The Remedy (18 page)
He will patent a Venetian cure, allowing him to “import” whole bottles of liquid from the little Republic. Naturally these liquids shall first arrive in his depository to be scrupulously controlled for the mold and taints of their long journey. So scrupulously that they shall be upended into other bottles, bottles more honestly labeled “rum” and “brandy.” Meanwhile the Venetian glass vessels themselves will receive replenishment—with a delectable and efficacious nostrum, no more Venetian than Valentine Greatrakes himself.
But it shall be all the rage in London in an instant. For what Valentine Greatrakes shall be selling is the very essence and perfume of Venice, the mystery of the Orient in which she veils her charms, the fragrant darkness of her apothecary’s studios, the whispered reputations of her great true doctors, the condescension
of her noblemen whose names shall unwittingly endorse his products, the mysterious depths of her dark jade waters, and the whole thousand years of her glorious history, golden, serene, imperial, all encapsulated in his little bottles, just as Mimosina Dolcezza now lies in his arms, soft and sweet as milk.
Sleeping, he thinks.
Take Tamarinds 1 ounce; grind them in a Mortar with thin Mucilage of Gum Dragant, pass them thro’ a pulping Sieve, dissolve also Spanish juice of Liquorice in the same sort of Mucilage 2 drams; mix, and make Troches as thin as Wafers to seal Letters; which dry in an Oven, according to art.
These are very pretty, desirable and useful things to hold in the Mouth, to alleviate Thirst, and take away an ill Taste in Fevers.
“You will take me as your wife,” she says, the next morning when she wakes up. “It will be the greatest pleasure for you.”
“Ah now, wait a little there,” splutters Valentine.
“Yes, I shall leave the troupe and slip into your arms and we shall live together in your great house and none shall find me there.”
She smiles generously, like a mother who has pressed a comfit on an undeserving child. She is already ringing the bell for her maid Tabby Runt. An instantaneous sniffing by the door announces what Valentine has always suspected: The girl listens regularly at the keyhole, and that she does not find him satisfactory company for her mistress.
Valentine stammers, “It’s not so simple as that.”
He strokes her cheek in a mediating way.
She’s having none of it. At his unkind cavilling, this tiny interruption to the romance she is spinning, her eyes glitter and she drops her chin so her face is entirely pivoted on huge tear-filled eyes. Tabby Runt enters the room bearing a large silver tray of her coffee, takes one look at her mistress, and backs out again, all the
while bestowing upon Valentine Greatrakes a stare as bleak as a northerly voyage.
“So you do not love me after all, is it?” the actress whispers.
“Of course I-I-I…”
“It is just a small thing for you, not the great love that comes only once in a lifetime, as it is for me? I have thought, all this time, that our hearts were married already.”
And damn it
, thinks Valentine,
it’s true, they are. I love you. I love you. I love you. Damn it.
But he thinks to himself. She is already leaping from the bed and dressing with demented speed. He hangs his head, his ears lacerated by the sharp swish of lace.
This time he lets her go. Just now he has no resources to refashion the peace between them. When she sweeps away to the dressing room, he quietly puts on his clothes and lets himself out of the apartments, walking slowly down the stairs from which the newspapers shrilling Stintleigh’s demise have not yet been cleared.
Valentine forces himself to take the hand of Pevenche, emerging white and strong from her gaudy mourning cloak. She has fattened on tragedy and it suits her ill, he thinks. Together they have thrown the first clod of earth into the cavity that will swallow her father. He has watched her tearless face with concern: better for her to cry, really, like the other veiled women in the second and third tiers of onlookers around the grave. Anonymous under their black swathes, they howl and sniff, these brief loves of Tom’s. He sees Pevenche opening her mouth at the sight of these ladies and quickly distracts her before she can make more scandal than a whole coffee house. “Throw your little posy now, dear heart.”
And she unfastens it from her capacious sash and throws it into the grave, saying, “Bye bye, Pa, I
hope
you are going to Heaven.”
People within earshot are shocked by the girl’s equivocation and a chafe of whispers sprints her words to the back of the crowd in a moment. Valentine pulls Pevenche to him and speaks softly into the aperture of her bonnet, “Of course he is, little one. Where else would he go?”
