The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

by Michelle Lovric

  In two weeks I was travel-soiled, exhausted, barely able to speak. But at least I was back in London.

  Part Four

  A Cardiac Infusion

  Take conserve of red Roses 1 ounce; conserve of Borage flowers 2 ounces; candy’d Citron peel, beat to a Mash 6 drams; pour on them Borage water 9 ounces; Meadow sweet water 3 ounces; Damask Rose water 2 ounces; having mix’d all very well in a marble Mortar, and let them stand cold an hour, strain out the Liquor and add to it juice of Kermes half an ounce; juice of Lemon 1 ounce; Syrup of Raspberries half an ounce; and pass it all through Hippocrates’s sleeve, till it be pretty clear and fine.

  It restrains the Fervour, and allays the impetuosity of the too inflammable Blood at the same time, it also clarifies and rouses up the Spirits, darkened and depress’d with atrabilarious Vapours. Tis a very grateful and comfortable thing in a burning Fever, especially if the Patient be inclinable to Hypochondriacism and Melancholy. You may give a large Wine glass full thrice a day.

  Off he went to Venice without a word of good-bye.

  As if I deserved that. As if I had not done everything to keep him charmed almost to convulsions these last weeks since my Pa died.

  I was more than a little disgruntled.

  All I got was a hasty letter with a quite nugatory quantity of apology in it. He scribbled that he was going to make some personal inquiries into the “tragedy,” and that he was meantime researching some vastly exciting new opportunity of a commercial kind. And that, moreover, he might well be bringing me a wonderful surprise when he returned, something that would make me a happier girl, and improve my life in oh-so-many ways.

  “I’ll not be hinting more, dear Pevenche, on account of otherwise you’ll be second-guessing me, perspicacious as you are,” he added. He loves a four-syllabled word, does my Uncle Valentine. And when he finds a new one, he carries on with it as if he had discovered hot water! Yet it’s impossible not to be fond of the fellow. Even my Pa loved him. My Pa, who didn’t have any love to spare, who’d fight with the nails of his own toes, and was always ready to use the heel of his fist on anyone at all, even young innocent persons, just for asking a little favor of him.

  While Uncle Valentine went a-gallivanting, I was to content myself with Dizzom for my requisites. Risible little Dizzom, with his pantaloons forked so low it seemed like he had four equal limbs. It was an embarrassment to me when he came to the Academy. I gave him dog’s abuse when he did so, only to discourage him, not to be personally hurtful.

  If I needed him, I would go to surprise him at the depository, a thing I loved to do. I always hoped to happen upon Dizzom in the act of smelting the Venetian glass daggers out of the tallow candles in which they arrive at the warehouse, and to beg one from him. The pretty little things are never delivered to the ultimate clients still embedded in the wax because the secret mode of their smuggling serves to increase their price. Like every good scam, it is head-smackingly obvious once explained, but delectably arcane when not. My Pa would never let me have one and got quite irate when I asked.

  Deprived of my treats and excursions on the arm of Uncle Valentine, every day passed slow as a wet week inside the Academy I was not happy about any of this, and I intended to make my displeasure felt in all the ways open to me, chiefly of a melancholic and hypochondriac nature. Abandonment will certainly ruffle a delicate girl’s constitution, sometimes dangerously. And this behavior had galled, piqued and hurt me until my every feeling was perforated with a thousand tiny rips.

  Uncle Valentine would be hearing of my afflictions, my fevers, my weaknesses, and my depression, and they would rend his heart with guilt, and bring him back to London all the sooner.

  I had my suspicions about his “wonderful surprise.”

  Venice, January 1786

  • 1 •

  A Cephalic Electuary

  Take powder’d Male Peony root half an ounce; Human Cranium, Cinnabar of Antimony (or rather Native) each 2 drams, candy’d Nutmeg 1 ounce; Syrup of Peony compound 2 ounces; or as much as is requir’d. Oil of Rosemary and Sage, each 4 drops, mix.

  It cheers and roborates the Brain, depurates the soul, and fixes the too Volatile Spirits.

  All the way to Venice, Valentine tells himself that the woman comes second. Or even third.

