The Remedy (31 page)
I was still pondering what to do when I arrived in London.
I had to resist all longings to fling myself straight into my lover’s arms. For Valentine Greatrakes would unwittingly lead my pursuers straight to me. They knew of our liaison: His bed would be the first place they would look for me, with dire consequences for us both. No, it was essential to let my trail cool a while, allow Mazziolini to get to London, scour it, pronounce it empty of me, and leave again. Only then could I claim Valentine Greatrakes for my own,
The journey back to London had sponged my purse almost dry. My employers always kept me short of cash, in order to prevent just such a flight as I had made. Now I must live upon the dew, unless I could contrive a way of earning money.
How was I to earn enough to support myself while I waited? Theatrical roles were not safe, not with Mazziolini on his rampages. I could not cook or wash or sew: I had neither the skill nor inclination to live upon such paltry labors. I did not wish to contaminate myself with their humbleness: A woman who has slaved at low work always shows it in her face.
I decided to he low south of the river, where everything was cheaper. In an obscure way, it comforted me to be close to the place where Valentine Greatrakes operated his business. None of his colleagues, save old Dizzom, would remember my face.
Dizzom rarely left the depository. I might safely walk those streets, fearing only to meet my lover himself. I was alert enough to see him first and hide myself, while he had no idea of the need to be vigilant, thinking me in Venice.
To this end I befriended the coachman with every kind of flattery and the alluring appearance of helplessness. He directed me to a clean house in a back street near London Bridge where a cousin of his kept a boarding house. I gave out that I was an Italian woman tragically widowed on a recent trip abroad, and that I awaited the remittance of the not inconsiderable sums due to me from my English husband’s estate. In the meantime, I told the coachman, and soon after his cousin, I planned to live with exceeding modesty and in virtual retirement.
I concluded, “Finding my affairs temporarily a little embarrassed, I think it unseemly to live large.”
My wily landlady looked at my elegant clothes with satisfaction. I could see her calculation: Even if my story turned out to be bunkum, my dress would fetch a good sum.
I sank into a bed with sheets that stank of nothing worse than cheap soap and slept for some hours. When I awoke, the landlady served me some grayish pap she thought suitable for recent widows. Clearly, she planned to use my bereavement as an excuse to feed me as inexpensively as possible.
I forced down a decorous quantity of food under her watch-ful eye. I declared myself replete and told her that I had a great longing to take a walk.
“After many days and nights enclosed in my husband’s sickroom, behind dark curtains, it seems months since I have breathed and smelled fresh air.”
Her lip curled, and I realized why The air of Bankside was far from fresh. It was better to arrive there with perfumed pellets in the nose, and wrapped in a muffler. Bankside stank of urine from the tanneries, belchings from the brewery, and the sky was flecked with smoots from the glassworks. The coachman had warned me that there were no elegant places of refreshment here, like Morandi’s Chocolate House in Playhouse Yard: Such places were to be found only on the salubrious northerly shores of the river.
Feigning nervousness, I asked my landlady: “Is it safe for a lady of quality to go about unaccompanied in this place?”
She was not taken in, but she preferred to play my game with me: “No one will hurt you, madame,” she told me briskly.
I drew on a hat with a veil, just in case, and walked with an unerring Venetian instinct toward the noisome flow of the River Thames. Down there the air was thick with the clatter and stink of every kind of small trader. And the English, who are known to love their fruits, were gathered around stalls, handing over pennies and grazing like goats on apples and pears.
I walked fast, as if I had a purpose. I was hoping to clear my travel-worn brain that had begun to run in interminable circles like the wheels of the carriages that had borne me across Europe. In those lonely, crowded moments, jostled by strangers, my mind frequently taunted me with images of the face of Valentine Greatrakes, candid as a lighted window at dusk. I could not resist walking down Stoney Street and past his depository, though I kept my eyes firmly lowered. How easy it would be to walk straight through those gates and claim my rightful refuge, and how dangerous too.
