It was a revelation to exist in such intimate proximity with other human beings. I had no need to dissemble, or pretend my looks were anything but what they were. I was as never before stripped to my personal merits. I had no appearance to keep up with these men. I did not hesitate to apply a Vizard cloth to my tired face in the cosy fug of their tobacco, after we had dined in famiglia.
“It’ll do you a power o’ good, dearie,” said the Doctor, sniffing at its medicinal perfume of wax, gum benzoin and oil. “Shall I rub your feet the meanwhile?”
Dottore Velena was no sort of doctor, but as a massager of feet I would name him prince of the profession. When I lay under the Vizard, and he rubbed my toes and ankles all over with gin, I found my feelings dissolving. I did not trouble to hide my lassitude but wept openly and refreshingly, allowing my softened mind to stray lightly over the dreadful scenes from my past life.
The Zany looked on indulgently, grumbling, “Not enough brains to give ’erself a headache, but she’d drown us if she could.”
“Aye, there’s a sweet gurrlie,” purred Dottore Velena. “Have a guid greet. Don’t ye sprauchle to hould it all back. Wash it all awa’.”
And so I did. After he had finished with me, I was purely content, as a child is, all the wicked memories having flowed out of me. I lay down and slept more soundly than I had done in my life, despite the unmelodious snores of my companions and the noisy bad dreams of the Zany, whose unconscious hours were beset by “gipes,” “sleekit weans,” and “a great black bitch of a devil” who caused him to be “darned in gar, man,” a phrase he keened, repeatedly, on nights of heavy liquid consumption. On the rare occasions when he woke me I crawled over to his plank and took his hand in mine. He never woke, but commenced to tremble, and whisper that he would be quiet and good now, if the beastie would only promise not to come back and “mange” him up. He shivered so that I would sometimes cover him with my own scrap of blanket. He would remain silent for the rest of the night after that.
And I too slept, enmeshed in the preferable dreams of my companions’ past lives, instead of the nightmares of my own. I had a passion for their memoirs, for their voices smoking out of dim corners of the room when the sun had set. I, who had only ever known the luxury of pure spermaceti candles, now came to live by the cheap glow of rushlights. A pound of rushes for a shilling and the daily scummings of the bacon pot could keep an illiterate London household in light for a year. The Dottore and I, of course, knew our letters, but there was no incentive to read books, and there were no books to read, except medical texts, and so we talked, he of his past, and the Zany sometimes weighed in with teary reminiscences of his old Ma and of a certain Sukey who had used him ill and bled his heart “dry as a monk’s bum.’ The more I knew of them, the less willing I was to he to them, but the truth was inconceivable, so I stayed mostly silent, or encouraged them by asking questions.
On these nights, the retrospective affections between the two men warmed the room, and there were times when they leapt to their feet and collided in embrace at the thought of some previous triumph. Whenever the Dottore uttered what the Zany described as “ne’er sich a true word,” there was always a peculiar ritual by which the Zany rose and lifted his leg like a urinating dog, at a right-angle to his body, as if this triumphant display marked the territory gained. Then the Zany would declare himself “drier’n a nun’s nasty” and lope downstairs for a jug of gin, which he shared out in scrupulous portions.
And the Dottore’s affection spread in my direction. “Dear heart,” he often called me, rocking my own with the memory of another man who had used that term of endearment.
I did not cook but I loved to shop. I had never known it. A Golden Book daughter or a nun in Venice would never experience the pleasures of running to the chandler’s shop in Foul Lane for an hour’s inconsequent pleasantries with the proprietors over the purchase of half a peck of coal and sundry provisions; even more sundry advice was ladled out free. In Venice, I would have been ashamed to be seen at such humble pursuits but in London I was declassed, and happy to be that way. Sometimes I chuckled to myself about what my new friends Mr Crumblestalk and Mr Gibbons would say if I told them that I was a high-born Venetian lady with thousand-year-old blue blood. I suspected it would be, “Well, of course you are, my sweet, and here’s an apple for you, darling. You tell that Dottore Velena you’re looking a spot peaky and should have a bit of a lie-in tomorrow. And take a drop of gin.”
