The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

by Michelle Lovric

  And not a single item of it culpable for duty.

  The dim catacombs of Bankside are suddenly lit up by a providential shaft of pure moonlight, as if to welcome home its most illustrious son. Late as it is, men tip their hats to him and women bob as the carriage of Valentine Greatrakes passes by.

  The horse goes like an eel down the slyest alleys. Valentine surveys his domain with a certain amount of smugness. What he slips in and flushes out has made Bankside what it is today. No public house rollicks without the illicit life-blood he porters to it. Every local magistrate, if he does not sup off the discreet back-handers of Valentine Greatrakes, at least dines on the affordable commodities he has free-traded all the way to his kitchen door. No babe is born without its mother first partaking of his Maternal Wafers. No man goes to his marriage bed unfortified by his excellent preparation, the Husband’s Friend. It is these last two items, and many related confections, that please Valentine above all items of commerce, that raise him higher than all other gentlemen free-traders in London, and not just in his own eyes. For Valentine Greatrakes, while not disdaining Ginevra from Amsterdam and Bohea from India, has taken it upon himself to specialize in certain liquid and powdered pharmaceutical substances that come only from the tiny aquatic Republic of Venice: universal balsamick cure-alls for the people of London.

  The quack doctors of Valentine Greatrakes thrive richly on the credulity of London’s afflicted. And such lovely nostrums, so sweet and grateful on the throat, are those he provides to ease them of their money. And if their narcotic or purging qualities do sometimes prove destructive to the patients, why, his quacks will always mention that this is because they have been taken in insufficient quantities. A man killed by taking thirty of these wonder-pills would have been saved by the thirty-first. If only he had not lacked of courage at the last moment: Why then his vital spark would not only have been prolonged but fully renovated.

  And how picturesque are these potions, these Balms of Gilead these Macassar Oils, these Odontos and these Infallible Balsamicks. Their labels are the poetry of the streets, and the stanzas are their lists of fantastical ingredients. And indeed they appeal infallibly to that majority of Londoners who bear a love of the incredible and marvelous. Sometimes it is no mere congenital deficiency of brain that sends people scurrying for these nostrums but a special form of blindness: They might read any newspaper with all the cynicism of a Frenchman, yet, when they scan the quacks’ handbills, they respond as if to an article of the catechism, with an instinctive and deep belief.

  And the trade is all the smoother for one fact that became apparent to Valentine when he was just a young entrepreneur, thin as a shorten herring and half hazy on the excitement of it all. Bankside, as he has known since childhood, is excellently attired to be the disseminating headquarters of the business. For Bankside is the Murano of London, the site of a hundred glassworks, all churning out clear containers for the soothing and uplifting liquids that must be free-traded through the city, commencing their journey in the capillaries of passageways, communicating secretly between friendly houses.

  They pass on to the baker’s and Valentine hellos his platter-faced friend already at work inside, on a batch of hollow loaves for the concealment of whatever morsel’s currently attracting the interest of the Excise. Cooling in his storerooms are trays of the aforesaid Maternal Wafer, excellent business at a penny each.

  One of Valentine’s quacks passes in his trap pulled by a white donkey painted with purple spots. He brandishes a bleached female femur at his employer and indicates, with his hands, the airy lightness of his cart: Today he has sold many dozens of his bottles of nostrums, each one enriched with brandy poured from kegs damp with the slime of Romney Marsh. Valentine scowls and the quack lowers his head. Too late, the man has remembered the effect of his proprietary escharotic ointment on the sensitive back of his patron. Despite the application of a cabbage leaf, the caustic salve has caused a weeping lesion that still troubles the laundrywomen beating the linen shirts of Valentine Greatrakes. When he sees the quack who is the author of his discomfort, the delicate skin of Valentine’s back contracts painfully and he is forced to remember the words of the advertisement that he himself had written: “It prevents Inflammations, Festerings, and Running of Matter, in any of which cases this great Vulnery has never yet been known to fail of effecting a perfect Cure in a few Days.”

