Privileged girls are allowed to linger in the dining room and have a glass of port after supper, she informs him with a significant stare, and he reminds himself to make such an arrangement for her.
On delivering Pevenche back to the Academy for Young Ladies, she torments him with one more little scene. She greets Mistress Haggardoon with the loud words: “Here I am back, he doesn’t want me aroun’, you see, he’s got better things to do, I don’t feel welcome any more.”
Pevenche runs through the hallway snorting sobs and thunders up the stairs. Both her headmistress and guardian flinch at the slamming of the door. They stand in agonized silence.
Why doesn’t she say something mitigating? The atmosphere’s so thick you could eat it with a fork.
At last the headmistress whispers carefully: “She wishes you to think…” But her words are interrupted by the tarnished glint of the guinea he’s tugging from his pocket.
“Yes,” she says wearily, “I’ll buy the girl something nice.”
“And the port after supper?”
She nods sadly, sacrificing the pleasantness of future evenings.
Marriage! The word tangs and needles all over his body as he jerks over the cobbles toward the theater. Where else is there to go?
Tom is buried. It is time to make sense of Mimosina Dolcezza, and if that cannot be achieved at least to hold her while she rants. He must feel her in his arms again, even if it is just the once. The day has sucked him dry. He must have his fill of her before he renounces her, if that is what he is destined to do.
And first he must make her his lover again. This morning’s skirmish is of the kind that can only be remedied with tenderness, and she, the doting girl, could never deny him that, not if she sees the hollows of his eyes and the funeral’s tearstains on his shirt, both of which he has observed in the same mirror and not corrected before coming out to intercept her at the theater.
Twelve hours apart, in a state of war, have been unbearable. When he sees her face he knows it has been so for her too. They fall gratefully into one another’s arms in the hall outside her dressing room, the very site of their first encounter.
It makes a body ooze with desire all over again just to remember that.
He does not mention the matrimonial issue that rent their reunion apart, and nor does she.
• 13 •
An Alexipharmac Draught
Take Alexiterial Milk Water 3 ounces; Epidemial, Compound Piony Water, Syrup of Gilly-flowers. Syrup of Saffron, each 2 drams; Diascordium, 2 scruples; Goa Stone 1 scruple, mix.
In suspicious, ill condition’d Fevers, it raises and supports the drooping Spirits, resists Malignity, and drives it out from the Centre to the Circumference.
Icebound London turns magical. The Thames freezes over, as if to demonstrate the solidity of their love. The usual frost fair enlivens the stilled river under London Bridge. Together they go there—the actress like a flame in her new rust-red redingote and black hat trimmed with matching ribbon. They drink hot wine in the refreshment tents, watch the skaters, and visit a printer who has set up a stall upon the ice. They have identical sheets set and printed, and fold them against their hearts where they crackle at every embrace.
Valentine Greatrakes & Mimosina Dolcezza,
London, December 15th 1785,
Printed on ICE.
Most nights are spent in her rooms, and after her performance they rarely go out, not wanting to leave the enchanted circle of their intimacy. Tabby Runt supplies all their needs without making her presence obvious. Every evening Valentine goes to watch his lover perform on the stage. Feeling the desires of the men in the audience sharpens his own later. And he finds messages specific to himself when he observes her now. Little sighs, significant looks, the style of uttering certain phrases: All these are private ways she communicates with him in public. He is sure of it. He delights in isolating new instances with each show, and later she blushingly confesses him right each time.
Then there are the romantic suppers, where he eats one-handed so that he may caress her throughout. These meals are not without their usual drawbacks, however, chiefly of a culinary nature. He still cannot, without grievous loss of face, refuse to eat the unnatural liaisons of fruit and meat she places before him. More than once he has barely arrived home at Bankside before spewing abundantly into a gutter and recovering himself at the Anchor with a cup of plain tea strong enough to trot a mouse across it.