  No, he’s not whimpering after her. No, he’s going to find out what happened to Tom, and to avenge his death. Forthwith. In fact, he is amazed that he has not thought to do so before now. How could he even hope to resolve matters remotely, from London? Tom’s death has festered unavenged too long for anyone’s animative well-being. A body should always have a just, swift revenge and not merely a gesture toward it.

  Otherwise the insulted heart will continue in its aching.

  And, to sweeten the dolors of this expedition (something perfectly possible without the company of the actress) Valentine is going to research the idea that was, by purest coincidence, born as he lay in her arms. Once he has dealt with Tom himself, then he will proceed as Tom would have wished, to business. He is going to orchestrate a symphony of hard goods and sweet relationships that will in the end bring forth his quintessential Venetian nostrum, which the denizens of Bankside will be lining up to buy.

  He is eaten from the inside with ambition on both fronts. He sees himself in Venice, busy about the town, attending to both matters with scrupulous attention and flair. If he happens to fall upon Mimosina Dolcezza while striding up an artisans’ calk near the San Luca theater, well, that will be a pleasant surprise, of course. He might see if he can catch a performance of hers. If he has time, naturally. Which is doubtful.

  Why, he has to source the bottles and make sure they are of appropriate splendor (the whole true worth of the package reposing in them, in fact, as the nostrum itself will be a masterpiece of nothings), and he must find the brandy distillery that will be prepared to bottle its wares in such unusual containers. He has already contrived the scam to pay for these expensive items.

  English wool, whose export is outlawed on pain of death, is the most prized of all raw fabrics among the Venetian clothsmiths. Surely one can be found who will take free-traded English sheepskins, paying not Valentine himself—the ways and means must as ever be carefully blurred—but the local Venetian distillery in cash or kind, all the while preserving the utmost secrecy about the whole procedure.

  The intricacies of this plan, and the text of his new handbill, keep Valentine occupied as the coach pounds down the icebound road to Dover, and during the lonely hours while he waits in his inn for the next packet to Calais, a high wind preventing today’s crossing, meanwhile negotiating the stages of his outbound journey with various agents. By morning, Dizzom has arrived, having followed on the next post-chaise with trunks, wool samples, waybills, coins, not to mention a snowy mound of clean linen for Valentine.

  He brings one more thing: an offer to accompany his master although Dizzom is a highly domesticated creature and hates to travel, and he moreover feels a fearful antipathy to foreigners. Tom’s murder in Venice has merely served to confirm Dizzom’s suspicions of all Italians as vile assassins. He loved Tom, albeit warily: He cannot bear to lose his adored master in the same way. If only Valentine were going somewhere other than Venice! Worse, he knows the man is deranged lately by romantic love, an unruly emotion that has never touched his own plain heart. And having beheld the object of desire, he tremblingly knows her worth all manner of wild acts. Dizzom fears that in this condition Valentine is far too vulnerable to set sail for that fatal city where the mystery of whoever killed Tom remains unpenetrated, and where therefore the same violent danger quite possibly awaits his master. Although Dizzom has never met his Venetian counterpart, Smerghetto, he has always thought ill of the man, an opinion embittered by undeniable jealousy.

  Dizzom needs to say none of these things. His own shabby gray valise and his fierce expression of bravery say it all to Valentine, who, in his weakened state, is touched almost to tears. Or perhaps the tears are just seeking pret
exts for showing themselves. But he will not hear of Dizzom coming with him: He needs him back at the depository, to take care of business. With both of them gone, there are elements of their fraternity who might become a little frisky, a little reckless of authority. And there is much work to do at home regarding the proposed Venetian nostrum. Dizzom must busy himself at his bain marie, his powders, his bruised seeds and his dried herbs. He must also consult with the metal-workers and chymists of Bankside, for it has already been decided between them that this nostrum shall contain, as far as the consumers are concerned, a vast number of—apparent—flakes of gold, which is widely known not only to prolong life but also to retard the unsavory symptoms of old age.

  Yes, while Valentine makes his journey Dizzom must perform some credible counterfeits of alchemy, so that a preparation is ready on his return that does not kill the patients before the blame for their death can be diffused over any number of circumstances. A nostrum that produces fatal grimaces and kills at a single mouthful, no matter how lucent its golden depth, will be no good to man, beast or business. Whereas great expense is no object: In fact the monstrously high price of the Venetian nostrum will only serve to increase its desirability.

