It would have been easy for me to hate Pevenche from that first moment but she did not raise any strong emotion in me, and this enabled me to see her not as a person but as an object of use.
• 8 •
A Decoction of the Woods
Take Guaiacum 4 ounces; Sassaphras 2 ounces; Sanders both red and yellow, each 1 ounce; Ivory, Harts-horn, each half an ounce; infuse and boil according to Art in Water 6 quarts to 3 quarts; then strain, and sweeten with Sugar so as to make it grateful.
It warmeth, drieth, attenuateth and procureth Sweat: it’s suitable to such as are of a cold, shabby Temperament.
It was an easy matter to seize the girl.
Fortunately I remembered the name of the school, seen so often on the outside of letters sent to her: “The Marylebone Academy for Young Ladies.” Two days after glimpsing her at the depository I was there, requesting an interview with the headmistress. Modestly dressed in gray, my hair newly tinted a mouse-brown, I introduced myself as a chaperone appointed by her guardian Valentine Greatrakes to convey his ward to Paris where he awaited her arrival with some impatience.
The mention of his name cast fear upon the countenance of Mistress Haggardoon, but an expression of relief flitted covertly across her face at the same time. Her graying eyebrows shot up as I explained myself further and she looked at me suspiciously while ushering me into her office and indicating a chair opposite her desk. She was thin and tense, appallingly dressed. Englishwomen! I thought. What withered objects they are, all several hundred years old, even the young ones. It amazed me that the race continued to propagate. Yet even this one was once married, I saw from the ring on her knotty finger … a painful reminder that the one Englishman I myself truly loved had been numb to the opportunity of marrying me.
Well, I thought now, not a little triumphantly, he can be jolted to It.
“Madame,” I said, modulating my voice to express surprise. “Did you not receive his letter?” I rustled in my pocket and produced a neat packet addressed to “Mme. Jaune-Fleur Kindness” in an unmistakably masculine hand, something I had perfected in an afternoon’s practice. She looked blank.
“Ah, the unreliability of couriers,” I sighed. “That it should reach me in Mayfair and yet pass you by in Marylebone!”
The headmistress nodded vigorously. The mention of Mayfair was soothing and the vagaries of couriers were well known to her, I suspected. How often were her fees mislaid or delayed by reason of their mishaps? Now she smiled at me. “Pray explain what has been requested by Pevenche’s guardian. I hope he finds himself well? I have not seen him for some time. I know he is abroad, of course.”
“Indeed,” I smiled. “He prospers greatly, and wishes to share some of his good fortune with his poor ward. He has decided that it would be advantageous for the girl to undertake a species of Grand Tour. He himself shall accompany her, for he has business matters to progress in Vienna, Prague, St. Petersburg, and of course Venice. I myself shall attend, instructing her in the Italian tongue. I believe that she is already fluent in French and German.”
By the headmistress’s stammers and blushes, I understood that Pevenche had bullied her way to ignorance in these subjects and all others.
“When should we have the girl ready?” she asked eagerly.
“I thought to take her immediately,” I explained, “having expected to find her ready to travel, of course,” I reminded her, reviving the idea of the undelivered letter in her head.
I did not know when Dizzom might next come calling, and I did not want to take the risk of his intervention.
Her eyebrows rose again, and I saw a flicker of concern cross her face.
I explained quickly: “A complete new set of outfits awaits her in Paris, already ordered by her guardian. Her London clothes are hardly suitable for the life she will pursue in the foreign courts.”
At the word “courts” the headmistress looked stunned and she offered me no more resistance. She excused herself to go and find the girl.
When she left the room 1 immediately leapt to my feet. Trained as an actress, 1 usually performed my scripted emotions from a standing position. It had been unexpectedly hard to interpret the role of governess from the depth of an armchair.
I heard Pevenche before 1 saw her. Outside the door, she was berating the headmistress in a language that was coarse and offensive. I noted that she used the faux-common accent of one who in fact pretends to a very high class.
“Who is this female?” she was asking. “Why did not my guardian write to me personally with this plan? Not that I’m against it—I ain’t—but this method of delivering shows me a lack of respect.”