He loves her apartments but sometimes their relentless femininity oppresses him. When he feels a cabin-fever descend, Valentine hires some rooms he knows near Bond Street, a comfortable building done out like the home of a gentleman of the first rank and fortune. He has Dizzom go there in advance of them, to spread some personal belongings about and to muss the chill perfection of the décor with a few morsels of bachelor squalor.
Mimosina Dolcezza is pleased with the accommodations and wrapping her naked body inside the curtains one night, she teases him for the luxury of their marquisite silk.
“No expense is spared!”
He fastens the curtain round her so that only her head emerges, a pale bud forming on a green stalk.
“For you yourself, nothing is too good.” And he puts his arms around the tube of silk and walks in circles, over and over again, until she can no longer bear the shimmying and hissing of the fabric against her naked skin, and begs him to release her. Then she steps naked into the room and she is so beautiful that he must douse the glim of the candle in order to bear it.
Christmas comes and he puts her first, instead of Pevenche who breaks a great many things in the drawing room at the Academy for Young Ladies. (Nevertheless, he increases the girl’s allowance, on top of paying for the damage.)
He is neglecting his business, thinking of nothing but her. Dizzom is told to keep everything ticking over, but this cannot go on forever without damage, and without dangerous talk. There are always upstarts in Bankside ready to surge into any vacuum of concentration. Valentine is dimly aware of the risk, but he tells himself that this cannot last. He is sure that he will satisfy himself with her soon, and that he shall be able to let her go. This love affair is like the ice that now holds the Thames unnaturally in check. It cannot stay so forever, and its rare beauty is like a heartbeat stolen from time and displayed in a glass bottle. Such fraud shall have its detection and the bliss shall soon dissolve in his hands. And he will accept it as a natural thing, even if a hurting one.
Yet he cannot evade daydreams of a different nature entirely and has begun to understand that these caressing manners of hers promise domestic pleasures above the sensual ones he already enjoys. How sweet a thing would it be to bring this woman a cut finger to wrap in linens! And how kind a homecoming with a lady like that to fuss him with such little objects of minor spleen that had grizzled her tame day. When she lowers her eyes there is a tinge of the Madonna about her. Yet, cruelly, her profession has not allowed her the joy of motherhood.
Not yet, he tells himself, and blushes at the thought.
And that’s another thing, by God, we’re not fecundating, despite doing the bold thing innumerably and without any precautions against it.
She’s birdmouthed on that subject, doesn’t raise it, never offers him a birthday bonnet for the bald fella, nor asks him to furnish one himself. And she seems so delicate that no one could bring home a child from her.
Or is it an unnaturality on her side?
And how can he tell if her winning ways are born into her, or if she merely enacts them? Can she love without a script? In the short rapture allowed to them, Mimosina Dolcezza has given him some few specimens of her oddities. She has not even managed to behave immaculately, viz her ungenerous attitude to his little ward, not to mention the sickening incident of Lord Stintleigh. She speaks languages he knows not; she has lived lives he knows nothing of: What would he be taking on in her? One woman, or a continent of them?
Another thing: She seems strangely distracted these days. He sp
eaks more softly to her, so she is forced to concentrate on his voice. Even then it seems that she merely follows the faint tracks of his words, rather than really listening to him.
The painful thought strikes him down that a woman so exquisite, so much in demand, must be listening to his declarations with old ears. She cannot know how dewy is this vocabulary for him, who has never before had recourse to it. He imagines his loving words leaping fresh from his lips yet already staled, bent over and smelling slightly of mold by the time they are in her possession. He is driven mad by the thought of those other voices in her ears, uttering more powerful and more elaborate phrases than he can coin, in her own language even.
But I’ll have her anyway. I’ll take my turn. Just to be with her, that’s the thing.
Finally, he brushes even that thought aside. The point is—he’s a great one for the music and the dancing and the women, but he’s not one of those men who are preciously self-deceitful.
The truth of it is just that Valentine Greatrakes has never calculated for a matrimonial sort of life. There have been too many women offered for him to think of settling for one.
