The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

by Michelle Lovric

  To pay for the wool that will finance the new nostrum, he has decided to go into the antiprocreation business. For some time he has been interested in the Capotes Anglaises, made from the blind guts of lambs. He has Dizzom set up an experimental studio in one of the empty rooms in the depository. Daily he strides among the chattering young ladies hired for washing and drying the intestines and then rendering them soft and pliable by rubbing them between two palms anointed with bran and almond oil. Among them is Sylvia Grimpen, whose mantua business has fallen on hard times, and who is looking hungry. Remembering the incident with Pevenche at the Bond Street coffee house, he avoids her eyes, but he tells Dizzom to put a little extra something in her pay.

  And still no letter arrives from Mimosina Dolcezza. He hates her and he misses her too, and he misses her viscerally and painfully. Without her, and without news of her, he’s dangling like a frayed rope in the water. He does not go to take his once-accustomed balsam at the Seven Dials. He cannot contemplate it. It does not escape him that his manufacture of devices for carefree lovemaking is most bitterly ironical in view of the fact that the one woman he desires is not available to him.

  There is something wrong. The ransom letter should have arrived by now, unless the delay is specifically calculated to reduce him to the weakness of desperation.

  It doesn’t take three weeks to dip a pen in ink and put a letter on apiece of paper, does it?

  Again and again, he says to Dizzom, “I just can’t understand it. What are her intentions? Does she do this to drive up the price?” Seeing Dizzom’s strained face, and ashamed of his own weakness, he tries to make light of their trauma: “Dizzom, dear friend, it’s all dark as your grandfather’s nostril to me.” He attempts a comical elevation of his brows, but his lip trembles underneath.

  This personal frustration leads him into new professional paths with the Venetian nostrum. Out of this darkness churning inside him Valentine conjures up an inspired idea that sparkles with potential profit. Until now he has conceived the Venetian nostrum as the usual universal specific, able to cure the habitual infinite list of complaints, simply endowed with the added glamor of a beautiful bottle and alleged Venetian provenance. But in his misery Valentine has now perceived a hitherto unsupplied niche in the market. He is groping his way toward an original idea: a nostrum specific to the enhancement of the act of love.

  The Venetian nostrum shall be a love potion! It shall invigor even the most depleted of libidos!

  The mind of Valentine Greatrakes twirls with words for his handbill, and the title of the new creation is molded and remolded in his brain. He whispers aloud combinations of alluring words. By the end of the day he has dictated a list as long as his desk, and scribbled out half the attempts. By the next, he has narrowed the title down to seven key words, which he pens with a flourish in red ink:

  Sovereign

  Empirick

  Venetian

  Balsamick

  The Remedy

  He lays his head on the desk. When he raises it again, long minutes later, the words are staining his cheek.

  Two weeks later, and he is still deliberating over titles for his Venetian nostrum, when Dizzom hands him a disintegrating letter dusted with icing sugar and smelling of marzipan. Valentine knows he should be asking questions as to the provision of the letter and the manner of its delivery but he is too feverish to be sensible. Or to listen to Dizzom’s quiet urgings that something is amiss, must be explained and dealt with. It is like his first meeting with the actress herself. He wants possession unburdened with information.

  He takes the letter to his lips and sniffs all along its fore-edge. He draws back in shock. Yes! Its authenticity is entire and faultless. Her every note was always perfumed with a delicate sweetness, just like this letter. Its narcotic aroma hangs around his face now. It must be from her, of her. It is only after fondling it with his lips, fingertips, and nostrils that he finally looks in detail at its contents.

  And looks again, in disbelief.

  The letter from Mimosina Dolcezza bears no recognizable words. Somewhere on its travels it has suffered an immersion, perhaps, or the natural grease of the almond paste has invaded the ink like a cancer and replaced the words with its own vital substance. Or the ink has proved evanescent and faded prematurely. How could she economize on such an important item as ink? She must be in dire straits!

  To think of her in bad circumstances! I’m sick as a small hospital just wondering what’s befallen her.

