The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

by Michelle Lovric

  Valentine gazes up at her now, and thinks rapidly: How many men before me? Will she cry out someone’s name? I wonder if she speaks God’s own English. Does it matter? Tom would have loved those green eyes.

  • 2 •

  Spleen Ale

  Take Barks of Tamarisk 4 ounces; of Capers and Ash-tree, Woods of Guaiacum, Sassaphras, each 1 ounce; Herbs of Agrimony 4 handfuls; Wormwood, Dodder, each 2 handfuls; cut and boil these in 6 gallons of new Ale to 4 gallons, into which hang Filings of Needles half a pound; Crude Antimony 4 ounces.

  When it hath Fermented enough, and is become clear, give half a pint twice a day.

  So the thing is, how to get her.

  Stepping out under the star-stuttered sky, Valentine is pummelled by a bitter wind. He feels the sudden tiredness of a man who has fought a battle and changed the landscape. It is true. In the scenery of his heart, his rage and pain have smelted down into something else entirely.

  Mimosina Dolcezza, the pride of Venice, the miraculous beauty who has enchanted courts and Royal Families from Russia to Naples—so declares the playbill he still holds in his hand as he strolls west of Drury Lane, his carriage following at a discreet distance. He halts under a lamp to smooth it out and look at her likeness etched on the paper.

  The delicacy of her has already informed Valentine that it would not do to send a purse and scrawled card to her dressing room, the coachman curling his whip like a dog’s tail in his hand and averting his eyes while she read and felt for the purse’s bulge.

  He has no scant feeling that this lady is of the type that requires to be forcibly adored all the way from her high horse to her last, grateful whimper.

  And this meets nicely with my own feeling that a quick once is not going to give more than brief respite from all the hurting.

  No, he wants a sought-after coupling, one that costs him something and so is worth something. He craves a spending that is waited for, hoped for, not even inevitable. The more intricate the plot of getting her, the more he can soak his mind in it, the more it will crowd out those insupportable images of Tom.

  He had no small eye for those Italian ladies, Tom, unpetticoating them by the dozen, with a great tongue on him for their lingo. Sure, no woman was safe from the fellow, not on the Thames or the Grand Canal, and all and every one of his ladies kept in Turkish ignorance of her rivals.

  Valentine Greatrakes takes himself for a promenade around the Seven Dials, for a restful eyeful of tarts. Some men like to go to the sea when they want to think profoundly. Or to the countryside. Or the inside of a tavern. But Valentine holidays his worries best on a flutter of Covent Garden nuns.

  Of course the sight of all those willing women and the fact of their availability does not bypass the trout, the rig, the handsome pissworm of Valentine Greatrakes but communicates directly with it. So often the result of a quiet contemplation is indeed a quick, refreshing clicket, though it is rarely the main object of his going out on such perambulations.

  He strides along Monmouth Street and pauses at the Seven Dials, the delta of the local streets, and the richest pickings of whores in all London, where there are situated any number of convenient places to buy love ready-made and kept warm at all times. At the sight of the girls strewn around the seven corners, in his trews the friend of Valentine Greatrakes and his friend’s two friends yollop about.

  “You hungry, boy?” he asks out loud, looking at what’s on offer. “You on for your greens?”

  A twitching yespleasenow fetches a smile to his lips and he resolves to make a speedy selection. This new enterprise, the winning of Mimosina Dolcezza, is not something to work on from a point of sensual famine. Better to contemplate that special copulation from the relaxed state that comes with an intermediate satisfaction. He considers one whore after another, a blonde, a brunette, a redhead, some proud in the theater-glow of the lanterns that adorn every tenth frontage, others eschewing the revelations of the light: Many here are wrinkled and some scarred, and some indeed no kind of lady, but male-misses, for every taste can be accommodated here at the Seven Dials.

  Pausing in front of each genuine female, Valentine silently asks his friend, “This one? Her? You want to go a-goosing in Hairyfordshire?”

