At the Calle del Cinque, my Pa frowns, puts the paper back in the pouch, and moves uncertainly to his right, stops again.
She seems to know exactly where he is going. She no longer needs to shadow him but instead trails him obscurely, in parallel lines and circles that meet with his.
So while he crosses the Campo San Giacomo, she turns down the orange-scented path of the Naranzaria and runs along the Sotoportego de l’Erbaria. And when he paces through the Casaria, sniffing the remnants of the day’s trading in cheese and oils, she slips along the Fabbriche Nove, and waits at the edge of the Campo de la Pescaria until he has passed into the shadows beyond it. Then she crosses his wake into the Calle de la Donzela, turns right into the Ruga dei Spezieri and right again into the Calle de la Becarie. She makes her way along the façades of the bread shops until they no longer provide protection. She pauses in the shadows, her quarry again in sight. Now he is mounting the steps of the bridge that leads to the Fondamenta de l’Ogio. When he reaches the peak of its humpback, he descends and disappears. She counts off his footsteps on the fingers of her hands.
At this point she darts across the street and hides herself behind the wall at the foot of the bridge, facing the deserted Ca’ Rampani, first ascertaining that the Poste Vecie tavern has bedded down for the night. She flinches when she sees that smoke still belches from its funnel-shaped chimneys, but the lamps, voices, and music are all long extinguished. She turns her back on the Poste Vecie, crouches down and appears to be listening intently.
A footstep can be heard from the other side of the bridge. My mother counts under her breath. One, two, three… at sixteen she pauses, and my Pa’s full silhouette is visible at the top of the bridge. He is squinting at his piece of paper and back again at the Ca’ Rampani. He looks confused. He swivels round and starts to walk down the steps back in the direction of the market. Again my mother counts, under her breath. When she reaches “eleven” she surges up blindly from her hiding place. She is standing a breath away, behind him.
Then she is upon him; the ice raised and falling like a bird of prey.
When he turns back to see her, he does not scream or even raise his voice. He smiles weakly, foolishly, as if he understands that all this is his own fault, or perhaps in one last attempt to ingratiate himself.
He is twice her size, a huge man, but her first quick blow has punctured his neck and the blood pulses out from between the fingers he clutches to it.
He raises one hand up to the moonlight to look at the black ribbons of blood that lace his fingers. Then he looks at her and at the dark-tipped weapon that has wounded him. He raises an eyebrow: This is to show that the ice knife has impressed him, both in concept and execution. He would have been proud to be the author of its invention, a murder weapon that shall never be produced in evidence against the murderer. He acknowledges it as a righteous tool of his own trade.
She has drawn back and watches him.
He is suddenly very tired, not just from the wound but from the past days of lovemaking and perhaps also from the weight, suddenly thrust upon him again, of all that passed between them sixteen years before. It is as if he cannot bring himself to enter into one more conflict with her, not even to remonstrate or beg for mercy. He does not even tell her about me.
He sinks to the ground, rolls and rolls with effort until he is lying on his back. In doing so he has involuntarily wedged himself behind the balustrade of the bridge in the far corner of the Campo de la Pescaria among the refuse of fruit and fish merchants who have purified their shops for the holy day. She crouches over him and looks up again quickly to ascertain that neither of them can be seen now, not even if some unlikely passer-by should enter the deserted quarter of the market.
Clutching the ice dagger, she looks down into his face. She pulls aside the lapel of his frock coat, strips open his shirt and deftly inserts the dripping ice into a space between his ribs, and then pushes it slowly in until it disappears from her fingers and the flesh closes. He gasps and swallows. His eyes do not leave her face.
Then, while he lies quietly, in an apparent effort to slow the progress of the ice dagger through his flesh, she pulls the leather pouch from under his arm, takes up the note that has fallen from his hands and lies soaking up his blood. She shakes the liquid from it and slides it back inside his goatskin pouch.
The man cannot move. Yet with his eyes he lets her know that he appreciates the cleverness of this false clue, which will lead any investigation down a blind alley.