  Only now does he hear Dizzom’s discreet cough and feel his friend’s kind eyes upon his trembling back which, in response to this tragedy, has broken out in welts down which eddy long tongues of sweat.

  “I believe I can help, Valentine,” murmurs Dizzom. “Would you let me handle the letter, boy? Would you let me try?”

  Valentine does not wish to hand over the letter. Not one fiber of him inclines to let go of it.

  Dizzom gently prises it from his hands. Valentine Greatrakes flinches as the decayed letter is placed on a sheet of board reminiscent of the horrors of the operating theater. He hovers, barely restraining himself from snatching it back.

  Understanding how Valentine positively needs to keep touching the letter, Dizzom asks him to hold the top two corners while he performs his ministrations, and he keeps talking in a soothing voice, explaining every action before he undertakes it, like a tooth-puller who prepares his patient for the wrench.

  Dizzom thoughtfully consults a cupboard, makes a selection and places a series of bottles on the table with ritualistic solemnity. He thrusts a soft tallow candle on to a pricket and lights it. Then he reaches for a large egret quill, uncorks one bottle and dips it in. He explains: “First you cover the letters with philogisticated alkali—spreading it thus with a feather, like this, look, thin as a poor gel’s shawl.”

  Valentine cranes his neck, and grimaces with disappointment.

  Dizzom reassures him: “Indeed, no sensible change of color results immediately, but just see… Now, with the addition of a diluted mineral acid… I use marine, but vitriolic and nitrous will also serve you to a nicety, my dear—and as you observe, the letters have changed very speedily to this mighty blue color, of great and beautiful intensity, beyond comparison stronger and more vivid than it was even on the day it was written.”

  As he watches this alchemy, Valentine stands with his mouth open. When the words bloom on the paper he cries out and makes to seize it, but Dizzom halts him by pointing to letters already starting to merge into one another. The blue is now out of control, threatening to eat every inch of the paper and overwhelm the words again! Valentine groans.

  But Dizzom continues: “Fear not. We have a remedy also for this. To stop this blue from spreading, we must quickly apply the blotting paper near the letters so as to imbibe the superfluous liquor.”

  He dabs at the page with tiny scraps of blotting paper, which are soon speckled blue. There is frantic activity for a few minutes and then Dizzom stops and surveys his work. The letters are stable.

  Valentine breathes, “Is it safe to hold now?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  And in a moment the fragile paper is snatched up and secreted in his breast, as he stumbles away to the dim privacy of his bedroom.

  He reads the letter standing by the window, again sitting on his bed, and then he runs down the stairs and walks to the river, to read it again out of doors, as if natural light will verify its contents.

  The denizens of Bankside watch their favorite son and see his shoulders shaking. Oblivious to their clucks and sympathetic eyes, he strides back to the depository.

  The letter has made him weep. It makes him dizzy. It makes him wild. Yes, she is in Venice now—no, she was not there when he searched the town the first time—and she suggests that he makes his way in that direction again with all possible speed.

  It is not the letter he expected.

  • 3 •

  A Foment for the Pain of Haemorrhoids

&nbs
p; Take Onion, Linseed, each 4 ounces; Herbs Henbane, Toad flax, Tarrow, Mullein, each 2 handfuls; boil in Water 3 quarts to 2 quarts; in the strain’d liquid dissolve Opium 2 drams.

  It relaxeth the cruel tension of the Vessels, obtunds the Acuteness of Pain, melts down and discusses those viscid and grumous Feculencies, that lay Obstructions and Excite Tumors: And lastly, it repels the Inundation of the Blood.

  The black humor of his situation does not escape Valentine Greatrakes, hurtling the other way down roads he has so recently traced homeward.

  In less than three weeks he is making the same arduous journey, still beset with a cough and now with an ominous soreness in his nether parts—and for what? On the strength of scarcely credible words wrung from a greasy scrap of paper. Yet he’s cursing the notion that caused him to run all the way home from Venice, only to find the gold is still waiting for him at the wrong end of the rainbow. If only he had not lost courage and stayed a little longer. He has worked at the timings of it—she must have left London just days after he fled Venice. They must have passed each other at some point on their opposite journeys, even rested at the same inns, eaten off the same hostelry’s pewter.

