those lowered lids, she shoots off grateful glances like sparks in a foundry. Men caught in their direct trajectory jerk with pleasure, ducking their heads and shrugging bashfully.