I will never be avenged now, his eyes tell her. You have been too brilliant. They will not discover you.
A small moan escapes from him as the icicle plunges deeper through the forks of his body.
Surely this is enough, ask his eyes, now gaunt in their sockets. You have killed me with coldness. I see what you mean.
But no, while he still lives, she has more metaphors to lay out on him.
It is Saturday night, the leavings of the fruit market lie stewing with the fish offal. Peel, bone, shell, and fish flesh mingle, picked over by the rats. She rakes through the mound of rubbish and throws the first handfuls over his body, pausing to read the dawning understanding on his contorted face.
She nods, Yes, it is as you fear.
He does not cry out for help. He does not grovel or make his excuses. He does not request her forgiveness. After all, she has just extracted the apology of her choice.
Now she works fast, covering him entirely in the stinking detritus, leaving his face till last.
From time to time she checks that he still breathes. When she ascertains that he does, she nods.
When his body is entirely buried, she picks through the mound with discriminating fingers, gathering a diverse tribe of objects in her lap.
She checks him again for signs of life. Finding them still apparent, she bends over his face.
First she plugs his nostrils with cod bones still garlanded with soft offal. Then she stops up his ears with rotting octopus, pushing the tentacles in with her little finger until he grunts an acknowledgement of his pain. Lastly she places the carcass of a large rat-gnawed crab over his mouth, driving it inside his lips with a sudden blow so sharp that a fine spray of blood bursts from his face. And then she backs away a little, looking at him intently. The crab rises and falls with his breath, but diminishingly She wrenches it out, and replaces it with a fish, so the tail protrudes stiffly from his lips.
Now he can never tell her about me.
Historical Notes
London and Venice, Winter 1785/6
QUACKERY
All the major characters in this novel are invented, although some of their names are borrowed or adapted from historical sources, several from the colorful world of quackery. There was a real Valentine Greatrakes: a famous, ringleted late-seventeenth-century Irish “stroke,” a healer who was reputed to cure scrofula merely by the laying on of hands. Pervenche was the name of the heroine in one of the moral fairy tales written in the late nineteenth century as a selling aid for the cocaine-based “restorative,” Vin Mariani.
“Tabby Runt” was the maid in Christopher Anstey’s New Bath Guide, 1766, the story of a family visiting the city. The unfortunate Tabby is treated by the famous doctor Sir John Hill:
He gives little Tabby a great many Doses
For he says the poor creature has got the chlorosis.
Or a ravenous pica, so brought on the vapors
By swallowing Stuff she has read in the papers…
The majority of recipes for medicines that begin the chapters come from the Pharmacopoeia Extemporanea compiled by Thomas Fuller in 1710.
The Zany’s song is based on The Infallible Mountebank, a popular broadside printed at Blackfriars.
There really was a London dental quack who drove a white pony painted with purple spots and brandished a female femur: “Dr.” Martin van Butchell also kept his first wife’s body embalmed in his parlor until the advent of a second Mrs. van Butchell. The recipe for embalmin
g Mrs. Butchell is the one I have used for Tom’s corpse.
“Doctor” James Graham did indeed set up his Temple of Health and Hymen in Adelphi Terrace in 1779, a little late for Pevenche’s conception, even if it had happened there. His “Celestial Bed” may in fact have been charged with electricity to produce tickling sensations in the occupants. Graham preached that the human ovum was fertilized by electrical currents, which are naturally generated by the friction of the sexual act. Graham was assisted in his ministrations by a beauteous “Goddess of Health and Hymen.” Several sources have since claimed that this “Vestina” was the artist’s model who would one day become the notorious Lady Emma Hamilton. So popular was the Temple of Hymen that nine hundred people were turned away on the first three nights of its opening, but by 1784 its attractions had waned and it was closed down by Graham’s creditors.
Most quacks produced elaborate handbills of the kind described in this novel, especially after 1762 when the hanging of street signs, once a dangerous feature of London’s windswept streets, was banned.
