• 5 •
A Consolatory Draught
Take Waters of black Cherries 2 ounces; of Mint, Damask Roses, Orange flowers Coelestis, each 1 dram; strong Cinnamon, and compound Peony Waters, each 2 drams; Confection of Alkermes, Gascoin powder, each 1 scruple; Oil of Cloves 1 drop; Syrup of Gilly flowers 3 drams, mix.
It notably succours the Spirits when sunk, and failing; and does eminent Service in Weakness, Faintings and Palpitation of the Heart.
Valentine Greatrakes, sipping fragolino from an earthen bowl, has not quite perished from embarrassment, though he thinks it a near thing.
He has by degrees risen from his knees, introduced, and even explained himself to the girl, who turns out to be the artist herself and to be quite expert and but lightly accented in his own tongue, no doubt as a result of long hours in the company of the many celebrated Englishmen she has painted.
Her soft voice is no less grateful on the ear, he must admit, than that of Mimosina Dolcezza and he is surprised that the accent is so similar, for Cecilia Cornaro is a Golden Book daughter, albeit a wayward one. He supposes that an actress of humble origins must learn to imitate the timber of an aristocratic voice as a matter of course. It is a trick he regrets that he has never managed himself, of course, no matter how he distends his sentences with flourishing words. Only a foreigner like Mimosina Dolcezza would be deceived about his true social station, and he believes that Cecilia Cornaro has already seen through him and detected the truth.
She is much too kind to say so, of course, treating him with a graceful courtesy, somewhat underscored by what appears to be an irrepressible and playful spirit of irony.
Cecilia Cornaro, twinkling and smiling, is very sorry, but she cannot help him as he needs to be helped. She is not currently painting the portrait of any beautiful young woman just returned from London. She would like to help him more, she says, and he believes her. There is unmitigated sincerity in her humorous brown gaze. Moreover, she is alight with a happy curiosity.
“No one has come to me with such a story before!” she says enthusiastically, as if he has brought her a marvelous gift—and he has told her but the bare bones of it, leaving out the theatrical and free-trading connections, out of sheer shyness and confusion. She scents better gleaning. She cannot wait to strip off the pith of it and discover the fruit. Her very hair is electric with the excitement, and her curls appear, to his tired eyes, to have grown alarmingly in profusion while he has recounted his tale. She walks to and fro across the room, too excited to sit still. Her movements keep the medicinal aromas of her paints in constant circulation through the air. In a moment, in this most alien situation, Valentine feels completely at home. Cecilia Cornaro’s studio, with its bottles and pestles of vivid powdered tint, reminds him of Dizzom’s lair at the depository on Bankside.
Now that, surely, is a good omen, is it not?
But no, she believes that she has never painted anyone named Mimosina Dolcezza—she smiles widely at the name. She asks him if he possesses a miniature or some other sketch of the woman, which would recall her instantly to mind. He thinks of the undrawn portrait on the ice, and the warning that accompanied it, and shakes his head sadly.
She hands him another bowl of fragolino. While he drinks it, she walks around him. His skin prickles, feeling her eyes traveling all over it. She offers him chocolate cake from a platter she pulls unexpectedly out of a large bathtub. When he refuses it a third time, she reluctantly puts it away, and observes in a slightly disparaging tone, “Ah, so you don’t like sweets, then.”
He shakes his head, watching her from over the rim of his fragolino cup.
“And your mistress, what’s her real name?” asks Cecilia Cornaro, finally, now leaning forward to scan his face, and at the same time brushing a lock of hair that has fallen in his eye, so that she may behold him fully. She continues to stare at him with a consuming interest, and he finds himself blushing. But in a moment she has turned, and is lighting small candles on a hat made of stuffed leather, which she now places on her head. She ushers him to a stool, presses him down upon it, and sits so close to him that his face is warmed by the heat of the tapers that cluster around her spiraling hair. She pulls a stick of charcoal from her pocket and taps it on her palm, then draws a small easel closer to her, all the while never taking her eyes from his face.