She slammed open the door and paused dramatically on the threshold, the headmistress trailing behind, murmuring ineffectually about lost letters.
She was preceded into the room by a stink of violet perfume. The unsubtle odor swept me into thought. I realized that I had smelled it before, on Valentine Greatrakes, when we were reunited in London after our quarrel. Then I thought he had been taking consolation with another woman, but he had not betrayed me after all: He had only been with Pevenche. I smiled with relief.
Pevenche took my smile as a greeting, but it did not meet with her approval.
“Why did he not write to me?” she fairly screamed, and I could not help admiring how she conjured up a tantrum. Tears squirted from her eyes, and once they arrived she was soon encouraging them with shudders to gather into a proper convulsion. She made a masterpiece of a fit of the vapors, a distemper that rarely fails to kill, I reflected, except perhaps onlookers afflicted with strong sensibilities. I myself stood impassively which enraged her more. A tender application of hartshorn and water, sweetened with the trilling of the headmistress and two maidservants, combined to restore her somewhat.
It was only when the storm was over that Pevenche looked at me directly, full of scorn, taking in my simple dress and coiffure. “What is it about you that inspired my guardian’s confidence?” she asked rudely, without preliminary courtesies of any kind.
I curtsied slightly, a show of deference that brought a grin to her moonish face. It was a master-stroke, establishing her superiority exactly to her satisfaction, and being conveyed in a gesture of my whole body rather than in words, it seemed more sincere than any humble phrases I might have summoned up.
Then I murmured, “I hope you will find me acceptable as a temporary companion, Miss Pevenche. Your guardian has subjected me to the most rigorous interview before entrusting you to my care. And now he is so very anxious to see you again. I trust that you will be kind enough to accede to his wishes.”
She stared at me insolently, defying me to prove my claim. It was a moment of supreme delicacy. In front of the headmistress, I was losing ground.
I forced myself, from gritted teeth, to say, “Your Uncle Valentine has told me he cannot manage any longer without his Baby P. close to him.”
At the mention of her own pet name for herself Pevenche smiled, almost prettily. I had shown my credentials to be impeccable.
Yet she did not deign to answer me directly. She cast one more brief look in my direction and marched out of the room muttering, “Well, at last he’s seen sense. And he must have got rid of her.”
Over her shoulder she flung at the headmistress: “Get my things. Didn’t you hear the woman:
I watched Pevenche’s back, noting its girth, and her spacious rear quarters.
The girl was clever with a rag of silk and flower, I observed. She had dressed herself in what was possibly the one color that flattered her: soupir étouffé, stifled sigh, a wan kind of lilac. But nothing could disguise what she was lacking of character in her features.
Even though she was too tightly packed in her dress, she had learned the art of walking as if she were gossamer light and it was the uninformed beholder who might think himself wrong if he observed the thickness about her midriff. She was not professionally trained, so she must have spent a great deal of time watching herself in th
e glass.
I could see that she had a vile temper upon her, and that crossing her would be an unpleasant business. This was proved to me when I followed her to her bedchamber, as if in proper attendance. She was not aware of my presence and walked in her natural way. Then she was heavy as a veal calf, bumbling into the corner of a credenza, which the maid had pulled away from the wall so as to dust behind it. That maid had the benefit of a stream of the bluest language I heard in London, not excepting the Dottore and the Zany in their cups, but worse was the shrill and insistent tone of it. Pevenche shrieked at the maid like a crazed ape, like a monkey to whom someone had administered an over-stimulating nostrum.
I watched with interest.
Her self-centeredness and laziness, combined with that temper, were the very ropes that would bind her to my plot. With Pevenche at my side, my lover could not long stay far from me.
And I liked the poetic nature of the justice of the thing: Pevenche had tried to kill our love and had almost succeeded. I had not wanted to see her as a rival. But as she had thrust herself forward as such, well, then, I would bury her.
Bury her alive, that is, in a place that swallowed young girls like sweetmeats.
• 9 •
A Temperate Pearl Cordial Julep
Take waters of Borage, Woodsorrel, each 4 ounces; Damask Rose, and Barley Cinnamon water, each 2 ounces; Pearl prepared 1 dram; white Sugar candy 3 drams; Oil of Nutmeg 1 drop, mix.