As I passed around the streets I was saluted by my new name and with affection by wholesale haberdashers, hair merchants, rope- and twine-makers and all the cheerful parties of St. Giles’ Blackbirds, as London’s plentiful blackamoors were called, at work on their various free enterprises: All such men as would never dare to lift their eyes in my presence in Venice. Nor did I feel demeaned by their familiarity. On the contrary I was warmed by it. I had found no comforts in superiority What a crew of gelid hellhounds seemed the noble nuns of San Zaccaria in comparison to my new comrades!
I even made female friends for the first time in my life, and happily passed hours listening to the grumblings of Mrs C. who sold pease porridge, soused pigs’ ears, and sheeps’ heads, three delicacies much beloved by the Zany, at her shop in Borough High Street. I made another friend in Sarah Mince, a sewer of books, who took in lodgers because her husband, a watch motion—maker, was afflicted with the gin and could no longer pursue his profession. I was on smiling, nodding terms with the young widow Mistress Grimpen who worked as a mantua-maker and fitted me up with a few of my costumes. I took pleasure in the feel of her delicate hands on my skin, and the way she spun me lightly around to view her work from all angles. I sorry to hear the gossip that her business did not thrive, and that times were hard for her. Perhaps the physical intimacy of her contact precluded actual friendship, but the possibility was there to be cultivated, I fancied.
Not that I gave up my male companions. In fact, I becoming more and more like them. The sophistication of the West End coffee houses soon palled on me. We took our leisure north of the river less and less. I grew to like the maltish comforts of the George, the Bell in Clink Street, and of course, our own Feathers in Winchester Square. I liked the Dog and Duck, the Shepherd and Shepherdess, and the Temple of Flora, all safe houses for highwaymen’s spoils and effervescing at all times with a resultant edgy humor. Some boasted camouflaged cesspits below stairs: These offered a surprise all-over embrace to curious customs officers, several of whom were said to have perished in their unfragrant stews. My favorite, surprisingly was now the Anchor. To me it was a country inn, kept for sailors. The reflections of the Thames pulsed on the ceilings and the whole interior was washed with a sea-light. I had entirely renounced my former poor opinion of it and now found it a heart-warming place. Moreover, it seemed that my lover had not entirely misled me about it. Although there were no elegant quarters concealed upstairs, the Anchor had seen its share of great men. Dr. Johnson himself had frequented it: indeed, his great friends the Thrales were until recently the owners of the vast brewery, the only totally legal business in the whole of Bankside. In its shadow, smaller, more discreet businesses were happy to prosper.
Like my fellow Londoners I had developed a taste for gin. It was cleaner than the water. The Thames was visibly poisoned by the effluent of three-quarters of a million inhabitants. I had heard my lover describe it as “monster soup,” referring to the innumerable pestilences that churned inside it. What came out of the wells here was too brackish to be palatable: It was only good to wash with. I wondered that more Londoners did not think to use it for that. I swore by their fumes that some of them had not known a drop of water on their bodies since the priest sprinkled them at the baptismal font. I had what the Zany called “good legs” for gin, and was able to slake my thirst without addling my brain, or so I thought at the time. In retrospect I think it was probably a mild but never-broken inebriation that allowed me to suffer all the other privations of my life on Bankside without dying of d
isgust.
The gin helped me swallow the food that tasted so insipidly if it tasted at all. It was principally of a fibrous texture, and not spiced but merely aggravated with pepper. And a most unchristian stink arose from it, mysteriously disproportionate to the weak, pallid taste. Yet it seemed rude to cavil when Dottore Velena and the Zany smacked their lips at the prospect of indulging me with hot furmety from the Fleet Bridge Tavern, or eel pie in Baldwin’s Gardens.
My nose was given a thorough education in all sordid matters.
In the taverns of Bankside I learned to recognize my drinking companions by their stenches, be they the tripe-dressers and catgut spinners of Field Lane, the singed glassblowers of Stoney Street, or the salty sea porters from St. Mary Overie steps. I learned like all the other denizens to pick myself up and throw myself toward the door if anyone came running in: such an event was likely to be the announcement of a press-ganging or a cockfight or another flimsy building falling down. Any house with seven windows or more was taxed, so the tenements loomed dark, like prison hulks decrepitating into the mud.
