The Remedy (34 page)
“The said
gentleman’s
presently in
Venice,”
the doctor added confidentially, “free-trading a little Venetian treacle our way.”
My lover? A smuggler? A fabricator of nostrums? A pimp? A printer of quacks’ handbills? I felt faint. And what was he doing in Venice? The likeliest answer warmed my cheeks—
he had gone looking for me!
But I had no time to examine my feelings. The quack was rising from his seat. Like me, he was anxious to settle terms. He had not noticed how I now trembled and struggled for breath,
though the Zany still looked at me with contemptuous curiosity.
“I’ll give you a shilling on each dozen bottles sold,” pronounced Dottore Velena, in a conclusive manner.
I had planned to negotiate: I had need of all my scattered wits now. I did not wish to be condemned to demonstrate only cures against love diseases. I hoped to change my illness to something more respectable, like the Bloody Flux. But first I must make sure of my employment, and survival.
“A shilling for each half-dozen, and a say in which disease is killing me,” I countered.
It was the Zany’s turn to gasp. “A shilling! For that minky girl!”
“Now, now,” temporised the Dottore, with his hand on his companion’s wrist. “Don’t ye see that the good fairies have showered all their gifts on this lady and the bad fairies have been most sparing in their attentions? Did ye not hear the snapping of the heartstrings when they looked at her dying? We took twelve guineas today, and it wasn’t
you
they paid to see. You wait; we’ll be knee-deep in prosperity in no time with this one.”
“Knee-deep,” I repeated, staring hard at the Zany.
“You’re a piece of work,” the Dottore laughed, now looking intently at me. With a slight menace in his voice, he added, “But you do a good job, almost professional, I’d say.”
He narrowed his eyes and spoke harshly to me for the first time: “Is it Doctor Trigg who taught you? Or that bastard Merry?”
Certain that he would never believe me, I was able to give my first honest answer: “Oh no, I trained on the stage, in Venice. I am an actress.”
“Oh yes indeed! How could I not have guessed it,” he sneered, though in a jocular manner. “Well, I’ll not ask you more.”
I winked, and looked shifty. “So I can teach you some Venetian words—or those that will pass for them, surely.”
I could see that this concept had caught his interest. While his nostrums were doubtless the purest effluent, he took a definite pride in his act. Any refinements I might bring to it would be gratefully received.
“So what do we call you, lassie?” he asked me.
“I am Mistress Giallofiore,” I said, thinking quickly.
“Missis Jallowfi-
whore
?” he chuckled, emphasising the whore.” He raised his glass: “To Mistress Jallowfi-
whore
, our Venetian
actress.
Your blood’s worth bottling, my dear.”
The Zany howled, “It’s nobbut a wheen of blathers the whole story. A shilling! Jallow-fi-whore, wha’ kind of a name is that?”
“The first thing we shall work upon is your Venetian pronunciation,” I said as primly as I could manage.
“Where do you lodge?” the quack was asking.
I smiled cheekily. “From today, wherever you lodge, master.”
The Zany choked on his beer. “She’d skin a flea for half a penny, this one.”
I pointed to the valise at my feet. I had been so confident of my performance that I had taken leave of my landlady that morning, explaining that my fortune had come in with unexpected swiftness.
Take live Millipedes and white Sugar, each 3 ounces; when they are well beaten and mix’d together in a Mortar, add white Wine 1 pint; and strain and squeeze out the Liquor.
Millipedes abound in Volatile Salt (as all Insects do) they incide, and dissolve tough clammy Phlegm wheresoever it sticks, attenuate, exalt and depurate the Blood, penetrate into the Glands, Nerves, Fibres, smallest Pipes and Passages, piercing through Obstructions, deterging, cleansing and comforting, and are famous for their Diuretic quality. They are used in cases of Gravel, Sand, Dropsy, Jaundice, Kings-Evil, Cough, Phthisic, Consumption at the beginning. Hypochondriac Affects; Scorbutic Joint Pains, dimness of Sight.
Dottore Velena’s handbills advertised that he was to be found “at home in his rooms” between the hours often and eleven “to be spoke with.”
Like most quacks, he lodged above a tavern. His was the Feathers, in Winchester Square. A fine, corrupt, leaning old building it proved, on a par with the Anchor for its sordidness and noise.
When we returned there the light had already grown dim. Business done, I had permitted myself to sink into a dispirited state, cast low by the shocking discovery about my lover. A smell as frowsy as a dove’s nest smacked my nose as Dottore Velena opened the door to his private apartment. The Zany, whose real name was never revealed to me, was put out that he must now share these limited digs with a third party, and that a female. He turned his back on me immediately, pulled down a kind of
hinged plank from the wall, threw a blanket on it and lay down to sleep, rather theatrically framed by a curtain of alligator skins with a canopy of dried poppy heads, all strung in rows from the ceiling above him.
The Dottore showed me the screened chamber-pot and the jug of stale water for washing, and finally a kind of large cat-basket, where I might sleep myself. He told me, with a sentimental tremor, that it had previously been used for several cats who had perished in experiments, and whose mummified remains dangled stiffly from a beam.