  That is, of course, if she’s not acting the lapwing, and leading me away from the nest, and the girl safely stowed in London all the while?

  Mimosina Dolcezza has hinted that she has answers to more mysteries than she has cared to name in writing.

  This time, at least, he can admit that he seeks the actress. It is no shame to him now to say that he is going after her. A letter like that! And she has Pevenche!

  Well, the women are physically safe, he tells himself again and again. He has already resolved that the actress shall not have it all her own way. It is his turn to be in control of the timing. Having manipulated him like a marionette, she shall herself now know the agony of waiting without explanation. He has no intention of going straight to the Black Bat. Oh no. Indeed not. First he will find out who she really is. When he condescends to meet her at the appointed spot, he will show that he’s not at all the halfwit she takes him for.

  That is definite. That goes without saying. I’ll not be running to her with the intention of greeting her with caressing and kind words. Not till I do it in my own time. In the meantime, if I saw the devil running down the street with her crosswise in his mouth, I wouldn’t be after him to drop her.

  And it does not escape Valentine that the actress has taken upon herself an awkward arrangement.

  Pevenche would annoy a saint, he thinks with a smile, the hinges of her tongue clattering away without thinking of stopping. Let the actress have the care of that one for a while, why don’t I? She’ll soon see the error of her harshness to me on that score.

  He smiles: It was no great masterpiece of planning, was it? To steal the girl.

  He contemplates the unlikely scenario that Pevenche has taken to her kidnapper like a calf to the teat, that she rejoices in her company.

  No, Pevenche is never well disposed to female strangers. Or men for that matter. When she’s a little older something drastic will need to be done to find her a husband.

  He laughs wryly at himself. Pevenche—married?

  The girl hasn’t the titter of a wit about her. She knows as much about being charming as a pig does about a clean shirt. She’s not behind the door when it comes to telling people disagreeable things about themselves. She has not the kind of nature that dreams of love.

  And her size!

  Most men would be like a pimple on a hill to her.

  It does not bear thinking about, Pevenche undressed for love, all those laps and dewlaps trapping moisture. He realizes that she’s probably never been touched, never charmed a hug out of Tom since she was a baby never seems to want one from anyone else. Perhaps she’s embarrassed at her size. Perhaps no one may hug Pevenche or they’ll embarrass her by discovering her topography.

  He promises, When I see her again, I myself will be giving the girl a proper hug. It’s not her fault. People always use Pevenche for their own motives. Both Tom and the actress took her up to serve themselves, not for her own sake or out of any love for her. Is it any wonder that the girl is awkward?

  He will gather them both to himself soon enough. But the agony of impatience is upon him and he needs a distraction.

  His brain is bruised with thinking about the kidnap. The going’s brutal on all the roads. His eye is so tic’d with tiredness that it runs hither and thither like a fly. As the carriage rattles and pounds down the roads, grinding his tender buttocks, he turns his mind back to unraveling the mystery of Tom’s death.

  There have been new developments. It has come to his attention, via Dizzom’s inquiries, that the dark-haired Italian man who shadowed Mimosina Dolcezza at Tom’s wake has also been seen in London in his absence, and that this man has been making inquiries about the business of Valentine Greatrakes and the manner of his relations with the actress.

  Dizzom sent men to intercept this Italian, but he evaded them, and the theory is that he too has now gone back to Venice, where he reports to some kind of underworld lord, some kind of Italian Valentine Greatrakes. But decked out in Venetian robes of state.

  On hearing this, Valentine had summoned all those of his men who had seen the Venetian spy with their own eyes at the viewing of Tom’s corpse. The memory of the scene with Cecilia Cornaro had prompted in him a stream of questions. Neck long or short? Hair straight or curled? Eyes long or wide?