  He wanders about, letting his imagination sample what the various whores suggest verbally and with gestures. They sink before him, as if he winnows through a cornfield of women, each raising her skirts to one side in the time-honored gesture to confirm her availability. Some speak to him in winning, confidential tones. Trembling quirks of music beckon from lady accordionists with subsidiary talents. Others writhe briefly like rashers on the griddle as he passes, or mince a few dance steps of the highest quality.

  He does his devoirs to each proffering lady: “Lovely,” he smiles encouragingly. But none tempts him sufficiently. He strays to the less populated fringes of the street, the territory of the girls less in demand, who loiter almost apologetically, like paltry coins left contemptuously on a counter, not even worth the counting.

  At last he spies a fake flower-seller, who, with the travesties of a profession, mimics not to be a harlot. She displays a poor stock of flowers, and she is outstandingly incompetent with her wares: They slide through her hands all the time, the blooms all wearied from being twice handled. A knot of men has collected around her and they cannot bring themselves to move on because it is somehow delicate and indelicate, this mauling of the flowers, and the tiny wan girl wilting herself.

  “Now that’s the one,” he says, looking at her taut little face.

  Hey-up lass, he winks at her, and she drops the entire drooping stock of flowers on her feet. He pulls a silver coin out of his pocket and waves it in the air. The other men shrug their shoulders and melt away. She walks, dreamlike, toward the guinea. He is amused, and moves the coin to the left and then the right. Her whole face follows each maneuver.

  She’s hungry, he realizes, and is pleased to think that she’ll dine well later.

  Valentine summons the carriage that crawls behind him and draws her into it with his silver coin.

  A few circuits of St. Giles and still it is not done. Valentine Greatrakes fumbles but fails. The girl is encouraging and blames herself. This predicament is unknown to him. She gently suggests that a glass of warm wine will set him up. He shakes his head, rebuttons, stares straight ahead. Passing another stall, he leans out and buys the girl a new bunch of flowers to maul and deposits her back at the Seven Dials. He assures her discretion with the additional tribute of a shilling.

  His head is far from clear. This is not at all what he intended.

  Worse, his eunuched encounter with the flower girl gives him cause for worry about the Venetian woman. He does not like to envision her similarly available for such use.

  I don’t want to be throwing apples into an orchard.

  He shrugs off the thought and orders the carriage back to the theater, where he is unsurprised to find the manager still at his desk, working by a mean rushlight. It is a desk that hosts two sets of books: one that records the ingoings and outgoings of the theatrical side of the business, and another that keeps record of the items “free-traded” into London in the costume coffers of the troupes he imports from Italy, often in alliance with his esteemed colleague Valentine Greatrakes of Stoney Street, Bankside.

  “Greatrakes, you great scoundrel, how goes it? Tutto bene?”

  Massimo Tosi, bulky and fragrant as a hay-bale, lumbers from his desk. Seamed into his cushioned face is a mixture of pleasure and apprehension. It’s a finely judged thing, to call Valentine Greatrakes a scoundrel. And it seems Massimo has miscalculated tonight. His visitor regards him coolly, greeting him: “And what can you do for me? Isn’t that right?”

  “Exactly, exactly,” simpers Massimo. “All was well with the shipment? You need a box for some of your foreign colleagues? Champagne buffet? Some girls for after?”

  “Maybe you’d do me the courtesy of thinking sweeter, Massimo.”

  The manager�
�s face grows troubled. “The leading lady’s not… available this time, Valentine.”

  “Soon you’ll be telling me she’s a nun! An actress? An Italian actress?”

  Valentine makes the appropriate voluptuous gestures, pouring a torrent of enthusiasm into the motions. Even his large hands are almost musically attuned.

  It is a pleasure to watch him, thinks Massimo. What a shame the business is impossible.

  Aloud, he responds: “She is not like the others. She’s—she’s a genuine oddity. I don’t know what it is with her. Never came here before, and she was substituted at the last minute. The original was taken with child or some such thing. She is competent, as you saw but there’s something not quite right about her, anyway. Don’t waste your time on her. You are not the first to come to me with an interest in her.”

  Valentine feels a lurch in his stomach at the unforeseen presumptuous bastards who have attempted to get there first. His mind’s eye drenched rosily with images of revenge, there’s a buzzing in his ears.