  The public girls are out on the streets still: all faces and figures he knows well one way or another. For Valentine frequently sends the skimpy south London prostitutes on jaunts across the Channel so that they might return crinkled and snowswept with lace: Apparel in use upon a living body is not liable to duty. Moreover, he most heartily enjoys the unwrapping of his lacy girls when they come home to him, dipped in cognac and juicy for the tasting. Those more lively in their wits double up as assistants to his quacks, posing as deathbed cases who are instantly revived by the latest miraculous nostrums.

  Now the carriage is drawing into the depository in Stoney Street and two of his sleepless men, having observed his arrival through a spyhole, open the discreet gates and close them again behind him.

  Valentine vaults down from the carriage and runs up the stairs into his office where his assistant, Dizzom, hunched over a burner worries a piece of hemp into charred segments that will be sold for a guinea an inch as hangman’s rope, which is known to be efficacious against the earache. Behind the man a row of bottles glow hellishly in the firelight: The heat agitates the liquid inside them, so that slow and graceful ballets are now performed by the corpses of rats and mice preserved in their death throes and other, less familiar, abortives put up in syrups. Dizzom’s experiments with embalming fluids have proved grimly and unexpectedly useful: This week nine gallons of them have already been dispatched to Venice, so that Tom’s body, packed in a lead-lined coffin, will soon be on its way back to them, without growing inconveniently ripe. Valentine wants Tom’s remains laid out in state at Bankside, for all their friends to pay their last respects.

  “What’s new?” Valentine asks affectionately. Since Tom’s death he takes the lives of none of his manor for granted.

  Dizzom smiles. Due to a tendency to taste his own potions and resultant encounters with dental quacks, he displays a giddy rush of forward-leaning wooden and gold teeth at the front of his mouth.

  In the pleasure of seeing his master, Dizzom has forgotten the task at hand. A segment of rope catches fire, releasing sharp tarry fumes into the room. He plunges the rope into ajar of something that makes it fizz and spit. Some drops splash Dizzom’s low forehead, which is oppressed by a coarse pinkish wig that is heavy with grease and waved in stiff little peaks like innumerable tiny ears. His hands are delicate rose-pink on the inside, hornily skinned and heavily downed with gray hairs right up to the second joint of each finger. Dizzom has long adopted a habitual posture in which he holds his digits curved to his breast with the roseate skin upward. When he must use them he turns away from any witnesses and busies himself with astonishing rapidity, so that, as now, all that may be seen is a shadowy blur about the ends of his wrists, as if someone were scribbling above them with a soft lead pencil.

  Valentine takes a step forward, and puts his arm on his employee’s shoulder.

  “What can I do for you, my dear?” asks Dizzom fondly. “I see you have an idea about you.”

  He lays down his task and stands up to look his master in the eye.

  “Well, indeed, and it’s about a woman,” declares Valentine a little shyly, and at this Dizzom chuckles aloud, revealing the full treasury of hollow back teeth, in each of which, on certain business trips, he may lay up a ruby or an emerald. Or even a tiny phial of poison or sleeping philter.

  It is something between the latter two that Valentine Greatrakes requires.

  • 4 •

  Antiphthisic Decoction

  Take Ox Eye Daisy flowers dry’d 1 handful; Snails wiped clean 3; Candied Eryngo Root half an ounce; Pearl Barley 3 drams; boil toge
ther in Spring Water from 11/2 pints to 1 pint, and strain it out.

  It smoothes and restrains the saline turbulent Particles of the Blood, so as to hinder it from rushing impetuously through the Canals.

  The next morning opens the sky like a bank vault. Valentine reads the crackling golden light as a good omen, but cannot decide whether it instructs him to take in one more stage show by the actress before he allows her to perform intimately for himself alone. To do so might dilute or it might enhance the effect she achieved the previous night, and he is perfectly happy with the sherbet of excitement that currently enlivens his blood. In a strange and pleasant way the certain prospect of her, confirmed in an oblique note from Massimo, makes it easier to concentrate on the demanding business of the day.