But he has never calculated for Mimosina Dolcezza either. He’s got the greens to clap a diamond on that finger, only the little finger, mind. It doesn’t mean he has to marry her. He just loves her hands, and that a man may do in complete safety, it would be a stinting and ungrateful thing not to love those hands of hers.
What’s the harm in that?
He spends a night apart from her, to see what it feels like, to gauge the pain of the prospect of many more such.
Valentine lies sleepless in a room at the depository. It is not a bedroom, but a room with a bed in it. Mimosina Dolcezza has taught him the difference. Rising in the early hours, he holds a candle up to the mirror and looks at himself, looks at what she must see when he is naked and prayerful in front of her. He notes that the hairs along his right side have worn away, for it is this way that he lies when he holds her in the night.
Lilies that fester, and all that.
Valentine Greatrakes knows very little about—it. He flinches from the tolling word “marriage.” He does not believe his own mother knew the honor. He tries to think of any married people he knows, by way of encouragement. It fails to tempt. He thinks of the flower girl at the Seven Dials, anyone’s ten-minute bride, and all the sweeter for it.
He thinks that he will ask—just ask, mind, the price for the freehold of the Bond Street rooms he now dissembles as his own.
It can only be a few hundred tiny little pounds.
It’s not that he craves luxury, but for the first time he aches for a house, over the threshold of which he could carry her.
If it should come to that.
He’s more or less abandoned his profession, and all his old entertainments too. It’s weeks since he’s been seen inside the Anchor. His silver season token to the St. James’s Cockpit languishes unused on his dusty bedside table at the depository.
Instead the lovers haunt the still-frozen Thames together, learning to skate, like newborns learning to walk. The significance of this mutual education is not lost on them. Nor is the melodious trickle of water flowing every day a little faster beneath the ice.
Valentine Greatrakes has meanwhile reinvented his wardrobe in a tribute to his lover. He commissions a cream waistcoat embroidered with goosegreen and yellow flowers, shoes braided with yellow cord like a string of mimosa flowers. He wears only the colors of spring in this bitterest of weather. She answers him mutely but eloquently, appearing in a dress of yellow silk and tulle with two hundred real butterflies pinned among the gauzy petticoats.
They are inside the City of Moscow tent one afternoon when a jagged sound is heard and the ice trembles beneath their feet. They peer out of the tent to see that they are now aboard a glassy island that bobs gently away from the thick white crust of the riverbanks. Valentine’s instincts impel him to action before conscious thought. He swings Mimosina Dolcezza into his arms and into one of the wherries that was previously frozen into the iced river but is now divesting itself of its encumbrance. He throws himself in afterwards but then leaps back out again to gather three toddling children who still stand on the edge of the City of Moscow with their mouths wide open but too frightened to scream. These he tosses one after another into the fragile arms of the actress while he rushes into the tent and picks up the remaining stallholders, the rest already following his example and scrambling into nearby boats. When he returns to the wherry the children, the actress and the other victims of the ice’s shipwreck have all recovered themselves enough to be bawling lustily and he calms them on the instant with a huge smile.
“Is this not prodigious fun?” he laughs, tickling one of the children until the boy perforce begins to chuckle. “Isn’t this a hooting thing?”
One by one he catches the eye of all his terrified human salvage and works his eyebrows until they cannot help but burst into merriment.
And then he grabs an oar and commences to row the hilarious party back to shore, where the children are greeted with smothering parental caresses, the adults with warm brandies and Valentine Greatrakes with a great roar of hot love.
Back in her rooms the actress strokes his hair again and again. Each time she raises it to start again at the crown of his head; she shows him her hand in a gesture that he could not describe, except that it makes him know it’s naked of a ring. She eels it slightly, indicating the vacant cleft, and it’s hurting hard thigh-deep in his lapidary heart to remember that between those fingers he’s known pleasures to make him mad or, if not mad, at least to visit the extreme peninsula of sanity.