  Dizzom and his master shake their heads, discussing the finer details over a large English steak pie studded with oysters, the like of which will not be seen by Valentine Greatrakes for many a week. He lays in store a plentiful amount, washed down with beer. Valentine has long since learned to regard every foreign table with suspicion and depression, arising from the impossibility of a plain chop. He tries to encourage Dizzom, who nibbles sadly, and takes no beer at all. “Look now, eat up, you’ve got a face on you as long as today and tomorrow.”

  Neither of them speaks of Mimosina Dolcezza, and so they pass the time in manful, hearty ways before the Calais packet is announced.

  Valentine, waving to Dizzom from the departing boat, calls out to him unheard above the moiling of the waves… “Take care of Pevenche. Just give her any little thing she asks for.”

  And Dizzom, scampering up and down the jetty, calls back to him, in a sentence that likewise perishes in the wind, “I shall visit Pevenche every week, and take her for outings! And any little thing she needs.…”

  As Dizzom disappears from view, Valentine jerkily paces the wind-scoured deck until his damp hair whips his face. It feels good to be traveling south across the water. He feels fractionally less helpless; he has found his direction.

  Yet his cheeks burn bright with the humiliation of it all. All the way across the guffawing water, he thinks that he should have waited for a letter from her imploring him to come.

  • 2 •

  An Icteric Decoction

  Take Roots of Turmerick, Madder, each 1 ounce; Celandine roots and leaves 2 handfuls; Earth worms (slit open and washed clean) 20; boil in Water and Rhenish Wine (added towards the last) each 1½ pints to 28 ounces; to the strained Liquor, add Tincture of Saffron (with Treacle Water) 1 ounce; Syrup of the 5 opening Roots 3 ounces; mix.

  It inspires the Mass of Blood with a fresh, yet mild Ferment; searcheth the Hepatic Glands, and specifically cleanseth and cleareth the bilious Passages.

  Venice flutters in a light wind that pleats the water and tousles his hair in an insinuating manner as he passes under the bleached sternum of the Rialto bridge.

  The winking fanlights, the flapping curtains, the beckoning aroma of coffee, too much seems to be trying to attract his attention at once. Everything is arranged to entice: shop windows, cages of exotic birds, and silk hangings. He feels faintly bilious, too much sought after. Yet he feels the charm of it all stealing over him. And what strikes most of all at the affections of tired, travel-soiled Valentine Greatrakes are those guileful Venetian faces and those sweet, beseeching looks bestowed on ladies of even mild attractions. Even now, in the working hours of the afternoon, there is time for each Venetian to be made pleasantly aware of the particularities of his or her gender.

  It is two years since he was last in Venice. For some time Tom has handled the Venetian business with such a flourish that Valentine has had no need to be there. So he’s forgotten how women here practice the art of being watched, and of making it worth the watcher’s while. In London the women hold their necks up as if nailed to the sky; they keep their hands rigidly to their sides. Venetian women are infinitely flexible and always in movement, be it a graceful inclination of the head or a subtle flaring of the fingertips. It’s all finely nuanced so as to be above any reproach of unladylike attention-seeking Yet it’s impossible to take one’s eyes off these fluid women, even those who bear no resemblance whatsoever to Mimosina Dolcezza.

  When he’s not watching the women, his eyes keep falling on gavotting liquid light: His spirits dance too, despite his exhaustion. Observed from the gondola, every coralline, banner-streaming palazzo is lengthened by a good six feet or so—and, by God, what this adds of grace to the spectacle! And of course there is always something offered to fascinate the gondola-borne eye: tiered rolls of wainscoting, as he calls it, at the foot of each building, all grimacing with lions and gargoyles, glimpses through water gates into paradisical, rampant gardens, the striped poles of the noble houses standing sentry, but in fancy dress, for no serious threat can be made against a city as beautiful as this.

  The Venetians think themselves unsinkable, he reflects with a smile, for the city proves that they are. It is infectious. He bounds ashore from his gondola, convinced that all things will stay afloat for him here.