  With Dizzom, he dispatches some Venetian glass daggers to St. Giles, and oversees the packaging of some Antiphthisic decoctions for a Mayfair destination. He checks the inventories of their nostrums, finds a certain depletion in the Balm of Gilead. He has himself composed some alluring texts for the bottles of their latest confections from Italy, borrowing from Shakespeare and Galileo, melting down the language of literature and science and fusing them for his purposes.

  Perhaps it is the Irish in him, but no one can match Valentine Greatrakes in the kind of wordsmithery that provokes a rumpus in the chitterlins, a sudden thirst for the contents of a petite green bottle and the conclusive symptom of the opening of the purse.

  The luminous words of Valentine Greatrakes are rarely read in the newspapers, for since 1712 a scurvy law has placed a duty even on advertisements. But in the depository at Bankside he has his own small press, where handbills by the hundred are printed, full of learned miniature essays on the latest scientific discoveries, with many references to the great physicians of the day and the arcane past. Valentine knows his audience, he knows that they long to hear not of homely garden cures but of atoms charged with the Quintessence and Virtues of Chymical Oils, and secrets unearthed from the tombs of pharaohs.

  Here at Bankside he also prints and stores the labels for his quacks’ potions. These square tickets may be indifferently applied to any bottle of their cures, to flatter the needs of each separate market. So, arranged in neat piles, are labels that bear the legends. Digestive Bolus for Aldermen, Sublime Elixir for Poets, Consolation Cordial for the Bereaved, and solutions for many other retail opportunities. These colorful labels Valentine sells to his quacks at almost no margin at all, just for the joy of their manufacture.

  Errands of mixed sociability and profitability detain Valentine around Bankside until late evening: Even if he had chosen to do so, there is now no time to see the actress reprise her role on the stage. From time to time, the thought of her suddenly rinses all other thoughts from his mind and he must stammer apologies to his colleagues and friends. He wonders if she speaks English. He would like to ask Massimo, but he somehow scruples to send a messenger, lest this interest drive up the cost of the favor.

  Returning to his desk, Valentine is already dragging the cravat from his neck in preparation for changing into his evening dress. He greets his assistant, immediately aware that something is wrong. From the pink rims of Dizzom’s anxious eyes he knows that there is a new communication about Tom to be found there among the papers. Sure enough, here it is, atop everything: The news that Tom’s body is now approaching Basel and that all goes safely with the couriers appointed to bring it, but the delays continue with the paperwork. It occurs to Valentine that it is easier to bring contraband back to England than a dead Englishman with expensively immaculate papers. For once, everything about Tom is above board, something that never happened in his lifetime.

  Valentine approaches the theater to the thunder of the final applause, and remembers how last night Mimosina Dolcezza was held up to the crowd, impaled on the arms of Massimo Tosi. He hears the drumming of appreciative feet and the cries of pleasure from the audience, if anything louder than the previous evening.

  Of course he already knows the rear entrance and all the passageways to the female dressing rooms. He enters the dim back hallway that stinks of the cheapest tallow candles—backstage Massimo has no need to maintain an illusion of luxury—and strolls without hurrying down the threadbare floorboards. He knows, from experience, that Mimosina Dolcezza is at this very moment walking toward the same dressing room, though from the other end of the theater. He can almost hear her light tread and the whispering drag of her gown. If he maintains a leisurely pace then she should arrive a minute or two before him, have an interval to restore any dishevelment in her person, attend to any bodily functions, indeed discard any distracting preoccupations of the day, so as to be ready to meet her short-term destiny—that is, Valentine Greatrakes—in a state of pleasing expectation.

  Young dancers start to helter past him, not bothering to change their gowns before falling into the arms of the beaux waiting for them in the street. He smiles, noting the comfortable fullness of several faces more familiar in an emaciated state. He often places lace-girls of his own with Massimo when they have done a few too many errands to France and their looks have become known to the excise-men. One girl stops and looks at him, jerking her head back in the direction of the dressing rooms with an interrogative expression. She looks concerned and opens her mouth to say something, but another dancer rushes past and seizes her wrist: She disappears with a light clatter of heels. He tries to remember her name, but such memories are swallowed up in the all-consuming thought of what awaits him.