At the end of Stoney Street I turned left through an archway into Clink Street, and walked past the gabled houses, tenements and the ruins of an old prison. I continued down toward the vast grounds of what my nose infallibly informed me to be a brewery. My ears rang with a great thumping of sacks that split to spill malt and hay in moldy heaps in my way On my right, the gray swell of the water appeared through a gap in the houses. Steps and a jetty tottered straight into the Thames. I passed by the establishments of discreet ivory merchants and pulverous coal merchants. Children in rags skittered past me, marching barefoot through puddles of mustard-colored effluvia, their squeals rich and deep with tubercular infections. It was a far cry from the quiet luxury of my former London lodgings at Soho Square. But I was not repulsed by it: on the contrary. It had a vivacity about it that reminded me not a little of the humble quarters of Venice.
For one heart-stabbing second, I thought I had caught sight of
my lover, or perhaps my desirous eyes conjured up what they most wished to see. My body was convulsed as if suddenly struck by a hundred pinpoints at once. I flattened myself against a wall and averted my face. But I had been deceived by a man of his enviable height, dressed in a waistcoat embroidered with green and yellow flowers.
And there was the Anchor Tavern, that sanctuary of which I had heard a great many pleasant things! Valentine Greatrakes, gagging over one of my rich
veloutés
, had once declared that the Anchor prepared the finest mutton chop in the whole of Christendom and that its cupboards contained the finest and most useful concealed stairwells in all Bankside. Seeing me mystified at the latter, he returned to his laudation of the Anchor’s mutton.
“Simply done,” he had said, looking ruefully at the next item of culinary artistry I had placed in front of him. “Nothing but the meat, seared and turned.”
Indeed, the smell of overcooked and greasy flesh was churning out of the tavern and through an open door I saw that the inn did a busy trade. The tables were laid with wooden platters and green earthenware pots into which (or at which) the gnawed bones were thrown with varying degrees of accuracy. The tablecloths looked as if a cat had recently kittened upon them. None of this raised any dismay in the customers, many clearly members of starving trades, who had come to drink their pittances and look with dripping jaws at those who were eating such horrors as pigeon barely transmogrified and wrapped in pastry or larks on a skewer.
I was surprised to see what kinds of men were being served. Not gentlemen, like Valentine Greatrakes, but working men, in shabby clothes, with shabby manners if any at all, from the way they grabbed at the condiments and wiped their slick chins with their sleeves. They yelled in coarse accents, laughed with their mouths full, and brawled with the harassed waiters. The door swung shut on an infernal scene, like a dining room in the hindquarters of Hell. I stood still a moment, telling myself that there must be another dining room reserved for the aristocrats
and men of quality like Valentine Greatrakes, probably with its own entrance to avoid promiscuous social mingling.
But I did not see it. For it was then that my eye fell on another spectacle, and I found my means of subsisting in London.
Take Waters of Baulm, Black Cherries, each 3 ounces; of Barley Cinnamon 2 ounces; Epidemial 1 ounce and a half; of Peony compound. Syrup of Gillyflowers, each 1 ounce; Syrup of Lemons half an ounce; Confection of kermes 4 scruples, mix.
As soon as these sorts of Spiritous Cordials come to touch upon the Stomach; yea sometimes as soon as ever tasted in the Mouth, they exert their Virtues; for by a grateful appulse they refresh and restore the Spirits waiting in the first Rooms, or Porch, as twere of the Body. And then these Spirits affecting others contiguous to them, and they likewise others successively onward, the pleasing Ovation undulates, in a trice, through the whole System of the Sensitive Soul: And so the Brain and Praecordia being recruited and irradiated with a full Influx of exulting Spirits, perform their Business of Vital Functions, with a new Briskness, and fresh Alacrity; and the Pulse, that lay before weak and wavering, rouseth up, falls a vibrating lustily, and drives round the Wheel of Life vigorously.