Valentine whispers: “That is her real name. Mimosina Dolcezza.” He loves to say it, and repeats more loudly, “Yes, Mimosina Dolcezza.”
She looks at him with transparent pity. “Ah, Signore, I see you need some things explained to you. That name—is not a real one. It is the assumed name of a courtesan or a dancer, perhaps…”
“She is an actress.” His voice is breaking.
“Ah yes, indeed. And you say she is Venetian?”
“Yes.”
“But I have never seen or heard of a woman of that name.” She adds, not bothering to conceal her pride, “I know everyone. I paint everyone.”
“She is frequently away on tour in foreign countries.”
“Well, yes, that could explain it perhaps. Some Venetian actresses live their lives almost entirely in exile. Venice treats them shabbily They are cared for better outside of their own town. Still, it is strange that I have not come across her, if she is young and beautiful. The ones like that, they usually come to me. Or their lovers send them.”
The mention of “lovers” is heartily unwelcome on the ears, I must say.
It would seem an act of extraordinary disloyalty for Valentine to utter the truth: While she is beautiful, actual youth is no longer among the fascinations of Mimosina Dolcezza. So he does not.
Cecilia Cornaro chivvies him, “And what is she like? To look upon, I mean.”
“Why must you know?”
“So that we may play a game. I would like to have you paint her for me.”
Valentine Greatrakes recoils.
She is toying with me. I need not games but hope and hard facts now, preferably intertwined.
Valentine stammers, half-rising from his chair in his distress. “You mock me. I cannot paint…”
“No, I want you to paint her with words.” She lifts her charcoal and turns the easel away from him, simply confounding his disarray with a businesslike demeanor. “First, the shape of her face—is it an oval, a strawberry or perhaps an apple? And her neck… is it long, or short?”
The happy tongue of Valentine Greatrakes, so long kept silent on this most delectable of subjects, needs no third inquiry. It bursts forth into a most refulgent description of Mimosina Dolcezza, not neglecting any detail that has given him pleasure, and there are so many that he talks for a great length of time. He closes his eyes the better to see her.
All the while Cecilia Cornaro is making rapid movements at the easel, and asking yet more questions.
So many and such intricate questions that Valentine falls into a trance and lets his mouth frame answers without reference to his brain. For how is a man consciously to know if the eyebrows of his mistress are natural or tweezed? Or remember the distance between eye and brow? He sees her as one single vision, as everything he desires fused in one, not as her separate parts.
Women probably think differently, he muses, and for the first time he wonders how Mimosina Dolcezza sees him. This does not quite bear thinking about, not in view of the last time she laid eyes on him, guttered with drink at the door of her departing coach.
Still, he trusts this young woman with the blackened fingers. Perhaps it is the fragolino, perhaps it is exhaustion. But he has every confidence that a most perfect and living portrait of Mimosina Dolcezza will shortly be presented to him. To help her, he talks without drawing breath until his lips are numb and he can think of not one more image, simile or exclamation. Cecilia Cornaro nods, smiles sometimes, and at other times looks quite grave.
“You’re sure?” she asks after some answers. “You’re really certain? That she is fine and plump? You know the heart can put a blindfold on the eyes, and y
ou never know until it’s far too late. The eye is a lens that magnifies the objects it likes, and magnification, of course, distorts.”
“I’m certain!” he exclaims, time after time, and so he is. He feels as if he’s extemporizing a love poem, a paean to the attractions of Mimosina Dolcezza, a sadly overdue tribute, one he is ashamed not to have delivered before. He wishes she could hear him. She would not feel unappreciated now.
He is growing excited. This is the closest he has been to her for days. Lacking her substantial presence, he’s hungry for her image.
But when Cecilia Cornaro finally drops her charcoal and turns the easel to face him he sees a face that bears only a glancing resemblance to that of Mimosina Dolcezza.
The face still strikes him as familiar, though. For there is some glancing resemblance in it to Tom. Then again, the girlish softness of the lips to make it look—fleetingly—and with the utmost flattering—a little like Pevenche too.
“I suppose I’ve made her too young and too plump,” says Cecilia Cornaro regretfully. “That’s what usually happens when I have to do it this way.”
