The Remedy (37 page)
My audacious plan had worked, but the perfection of it served not to gratify me but to reveal the paltry dimensions of my ambition. It was no great thing I had achieved: Why any smart young woman might have got where I stood now, with a modicum of good looks and a few atoms of wit. What so clever about existing in a slum, making a living swindling poor people with fake medicines? Living in company with the dry squeal of mice behind the all night, a quack doctor who addressed me as his “wee sweetie creature” and a coarse flunkey who usually denominated me in terms I would not care to repeat.
Familiarity was beginning to breed not contempt but boredom. This fermented a more dangerous new emotion: anger. My old arrogance made a reappearance. Why was I confined here, living like a street-woman? Was I not a Golden Book heiress, a noblewoman of Venice? How had it come to this pass?
When I answered this question to myself I refused to hear certain essential elements of the response, those that cited the nun I had blinded, the dangerous ways of my former employers, the lies I had told and implied to my lover.
The only thought that came into my head and was allowed a hearing was this: Valentine Greatrakes was the author of my predicament. He had scammed his way into my heart by pretending to be a gentleman, and pretending to love me. He had failed to honor the love I had given him, and now, when I was ready to make him happy—he was obstinately absent. Why did he not return? Moreover he was lacking in guile, despite all the fear he inspired at Bankside. How was it that he had not discovered me yet? For surely he had sent spies to find me? Were they not, every man of them, as incompetent as their master?
It seemed to me a shoddy turn of fate that I still languished in poverty in London, when I might at least have been revealed, brought to him, abjectly apologized to, and persuaded to resume the romance that had been so cruelly interrupted. My fantasies in those days were centred on the depository in Stoney Street and the secret comforts of the bedchamber there that I—another sore issue—had never seen.
These were the images poisoning my thoughts one morning when we drove down Stoney Street, this time heading for Borough High Street. The doors of the depository were open for once, and I glimpsed Dizzom in conversation with an expensively dressed but grotesquely overgrown young woman. The toes of her enormous shoes were acutely pointed and adorned with silk roses. I could see only a snatch of her profile, partly hidden by the violent gush of velvet peonies swarming over her hat. These framed a short column of hair, which was of a color that the English in their sprightly moments call “strawberry blond” but in reality better merits the appellation “boiled shrimp.”
From the nervous way Dizzom looked up at her, I guessed she was finding fault. How did she dare? In the absence of my lover, Dizzom was king-regent of Bankside.
I had never seen her before: not in the crowds I worked, nor on the streets, nor yet in the shops or taverns.
Of course not! She was not the type to live around here.
I have no idea
how
I came to the realization, but in one swift moment it fell upon me. There was something about her that made this unprepossessing stranger instantly familiar to me. I calculated rapidly Even though the girl was at least a dozen years older than my lover had led me to understand, I had the clearest inkling of who she was. The gigantic and arrogant young woman was no other than the so-called Baby P.! No wonder my lover had fingered the miniature bonnet I bought her with such embarrassment. It would barely cover her brawny fist!
My mind sped. As we rounded the corner to Clink Street I cried out to Dottore Velena: “Stop! We must go back to the depository. I sense a superabundant day’s work ahead of us. We must refresh our supplies.”
Eyes gleaming, for he knew that I was capable of delivering what I said, Dottore Velena swiftly turned the cart and we trotted back down Stoney Street. The Zany grumbled cynically in his gizzard.
The young woman was still there, hectoring Dizzom, who had his back to us, and her eye passed coldly over our rig. It paused a moment on me, and then swiftly dismissed me as an older and shabbier woman than herself.
