The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

by Michelle Lovric

  Someone has locked the doors and all are pressed against the four walls, panting and pawing at the floor. Everyone is looking at everyone else with narrowed eyes.

  Until this moment Valentine has easily dismissed as a fairy tale the belief that the corpse of a murdered man would bleed again if his killer drew near. Too picturesque, too fanciful to be true. In the real world of murder, nothing so fair or clean as cruentation ever really happens, except onstage in the theater. There must be a real reason for the eruption of blood from Tom’s corpse, and he is hot to deal severely with Dizzom who should have plugged all such possibilities, and who has clearly been negligent with the chemicals on this of all days.

  He looks down on his assistant, even now bending desperately over the corpse below, tenderly sopping the blood with his own handkerchief and searching its face as if Tom’s plugged eyes and sewn-up lips might suddenly burst open with some eloquent explanation of their own. Dizzom’s shoulders are shaking: His tears drop into the pool of blood in the hollow of Tom’s chest.

  Valentine cannot stop himself from looking around the room at all the distorted faces to see if there is a relic of guilt written upon any of them. Yes, he sees three weeping Venetians of their business acquaintance but they are old friends of the enterprise, men he has trusted with all manner of opportunities, whose children he knows. They loved Tom as a brother and could not possibly dissemble at this unrestrained grief. Valentine knows that the Venetians are the most superstitious race on earth, and surely these men would not have attended if they had been responsible for the outrage in their midst. No, none of these men is capable of killing Tom and none has ever been furnished with a motive. Valentine’s eyes rove around the room, looking for strangers.

  He has momentarily forgotten Mimosina Dolcezza but suddenly he sees her cowering in a corner and is overcome with shame and pity for her; alone, in a strange city, a woman of acute feelings, she has been forced to witness a complete stranger’s corpse perform a gory miracle. Now she is trapped in a room with a hundred vengeful strangers, and indeed they are eyeing her now, full of venom, for everything about her features and dress indicates that she is a foreigner. A foreigner killed Tom. There is no doubt in their minds. What is she doing here, if not gloating? Valentine feels his belly contract with fear: What if they should turn on this poor, innocent woman? Those who have come to mourn Tom are mostly of their own ilk: Violence, though regrettable, is a necessary tool. If they believe her the author of Tom’s murder, by act or even by commission, then there is nothing he shall be able to do to save her. The men have killing in their eyes: He sees it. He knows it. Several of them are edging in her direction; one has snatched up a pole from the curtains.

  Then he notices something else: Behind her stands the one man in the room upon whom Valentine has never laid eyes before. It is not the actress drawing the glares of the Banksiders: It is this man. He’s an Italian, Moorish in coloring, but somehow refined. Curiously over-refined, if anything, thinks Valentine. His nose and lips are but barely in relief. It is as if the modeling of his face has been executed so obsessively that his features have been almost smoothed away.

  With a face like that he’ll not be needing a conscience. He’ll be available for any crime, a complete creature of his masters, whoever they are. Such a man has no will of his own: This makes him more efficacious at the worst work.

  The man stands too close to the actress and it seems as if he is breathing into the very tendrils of hair at the back of her neck. He barely glances at the corpse; when he does, it is with a faintly amused expression. He has eyes only for the woman.

  Only a murderer, the thought suddenly strikes Valentine, could be so callously lewd in the face of his cruel work. That look’s so dirty that if you threw it at a wall, it’d stick.

  Perhaps this man has arrived in London with a mission to torment Valentine Greatrakes himself! He has taken Tom from him and now he plans to murder the woman who has stolen his heart? Perhaps those fixed looks at the back of Mimosina Dolcezza are serving to set her firmly in his memory, so that when he comes upon her silhouette in some darkened street he may know to rush at it with a knife…

  Valentine crashes down the stairs and into the reception room only to find its weeping population surging out into the street. They have pushed aside his men and burst open the double doors. The murderous Italian has melted away with them. Only Dizzom remains, bent over the corpse, and Mimosina Dolcezza, who is rooted to the spot, staring at a point somewhere above the lid of the coffin.