It brings an exceeding grateful and present Relief to those that are troubled with sick Fits, and Anxieties in Fevers; for it neither exagitates nor rarifies the Blood; neither doth it promote or increase its effervescence; and yet nevertheless, succours the Ventricle, labouring and almost sinking under the oppression of sharp Feculencies, and adult Humours flowing from the Blood, endeavouring Despumation, and excocted by preternatural Fermentation: And all this it does, by imbuing the Stomach with a sweetly pleasing Gust and Flavour, whereby it being recreated and rejoiced, the Spirits (both indwelling and inflowing) through the whole Machine, are inspired with fresh Vigour, at an instant recruited, and mightily supported.
I had told Dottore Velena that I needed to attend to family matters in Venice.
And he tried to believe every word, unlike the Zany who listened in silence and rolled up his eyes, as he had done when he noticed the new dulled color of my hair. Nevertheless I kissed the Zany fondly on the cheek, and though he rubbed at the spot, he did not recoil from me, nor did he expostulate when I promised to rejoin them both if I ever returned to London. At this Dottore Velena waxed a little Italian, and became sentimental, and called for a bottle of port to lubricate our valedictory coddle of sausage and onions. Needing my wits, I only pretended to drink it. After a roistering final evening at the Anchor, the Bell, the George, and the Feathers, I negotiated the purchase of one of my costumes: The padded apron that gave me the silhouette of middle pregnancy, which was used to illustrate the goodness of our nostrum for painless childbirth. The Zany did not for one moment let up from his disputatiousness with the Dottore or express regret at my imminent departure, but, for the first time, he stood me a small gin.
Before settling into sleep in his parturition chair, Dottore Velena delivered a speech that meandered into romantic declarations, and he even tottered over to my basket to make a hazy approximation of an attempt upon my virtue. I clipped his ankle with a candle-snuffer and he fell headlong into the fireplace, smiting his forehead with a smart clap. He fell asleep there, shuffling in the ashes, muttering about the tragic impossibility of “sewing up a broken heart without the aid of fairies.”
We parted in good, if subdued, spirits, the next morning. The Zany had already slunk out before dawn, perhaps in search of “combustibles” but also, perhaps, to avoid the final embarrassment of a farewell. I had expected nothing more, so I tucked a small eel pie, wrapped in a beautiful silk handkerchief, into the angle of the plank where he slept.
Then I walked out into the dawn of the Bankside morning, holding a valise that I had forced to accommodate sundry items plucked from the quack’s surgery as well as my old grand clothes. As I listened to the pigeons croodling in the privet hedge of Southwark Cathedral, I stopped a moment, looking back up at the Feathers and the grimy window behind which the Dottore was shuffling about his toilette. As if he felt my gaze, his face appeared at the window and he saluted me with a silent blizzard of blown kisses. I kissed my fingers back to him, unexpected tears on my lashes. A tender part of me was sorry, and also a little afraid, to leave the scene of so much rollicking amity, but I knew that it was time to move on, and to bring my lover to me.
I didn’t have much time: He’d be back in London within days.
I turned my back on Bankside and set off for Mistress Haggardoon’s Academy for Young Ladies in salubrious Marylebone.
Pevenche had decided that it was beneath her dignity to talk to me, so the first part of our journey to Dover passed blessedly in silence, apart from her disbelieving snort at the inelegance of the equipage. She herself had dressed in a lilac silk gown and sported a white hat lined with dusky pink underneath, causing her oblong pale head to resemble the pitted stalk of an overgrown toadstool.
“Only two postilions!” she muttered, jangling the steel-sprung carriage with her weight as she lumbered aboard. Although there was space for four passengers, we were fortunately alone, so I had no need to fear her indiscretions. I passed the entire distance fretting at the cost, which would run high at threepence a mile. I was already afraid of the furious sums of money that it would take to transport my spoilt hostage across Europe. My plan, more viscerally than intellectually made, seemed insane even to me then. But it was too late. I was committed to it, however thin its logic and however fragile its framework. And I had no other.