She dabs a disfiguring shadow under one eye in a way that is not infused with kindness.
“Either that or you were not telling me the entire truth about her,” she accuses.
He does not trust himself to speak. It seems that his earlier words have betrayed not just his love for the actress, but also his other preoccupations, Tom and Tom’s daughter. He should do her the honor of an explanation, but his tongue is tied.
The artist must have her dollop of praise or blame, and Cecilia Cornaro is growing impatient.
“So I have monstered her then?” she asks waspishly.
Valentine recovers himself enough to make noises of protest.
“Shall you take it with you? I thought not.”
The girl is angry. He sees the color in her cheeks and remembers that Tom had told him one more thing about her: that Cecilia Cornaro is endowed with what the Venetians call the lingua biforcuta, a famously sharp tongue. He quails now, thinking of all the lacerating things she might say to him in his weakness and confusion.
She’s not the kind to whom I’ll be singing all my sorrows.
She says succinctly: “If you must know, if this is your mistress, then she has deceived you. She has only pretended to be a Venetian actress. Perhaps it is not the only thing she has pretended, eh, Signore?”
Valentine flinches and bows his head.
Cecilia Cornaro seems a little ashamed of her sharpness. More kindly, she advises, “Better go back to London, Signor Greatrakes. There’s nothing for you here.”
The woman in the picture is not his lover, and the moment turns the tide for him. He scurries back to his rooms, orders his things packed up, bids farewell to the bemused truncheoni. He makes a final round of all those studios and workshops that shall be involved in the preparation of the Venetian nostrum, and shakes hands until his fingers ache. When he tells his colleagues of his imminent departure, he is roundly embraced, and the warmth of human skin closed around his own is almost too sweet to bear. One last time, he watches the lovers in the neighboring building, his tears sliding down the window pane. He has never been so depleted in his spirits. He is bitten with desire for home.
He is not so much homesick for unlovely Bankside as wearied from being humbled by Venice’s beauty. He is worn out by her incessant seductions, humiliated that she takes him so cheaply even in the midst of his preoccupations. A lithe curve of the Grand Canal, the rich mew of a violin behind a shutter, the sun emblazoning the fern of a gondola—and his heart turns over, helpless and flabby as any Grand Tourist’s. He is denatured here. He cannot think properly. In London, his brain will be restored, and perhaps his heart will gradually mend.
He is floundering. As he makes his farewell rounds, clouds are strewn like dirty bandages around a feverish bruised sky. The air is gross and thickening for a shower. The stone pillars are already sweating droplets, not waiting for the rain to come. And in the canals the water quivers and spasms rather than flows, as if someone had prepared and poured into them a gelatinous sauce of squid ink.
And surely all the belfries in Venice have been tuned to furious, sawing tragedy by the red priest Vivaldi—how else could the bells play on his spirits as they do?
In disappearing, Mimosina Dolcezza has burst not just the delicate structure of their romance but has revealed him to himself as a man who knows not how to love or be loved, an accomplished side-stepper, a flim-flam man. How exquisite is her revenge on him for his neglect—had she but the wit to know it. His happiness has melted like foam, as he now realizes, being just so insubstantial. He threw his whole heart into her lap. But she could not know it: that doll’s face, that doll’s heart, a little mechanical device that knows nothing of the dark side of passion, and whose ticking can be quickened only at the sight of simple love in a man’s face, of lovely gowns, at the glitter of ice on the Thames and snowdrops in Hyde Park.
Time to go home.
There is one duty he must perform before he leaves.
To conclude and make an end of this.
For the first time Valentine forces himself to walk through the fish market to the place where Tom died. Until this moment, he could not bear to do so. Now he has fallen so low in that the sense of loss cannot be made worse. It is a needful part of the so-far botched investigation to examine the scene of the crime. He has been absurdly neglectful in not doing so before. To make it more bearable he chooses to go there not in the dead of night, as Tom did, but in the bustling hours of the morning.
The promised storm has not delivered its relief.