As the scholar David Gentilcuore has remarked, it was a safety measure for the quacks to advertise the application of their nostrums to dozens of different illnesses: Someone who bought the medicine was sure to get better.
The symptoms that cause Mimosina to be sure that she had conceived a son are based on popular wisdom prevalent in Italy from medieval times. Such advice was frequently published in marriage manuals.
LONDON
Valentine Greatrakes’s rant against unjust duties reflects Adam Smith’s writings on the same subject. Between 1775 and 1785 the American War of Independence was raging, and the state justified the plethora of duties—more than four thousand of them—by citing the war effort.
The “free-trading” activities of Valentine Greatrakes would not have faced much opposition from the law. Watermen and smugglers, in league with corrupt watchmen, were seldom troubled by the forces of order until the establishment of the Thames Police in 1798.
One of several great frost fairs was held on the Thames in 1789. when the incident of the City of Moscow breaking away from the shore occurred. I have set it a few years earlier, however. The year 1785 also saw a severe winter, with one hundred and fifteen days of frost.
The Venetian theater troupe that brings Mimosina Dolcezza to London is invented, though Italian companies did go there, the first appearing in 1726. Italian theater was a taste that Londoners only gradually acquired: The slapstick and tickle style of the commedia dell’arte at first received much censure. Individual Italian performers, however, were very popular. Both singers and dancers were engaged by London impresarios and gradually created a demand for Italian light opera.
The entertainments to which Valentine Greatrakes treats Pevenche were all available in London around that time, except for Signor Cappelli’s Gats, who were not to be seen until 1832. I have also taken a liberty with Vauxhall—the gardens were normally open only in the summer months.
The London Bridge of today little resembles the one of this story. The famous “falling-down” buildings upon it had already been demolished between 1757 and 1761. The huge railway arches which dominate Stoney Street and the Borough Market today would not be constructed until the 1830s.
In the 1780s, Bankside’s Stoney Street was a picturesque road of half-timbered buildings. At the northern end an archway led through to Clink Street and straight to St. Mary Overie’s Stairs at the edge of the Thames. Now the blue building known as Little Winchester Wharf, built around 1816, blocks the river from sight. Fifty yards to the east one can still see the remnants of St. Mary Overie Dock. These days it shelters a reproduction of Drake’s Golden Hinde, but in the eighteenth century the dock must have been crowded and noisy, for it served as the main landing point for the malt, hay, fuel, and other necessities for the key local industry of brewing. In Clink Street the notable tavern was the Bell, a haunt of watermen, smugglers, and press-gangs ready to prey on the likes of Smollett’s eponymous hero Roderick Random. It was also a warehouse for saltpetre. The street was cobbled, as it is today but then it was lined with the establishments of millers, lightermen, coal, wood, and ivory merchants.
At the west end of the street, in 1785, stood—and still stand—the ruins of the notorious Clink Prison, destroyed when Lord George Gordon’s rioters turned their attention to it in 1780. It never again served as a prison and today is a grim museum with banquet facilities. Just west of the prison is Bank End, site since 1774-1775 of the Anchor Inn, still a popular riverside pub. It is indeed full of concealed and unexpected staircases.
Modern-day Park Street was then known as Deadman’s Place, possibly because of the nearby burial grounds (“Gross Bones”), resting place of many thousands of plague victims from medieval times onwards.
Dr. Sniver’s priapic museum is an invention—such anatomical museums did not flourish until the nineteenth century. My mention of homoeopathic techniques is also somewhat in anticipation of their development.
Even as this book was being researched, Bankside was undergoing one of those revolutions that periodically transform the fortunes of inner-city villages. Until a few years ago the area had been condemned as unsavory and dismal: Now the presence of the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Tate Modern art gallery and the renewal of the epicurean Borough Market (which dates from the twelfth century) have quite suddenly conferred upon Bankside a rough kind of glamour, complete with restored lofts, converted railway arches, and café life.