He sees that she is fully prepared to answer this question and desperately forfends her response by starting up an impromptu hymn in his easy baritone. The confused mourners are thankful to join him in this godly display. Meanwhile Pevenche observes the sly bottles handed round with thumps on the back and exhortations to “have a little bit o’ that, my lover, don’t let the tears run dry”
“They’ll be drunker’n roaches,” she huffs above the doleful singing. “They won’t be able to taste the eatables at the party. And we’ve gone to such trouble over ’em!”
When the hymn is sung through, the mourners nod as if satisfied and gradually steal away in silence, leaving Valentine and the girl at the grave’s edge, staring at the fresh earth for many minutes in silence. A moist wind brawls half-heartedly with the few trees not yet fallen to progress on Bankside. A smell of clay drags at their noses but no tears fall from the girl’s small eyes.
Pevenche then announces, “Well, that’s him done for, then.” And Valentine flinches with pain, and feels more alone than he has ever done. Just now, with Tom gone, and Mimosina Dolcezza a questionable quantity after their quarrel, he feels bathed in self-pity. Dizzom and Pevenche are all his family now: What kind of life is this?
At the repast, he stands apart from the others, watching them stare suspiciously at the calves’ ears and duck tongues forced, the puptoon of lobsters and veal sweetbreads carbonaded, the triple toasts, the bisques that Pevenche has specifically required and indeed supervised at the cookshop in Deadman’s Place. After all the humiliation her father visited upon her with regard to food—yet still she has tried to make his funeral a feast fit for a gourmandizing duke.
But Tom’s friends do not want these jellied and parsleyed creations. After long moments of silence, one of the Bankside bakers rushes outside and returns with a vast tray of tall pies. The crowd swoops on them with unabashed glee. And Valentine too finally succumbs to the greasy delight of the pastry washed down by a motherly tankard of ale.
Pevenche, meanwhile, is mercifully nowhere to be seen. Later he finds her in the kitchen, happily confecting a monstrous pie from
the spurned sweetmeats, and humming tunelessly under her breath, while a large bun smiling yellow custard hangs from her jaw.
He is moved to ask her: “Do they not give you proper feeding at school, Pevenche?”
Far from it, she tells him. At the school there is merely roast beef on Mondays, roast shoulder of mutton on Tuesdays and Fridays, a round of beef on Wednesday, boiled leg of mutton on Thursday, and on Saturdays stewed beef with pickled walnuts. But fibrous chops are sometimes substituted, she hisses, when there are fees unpaid, and then the undersubscribed pupil is made to sit at the head of the table and watch while her comrades gnaw the bones.
His mind wanders as Pevenche now recounts the whole pudding menu to him in even more lavish detail, lingering on the “choke dogs,” apparently a currant-studded dumpling, that would “go blah” if overcooked.
Privileged
girls are allowed to linger in the dining room and have a glass of port after supper, she informs him with a significant stare, and he reminds himself to make such an arrangement for her.
On delivering Pevenche back to the Academy for Young Ladies, she torments him with one more little scene. She greets Mistress Haggardoon with the loud words: “Here I am back, he doesn’t want me aroun’, you see, he’s got better things to do, I don’t feel welcome any more.”
Pevenche runs through the hallway snorting sobs and thunders up the stairs. Both her headmistress and guardian flinch at the slamming of the door. They stand in agonized silence.
Why doesn’t she say something mitigating? The atmosphere’s so thick you could eat it with a fork.
At last the headmistress whispers carefully: “She wishes you to think…” But her words are interrupted by the tarnished glint of the guinea he’s tugging from his pocket.
“Yes,” she says wearily, “I’ll buy the girl something nice.”
“And the port after supper?”
She nods sadly, sacrificing the pleasantness of future evenings.
Marriage! The word tangs and needles all over his body as he jerks over the cobbles toward the theater. Where else is there to go?
Tom is buried. It is time to make sense of Mimosina Dolcezza, and if that cannot be achieved at least to hold her while she rants. He must feel her in his arms again, even if it is just the once. The day has sucked him dry. He must have his fill of her before he renounces her, if that is what he is destined to do.