From under lowered eyelids, I studied her in brief glances, while seeming to stare vacantly at Dottore Velena and the Zany loading bottles into the back of our cart. Over her shoulder, I caught a glimpse of a vast, ordered storeroom lined with shelves crammed with ranks of bottles. Each shelf bore a large, clear label … Canada Maidenhair Syrop, Geneva Cordial Water of Lemon. There were several signs I recognized—they were Venetian! Of course, Dottore Velena had told me that my lover sourced his supplies from the infamous Black Bat in Santa Croce
and the discreet Fir-Cone in Castello, but it was another thing to see the actual objects here at Bankside. I was amazed at the precision of the storage and labeling. The Black Bat’s products were announced by a perfect replica of the original Venetian shop sign, wooden wings prettily paired like a browsing butterfly. It turned my heart over to see its familiar shape again. But the door was soon slammed shut and bolted. There was a moment of danger as Dizzom glanced back at us, but his eyes were glazed; his attentions were fully occupied by the girl.
“I shall be telling my guardian about this!” The words, laden with menace, turned my head back to the girl berating Dizzom. “He’s on his way back, you know. Or, perhaps you don’t?” she sneered.
My heart turned over again with this news, but I forced myself to look at the girl and gather information.
Apart from her age and size, she was everything I had suspected: lumpish, spoiled, and plain as a pike. Her coarse pale red hair was fashionably dressed but lustreless. Her voice was like iron filings being scraped. And yet this lardish, charmless creature was loved by Valentine Greatrakes, treated by him as a lady and not as a whore to be used and let go. I supposed he had not told me her true age, which I reckoned at around twenty, for fear that I would find his tenderness toward her a threat.
My poor lover, always so considerate of my feelings, and so misguided! I did not blame him but myself. I should have guessed, from the quality of her manipulations, that she was more mature than the “little girl” he described. There was nothing little about Pevenche. She was a hefty piece of nastiness. There was nothing vulnerable about her to my eye. She was all too well defended.
It would have been easy for me to hate Pevenche from that first moment but she did not raise any strong emotion in me, and this enabled me to see her not as a person but as an object of use.
Take Guaiacum 4 ounces; Sassaphras 2 ounces; Sanders both red and yellow, each 1 ounce; Ivory, Harts-horn, each half an ounce; infuse and boil according to Art in Water 6 quarts to 3 quarts; then strain, and sweeten with Sugar so as to make it grateful.
It warmeth, drieth, attenuateth and procureth Sweat: it’s suitable to such as are of a cold, shabby Temperament.
It was an easy matter to seize the girl.
Fortunately I remembered the name of the school, seen so often on the outside of letters sent to her: “The Marylebone Academy for Young Ladies.” Two days after glimpsing her at the depository I was there, requesting an interview with the headmistress. Modestly dressed in gray, my hair newly tinted a mouse-brown, I introduced myself as a chaperone appointed by her guardian Valentine Greatrakes to convey his ward to Paris where he awaited her arrival with some impatience.
The mention of his name cast fear upon the countenance of Mistress Haggardoon, but an expression of relief flitted covertly across her face at the same time. Her graying eyebrows shot up as I explained myself further and she looked at me suspiciously while ushering me into her office and indicating a chair opposite her desk. She was thin and tense, appallingly dressed. Englishwomen! I thought. What withered objects they are, all several hundred years old, even the young ones. It amazed me that the race continued to propagate. Yet even this one was once married, I saw from the ring on her knotty finger … a painful reminder that the one Englishman I myself truly loved had been numb to the opportunity of marrying me.
Well
, I thought now, not a little triumphantly,
he can be jolted to It.
“Madame,” I said, modulating my voice to express surprise. “Did you not receive his letter?” I rustled in my pocket and produced a neat packet addressed to “Mme. Jaune-Fleur Kindness” in an unmistakably masculine hand, something I had perfected in an afternoon’s practice. She looked blank.
“Ah, the unreliability of couriers,” I sighed. “That it should reach me in Mayfair and yet pass you by in Marylebone!”
The headmistress nodded vigorously. The mention of Mayfair was soothing and the vagaries of couriers were well known to her, I suspected. How often were her fees mislaid or delayed by reason of their mishaps? Now she smiled at me. “Pray explain what has been requested by Pevenche’s guardian. I hope he finds himself well? I have not seen him for some time. I know he is abroad, of course.”