It would be almost unrecognizable to the protagonists of this novel.
VENICE
The old convent of San Zaccaria is now a military zone, the regional headquarters of the Carabinieri. The convent was closed down by Napoleon, as one of his measures to suppress powerful Venetian institutions. It stood disused for some time until the Austrians took it over and transformed it into offices. It was probably then that all traces of the convent’s enclosure were removed. The ruota and parlatorio no longer exist, but from the inside it is still possible for a privileged visitor (with military escort) to see the two cloisters, one by Codussi and one by Gambello, and the beautiful raised loggia just behind the church.
The church too has changed. The interior walls, which were once perforated with the grilles through which the nuns sang and observed the world, are now hung with paintings. But there is still a representation of the nuns, in a painting by Antonio Zonca (1652-1723), that shows the annual visit of the Doge to the convent, among a series of pictures depicting the important events in the life of San Zaccaria. The nuns are shown fresh, plump, and pink-faced behind their grille, interested but not straining to see the outside world; self-contained without needing any other kind of enforced confinement. The abbess has the prime position in the large aperture where two bars, vertical and horizontal, have been removed to make an opening four times the size of the other fifty-two holes.
Nor can the modern visitor to Venice enter the church of S.S. Cosma e Damiano on Giudecca. It is deconsecrated and derelict now, though the façade retains its handsome late renaissance brick and marble. Its former convent, however, has been restored and is used for art exhibitions during the Venice Biennale.
Sant’ Alvise, in contrast, is still a working convent, today inhabited by just twenty-three white-clad sisters of the Canossian order. If “dressed adequately,” a visitor may roam among the echoing corridors of cells and the gardens. The brick cloister is these days enclosed in glass and part of the convent is now run as a school. The atmosphere, peaceful and friendly, is of another world, miles and centuries away from the tourist hub of Venice.
By one of those coincidences that invariably and felicitously befall the historical novelist, quite late in the writing of this book I discovered that the church of Sant’ Alvise was endowed by an ancient member of the Venier family. In 1388, Antonia Venier had dreams in which Saint Louis (Sant’ Alvise in Venetian) of Toulouse appeared to her. He told her that God wished him to be venerated in Venice also. Sant�
� Alvise even showed her where the church was to be situated.
The musicals seen by Valentine Greatrakes in his pursuit of the actress were those performed in the relevant theaters of Venice in the 1780s. Domenico Cimarosa’s comic opera L’Italiana a Londra was composed in 1778. The heroine, Livia, comes to London under a false identity, searching for an English lord with whom she once shared a romance, but who could not be persuaded to marry her. The other details of the plot have been slanted to suit this story.
Modern Venice is still remarkably like eighteenth-century Venice. You have to stay up very late at night to understand the major difference between the Grand Canal of 1785 and today. The difference is silence. Today the Grand Canal is a motorway: By day the symphony of a hundred different boat engines dominates every aural sensation. Only late at night can you hear just the waves lapping for more than a few minutes at a time. And then you can also hear the rare sound of a gondola prow slapping the water and footsteps echoing over bridges.
MEANS OF DEATH
Hangings of condemned prisoners from London and Middlesex still took place at Tyburn gallows, near modern-day Marble Arch, until the end of 1783. But the crowds became too restive and the executions were transferred to the yard of Newgate Prison. Like the Clink, Newgate was destroyed by the Gordon rioters. But it was quickly rebuilt, unlike the Clink.
Mimosina’s technique for breaking out of her prison is based on one used by the notorious eighteenth-century London escape-artist Jack Shepherd. He made small holes in the wood that framed the bars of his Newgate cell; in this way he weakened the window and was able to pull the whole structure loose.
Popular belief in cruentation dates back to the Middle Ages, and is even mentioned in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Catarina’s dream of being roasted alive at San Zaccaria reflects a true story: An instance of a London baker throwing his apprentice girl into an oven was recorded in 1787.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 41