  He’s burning hot. The crush of people has raised the temperature of the depository to that of a summer day. Behind the doors the spurned refreshments are already raising a questionable odor. The fine native Melton oysters and hogshead ordered to give Tom’s lying-in-state some substance—all seem to wish to join Tom in grim putrefaction.

  As he enters the room, the actress is already murmuring feverish apologies—she cannot ever forgive herself for intruding, she had not the least idea, how could she have done this to him? And he is interrupting her every phrase with inapposite exclamations,

  “Sure, you’ve no call to be sorry. Sure, you’re more than welcome,” he responds, ridiculously. They continue to speak together at the same time for many seconds, both drawing to a sudden stop at the same moment.

  He crushes her into his arms, kissing her eyes, her hair, her ears, no matter who sees him at this soft work, and he calls his carriage, never taking his eyes off the sobbing woman. His antique Irish namesake, the famous healer Valentine Greatrakes, was said to be able to cure scrofula with his bare hands; now Valentine Greatrakes of Bankside uses his fingers to stroke away the fear and trembling of Mimosina Dolcezza.

  He takes her home, holding her fast against him the whole way. He thinks he can erase the thought of her betrayal with the desperate quantity of his own feelings for her. But there’s a cruel reminder on the stairs: They brush past a pile of discarded newspapers shrieking Stintleigh’s death, his portrait uppermost on the front pages. An example of every newspaper printed in London is here, it seems, all obsessed with the same crime. He hurries her past, hating the rustle of newsprint raised by her trailing skirt.

  Back in her sullied room, when she excuses herself a moment, he can’t stop looking in her gilded Venetian mirror and regretting mirrors don’t keep diaries that a man can get his hands on and consult for interest. Now the straining—not to do himself the damage of a whiff of something male—lies heavy on his ribs. He’s singeing hair roots with a bargain: The act itself he’ll almost live with on condition she’s not kissed or said or gazed or, worst of all, admired when—0 Lord here she comes herself—swimming up behind him, and she ought to touch him now and she ought to kill the thought but no, she stands still and lets him drown gold-rimmed in the lens of petrified water.

  He doesn’t turn his fizzling head, instead he meets her smoky look in glass. The mirror’s blear-eyed, nazy on fermented mold, a little piece of Venice she’s brought here with her to distort everything with mystery. He hates that mirror.

  Is it bilious with the witnessings laid up?

  He cannot keep the question down. So he by-the-ways as if he doesn’t care: “D’you know at all that fellow, the politician, the dead one?”

  The words jangle bitter as small change in his mouth and he’s struggling to keep down the truer definition: that humming man, that smug man, that nobler man than me.

  In the mirror, her face is blank.

  “Did you not read about it? Are they not your newspapers we passed just now out there, out there on the stairs?”

  “What stairs?” she asks.

  “Your stairs,” he says, “the stairs into your house.”

  And she says absolutely not, why should she? She shakes her head in vigorous agreement with everything she says. She enumerates. She lays down as obvious.

  He feels the individual fronds of hair curling and uncurling on his head, when, his belly stuck to his back, he tows Stintleigh’s shadow to the bed
room. They lie down and make dizzy the mirror’s pocked and perished silver.

  Pleasantly occupied, he’s not quite deaf to his heart’s howling its bereftness and his head’s aching dread that something fine has fallen off and rolled away, underneath this very bed.

  Nevertheless he holds her all afternoon and night, never once closing his own eyes, lest there should blossom under their dark lids the vision of Tom bleeding to death when already dead, or the pallid face of Stintleigh grimacing at the end of his stick.

  Valentine makes no more mention of the politician or of his murder. He’ll not ask for any more lies, whether it’s the little one, that she never saw the man, or the greater one, that she has not lain with him. There are of course a million and six reasons why she would utter the smaller, almost harmless one: She would be afraid of his jealousy, not wish to hurt him, be embarrassed at the connection.