It was a squalid area, this demesne of my lover. But as my acquaintance with it became more intimate, somehow I forgot to be shocked. To those of us who inhabited it there was a certain fraternity, camaraderie, and code of honor, but let a fashionable carriage from north of the river venture to pass a night in Naked Boy Yard and it would be stripped like a carcass under the desert sun.
I came to recognize the bulky silhouettes of the smugglers and the Heavy Horsemen, dockers whose loose clothes concealed pockets and bags for pilferings from the cargoes of sugar, coffee, cocoa, ginger, and pimento. I became familiar with the swagger of the dippers, come to fence their rich pickings from among the mercers’ stalls at Ludgate. I came to know professions I had not dreamed of, such as that of the wretch who stockpiled dead dogs and rotten fish for flinging at the blackmailers and the sodomites pilloried at Smithfield; even he had his story and a smile for Dottore Velena’s Zany, with whom he shared a passion for the adamantine Sukey.
Too late, of course, I learned to distinguish the various accents of London, from the truly aristocratic (to be heard shooing us low-lifers away from their carriages) to the genteel, dirty-genteel, genteelish, and right down to the snipes of the gutter. Somewhere among this rabble floated the remembered tones of Valentine Greatrakes, and they did not bear any resemblance to those of the crème de la crème. But this discovery no longer angered me. As I grew fonder of the Banksiders, so I became more indulgent of their prince. And it seemed to me that to be princess of this vivid realm would be no bad thing.
• 7 •
A Sweetening Scorbutick Ale
Take Pine (or Fir) tops, cut 4 handfuls; boil them in 5 gallons of very strong Wort to 3 gallons and a half; when its tunned up, pour into it the juices of Brooklime, Water-cresses, Dandelion, Cleavers, each 1 pint; also hang into it the following bag of ingredients, and work all together. Take roots of sharp pointed Dock 4 ounces; Sarsa, China, Juniper-berries, each 2 ounces; Shavings of Sanders yellow and red. Harts-horn, Ivory, Liquorice, Sweet fennel-seed, each 1 ounce; Harts-tongue, Liverwort, Agrimony, Ground-Ivy, each 2 handfuls; Crude Antimony 1 pound: Prepare all rightly.
It brings adult, fervid blood to a temper; quieteth it when in a furious ferment.
After two months of this existence I felt as if I had lived in Bankside all my life. I had got away with my little swindle, and I was even well in purse from it, for Dottore Velena was exceedingly generous with the takings I had swelled. Now there was no danger left, at least while Valentine Greatrakes stayed away.
My audacious plan had worked, but the perfection of it served not to gratify me but to reveal the paltry dimensions of my ambition. It was no great thing I had achieved: Why any smart young woman might have got where I stood now, with a modicum of good looks and a few atoms of wit. What so clever about existing in a slum, making a living swindling poor people with fake medicines? Living in company with the dry squeal of mice behind the all night, a quack doctor who addressed me as his “wee sweetie creature” and a coarse flunkey who usually denominated me in terms I would not care to repeat.
Familiarity was beginning to breed not contempt but boredom. This fermented a more dangerous new emotion: anger. My old arrogance made a reappearance. Why was I confined here, living like a street-woman? Was I not a Golden Book heiress, a noblewoman of Venice? How had it come to this pass?
When I answered this question to myself I refused to hear certain essential elements of the response, those that cited the nun I had blinded, the dangerous ways of my former employers, the lies I had told and implied to my lover.
The only thought that came into my head and was allowed a hearing was this: Valentine Greatrakes was the author of my predicament. He had scammed his way into my heart by pretending to be a gentleman, and pretending to love me. He had failed to honor the love I had given him, and now, when I was ready to make him happy—he was obstinately absent. Why did he not return? Moreover he was lacking in guile, despite all the fear he inspired at Bankside. How was it that he had not discovered me yet? For surely he had sent spies to find me? Were they not, every man of them, as incompetent as their master?