  Hoarse voices salute him; hands reach out for his.

  “Bentornato! Ti vedo in forma splendida,” he hears from all sides. “Signore Greet Raikes! Che piacere!” He does not know the words, but he feels their warmth, and feels the better for it. He has forgotten the flattering effect Venice always has on the spirits, washing the blears from the eyes in an instant.

  He nods and ducks his head, murmuring, “Sure you’re more than welcome,” and the boatmen take these incomprehensible words with evident delight, pointing at him, announcing excitedly “Eccob quà!” to one another, “Here he is!”—as if the presence of Valentine Greatrakes was the very thing required to perfect their day.

  He is well known in Venice, for he has done a little business with everyone here. He has his Venetian Dizzom and his own Venetian depository. Smerghetto, part interpreter, part lawyer, part chemist and part pimp, lives in some unknown part of Cannaregio and materializes at Valentine’s side like an inescapable thought every time he goes abroad by day. Somehow, Smerghetto is waiting at the exact point and time when the gondola brings him ashore at San Silvestro, and together they walk down the Campiello de la Pasina to the apartments that Valentine rents there on a permanent basis.

  The Venetian headquarters of Valentine Greatrakes boasts a garden, something that is beyond the realms of possibility in crowded, smoot-sprinkled Bankside. Every time he comes back to this city, he must force himself to accommodate not just the aqueous sensations of her arterial traffic but also the scarcely less distracting ones of being in the country. On opening the secretive gate to the Venetian depository, Valentine always feels that he enters a separate world, not in Venice but perhaps in Tuscany. Closing the door, Venice is excluded.

  At the other end of the garden is the depository, with convenient access to water-doors on the Grand Canal. The street façades of the building are eaten into by various professions and their needful ingresses. Valentine Greatrakes has the store space, the garden, and the second-floor apartments it overlooks at the back. A tavern with a separate entrance in the street occupies the ground floor and lets rooms on the first. A little shoemakers is etched into an alcove of the west pianoterra—a pie shop dedicated to the appetites of the wharfmen occupies its twin to the east.

  Another workshop, this time connected to Valentine’s own business, is let in through a discreet street-side hole to the garden: Here he employs skilled craftsmen to damage rare antiquities from Rome. They must do so in a way that is easy to repair, but the
missing noses and lopped ears facilitate the export licenses that will allow them to reach London. This studio conducts a thriving double life as a Knickknackatorium, selling historical trinkets of fresh manufacture, ex-voto paintings of a cunning naïveté, and lifelike effigies of their deceased friends, on moderate terms, to Grand Tourists. For the Italian pilgrims, who have a taste for the morbid, his craftsmen toil on memento mori of all kinds, but particularly miniature ebony coffins with ivory skeletons inside, the smaller the better, and holy-water bottles exquisitely painted with the likenesses of saints. The studio is of course conveniently situated to fill these bottles with small measures from the Grand Canal, a liquid which in no way other than visually resembles the pure spring waters from consecrated streams eulogized upon their labels.

  And in a light-flooded room on the third floor, several lady artists blessed with tiny fingers bend their heads over freckled cowrie shells that have been fixed with secret hinges. On the pearly inner curves the ladies paint tiny tableaux of bishops unlocking the chastity belts of otherwise naked nuns and similarly instructive scenes. None of these ladies, of course, is directly employed by Valentine Greatrakes. In Venice, as in London, he makes sundry genuflections toward the rules, regulations, and shibboleths of the law.

  Innumerable trackless staircases obfuscate the entrances from one part to another of Valentine’s enterprises in Venice. This is as it should be, lest Smerghetto or any of his employees need to deny knowledge of any part that might come under suspicion.

  Meanwhile the great canal-side rooms of the piani nobili are still occupied by the elderly nobleman who inherited them, and who yet maintains a show of dignity, not to mention nonchalance, at even the most disastrous gaming table, while living off these diverse and shabby rents, which are in no way charitable. So fragile is his dignity that the diminutive nobleman cannot afford to acknowledge any of his tenants in the street, maintaining a taut, faraway expression on his powdered face, should he unfortunately cross their paths. This expression bespeaks, or so he believes, the delicate sensibilities of his class.