And first he must make her his lover again. This morning’s skirmish is of the kind that can only be remedied with tenderness, and she, the doting girl, could never deny him that, not if she sees the hollows of his eyes and the funeral’s tearstains on his shirt, both of which he has observed in the same mirror and not corrected before coming out to intercept her at the theater.
Twelve hours apart, in a state of war, have been unbearable. When he sees her face he knows it has been so for her too. They fall gratefully into one another’s arms in the hall outside her dressing room, the very site of their first encounter.
It makes a body ooze with desire all over again just to remember that.
He does not mention the matrimonial issue that rent their reunion apart, and nor does she.
Take Alexiterial Milk Water 3 ounces; Epidemial, Compound Piony Water, Syrup of Gilly-flowers. Syrup of Saffron, each 2 drams; Diascordium, 2 scruples; Goa Stone 1 scruple, mix.
In suspicious, ill condition’d Fevers, it raises and supports the drooping Spirits, resists Malignity, and drives it out from the Centre to the Circumference.
Icebound London turns magical. The Thames freezes over, as if to demonstrate the solidity of their love. The usual frost fair enlivens the stilled river under London Bridge. Together they go there—the actress like a flame in her new rust-red redingote and black hat trimmed with matching ribbon. They drink hot wine in the refreshment tents, watch the skaters, and visit a printer who has set up a stall upon the ice. They have identical sheets set and printed, and fold them against their hearts where they crackle at every embrace.
Valentine Greatrakes & Mimosina Dolcezza,
London, December 15th 1785,
Printed on ICE.
Most nights are spent in her rooms, and after her performance they rarely go out, not wanting to leave the enchanted circle of their intimacy. Tabby Runt supplies all their needs without making her presence obvious. Every evening Valentine goes to watch his lover perform on the stage. Feeling the desires of the men in the audience sharpens his own later. And he finds messages specific to himself when he observes her now. Little sighs, significant looks, the style of uttering certain phrases: All these are private ways she
communicates with him in public. He is sure of it. He delights in isolating new instances with each show, and later she blushingly confesses him right each time.
Then there are the romantic suppers, where he eats one-handed so that he may caress her throughout. These meals are not without their usual drawbacks, however, chiefly of a culinary nature. He still cannot, without grievous loss of face, refuse to eat the unnatural liaisons of fruit and meat she places before him. More than once he has barely arrived home at Bankside before spewing abundantly into a gutter and recovering himself at the Anchor with a cup of plain tea strong enough to trot a mouse across it.
He loves her apartments but sometimes their relentless femininity oppresses him. When he feels a cabin-fever descend, Valentine hires some rooms he knows near Bond Street, a comfortable building done out like the home of a gentleman of the first rank and fortune. He has Dizzom go there in advance of them, to spread some personal belongings about and to muss the chill perfection of the décor with a few morsels of bachelor squalor.
Mimosina Dolcezza is pleased with the accommodations and wrapping her naked body inside the curtains one night, she teases him for the luxury of their marquisite silk.
“No expense is spared!”
He fastens the curtain round her so that only her head emerges, a pale bud forming on a green stalk.
“For you yourself, nothing is too good.” And he puts his arms around the tube of silk and walks in circles, over and over again, until she can no longer bear the shimmying and hissing of the fabric against her naked skin, and begs him to release her. Then she steps naked into the room and she is so beautiful that he must douse the glim of the candle in order to bear it.
Christmas comes and he puts her first, instead of Pevenche who breaks a great many things in the drawing room at the Academy for Young Ladies. (Nevertheless, he increases the girl’s allowance, on top of paying for the damage.)
He is neglecting his business, thinking of nothing but her. Dizzom is told to keep everything ticking over, but this cannot go on forever without damage, and without dangerous talk. There are
always upstarts in Bankside ready to surge into any vacuum of concentration. Valentine is dimly aware of the risk, but he tells himself that this cannot last. He is sure that he will satisfy himself with her soon, and that he shall be able to let her go. This love affair is like the ice that now holds the Thames unnaturally in check. It cannot stay so forever, and its rare beauty is like a heartbeat stolen from time and displayed in a glass bottle. Such fraud shall have its detection and the bliss shall soon dissolve in his hands. And he will accept it as a natural thing, even if a hurting one.