I had done it! I had arrived in Venice, and I had delivered Pevenche into a safe house. No one had detected me, and no one knew my true identity. I was safe. All I had to do was write my letter to Valentine Greatrakes, keep my head down, and wait. I knew that there was a risk that he might call my bluff, but I preferred not to think about that. I saw only sweet hope in that direction of thought. What I must fear lay all around me in the silent streets of Venice: The eyes and ears of Venetians who might betray me.
The sooner I wrote the letter, the sooner I would be delivered from this danger. But something in me stopped me from writing it. My plan had worked perfectly until now, but I still lacked the confidence to use my own words to ask for what I wanted. And so I prevaricated, never even setting pen to paper. Each day for a fortnight I sat at my little desk, dipped the quill in the ink, and turned to stone. Eventually, when the darkness made the streets less perilous, I stole out and foraged for some food.
I walked to Zattere, and listened to the water chanting. For hours, I stood there, sniffing the salt and watching the lights extinguish on Giudecca, until the island lay nakedly dark, crooked as a gibbon’s arm flung round the promontory of Dorsoduro.
Then I went back to my desk, and did not write the letter.
I drank a little gin, and then a little more.
• 13 •
A Cordial Caudle
Take sweet Almonds beaten in a Mortar 12; Yolks of Eggs 2; Conserve of red Roses and Gilly Flowers, each 1 ounce; Aqua Coelestis half an ounce; Canary Wine, Damask Rose Water, each half a pint; work them about well together, then strain and add confection of Alkerms 2 drams; Oil of Cinnamon 2 drops.
It greatly Nourisheth, Recruiteth and Reviveth the Spirits.
Meanwhile the strangest thing was happening with Pevenche.
Instead of screaming and fighting, instead of sulking, instead of threatening, she settled calmly into life at the convent.
I did not at first go to visit her. I wished neither to witness the histrionics nor to hear her lamentations. I had endured enough of her voice and her dull repertoire of self-pity on our journey. I hoped that the nuns would be generous with the bottles I had left, for their own sakes. Dottore Velena’s opiate was sweet enough to please Pevenche and I knew that the nuns would have no trouble administering it. In fact, they would probably have to ration it.
But I received reports from the nuns, and they were good.
After a scant hour of repinings and tears she had asked to be let out of her cell so that she might dine with her companions. The next day she made a hearty breakfast and later a substantial luncheon. In the afternoon she had remarked on the beautiful smell of almond cakes and asked to see the kitchens where they were made. There she had been fascinated by the sight of nuns measuring flour and butter, and stirring powdered almonds into marzipan paste.
The following morning she asked if she might be able to try making the marzipan herself, and within three days she was working with the most accomplished bakers in the kitchen. She proved to have a good touch with all sugared dishes, and her productions were of high quality, her only fault being a tendency to over-sweeten.
Despite her lack of Italian, the other nuns found her a very acceptable companion, and in her way, she was popular among them. They even admired her. The appalling red of her hair, universally despised in London as a fashion item, was optimistically seen as approaching the gorgeous tint of Titian’s painted tresses in Venice. Her foreignness and the expensive cut of her clothes meant that she was not classified as a Venetian girl would have been. No one knew her bloodline: Golden Book, borghese or peasant. No one countenanced the idea that society might be organized differently outside of Venice. They took her as they found her. She appeared to think very highly of herself, so they did too. Her interest in cooking was viewed as charmingly and cunningly faux-naïve. Her productions were exquisite, and much appreciated. And when she sat at the supper table it was among Cornaros and Mocenigos, the highest-born girls in the convent and those who were most arrant in their pride. The convene jostled to wash her sheets.
She did not ask when she would be released. She occasionally asked for more cream and sugar, because she wished to experiment with recipes of her own. And she was soon hosting cake festivals in the convent laundry, with the noble choir-nuns as guests and the convene serving. In honor of their new sister, the nuns commissioned a ukulele-shaped baking tray for the kitchen, and in it Pevenche produced the most exquisite panpepato flavored not just with ginger and saffron but also with powdered red sandalwood. She even went down to the orchard with the other nuns to decorate the trees with sugared almonds and candied fruits on the days when young girls were due to come and see the convent. Stupid young girls, such as I had been! Pevenche was already a part of the conspiracy, from the powerful end of the operation.