It seemed to me a shoddy turn of fate that I still languished in poverty in London, when I might at least have been revealed, brought to him, abjectly apologized to, and persuaded to resume the romance that had been so cruelly interrupted. My fantasies in those days were centred on the depository in Stoney Street and the secret comforts of the bedchamber there that I—another sore issue—had never seen.
These were the images poisoning my thoughts one morning when we drove down Stoney Street, this time heading for Borough High Street. The doors of the depository were open for once, and I glimpsed Dizzom in conversation with an expensively dressed but grotesquely overgrown young woman. The toes of her enormous shoes were acutely pointed and adorned with silk roses. I could see only a snatch of her profile, partly hidden by the violent gush of velvet peonies swarming over her hat. These framed a short column of hair, which was of a color that the English in their sprightly moments call “strawberry blond” but in reality better merits the appellation “boiled shrimp.”
From the nervous way Dizzom looked up at her, I guessed she was finding fault. How did she dare? In the absence of my lover, Dizzom was king-regent of Bankside.
I had never seen her before: not in the crowds I worked, nor on the streets, nor yet in the shops or taverns.
Of course not! She was not the type to live around here.
I have no idea how I came to the realization, but in one swift moment it fell upon me. There was something about her that made this unprepossessing stranger instantly familiar to me. I calculated rapidly Even though the girl was at least a dozen years older than my lover had led me to understand, I had the clearest inkling of who she was. The gigantic and arrogant young woman was no other than the so-called Baby P.! No wonder my lover had fingered the miniature bonnet I bought her with such embarrassment. It would barely cover her brawny fist!
My mind sped. As we rounded the corner to Clink Street I cried out to Dottore Velena: “Stop! We must go back to the depository. I sense a superabundant day’s work ahead of us. We must refresh our supplies.”
Eyes gleaming, for he knew that I was capable of delivering what I said, Dottore Velena swiftly turned the cart and we trotted back down Stoney Street. The Zany grumbled cynically in his gizzard.
The young woman was still there, hectoring Dizzom, who had his back to us, and her eye passed coldly over our rig. It paused a moment on me, and then swiftly dismissed me as an older and shabbier woman than herself.
From under lowered eyelids, I studied her in brief glances, while seeming to stare vacantly at Dottore Velena and the Zany loading bottles into the back of our cart. Over her shoulder, I caught a glimpse of a vast, ordered storeroom lined with shelves crammed with ranks of bottles. Each shelf bore a large, clear label … Canada Maidenhair Syrop, Geneva Cordial Wate
r of Lemon. There were several signs I recognized—they were Venetian! Of course, Dottore Velena had told me that my lover sourced his supplies from the infamous Black Bat in Santa Croce and the discreet Fir-Cone in Castello, but it was another thing to see the actual objects here at Bankside. I was amazed at the precision of the storage and labeling. The Black Bat’s products were announced by a perfect replica of the original Venetian shop sign, wooden wings prettily paired like a browsing butterfly. It turned my heart over to see its familiar shape again. But the door was soon slammed shut and bolted. There was a moment of danger as Dizzom glanced back at us, but his eyes were glazed; his attentions were fully occupied by the girl.
“I shall be telling my guardian about this!” The words, laden with menace, turned my head back to the girl berating Dizzom. “He’s on his way back, you know. Or, perhaps you don’t?” she sneered.
My heart turned over again with this news, but I forced myself to look at the girl and gather information.
Apart from her age and size, she was everything I had suspected: lumpish, spoiled, and plain as a pike. Her coarse pale red hair was fashionably dressed but lustreless. Her voice was like iron filings being scraped. And yet this lardish, charmless creature was loved by Valentine Greatrakes, treated by him as a lady and not as a whore to be used and let go. I supposed he had not told me her true age, which I reckoned at around twenty, for fear that I would find his tenderness toward her a threat.
My poor lover, always so considerate of my feelings, and so misguided! I did not blame him but myself. I should have guessed, from the quality of her manipulations, that she was more mature than the “little girl” he described. There was nothing little about Pevenche. She was a hefty piece of nastiness. There was nothing vulnerable about her to my eye. She was all too well defended.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 27