The Dottore himself seemed content with a minimal deshabillé. He donned a quilted bedcap over his wig and stretched himself out in a leather chair, a strange object that had suffered a large neat bite out of its seat and boasted two separate footrests that spread his legs wide apart. He was soon unconscious, snoring in an oatmealish kind of way, the satin ribbons of his bedcap ruffling in the gusts. I do not remember falling asleep, but drowsiness must have overtaken me fast, despite the lumpen pillow, leprous with stinking mold. My last clear memory of that night was starting up at the looming silhouette of an enormous bird, but that image too had the quality of a dream.
The next dawn I was amused to see the preparations made for patients. The Zany jumped up smartly at cockcrow and stalked out of the door without a backward look, presumably gone to his preferred cookshop to breakfast. The quack’s cap and wig had tottered from their perch in the night, revealing a bald head above the collar of his undershirt. This, too, was removed and he performed thorough ablutions in his native state while I averted my eyes. Then he remounted his voluminous wig, which boasted not one but three beribboned tails, and he pulled on the decent black suit I had seen the day before, finally shrugging a plush jacket over it.
Thus arrayed, he proceeded to pull all manner of accoutrements into view that had been concealed on trays and drawers closed fast into walls and desks in the night. Within minutes he had transformed our sordid sleeping chamber into an Aladdin’s cave of potions-m-the-making, all, he informed me proudly, according to the highest fashion of the trade.
Every surface glinted with mysterious bottles, some filled with swarthy tar-drippings, others with fair water, colored, so he told me, with sandalwood and cochineal. The largest of them was boiling with live millipedes, though a grim, still sediment at the bottom of the jar showed unfortunate trampled multitudes. Laid open by the divan was Cornelius Agrippa’s
Occult Philosophy
propped up on a pile of musty Greek and Latin tomes. Only the most observant visitor would notice that this pile was glued together and wheeled at the bottom, to allow for speedy stowing in a low cupboard. The momma light gradually revealed shelves stacked with small bags. I was told that these were much sought after to hang about the necks of children as an infallible prophylactic against rickets. Inside was the finest muscovado sugar imported from the West Indies. This, and the loose knot, ensured that children frequently consumed the contents, thereby providing a brisk trade in re-orders.
On the desk of Dottore Velena reposed a human skeleton, marked up with esoteric calculations. Behind him hung the stuffed corpse of a monkey, who, he informed me, had formerly performed the duty of Zany for him. He patted it affectionately and a cloud of dust rose and glowed about its mournful head like a halo. “Used to drink a pint of ale like a Christian every nig ht,” he reminisced. “And he certainly drew the ladies.”
Next to the monkey a pure spermaceti candle was prepared for swift lighting at the sound of a client’s foot on the stairs. Its luxurious glow would illuminate an artfully careless pile of gilt coinage, done up to look like guineas, an indication of rich fees already received that morning from grateful patients.
The chair in which the Dottore had slept now revealed its obstetric nature as he plumped up in it a large leather dummy of a woman in the throes of birth. And in a corner I discovered the truth of that nightmarish bird that had haunted my last moments of consciousness the evening before. It was an impressive duckbilled alembic where even now Dottore Velena hovered, stirring up some fragrant powder with his lotion spatula. The whole device trembled upon a crippled table, bandaged at the joints
and yet extravagantly gilded with hieroglyphic decorations around its rim.
It was as elaborate as any stage set I’d trodden in my life as an actress, and there was something pleasingly familiar about it.
I pulled on my own costume, the respectable gray dress, after boldly demanding my turn at the ewer, and presented myself for work more cheerfully than I had ever done before.
Dottore Velena handed me a cup of hot chocolate that spouted from the beak of the alembic. With the other hand, he poured me my morning glass of gin.
For any actress there are moments of boredom on the stage, when she is not the center of attention and is obliged to erase herself from the eyes of the spectators to allow some other actor to strut his grandeur or his pitifulness. There are slow buildings of character, and early deaths. Even the prima donna is sometimes backstage.
But with Dottore Velena, I performed nothing but climaxes: I was always either Expiring-in-Doloros-Convulsions or Being-Born-Again-in-the-Very-Blossom-of-Health. I lived Life-after-Death-by-a-Regiment-of-Diseases. By the time I made my entrance, the crowd had already grown mobbish, and were satiated on the Zany: I was beautiful, I was haunting, and they loved me.
We developed the act to the highest pitch of quackery, rivaling anything to be seen on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice. Sometimes Dottore Velena relieved me of a worm as long as the Maypole in the Strand, using his
Vermifugus Pulvis
, or Anti-Vermatical Worm-Conquering Powder (made chiefly of flour). In this case I clutched my belly and crossed my eyes while Dottore Velena explained the grim battle taking place therein, as the complicated knots of the worm were broken up in my duodenum (“Aah,” I sighed), and its Phlegmatick Crudities were dissolved in my bowel (“Oooh,” I shrieked)…. Presently he reached under my skirt and brought away a long white woolen skein slicked with grease that came and came and came, and which the Zany seized and wove around the stage like a
demented spider making a web. The Dottore all the while intoned his soothing explanations, and the audience hung on his every word, their faces fervent with belief.
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.