The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

by Michelle Lovric

  The Dottore also had a vermifuge for those with carious teeth, popularly believed to be the work of the dread tooth-’worm. For these demonstrations we sat up late the night before, trimming tiny curls of paper and dyeing them in beet-juice. These the Dottore inserted under his ample fingernails before our performance. In front of the crowd he dipped his fingers in the blue bottle, as reverently as if he baptized them in holy water, and then commenced some excavations inside my mouth. Fortunately, in this case, it was important to demonstrate the ease of use, so in a few moments he desisted, and I spat out into a bowl a large number of apparently bloody morsels, looking for all the world like worms in a state of rigor mortis brought on by our nostrum. As a sideline, Dottore Velena always accompanied the tooth-worm extraction with the offer of fine sets of agate teeth imported directly from Italy, ready-made to be worn in the manner of the famously attractive Lord Hervey of Bristol.

  Other times Dottore Velena treated me to beauty-cures. I was obliged to make my entrance covered in hairy moles (of velvet, gummed) and horrid wens (painted) and wrinkles (penciled with coal). Hauling me up on stage, Dottore Velena spoke of the smooth beauty of foreign women, compared to those in England, whose natural good looks were blighted by such disfigurements as mine.

  “See this old lady, ruined in the visage by God alone knows what kind of life! Poor soul, how her sufferings are written on this wizened face!”

  He bent down to me kindly. “And are your grandchildren equally deformed?” he asked, “or are you the grandmaternal brute of a lovely family?”

  At this I burst into loud wailings and neighings, prompting him to add, nastily, “In my native Venice, beauty is of course compulsory. How you would faint and fall to your knees to see the loveliness of even our humble womenfolk. And they all appear of one age—that of perfect ripeness, but here in England, look a horse in the mouth and a woman in the face, and you presently know their ages to a year. You, my dear, are easy to read at seventy-nine and three-quarters.”

  I hung my head, protesting with thrashing arms.

  “What do the Italian women have over their English sisters? A simple remedy, when all is told!”

  And yet again the blue bottle was prepared, a napkin anointed with it, and my face turbaned up in that cloth for five minutes while Dottore Velena extemporized on the magic taking place within.

  In this case the bottle contained a warm solution of soap and water, which dissolved all my blemishes forthwith.

  When I was unwrapped, and my glowing, youthful complexion revealed, Dottore Velena would ask me softly, “And may I be so bold as to inquire your true age, my dear?”

  “I am fifty-five,” I answered sweetly, in the soft tones of a twenty-year-old, but loudly enough to make myself heard above the women clamoring for their bottles, and the soothing sound of Dottore Velena making his final pitch: “And it will be of greatest help to those of you, like the Irishwomen, who are afflicted in the limbs, having received a dispensation from the Pope to wear the thick part of their legs on the downward end. A nipperkin of this and you’ll be on the arm of the finest man at any party.”

  I was busy, and I was never alone. These two things conspired to prevent me from fully absorbing the shock of the new information I had received about my lover.

  It was a cruel blow and I could not resist thinking on it in all my free hours. Thinking only made it feel worse.

  I had wanted to take him at face value. It had been so alluring to do so. I now felt nostalgic for my previous state of happy ignorance. I was angry with myself, too. I should have realized that he could not be true. Stupidly, I had thought him a gentleman like Stintleigh. I had believed his money aristocratically unearned. Now I was to understand that he labored like a chimney-sweep when the occasion required. In my darkest moments, I imagined him spitting on crudely printed labels to stick them to the bottles of nostrums he peddled via quacks like Dottore Velena.

  And all the time I was uncovering yet more horrors about Valentine Greatrakes and his business, for his was a household name around Bankside. This meant that I soon discovered one more thing: It was gossiped everywhere that his errand on the Continent was likely to keep him away for some time, being of a nature to cause all his cohorts to chuckle with secretive glee, though without breathing a word as to its style. We heard at the Anchor that nothing would prize a word from Greatrakes’ men, not beer, not money, not the tickling of whores. There was not a man among them who would risk losing the favor of his chief.