  She says nothing about it either, merely gazing at him with an illuminated and tearless face. She clings to him. She submits to his lust meekly. She has need of forbearance for in the last Mimosina-less days he has not been able to find relief elsewhere.

  She must take responsibility for what she has pent up.

  So thinks Valentine, as he kisses her reddened eyelids, trying not to see the head of Lord Stintleigh as she caresses the back of his neck, or the drench of blood on Tom’s breast.

  He has hated her, and he loves her again, and the sweets of possession amply compensate for the bitters.

  And how she inspires him!

  For lying in her arms, Valentine Greatrakes comes up with the very best idea of his business life. Perhaps it is the joy she has distilled in him, perhaps it is a galvanizing relief at their reunion, but he awakes with a plan of crystalline perfection. Mimosina Dolcezza has brought such clarity to his private life that its illumination leaks on to the business ledger. He will market not just Venetian liquids, Venetian doctors and their doses, but Venice herself.

  He will patent a Venetian cure, allowing him to “import” whole bottles of liquid from the little Republic. Naturally these liquids shall first arrive in his depository to be scrupulously controlled for the mold and taints of their long journey. So scrupulously that they shall be upended into other bottles, bottles more honestly labeled “rum” and “brandy.” Meanwhile the Venetian glass vessels themselves will receive replenishment—with a delectable and efficacious nostrum, no more Venetian than Valentine Greatrakes himself.

  But it shall be all the rage in London in an instant. For what Valentine Greatrakes shall be selling is the very essence and perfume of Venice, the mystery of the Orient in which she veils her charms, the fragrant darkness of her apothecary’s studios, the whispered reputations of her great true doctors, the condescension of her noblemen whose names shall unwittingly endorse his products, the mysterious depths of her dark jade waters, and the whole thousand years of her glorious history, golden, serene, imperial, all encapsulated in his little bottles, just as Mimosina Dolcezza now lies in his arms, soft and sweet as milk.

  Sleeping, he thinks.

  • 12 •

  Wafers of Tamarinds

  Take Tamarinds 1 ounce; grind them in a Mortar with thin Mucilage of Gum Dragant, pass them thro’ a pulping Sieve, dissolve also Spanish juice of Liquorice in the same sort of Mucilage 2 drams; mix, and make Troches as thin as Wafers to seal Letters; which dry in an Oven, according to art.

  These are very pretty, desirable and useful things to hold in the Mouth, to alleviate Thirst, and take away an ill Taste in Fevers.

  “You will take me as your wife,” she says, the next morning when she wakes up. “It will be the greatest pleasure for you.”

  “Ah now, wait a little there,” splutters Valentine.

  “Yes, I shall leave the troupe and slip into your arms and we shall live together in your great house and none shall find me there.”

  She smiles generously, like a mother who has pressed a comfit on an undeserving child. She is already ringing the bell for her maid Tabby Runt. An instantaneous sniffing by the door announces what Valentine has always suspected: The girl listens regularly at the keyhole, and that she does not find him satisfactory company for her mistress.

  Valentine stammers, “It’s not so simple as that.”

  He strokes her cheek in a mediating way.

  She’s having none of it. At his unkind cavilling, this tiny interruption to the romance she is spinning, her eyes glitter and she drops her chin so her face is entirely pivoted on huge tear-filled eyes. Tabby Runt enters the room bearing a large silver tray of her coffee, takes one look at her mistress, and backs out again, all the while bestowing upon Valentine Greatrakes a stare as bleak as a northerly voyage.

  “So you do not love me after all, is it?” the actress whispers.

  “Of course I-I-I…”

  “It is just a small thing for you, not the great love that comes only once in a lifetime, as it is for me? I have thought, all this time, that our hearts were married already.”

  And damn it, thinks Valentine, it’s true, they are. I love you. I love you. I love you. Damn it.

  But he thinks to himself. She is already leaping from the bed and dressing with demented speed. He hangs his head, his ears lacerated by the sharp swish of lace.