  The men, at first confused, soon fell into the game with gusto. They argued roundly among themselves, but when an answer finally came it was definitive and universally accepted. After a scant hour, Valentine had folded up a list of features so detailed that his own recollection of the man had been wonderfully refreshed. This list now lies in his valise and he will make use of it as soon as he has liberated Pevenche and… dealt with… Mimosina Dolcezza.

  All the way through France, Valentine plans those dealings, sadly distracted by the pains of a crop of hemorrhoids he can no longer pretend away, especially as they burn like torches with every rasping cough. It’s as if there’s a pulley and trap inside him solely devoted to wrenching his neck and unscrewing his spine. That cough of his has thickened. His companions are a noisome lot, who appear not to calculate the benefits of breath-comfits or soap. The fetid air of the carriage stuffs his loaded bronchia with a fresh income of phlegm. He coughs up greenish slime with each gusty sneeze. His nostrils are so impacted that he must breathe solely through his raw throat. After a while even the cough is besieged in his lungs—except at night, when it racks his sleep with its imperative effusion. He’d never stop if he had his way, but each evening the coach disgorges him at sordid but compulsory lodgings, some pasha always occupying all the best rooms with his secretaries and blackamoor footmen.

  In the carriage on the last stage, from Padua, his discomfort peaks. Someone has packed a case of china carelessly, and it rattles without cease. The clinking of the china starts to chime with the jostling of his vertebrae, and his cough wakes up and adopts the rhythm, so he’s barking like a choleric puppy.

  At Mestre he urges the gondola forward, first with gesticulations to the gondolier and then with imperceptible thrustings of his own body, despite the pain this occasions in his trews.

  Although he remains unaware of it, Valentine communicates with great facility in Italian. He has that exuberant poetry of gesture that is normally reserved for their race. When he shrugs, it is with their fervent resignation; if he smoked, it would be with their avidity. Now that he is in a hurry, he expresses it with his hands, his feet, his nose, his eyes. The whole quayside at Mestre is alert to the fact that here is an Englishman who needs to be in Venice this instant, despite the distraction of a woman bewailing a case of broken china just unloaded from a carriage.

  The sky is juicy, white, and luminous as a blind man’s eyeball. It makes his hot head ache. All the way through the oblating water he counts the three-legged bricole that rise up like the truncated l
egs of outsize wading birds. He counts the vanilla-pod gondolas behind and before him. He counts the forty shades of green and blue in the waves. He counts the church towers pinpricking the horizon. He counts the gulls crying the news of his arrival. He counts the days he has spent apart from Mimosina Dolcezza.

  By the time they reach the town itself, he is clutching the sides of the gondola, for a storm has swelled up to welcome him back to town. Thick thrills of lightning illuminate the Grand Canal. Rain boils into it. Like an impatient mother, waves are combing the long-eared seaweed that grows from the banks. Two weeks of painful trotting are erased from his mind. He is back in Venice.

  And there is Smerghetto, waiting magically on the landing at San Silvestro, the faintest frown detectable between his brows, because while he is always happy to see Valentine Greatrakes, he does not like the sound of that cough, and he knows that it is not exactly business that has brought his master back so soon.

  • 4 •

  A Draught for a Catarrh

  Take Coltsfoot water 6 ounces, white Sugar Candy powder’d 6 drams; Yolks of 2 Eggs, having beat them up together, and set well.

  This Draught usually gives great Relief in a (let me call it) Guttural Rheumatic and Evening Cough, caused by catching Cold, which is pretty quiet all day, but returns at Night, especially when one lies down in Bed, incessantly disturbing, and vexatiously hind ring Rest. For by reason of its sweet unctuous Mucilage, it so defends the Larynx, that it feels not the pricking of the sharp irritating Serum, and so staves off the Cough, and dallies away the hour, till at length, the time of Coughing is slipp’d, and Sleep steals on.

  That same afternoon he takes the list of the Italian’s features to the studio of Cecilia Cornaro. The girl is dozing on her divano when he enters, and eyes him with a sleepy good humor, without raising her head from its yellow silk cushion.

  “Ah, Signor Englishman, back to see me? You have something new for me?”