One more extraordinary thing: Pevenche, tone-deaf to French and German, had begun to chatter in Italian and even Venetian. I had not bestirred myself to instruct her in Italian. I had assumed it a hopeless task. But the nuns reported that she was proving an able pupil.
Now I heard that she was a veritable queen bee among her set, and that she had begun to rule the social order with an iron hand. The little world of the nunnery, its febrile politics and coiled-up emotions, clearly suited her. While her Italian was still basic, the lack of nuance was an advantage to her, as she was able to press home her superiority in ways that were adapted to her own special kind of bullying. She had taken under her wing one younger noble girl, spurned by the rest on account of her ill-looks, and had taught this child some ideas about dress. The girl was pathetically grateful, and served Pevenche as if she were a duchess.
Now I had no fears for her being seen or reported to the three magistrates of the provveditori sopra monasteri. No one outside the Order would actually lay eyes on her. Three times a day she lumbered to the suspended choir-stalls and sang lustily with the other nuns—just “la-la-la” to their words of devotion, and she had begun to take her ukulele along with her. I wondered at the effect on the congregation of Sant’Alvise of her harsh voice and the squawking of the disembodied strings floating above their heads.
She even lined up with the other nuns to receive communion through a slit in the curtain over a grille beside the altar.
When I went to visit her at the end of the second week, the first thing I noticed was that she had gained a visible amount of flesh. She came into the room warily, and on seeing me did not stoop to a greeting but quickly assumed her usual attitude of disdain. She left it for me to greet her and try to begin a conversation.
I asked how she did, and she looked out of the window. Humiliated, I repeated the question with the servile formality that she preferred in me: “Your guardian has asked me to inquire as to your condition.” She nodded to acknowledge the question but clearly felt it beneath her to answer such a lowly messenger.
At this point two young nuns burst into the room and Pevenche’s face changed completely. It flowered into a smile, and she even took one of the girls by the hand. Then she pointed to me, and scowled. The little nuns erupted into knowing giggles, and I felt myself aged to ninety years by their cheerful disrespect. With a series of hand gestures, Pevenche indicated that she would not occupy herself long with such a paltry object as myself and the girls tripped out of the room.
Left alone with me, Pevenche seemed less sure of herself. She did not meet my eye, but looked at the floor. I saw that she was waiting to hear what I had to say. I noticed she was clutching her ukulele against her belly like a ridiculous toy shield.
It seemed too feeble to explain that I had come merely to see how she was. She would mock me for that pathetic weakness. I envisioned her laughing about it with her new friends. So I said merely, with as much menace as I could convey: “Now I have seen you are alive, you may go.”
She left without a word, moving faster than I had ever seen her, ducking her fat neck down in a poor approximation of humility In her rush she dropped the uk
ulele on the floor, where it issued a more musical complaint than her fingers had ever sent forth from it. She started at the noise but did not stop to retrieve the instrument as she fled. Thoughtfully, I picked it up, thinking it might be useful, marveling at her panic.
I suddenly realized that what she feared was that I would take her away from there. The irony had not escaped me that the girl was insensible of every service I had done for her except this one—to leave her at Sant’Alvise, the single action of mine that, in my own opinion, fully amounted to a crime against her.
Pevenche seemed altered, not just by her extra weight and evident felicity. She seemed somehow more handsome, or at least less wholly unprepossessing. You could almost see a shadow of beauty in her when she smiled at her young companions.
This gentle thought was immediately electrified by a wild conjecture that came bustling into my tired brain and which I was helpless to repel: that Valentine Greatrakes’s devotion to Pevenche could be explained by the fact that he was truly her father. The improvement in Pevenche seemed to make her resemble the person I thought most attractive in this world.