“Indeed,” I smiled. “He prospers greatly, and wishes to share some of his good fortune with his poor ward. He has decided that it would be advantageous for the girl to undertake a species of Grand Tour. He himself shall accompany her, for he has business matters to progress in Vienna, Prague, St. Petersburg, and of course Venice. I myself shall attend, instructing her in the Italian tongue. I believe that she is already fluent in French and German.”
By the headmistress’s stammers and blushes, I understood that Pevenche had bullied her way to ignorance in these subjects and all others.
“When should we have the girl ready?” she asked eagerly.
“I thought to take her immediately,” I explained, “having expected to find her ready to travel, of course,” I reminded her, reviving the idea of the undelivered letter in her head.
I did not know when Dizzom might next come calling, and I did not want to take the risk of his intervention.
Her eyebrows rose again, and I saw a flicker of concern cross her face.
I explained quickly: “A complete new set of outfits awaits her in Paris, already ordered by her guardian. Her London clothes
are hardly suitable for the life she will pursue in the foreign courts.”
At the word “courts” the headmistress looked stunned and she offered me no more resistance. She excused herself to go and find the girl.
When she left the room 1 immediately leapt to my feet. Trained as an actress, 1 usually performed my scripted emotions from a standing position. It had been unexpectedly hard to interpret the role of governess from the depth of an armchair.
I heard Pevenche before 1 saw her. Outside the door, she was berating the headmistress in a language that was coarse and offensive. I noted that she used the faux-common accent of one who in fact pretends to a very high class.
“Who
is
this female?” she was asking. “Why did not my guardian write to me personally with this plan? Not that I’m against it—I ain’t—but this method of delivering shows me a lack of respect.”
She slammed open the door and paused dramatically on the threshold, the headmistress trailing behind, murmuring ineffectually about lost letters.
She was preceded into the room by a stink of violet perfume. The unsubtle odor swept me into thought. I realized that I had smelled it before, on Valentine Greatrakes, when we were reunited in London after our quarrel. Then I thought he had been taking consolation with another woman, but he had not betrayed me after all: He had only been with Pevenche. I smiled with relief.
Pevenche took my smile as a greeting, but it did not meet with her approval.
“Why did he not write to me?” she fairly screamed, and I could not help admiring how she conjured up a tantrum. Tears squirted from her eyes, and once they arrived she was soon encouraging them with shudders to gather into a proper convulsion. She made a masterpiece of a fit of the vapors, a distemper that rarely fails to kill, I reflected, except perhaps onlookers afflicted with strong sensibilities. I myself stood impassively which enraged her more. A tender application of
hartshorn and water, sweetened with the trilling of the headmistress and two maidservants, combined to restore her somewhat.
It was only when the storm was over that Pevenche looked at me directly, full of scorn, taking in my simple dress and coiffure. “What is it about
you
that inspired my guardian’s confidence?” she asked rudely, without preliminary courtesies of any kind.
I curtsied slightly, a show of deference that brought a grin to her moonish face. It was a master-stroke, establishing her superiority exactly to her satisfaction, and being conveyed in a gesture of my whole body rather than in words, it seemed more sincere than any humble phrases I might have summoned up.
Then I murmured, “I hope you will find me acceptable as a temporary companion, Miss Pevenche. Your guardian has subjected me to the most rigorous interview before entrusting you to my care. And now he is so very anxious to see you again. I trust that you will be kind enough to accede to his wishes.”
She stared at me insolently, defying me to prove my claim. It was a moment of supreme delicacy. In front of the headmistress, I was losing ground.
I forced myself, from gritted teeth, to say, “Your Uncle Valentine has told me he cannot manage any longer without his Baby P. close to him.”
At the mention of her own pet name for herself Pevenche smiled, almost prettily. I had shown my credentials to be impeccable.
Yet she did not deign to answer me directly. She cast one more brief look in my direction and marched out of the room muttering, “Well, at last he’s seen sense. And he must have got rid of
her.”
Over her shoulder she flung at the headmistress: “Get my things. Didn’t you hear the woman:
I watched Pevenche’s back, noting its girth, and her spacious rear quarters.