She repeats it for hours, that turn of the wrist, that makes him blissfully believe her hand newborn from that sleeve, that it’s never touched another man.
It is then, on the first night of the thaw, that she says to him: “The show is finishing and I am going back to Venice, of course.”
• 14 •
Diuretic Ale
Take whole Mustard seed 4 ounces; put it into a quart of Ale; after 3 or 4 days begin it; and ever as you pour out a glass keep it filled up with fresh Ale; thus do as long as the seed has any strength in it.
It attenuates pituitose, fizzy blood; dissolves its close contexture, and renders it fit to shed off its serum. Also it detergeth the urinary pipes, irritateth the papillae and pelvis of the reins, provoketh them to stir and squeeze, and perform the work of percolation. Thus it moves urine powerfully beyond expectation, and is convenient in the dropsy, gravel, scurvy, palsy.
It’s cut and dried, says Valentine Greatrakes, swathing his sore throat in beer at the dear old Anchor; he’ll simply let Mimosina Dolcezza go back whence she came. This little storia, as she calls it has already been all the more piquant for its brevity, every savory moment velvet-sauced with wistfulness, every nerve fresh-strung each day.
There can be no doubt about it—the closer looms the date of her departure, the more beautiful she becomes.
But of course it could never be: Valentine Greatrakes—another of the same please!—not now nor ever has been in the business of settling down to fatten and slacken with any one woman; true, his eye has not yet gone a-wandering from this lady but how long can it be before it falls cheerily on some alluringly brackish riverside doxy or yet a bored great lady with the greens for a bit of…
He could drink the cross off a steeple today.
It has been amusing to fancy himself “in love,” no, really—caressing the glass—it forks a warm frisson through a body to think this may be the one he’ll remember when he’s in his decrepitudes, oh yes, porter that faraway look to his eyes when they’ve grown milky under stiff hoods; indeed, this one will be inventoried in large letters in his stock of stories.
It will be flourished like the plume of my aunt’s cap, in fact.
Down all the years, down all my days, I’ll be thinking of her, of how she was the measure of all my dreams, how she left my heart shaken.
Indeed, he thinks, dragging on another tankard, the letting go of her may well be the sweetest part of all.
And it shall be so for both parties.
For of course he’ll let her feel she’s forsaking him and confect some trinketish feminine triumph from the notion that she’s the one doing the leaving, that she leaves a man near expiring from the cleft she’s wrought in his heart: so he’ll go through the motions of that—acting most finely, every drink a toast to her.
Best pass her on, while she’s yet fresh.
For no one man could get the viewing of all of her beauty.
And to this end, delicately, on their last day, the soon-to-be-uncoupled pair eschew the Bond Street house and tousled bedchamber of Valentine Greatrakes, and nor does he follow her into the perfumed twilight of her own fainting rooms. Instead, they take a turn in frost-crisped Hyde Park, where even the squirting cupids are frozen midstream and the pigeons hunch in moaning clusters like droplets of black dew.
Both she who leaves and he who stays are elegantly attired, as befits the occasion. The ruffles at his wrist are so strongly starched they froth upwards like wave-spume. The butterflies swish drily in the hem of her skirts. They perform decorous farewells in perfect synchronicity from the twinned crystal tears sidling down each wan nose, the soothsaying looks into their julep glasses, to the few brave words and the last lingering kiss during which both feel their lips wasting away, and, in deference to the sadness of the occasion, the masculine organ of Valentine Greatrakes gallantly fails to rise.
He is surprised to find that he staggers slightly as they leave the park. He had thought himself merely bemused in the beer, but now he’s wall-falling drunk, scuttered with the drink, it must be that which has put the heart crossways inside him. He is drunk as a lord, no, drunk as an emperor, which is ten times as drunk as a lord. Fortunately, he knows how to hide it. Why, the actress can have no idea, he’s done his hiding oh-so-well.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 14