Surely he would still come to me, if only to fetch his child back.
• 14 •
An Hysteric Nodule
Take Asafoetida half a dram; Castor, Camphire, each 1 scruple; Oil of Amber half a scruple; mix, and tie up in a rag or piece of Silk.
Being often held to the Nose, it helps Vapours and Fits, for it represses the raging Spirits, drives them back from their wild excursions and exorbitancies; forces them into order, and hinders ’em from running into Tumults and Convulsive Explosions.
In the end, the letter, so long stopped up inside me, poured out in a rush. I had meant to draft it point by point, explaining as briefly as possible why he must meet with me and a priest and marry me immediately. I had meant to be cool. I had meant to spell out the fact that this was a marriage of convenience only to rid me of certain encumbrances in Venice, and that while I regretted causing him worry over Pevenche, it had been necessary to achieve my ends. I had meant to preserve a delicate balance: a stiffened tone of injury underlaid with inescapable tenderness. My ultimate aim was to make him feel guilty for forcing me to such lengths, not having the greatness of heart simply to take me to himself and marry me all those weeks ago, when the time was ripe and our love perfect.
I wrote no such thing. I wrote of how I had suffered for his absence, about how I longed to be in his arms again. I reminisced about our brief time in London, deliberately using words that had been currency between us then: terms of endearment, jokes, phrases that still gave off a faint perfume of certain unforgettable moments. I candidly admitted to feelings for him that I had never experienced before. I told him how I had returned to London and sought him out, though incognita. I explained, as delicately as I could, that I knew all about his business now, and that I forgave him his deception—as he would surely forgive mine—because everything each of us had done was to one end, which was to find one another again. Subtly, I reminded him of his heroism at the frost fair. Now, I explained, I had dire need of a heroic rescue, for I faced perils too dangerous to explain in a letter.
When the letter was done, I folded it quickly. I did not want to reread it. I wanted to trust my instincts, not treat them to a surgical examination. I hoped the letter would have the same effect upon the instincts of Valentine Greatrakes.
But how to deliver the letter? There was no one I trusted here, except perhaps the nuns at Sant’Alvise, and they had no reason to be sending couriers to London. If I sent it via a Venetian messenger, he would be questioned at every customs house and how long before the letter was opened and its contents fed back to the wrong people in Venice?
It was Pevenche’s new profession as pasticciera that gave me my idea. The convent of Sant’Alvise was famous for its marzipan cakes, so famous that even well-informed foreign tourists in Venice sent orders to the bakery. For many years the nuns had produced their own paper boxes decorated with a woodcut of their convent and a smiling angel rising above it. In these boxes they placed twenty-four of their little cakes between delicate sheaves of scented rice paper, cakes so delicious that people were known to consume the entire contents in a single sitting.
Now I asked myself: Would it be so strange that an English gentleman, a frequent visitor to Venice, might conceive a craving for those unparalleled delicacies he had tasted in the city, particularly when back in London and forced to wean himself back to the unfortunate local cuisine? Might he then not send for a box of his favorite sweetmeats to console his saddened palate?
So on one of my visits to Pevenche, I begged a box of cakes from the nuns and took it back to my rooms. They had been happy to give it to me, patting my pregnancy apron, “for the little one, too, of course.” They also pressed on me a can of creamy milk. I carefully lifted the cakes and lined the lower part of the box with my letter. The cakes smelled so good that it was hard to put them all back. Too hard for me. I had eaten four before I knew it. They made me thirsty. I drained the can of milk. Then, disliking its maternal taste, I took a little gin.
I restacked the sheets of lining paper interleaved with cakes and sealed the box. I then packed it in a stout pouch of parchment loosely tied with twine and labeled with the address of Valentine Greatrakes at the depository in Bankside. What a tug of nostalgia I felt, merely writing that name, not just for my lover and our happy time together but even for my eccentric adventure with Dottore Velena and the snug company of that room at the Feathers. I sipped a little more gin, raising my glass in a silent toast to my old colleagues.