Instead it is another azure day, pleasant and charming in inverse proportion to his spirits. The sky is dotted with just enough clouds to charge the heart of a landscape painter with delight. Gondolas are furrowing the grass-green water, on which the sunlight crackles like toffee.
He is not walking for his recreation, he reminds himself. To help him concentrate, he has hung Tom’s satchel over his shoulder a light but painful weight. At the last minute he had rifled the cupboard for the silk chemise and pushed it inside the satchel.
He sets off across Campo San Silvestro, turns left down Calle del Stivaleto, and right, left again. Before he even sees the market, the sudden reek of fish makes him blink, not just for its own salty pungency but because of the phrase he cannot forget.
Valentine has reached the glistening trays of the market. It is an unbearable thought, but it flickers in his mind at the sight of each different fish, each cod, each barbel, each crab, each eel.
Was it this one?
His back is rigid with the misery of it all. He walks stiffly to the bridge at the Riva de l’Ogio and leans over its parapet to the concealed corner beneath where he knows Tom’s body was found.
And he recoils, for there lies below him just one limp mackerel, its belly unseamed and its viscera taken by a gull. His eyes skitter away from the fish. He forces himself to examine the pale stone on which it lies, all the while afraid to see anything that might remind him too accurately of Tom.
But he cannot face it. His whole body cries out for flight.
And he’s breathing fish, slipping on fish scales, tormented by the dead mackerel. The shouts of the fishermen make him tremble. They are loud and, it seems, violent. Even the screaming colors of the fruit are hurting his feelings. He feels his heels pursued by the wheels of the fishermen’s carts. The satchel slaps against his hip and a foam of lace spills out of a corner of it.
The reflections in the water have stolen a fierce red from a wall at one side. It looks as if blood is still pulsing into the canal.
It’s more than a body can bear.
Yet he cannot help gazing at the stone pavement by the canal, and it’s impossible not to see Tom’s form there, especially now that he has a real Bankside memory of that coffined corpse, flowering with blood at the heart, to superimpose over the damp, blank stone he sees now. Dimly, and for the first time
, he recalls that there were no wounds to the front of the chest.
So why should Tom bleed from his heart?
It is too much for him. Valentine stumbles away, unilluminated. He almost runs back to his apartments, where he approaches the window and fixes his nose, hoping to see the lovers. They have vanished and their room is, for the first time, ruffled and untouched, as if they had never existed.
He is on his way back to London within the day.
Valentine Greatrakes, on the gondola to Mestre, turns his head back for a moment to see the towers of Venice rising behind him, sharp and black against the boiling colors of the sunset. The next moment evening wraps the town conclusively in mist, as if hiding a malign surprise. In this tricksy light he feels unsafe, and stubs his fingers against his windpipe. He senses that the city is truly empty of Mimosina Dolcezza, but he cannot renounce the idea that she is something of it. In London he has the means for more detailed inquiries, both about her and about Tom.
Anyway, he has left Pevenche alone for far too long.
“Small notice of poor me,” her usual phrase for neglect, is one that now rings in his ears. Strange, surpassingly strange, that he has not heard from her these past weeks. Only one communication, that arrived in Venice just the day after he did, and that a poignant little note of just seven words. They are easy to remember, like any matter inscribed on a flinching conscience. Pevenche had written just this, and not even signed it:
“No inquiring after poor me at all.”
Part Five
An Hysteric Julep
Take Waters of Black Cherries, Mugwort, Pennyroyal, each 3 ounces; of Bryony compound 1 ounce and a half; Tincture of Castor half an ounce; Oil of Amber (ground very well together with white Sugar, 1 ounce) 24 drops, mix.
This and other fetid Medicines, take off Hysteric Fits, by handling the Spirits roughly, and driving and dispersing ’em … the best Course is, to send such a stern Remedy among them, as may use severe Discipline, and lash and scourge them till they are glad to leave their Disorders, and run to their proper Posts, and fall to their Charge again. But this Medicine is not equally agreeable to all, for we meet with some, in whom Oil of Amber raises such abominable fetid Belching, and makes them so sick, that they cannot possibly put it away.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 22