At an urn on the way to Dover Pevenche and I consumed the first of several cheerless deaf-and-dumb dinners together. I suspected that she also feared to enter into conversation with me, for such talk would expose the shameful truth of her capacities in French and German. I had a hint of her deficiency already. If she was forced to address me, it was as “Madame Joanfloor,” her crude approximation of “Jaune-Fleur.”
I was speechless when she pushed her plate of cutlets in front of me and thrust her knife and fork into my hand.
“Cut them up,” she ordered.
Why not? I asked myself fiercely. Anything to keep her quiet, to let her think that she rules.
I obeyed her, though I could not resist saying lightly, “I’m not quite old enough to be your mother, my dear.”
From the look I received I saw that she considered me decrepit enough to be her grandmother. But she was soon deep in the consumption of the cutlets and speculating on the manner of their flavoring. It seemed a point of intense interest to her whether thyme or bay predominated in the marinade. This girl was the stuff of nightmares. Why had I done this senseless, dangerous thing of stealing her?
The answer was always the same: She is bait, Like any worm or maggot.
When we resumed our journey, she pretended to doze. I pretended to read—a guidebook for the Grand Tour—and so had an opportunity to watch her covertly.
While not quite formed yet, hers was a face that did not make any rash promises to deliver ecstasy. It was, I thought sourly, a typical English rose, sodden and parboiled in complexion. Even its freshness was not unimpeachable. Her small features were strictly consonant with the limits of her personality.
Yet she was extraordinarily adept in the artifice of juvenility She contrived to display her mouth perpetually open, revealing a natural gap between her two small front teeth. Her upper lip did indeed overhang in a childish manner. The two pretended milk teeth above rested on the lower lip like a doll’s. She cultivated a fixed, averted gaze, that seemed to be full of delight sacred to the private world of childhood, and then sometimes her eyes were full of wist as if she listened to a faraway nursery rhyme.
Eventually, we were forced to talk a little. Carefully, in the mann
er of a respectful governess, I asked her about her accomplishments, avoiding the subjects of French and German. It appeared she had no talents, and no energy even to develop such skills. She did not busy herself with embroidery, and certainly not with charitable acts, which would be natural to one of her ambiguous station, being a way to establish her superiority. She had a strange, obsessive, and unseemly interest in food, and could take on that bootless subject with surprising eloquence. Music was not her delight at all, despite the dreaded ukulele. I noticed that she had brought it with her, clearly thinking that she would soon be using it on her guardian.
Out of curiosity, I asked her to play for me. She sniffed petulantly. “I only play for my Uncle Valentine. He would not like me playin’ to you.”
I was in a condition to slap her face, and would have taken a bare delight in doing so. But that was not to my purpose. The tindery aspect of my character was not to be provoked by so poor an adversary. With caution, I changed the subject, groped for one that would please her. I soon found it. Pevenche was full of grievances for the way she was treated by the other girls in her school. Her complaints were as the tides of the sea, but sadly none so subtle. She recounted triumphs of humiliation she had visited upon girls who offended her, and of mistresses dismissed and servants demoted: All the amusements naturally dear to a young woman who was no prodigy of wit but a genius of spite-fulness. In talking of these tiny wars and her victories, she grew flushed and happy. English boarding schools, like Venetian convents, were evidently prime breeding grounds for monstrous bullies.
And so we whiled away the remainder of the journey to Dover, and the wait in the customs house, where we were but lightly examined. The weather was fair and we entered our vessel with ease, the journey running to less than six hours. Neither of us was taken with the seasickness. I fully expected the girl to part with her copious breakfast. She turned out to be fitted with a surprising pair of sea-legs, though as far as I knew she had never been upon the water before. At Calais we were disgorged with facility on the quay where the usual porters seized our baggage and conducted us to the municipality to obtain our passe-avant and show our own documents: mine hastily aged to look much-traveled and that of Pevenche, white and crisp. I had commissioned them hastily from an amiable forger I’d met in the Anchor. I had stood over him anxiously in his discreet cubicle, giving her description, trying to find neutral words for her appearance.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 28