  So I felt secure, though I still averted my face when we jolted down Stoney Street to the Anchor. Who knew when Dizzom might appear from between those stalwart gates?

  One day, as we passed the depository, Dottore Velena nudged my rib, saying: “Lord knows what keeps the great man away. It’s been weeks. Most unusual. Many’s the Bankside maiden sighing for the empty bed of Valentine Greatrakes.”

  Knowing now that “maiden” meant prostitute in this part of town, I smouldered with outrage. So he was the kind of man who consorted with Southwark prostitutes then? I had seen them lined up along the streets like tawdry dolls on a shop shelf. I was learning, slowly and painfully, to tolerate the thought of his running a superior brothel, or better still, an empire of brothels, for the golden gain of it, but the thought of him actually engaged in sentimental rapports with the street-whores suffered to tatter still further my vision of him as a kind of gentleman, who, if he must, visited the discreet and luxurious bagnios in the exclusive parts of town. I discarded my notion of him as a man of pure habits whose great love for me had comprised some natural elements of lust. I now saw him as another kind of pig who romped disgustingly. I had moments of ludicrous indignation, thinking that not even my employers had sent me into the arms of a creature as low as Valentine Greatrakes. Dukes, princes, politicians, great ladies of unusual persuasions even, but not dubious businessmen from the wrong side of the river! A lowly maggot who had ripened into a notable criminal! This was abundantly worse than a gentleman who had fallen on hard times.

  “Come now, lassie, don’t be blushing like that!” teased Dottore Velena. “What are you remembering?” Today my face was unfortunately naked of paint, for I had elected to be a “Madwoman Afflicted with the Tremens and Possession by Devils and All Their Kin.” I was to impersonate one of the poor mad rabbit-pullers of the Bankside furriers. These girls frequently lost their wits to the corrosive chemicals of their trade. The Dottore himself had thoughtfully sewn a little rabbit scut to the back of my dress, to remind the customers of my supposed profession.

  Another thought occurred to me. “You mean he sleeps there! In that warehouse?” I asked.

  “Valentine Greatrakes, my dear? He sleeps above the shop, like any good trader.”

  I thought of the vileness of Stoney Street by night, lit with globe lamps that burned on stinking whale oil. These humble half-timbered shops were the view from his bedroom window! I thought of the sumptuous rooms where he had taken me, in Bond Street, furnished to the highest taste, looking over white stucco and a miniature park, all kempt and elegant. I had believed it to be his ancestral town house! The Turkey carpets and immaculate wainscoting, the marquisite curtains, the down bed with soft blankets and fine linen, all these must have been bought for a guinea a time.

  Of course, at the time I had never asked, and I had never even thought to search the drawers or check the wardrobes, so busy was I swooning with foolish calf-love for this arrant trickster. So he had hired those echoing halls by the night, and it was not lost on me that he had more frequently insisted on conducting our romance in my rooms, which had cost him nothing.

  I exposed myself to the possibility of one more horrible revelation.

  “So are you acquainted with Greatrakes, then?” I asked my colleague. “I mean on a personal basis?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that. It’s not completely safe to be so acquainted with him. Things have happened. Never ye mind what. But yes, I’ve been introduced on a scant few occasions. Not that hi
s Greatrakeship’d remember, him being so very occupied on so many things.”

  “And how does he speak?” I asked.

  “My and aren’t you the little cat who is asking for a drowning today? He’s a man to charm you into tomorrow. If ye lost all your family in the morning and met him in the afternoon, ye’d be laughing by teatime.”

  “But his accent!” I persisted. “Is it that of a gentleman?”

  Dottore Velena laughed uproariously “She wants to know if he’s a gentleman, does she? Valentine Greatrakes? I would say that he talks like the sarf Lunnun crook he is, my dear girl. With a great many fancy words thrown in, for the show of them. But one of us’d know him anywhere. And the real toffs would have nothing to do with him.”

  I had not so much need to call on my acting skills when it came to throwing a violent tantrum on the stage a few minutes later.

  • 6 •

  A Paste for Aphthae

  Take new Butter, just out of the Churn, unsalted (and washed in Rosewater) 1 ounce and a half; Liquorice powder 1 dram and a half; white Sugar candy powdered, and passed through a Searce, as much as serves to make it up like a Paste, mix.