A quack doctor had trundled his wheeled rostrum into the cobbled lane outside the Anchor. The horse was quickly unharnessed and tethered at a small distance. Ingenious levers and pulleys transformed the rig into a small stage under which a knot of spectators assembled: a restive mixture of shopkeepers and laborers. A snowstorm of handbills was distributed by the doctor’s jester. I heard someone say, “Look at the Zany!” Eager hands reached out for the handbills. The semi-literate set themselves up reading aloud in pompous tones to those who could not guess at their inventions.
The Zany, got up in an extravagant confection of multicolored rags, now hurtled up on to the stage and began to warm the mood of the audience with his capers and jokes. Hearing laughter, more people drew near until at least fifty souls, baying and helpless with mirth, were the Zany’s to do with as he wished.
I felt homesick suddenly: Such a sight was to be enjoyed on the Riva degli Schiavoni any day in Venice. This stage even boasted the familiar effigies in wood of Cosma and Damiano, patron saints of medicine. Nor were the services of such a clown disdained by the most pompous of Venetian quacks. The Zanies were useful to draw the crowds and unlock their ears, all the better to steal a passage to their pockets. Sometimes the arrant silliness of the Zany served to underline the seriousness of his master.
My mind traveled back sixteen years to those nights when I had crept out of San Zaccaria to the Riva degli Schiavoni, pretending to be with my first lover, and watched the mountebank doctors at their work. I had not seen such a thing since.
All Zanies have their particular talents, acrobatic, theatrical, or musical. This one was a singing Zany and most tunefully he treated us to song as he scattered his creamy largesse of printed handbills advertising the services of the Great, the Unparalleled, the Most Rever’d Dottore Velena, the wonder lately come to London direct from Venice—
(Indeed!
I smiled)—with his Universal Cure that had lately saved many thousands of Venetians in mortal danger from the Itching Flux. I glanced behind the threadbare velvet curtain to see the said Doctor Velena, whom I had previously thought the horseman, applying his makeup. He was no more Venetian than I was an Englishwoman.
The Zany scampered about warbling:
See Sirs, See here
A Doctor rare
Who travels much at home,
Here, take his bills,
He cures all Ills,
Past, Present, and to come;
The
Cramp
, the
Stitch
,
The
Squirt
, the
Itch
,
The
Gout
, the
Stone
, the
Pox
;
The
Mulligrubs
,
The
Bonny Scrubs
And all
Pandora’s
Box.
Thousands he’s Dissected
And such cures effected
As none e’er can tell.
When the Zany had finished the last of five such verses, he backed away deferentially, making many respectful bows toward the curtain at the back of the stage, from which the quack now strode forth in a dramatic manner.
Strikingly swarthy in his paint, impressively wigged but quite simply dressed, he stood silent for a moment, glaring at the rabble, and then addressed them in an accent that but crudely pretended at Italian. However, he had a talent for rolling his ‘r’s, which he used to great effect.
Ignoring their rags, stinks and low accents, he began, “Most noble and illustrious Signorrrrri and egregious beautiful and virtuous Madonnas, and the rrrrrest of my honored friends and scrupulous Auditors …”
His customers, marinating in this flattery, drew closer, shrugging their shoulders and smiling shyly at one another.
“May I present myself, Dottore Conte Marchese Paracelsus Theophrastus Velena, lately arrived from the most ancient and stately city of Venice where I was wont to fix my bench in the face of the great Piazza.”
Full half an hour he intoned. He introduced himself as a friend to the ill and weak. A mere Mortal himself, he said modestly, casting down his eyes, just a man whose tender heart was easily riven in two by the sight of needless suffering.
“Little children …” he moaned, “… wasting away. Young women, ripped from their adoring husbands’ arms. How shall I bear it? How shall
you
bear it when it comes to you, gentle people?”
And from somewhere the quack conjured up a true tear, which he wiped away with a gesture of desperate bravery, before it could smear his paint.
Suddenly he drew himself up to his full height. He gyrated his features into a rictus of righteous indignation and stamped his foot. His boot was apparently tipped with iron, for the noise echoed like a shot. People in the crowd jumped. Women clutched their babies.