  This time he lets her go. Just now he has no resources to refashion the peace between them. When she sweeps away to the dressing room, he quietly puts on his clothes and lets himself out of the apartments, walking slowly down the stairs from which the newspapers shrilling Stintleigh’s demise have not yet been cleared.

  Valentine forces himself to take the hand of Pevenche, emerging white and strong from her gaudy mourning cloak. She has fattened on tragedy and it suits her ill, he thinks. Together they have thrown the first clod of earth into the cavity that will swallow her father. He has watched her tearless face with concern: better for her to cry, really, like the other veiled women in the second and third tiers of onlookers around the grave. Anonymous under their black swathes, they howl and sniff, these brief loves of Tom’s. He sees Pevenche opening her mouth at the sight of these ladies and quickly distracts her before she can make more scandal than a whole coffee house. “Throw your little posy now, dear heart.”

  And she unfastens it from her capacious sash and throws it into the grave, saying, “Bye bye, Pa, I hope you are going to Heaven.”

  People within earshot are shocked by the girl’s equivocation and a chafe of whispers sprints her words to the back of the crowd in a moment. Valentine pulls Pevenche to him and speaks softly into the aperture of her bonnet, “Of course he is, little one. Where else would he go?”

  He sees that she is fully prepared to answer this question and desperately forfends her response by starting up an impromptu hymn in his easy baritone. The confused mourners are thankful to join him in this godly display. Meanwhile Pevenche observes the sly bottles handed round with thumps on the back and exhortations to “have a little bit o’ that, my lover, don’t let the tears run dry”

  “They’ll be drunker’n roaches,” she huffs above the doleful singing. “They won’t be able to taste the eatables at the party. And we’ve gone to such trouble over ’em!”

  When the hymn is sung through, the mourners nod as if satisfied and gradually steal away in silence, leaving Valentine and the girl at the grave’s edge, staring at the fresh earth for many minutes in silence. A moist wind brawls half-heartedly with the few trees not yet fallen to progress on Bankside. A smell of clay drags at their noses but no tears fall from the girl’s small eyes.

  Pevenche then announces, “Well, that’s him done for, then.” And Valentine flinches with pain, and feels more alone than he has ever done. Just now, with Tom gone, and Mimosina Dolcezza a questionable quantity after their quarrel, he feels bathed in self-pity. Dizzom and Pevenche are all his family now: What kind of life is this?

  At the repast, he stands apart from the others, watching them stare suspiciously at the calves’ ears and duck tongues forced, the puptoo
n of lobsters and veal sweetbreads carbonaded, the triple toasts, the bisques that Pevenche has specifically required and indeed supervised at the cookshop in Deadman’s Place. After all the humiliation her father visited upon her with regard to food—yet still she has tried to make his funeral a feast fit for a gourmandizing duke.

  But Tom’s friends do not want these jellied and parsleyed creations. After long moments of silence, one of the Bankside bakers rushes outside and returns with a vast tray of tall pies. The crowd swoops on them with unabashed glee. And Valentine too finally succumbs to the greasy delight of the pastry washed down by a motherly tankard of ale.

  Pevenche, meanwhile, is mercifully nowhere to be seen. Later he finds her in the kitchen, happily confecting a monstrous pie from the spurned sweetmeats, and humming tunelessly under her breath, while a large bun smiling yellow custard hangs from her jaw.

  He is moved to ask her: “Do they not give you proper feeding at school, Pevenche?”

  Far from it, she tells him. At the school there is merely roast beef on Mondays, roast shoulder of mutton on Tuesdays and Fridays, a round of beef on Wednesday, boiled leg of mutton on Thursday, and on Saturdays stewed beef with pickled walnuts. But fibrous chops are sometimes substituted, she hisses, when there are fees unpaid, and then the undersubscribed pupil is made to sit at the head of the table and watch while her comrades gnaw the bones.

  His mind wanders as Pevenche now recounts the whole pudding menu to him in even more lavish detail, lingering on the “choke dogs,” apparently a currant-studded dumpling, that would “go blah” if overcooked.