  But the manager is explaining that no man has obtained what he sought from Mimosina Dolcezza, that the actress does indeed live, most unusually, a blameless existence when she’s not on the stage. She seeks no dalliances, not for pleasure, nor for gold: that purses are regularly sent back to their owners and there are no late suppers in her rooms. Those rooms are not in the usual garish quarters in St. Giles but in Soho Square, a salubrious area more favored by foreign ambassadors than actresses. She does not let her creditors’ notes decay. To add to this strangeness, she is always quiet and modest in her bearing; she makes no outrageous demands, not even upon the patience of the dressing women. She seems afraid of everyone greater or lesser than herself: In fact, in all ways she appears to resemble the trembling and virtuous maiden she plays, though—Massimo Tosi lowers his voice—she is of course a trifle older than the part she performs. She shuns the other actors as if they offend her delicate sensibilities. After each performance she quickly resumes her own simple clothes and returns—in an irreproachable sedan chair—to her rooms.

  She has been in London but a few days and already she is a cult. Men are asking for her likeness to be painted on snuffboxes. Some are willing to pay monstrous sums to be seated where her glance falls meltingly at certain stages of the play. There are grand polemics about her special allure; some say it is her skill in performance, for she excels in comical attitudes but is also well capable of pathos. Others say it is her offstage virtue that heats their blood and has them waiting like dogs under the windows of her apartments, which she is not seen to leave except on guiltless errands. It is, all in all, an extraordinary departure from normal behavior and the entire company is mystified by it.

  Massimo Tosi has shaken all possible insinuations out of his sack. Ducking his head, and turning saintly eyes to Valentine, the theater manager mourns the hopelessness of the situation, as a brother. After all, if an actress is cooperative with well-to-do admirers, Massimo too stands to gain, as his dear friend must see.

  Valentine remains silent when this performance is over. He seems to be waiting for more satisfactory news. The features of the manager tighten in rictus. Massimo has omitted mention of one thing: the troubling existence of the wordless Venetian man who has accompanied the actress to London, who haunts the theater at all times, and, while he is never seen to come into actual contact with her, is never far from her side and who is rumored to have taken rooms in a street that overlooks her own.

  Watching Valentine’s face, Massimo is already scribbling the address on a piece of paper and holding it out to him.

  Valentine lets the hand stay suspended in the air. In five seconds the pleasant gesture of offer has become one of abject imprecation. They both look at Massimo’s outstretched hand. The manager’s face crumples. “Graving your condescension and saving your grace, Valentine, there is nothing else I can do.”

  “You are her employer. You’ll be having a small word with her on my behalf. She would not be at this work if she did not need the money. Or something else you’re offering her. No, I don’t want to know the details. I shall be joining her at home for a twosome kind of supper tomorrow evening after the play.”

  Valentine turns on his heel. He does not take the address: not for him a pathetic vigil in the cold street outside her rooms. For Valentine Greatrakes, Massimo Tosi can do better than that.

  Massimo falls back in his chair, his face in his hands.

  Striding through the shadowy corridors of the theater, Valentine fails to see a small woman veiled in gray. She watches him from an alcove next to the door of the manager’s office. Then she slips in through the open door and says a few words to her employer, who thinks to express his grateful surprise in an embrace but is repulsed with a surprisingly robust slap.

  The echo of that slap reaches the ear of Valentine Greatrakes as he approaches the outer door of the theater and he pauses a moment. He wonders briefly if a duel has erupted among the actors, but he’s not long distracted from a more pressing conflict.

  He is quarrelling with himself.

  The words of the manager gnaw at him. He had resolved to win her slowly, but this coyness on her part has aroused in him an urgent desire to speed the proceedings. He can imagine his competitors now, all equally provoked by her unwillingness, some even skilled in the acquisition of such women, some perhaps as keenly interested as he himself. It is to be expected. She has transformed herself into something else: No longer a mere actress, the currency of the pleasure trade, she has elevated herself to something much more refined. She has claimed the contraband quality of chastity.