  Valentine reaches the corridor where the more elegant dressing rooms are to be found. He is uncharacteristically unnerved and slightly light-headed. His back itches painfully—he has, of course, forgotten to apply a buttercup decoction—and he pauses to rub it against a plaster column.

  What does he know of this woman except that she dissembles professionally? And that she is a Venetian, and therefore capable of any amount of subtlety. He is starting to shake off his enthusiasm for her company. Too much has been made of the occasion, and it’s putting him off the prospect.

  But then his trout tickles hard at its cloth encasement and Valentine realizes that no one else will ease him tonight, though he might spend himself—if he can manage it, a shuddering blush recalling last night’s failure with the flower-girl—a dozen times in different women. He continues to pad toward the room he knows at the very end of the corridor, the one with two windows looking into the well of the courtyard, both swathed in silk and hung with Venetian glass baubles he himself has supplied, for Massimo Tosi considers the dressing room of his leading lady the very front of his house. Indeed, sometimes it proves more profitable than the stage: a wealthy patron who enjoys himself with one of Massimo’s protégées is usually inclined to pleasant flights of generosity when it comes to subscribing to new productions.

  This very thought jars Valentine so that he stops in his tracks. Massimo, who will lie as soon as pick his teeth, may well have invented the story of the Venetian ice maiden. The production is three days old. Perhaps he has already sold her on a nightly basis to different clients.

  Isn’t the wish of the world to be in her arms?—Massimo’ll not have been backward in auctioning off the pleasure.

  The notion of being gulled by Massimo Tosi raises a trembling in the bowels of Valentine Greatrakes.

  If the swarthy little parasite has misspoken, he thinks, he’ll be laughing at me now.

  The thought is intolerable.

  I’ll be eating the head off him if he’s sold me some midden of a girl here.

  His hands have commenced to shake and he feels a tear of sweat peruse the blistered hieroglyphs of his back on the way down to the cleft of his buttocks.

  Valentine has secreted about his person a phial of one product he distributes with great success. “Quietness” is a tincture with one grain of morphine per ounce of sweet crimson syrup. This bottle is intended to still the nerves of Mimosina Dolcezza, who after all must be mightily unsettled by the prospect of an evening with so importa
nt a gentleman as himself. She’ll be nervous, no doubt, with a hungering wind excavating her belly, and her heart battering away at her lungs. He feels for her. He will distract her momentarily and decant a few drops into her glass: Afterward she shall feel calmer and happier, and matters will move more smoothly toward their natural conclusion.

  But what is this? Valentine Greatrakes, who has been turning the bottle in his hand, suddenly stops in a dark corner, lifts it aloft, and removes the miniature cork with a deft tooth. He swigs briefly on the bottle, checks the level (half full), and recorks it. Whistling, he moves on toward the fateful door.

  He is struck then by a sudden horror that perhaps his breath is no longer of the sweetest. He rummages in his pocket for one of his new bolus creations that is currently awaiting a patent. Dizzom has proofed up the handbill already, and he remembers all the maladies it cures: Mal-assimilation of Food, Coated Tongue, Bad Taste in Mouth, Bloating, Belchings, Sour Risings, and Restless Nights. Restless nights! He clamps his teeth on a bolus and identifies the sharp and infallible bite of rhubarb and cubeb.

  His tongue soft and clean, he taps at the door once, and courteously awaits the formality of her request to enter. A baffling silence ensues. He taps again, a little more forthrightly and yet again she fails to acknowledge his presence. Without any consciousness of doing so, Valentine reaches into his pocket and withdraws the “Quietness.” He is tipping the dregs between his lips when he feels a faint, humid breath at the back of his neck. A few livid pink drops of “Quietness” spill on to his white shirt and the pale brocade waistcoat as he spins around, the bottle still upraised, to see who dares to menace him in this way. In his other hand he clutches at the tiny glass dagger sewn into the lining of his frock coat against any unpleasant eventualities. Only Valentine Greatrakes knows how to liberate the miniature weapon without lacerating his own fingers, knows how to find the hilt, fragile as a sparrow’s breastbone, and where to thrust the beautiful sliver so as to launch it on a fatal voyage through human flesh.