In my mind, eye, and ear, the Zany lifted a tankard, saying “Here’s to a Glimmering of our Gizzards” as I had seen him do so many times before. I smiled fondly at the memory.
I surveyed my work. There was nothing exceptional about this packet. People dispatched such gifts from Venice all the time. The parcel begged: “Open me, if you must! I am, however, innocent.”
In the sending, the normality of the package was proclaimed by the fact that everyone in Venice knew the boxes from Sant’Alvise. But in receipt the situation would be different. Valentine Greatrakes had no great sweet tooth. He had balked at my jellies and compotes and egg creams, preferring a haunch of beef boiled till the flesh dripped off the bone. He drank beer to my chocolate. His Venetian trade was in stronger substances than little marzipan cakes—he would not have come across the Sant’Alvise delicacies. Or so I hoped.
In my hopeful imaginings the parcel arrived at Bankside and was opened by Dizzom, who would be alert to the mystery of its provision and understand the importance of the contents. He would find the letter and pass it on to his employer, and soon my lover would come to Venice and all would be resolved and made happy again.
I had only to keep myself safe and discreet in the meantime.
And to somehow survive. After paying off the nuns at Sant’Alvise, I was down to my last fifty lira. Thinking fifty days the maximum time before my rescue I mentally divided the sum into fifty parts. One lira being twenty Venetian soldi, I now put myself on a regime of almost poetic frugality. I had already renounced every luxury. I had, of course, long since learned to live without perfume. (I had economized even on the ink, buying an anonymous bottle of powder to mix from a stationer’s in Cannaregio, instead of expensive liquid ink. Perhaps I diluted it too much, for it wrote palely, and dried paler, but I told myself it would endure its short journey without further impairment.)
I had eight soldi each day to spend on my bed—a tiny room above a tavern, five for a cup of coffee each morning, and seven to eat. I lived on bread and black olives, which made me thirsty enough to drink the brackish water instead of craving something more expensive. I rationed myself to one small glass of gin per day, and not merely for economic motives.
On this meagre diet, my stomach was constantly fermenting acid glandular juices and ironically I suffered as if with the early symptoms of pregnancy, including a severe wind colic that distended my b
elly and pushed out the profile of my pregnancy apron. On my retrenched expenses I could not afford any palliative drugs, but only an extra ration of gin, to soothe the pain.
And there was only gin to warm me against the bora wind that now hauled all the bitter cold of the Russias down to Venice. When you are poor and ill-fed, I realized now, the wind hunts you down alleys and disrespectfully lifts your too-light skirts in ways in which it never victimizes the rich in their heavy velvets.
It was fortunate that the Carnevale still raged in the city I was able to walk about in my mask without anyone looking at me curiously Even pregnant women went masked in this season. I did not draw attention to myself. My apparent state even ensured me indulgent extra titbits on my plate. It was thanks to these that I survived.
Despite the dangers of it, I had need to leave my lodgings every day and go to the place appointed for my rendezvous with my lover. I did not know when he would receive my letter and when he would respond to it. For obvious reasons I had not given him an address at which to write to me directly.
There was always the risk that the letter might have fallen into the wrong hands, and for this reason I could not even be specific about the place of our meeting. I had embodied it in a subtle riddle, a reference to something that only he would decipher. I had decided to make use of his memory of the night when he believed he had found a bat in my bed, a feathered bat that was only my hairpin.
“I shall be waiting for you,” I had written, “at the place that takes its name from the thing that so falsely frightened you. I shall attend it each day at four, until you come to me.”
Thinking of my dulled hair and the pregnant disguise, I added: “You will find me changed, except in the part that loves you.” I hoped he would understand the hint.
I had reason to think that he would easily remember the apothecary known as the Black Bat in Santa Croce. I knew that it was the source of some of the most expensive Venetian nostrums. The day I saw the doors yawn open at the Bankside depository, I had glimpsed the shelves devoted to preparations from the Black Bat, and even a replica of the shop sign. I told myself it was not possible that my lover should fail to make the connections.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 31