  Let a little Pellet of this be put into the Mouth to dissolve by degrees; it’s good against the Thrush, parchedness. Heat, and roughness of the Tongue, foulness in the Mouth and Throat, wheezing and painful Breathing. It may also be put up the Nose when stopped and sore.

  Soon I had changed so much that I doubted if a returning Valentine Greatrakes would know me, even had he stood in my immediate proximity. Scorning the scorched roasts of the Anchor, and saving hard, I grew lean on a diet of over-stewed herbs in thin, heartless broths that the Zany stirred up in the grate at our digs.

  “You’re a woman. Why can’t you cook?” he mumbled indignantly “What sort of broughting up did you have?”

  Again the truth protected me. I answered: “I am a noblewoman, reared delicately I have never been inside a kitchen. Except in a convent and then just to look.”

  And the Zany was obliged to he on the floor and hold his belly till his violent pangs of mirth subsided. Between his howls of merriment I distinguished odd phrases: “Reared on the hind teat of a donkey, more like” and “Fell orf the back of a tinker’s cart and weren’t missed.”

  But after this exchange I would have to own that he showed me less stinging acrimony. So long as I put on no “lawdydaw” airs, and refrained from “moping around like a duck in thunder,” he accepted me. I had proved myself a distinguished liar, and that made me a worthy colleague in his eyes.

  I blended with my new peers, quickly becoming unobtrusive. My adopted profession called on me to resemble a woman of the streets, not a goddess of the stage. I was working nearly all the time, and soon I came to dress without a second thought in my costume of a gray dress and white apron.

  Very occasionally I opened my trunk and looked at the black silk dress of my escape, now laundered and carefully folded with lavender sprigs between its layers, and the one cerise satin, the butterfly dress, and sundry other pretty garments that I had lifted in and out of carriages all the way across Europe. When I gazed at this finery I felt that it belonged to someone else, to some great lady who would shortly arrive in a flounce of white mares and bear it away.

  I never sought more eligible accommodation. I decided that I found our eccentric rooms picturesque; I rose above the dirt by not looking at it, and learned to squeeze my nose as I passed the necessary vault at the bottom of the staircase. I even appreciated that primitive luxury, for having descended the social scale at a plummeting rate, I was surprised to find that I was nowhere near the bottom of it. Within a few weeks I knew that I was one of the lucky ones in London, where twenty thousand souls awoke each morning, leaving verminous twopenny beds cluttered like larvae on garret floors, not knowing if they would eat that day or where they would lay their heads at the end of it. This whole class of unfortunates had bypassed me in Venice. Here in Bankside I rubbed shoulders with them daily, saw the little, doomed, scald-headed men and women shuffling about the business of mere subsistence.

  I came to know every cranny of Bankside, all its glassworks, its breweries and gin shops. The latter made up fully one-sixth of the local businesses. I was shocked by the degree of drunkenness in this part of town, something I had never glimpsed in salubrious Soho Square. Men, women, and even tiny children were to be found stretched out unconscious on bales of straw inside and outside the London Bridge gin shops. Dottore Velena liked to pull up near them, for those in the early stages of intoxication, or those waking with all the parched ills of over-imbibing, were our best and most gullible customers, particularly for Aphthae pastes.

  At first I wondered why the people of Bankside spent their hard-won pennies on Dottore Velena’s spurious potions rather than go to Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals, so conveniently situated on their doorsteps. Men who earned fifteen shillings a week were prepared to lay out a guinea on our liquid nonsense. Laundresses and rabbit-pullers spent their pittances on our cheats.

  Once I would have disdained their idiocy just as I had mocked the contadini who fell for the blandishments of the charlatans on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice. Now I looked on them with pity, on the braziers gone deaf and gibbous from their crooked working posture, the coppersmiths stained green from poisonous steams, the mirror-makers grown cadaverous from the mercury, hairdressers and chimney-sweeps crippled with pulmonic diseases, the confectioners dropsical from too much strong heat.