  Contraband is something that Valentine Greatrakes understands with all his heart, to which all his faculties are perfectly honed, and for which all his considerable resources are available. To this end, he whistles up his carriage to take him back to his Bankside depository.

  • 3 •

  Horse-Dung Water

  Take Brooklime, Water Cresses, Harts tongue each 3 handfuls; juicy Orange peels 3; Nutmeg 6 drams; succulent fresh Horse dung 3 pounds; Whey 9 pints; juice of Scabious. Dandelion and Hyssop water, each 1 pint. Draw off the Water gently, in a cold Still, for three days in an Alembic (which is used for expedition’s sake).

  Tis used in Juleps, in the Pleurisy, Scurvy, and vagous Pains.

  For a man of his genre, Valentine Greatrakes is a great pacifist. He hates to do a body violence, positively tries to avoid it, and when it must happen he sincerely regrets it. But there is one war he fights gladly, with relish and with glory.

  Only to press him lightly on the matter is to be rewarded with a sturdy barrage on this theme, at the core of which is this: It’s a party’s downright duty and not just his inalienable right to fight against horse-dung taxes.

  Just such a flight of eloquence—not a little inspired by another blockade, that of Mimosina Dolcezza—is the treat bestowed by Valentine upon his driver, jolting by moonlight over luminous cobblestones back to the place where he conducts his personal vendetta against unjust harvesting of revenues.

  “Iniquitous!” he bellows, “infamous!”, as he calls the roll on the taxes that snack on every article that comes in at the mouth, or that shelters the skin, or is placed underfoot; taxes on all things that are lovely to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; there are taxes upon light itself, upon warmth, upon methods of locomotion; taxes on the raw materials; taxes on those things enriched in value by human labor and ingenuity; taxes on all things that stimulate the appetite and all things that satisfy it, on the judge’s ermine and the criminal’s noose, on the pap and the spoon of the baby, the toys of the child, the horse of the man and the road he rides it on, the ribbons of his bride, the brass nails of his coffin, and the marble of his tombstone.

  To each item the driver assents with a great flourish of his whip and so they progress down the Strand at a cracking pace. The horse anoints the cobbles with a superabundant stream of piss.

  The mullioned water of the Thames winks from between t
he riverside buildings. Valentine and his driver lean forward to examine a squat vessel that weaves toward St. Mary Overie Dock. At dawn it will unload the bales of hops with which Valentine Greatrakes quite legitimately supplies the Thrale brewery at Bankside, the brave parapets of which he salutes with a wave as they pass over London Bridge. Those bales are looped by rope twined with smuggled tobacco. They lie next to feathered heaps of headless geese, whose innards have been replaced with bottles of rum that shall be discreetly removed before the birds are delivered to the butchers of Smithfield and crates of living parrots destined to amuse affluent homes, having been schooled in speech by sailors on long journeys aboard illicit slavers’ ships.

  Occasional forays by the excise men into the tenebrous vaults of the depository of Valentine Greatrakes reveal nothing to incur a penny of duty, but plenty to baffle and torment the dreams of the officers. For their lanterns discover many unblinking drawers of glass eyes, hard clutches of false hands made of leather, racks of wooden leper-clappers, trays of artificial ivory noses for syphilitics, and miniature anatomical models of pregnant women with removable parts peeling back to reveal a fetus or two in residence.

  The Revenue never stay long. Cupboards specially hinged to utter dying groans swing slowly open to reveal rows of pink Bohemian tincture bottles, hallmarked silver nipple shields, earthenware posset pots, tin-glazed bleeding bowls, iron scarificators for blood-letting, and pewter enema syringes. Strung up in cloudy luminescence are necklaces of dentures fashioned from hippopotamus ivory (less liable to stain than that of baboons and goats). Lifting a trembling lantern, the excise men then gasp at the vision of a biblical plague of locusts apparently come to life—only to be reassured by their genial host that these creatures, mounted on velvet screens, are merely a craze of recent years: Algerian amulet brooches in the shapes of locusts, studded with what might credibly be described as, and is, purest turquoise from the mines of the Americas.