  Surely, I asked my companions, the St. Thomas Apothecary would answer better to their needs?

  The Zany tersely explained: “They won’t go there. If they goes into tha ’ospital, then tha have to give up a deposit for their burial first. And it’s pretty much a sure thing that tha’ll come out in the box they’s already paid for. Anatomized to boot, if tha’re not careful.”

  The poor people had a terror of being dissected by the surgeons, who required a steady supply of corpses for their paying medical students. If a person died in hospital, no one trusted the orderlies not to sell the body.

  The Zany added, “And it’s much the same crock o’fock they’ll be served up in tha ’ospital anyway. The St. Thomas Apothecary swears by Dr. Mead’s recipe for snail water and peacock dung too. The only difference is he bothers with real snails and real duns. Oh and to be sure he separates the white shite from the brown, as only the white is supposed to do yer any good at all, or so tha’ll be having it in the manuals.”

  With this, he heaved a gobbet of saliva at the Dottore’s copy of the Pharmacopoeia Extemporanea, which lay open on a lectern to give confidence to visiting patients. Many of its pages were puddled with similar outbursts from the Zany. This time the Dottore rose from his chair with dignity, lifted the heavy tome, and smashed it down on the Zany’s head. The Zany accepted his punishment without demur.

  Always in a state of near war, the Dottore and his Zany were nevertheless inseparable, as if each mistrusted the other, unsupervised, to find some illicit font of pleasure and gain. Nightly, we infected the less salubrious taverns of the borough with the temper of our irascible party. I remember one evening when Dottore Velena was moved to push the Zany over the balcony of the George into its courtyard, and another when the two men simultaneously spat in one another’s left eye at The Old Pick-my-Toe.

  Squabbling amicably all the way, we went to Peele’s Coffee House in Fetter Lane to read our rivals’ notices in The Gazette, The Times, Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, Morning Herald, and Morning Advertiser. I eavesdropped on the conversations of the coffee-drinkers whom Dottore Velena mysteriously called “men of exceptional parts.” Amidst their braying I never detected one morsel of piquancy in these supposed wits and scholars. And not a soul among them looked up at me, which was exactly what I wanted.

  Sometimes, late at night, the Thames called me down to its banks. In front of the Anchor I several times beheld the sport of the porpoises that occasionally made their way under London Bridge. Seeing the
m, I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia, for they resembled nothing so much as bucking gondolas in a sharp wind on the Grand Canal.

  In the interval during which I had traveled to Venice and back the thaw had dissolved the platform of ice where I had played out such scenes of pain and pleasure with my lover. On those blessed nights everything had been darkly oystered in gentle moonlit mother-of-pearl. Now the moon’s reflection was smashed to pieces and roughly jostled on the hard chop of the liquid river.

  I would return to my friends, hungry for the company, and with an honest appetite for the first time in my life. I loved the nights when we bought little dabs of meat in the Borough Market and roasted them on packthread strings dangling over the fire, turning them with Dottore Velena’s obstetrical forceps and cutting them up into bite-sized portions with his tiny metacarpal bow-frame amputation saw. I do not believe he had ever used these instruments for their intended purposes but they were good props for the consultation room.

  With my two friends, I became an adept at candlelit games of whist, cribbage, putt, and all-fours, sometimes staking my whole week’s earnings on a single game, finding the excitement well covered any losses. When the wind blew from the east, I awoke in the morning to hear the roaring of the lions in the Tower menagerie and smell their gamey scent borne on the same breeze. From under my warm blanket I heard the parish scavengers on their rounds collecting what people had discarded, in order to sell it to such as might find these pickings their heart’s desire.

  In Venice I had been solitary, even in the company of my family or the nuns. Here, I had companions, of a sort. In front of these men I lived shamelessly, undressing down to my shift to sleep or wash myself, eating, picking my teeth. And they behaved likewise with me. I knew all their rituals. Before sleeping, for example, the Zany emptied his pocket of many mysterious objects including a grubby letter, which turned out to be his official document to forfend the press-gangers. When I reached out to touch it, he slapped my hand away: “That cost three sterling, you little hoor, more than you’re worth for a week of hard treatment.”