The Remedy (9 page)
“You are her employer. You’ll be having a small word with her on my behalf. She would not be at this work if she did not need the money. Or something else you’re offering her. No, I don’t want to know the details. I shall be joining her at home for a twosome kind of supper tomorrow evening after the play.”
Valentine turns on his heel. He does not take the address: not for him a pathetic vigil in the cold street outside her rooms. For Valentine Greatrakes, Massimo Tosi can do better than that.
Massimo falls back in his chair, his face in his hands.
Striding through the shadowy corridors of the theater, Valentine fails to see a small woman veiled in gray. She watches him from an alcove next to the door of the manager’s office. Then she slips in through the open door and says a few words to her employer, who thinks to express his grateful surprise in an embrace but is repulsed with a surprisingly robust slap.
The echo of that slap reaches the ear of Valentine Greatrakes as he approaches the outer door of the theater and he pauses a moment. He wonders briefly if a duel has erupted among the actors, but he’s not long distracted from a more pressing conflict.
He is quarrelling with himself.
The words of the manager gnaw at him. He had resolved to win her slowly, but this coyness on her part has aroused in him an urgent desire to speed the proceedings. He can imagine his competitors now, all equally provoked by her unwillingness, some even skilled in the acquisition of such women, some perhaps as keenly interested as he himself. It is to be expected. She has transformed herself into something else: No longer a mere actress, the currency of the pleasure trade, she has elevated herself to something much more refined. She has claimed the contraband quality of chastity.
Contraband is something that Valentine Greatrakes understands with all his heart, to which all his faculties are perfectly honed, and for which all his considerable resources are available. To this end, he whistles up his carriage to take him back to his Bankside depository.
Take Brooklime, Water Cresses, Harts tongue each 3 handfuls; juicy Orange peels 3; Nutmeg 6 drams; succulent fresh Horse dung 3 pounds; Whey 9 pints; juice of Scabious. Dandelion and Hyssop water, each 1 pint. Draw off the Water gently, in a cold Still, for three days in an Alembic (which is used for expedition’s sake).
Tis used in Juleps, in the Pleurisy, Scurvy, and vagous Pains.
For a man of his genre, Valentine Greatrakes is a great pacifist. He hates to do a body violence, positively tries to avoid it, and when it must happen he sincerely regrets it. But there is one war he fights gladly, with relish and with glory.
Only to press him lightly on the matter is to be rewarded with a sturdy barrage on this theme, at the core of which is this:
It’s a party’s downright duty and not just his inalienable right to fight against horse-dung taxes.
Just such a flight of eloquence—not a little inspired by another blockade, that of Mimosina Dolcezza—is the treat bestowed by Valentine upon his driver, jolting by moonlight over luminous cobblestones back to the place where he conducts his personal vendetta against unjust harvesting of revenues.
“Iniquitous!” he bellows, “infamous!”, as he calls the roll on the taxes that snack on every article that comes in at the mouth, or that shelters the skin, or is placed underfoot; taxes on all things that are lovely to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; there are taxes upon light itself, upon warmth, upon methods of locomotion; taxes on the raw materials; taxes on those things enriched in value by human labor and ingenuity; taxes on all things that stimulate the appetite
and all things that satisfy it, on the judge’s ermine and the criminal’s noose, on the pap and the spoon of the baby, the toys of the child, the horse of the man and the road he rides it on, the ribbons of his bride, the brass nails of his coffin, and the marble of his tombstone.
To each item the driver assents with a great flourish of his whip and so they progress down the Strand at a cracking pace. The horse anoints the cobbles with a superabundant stream of piss.
The mullioned water of the Thames winks from between the riverside buildings. Valentine and his driver lean forward to examine a squat vessel that weaves toward St. Mary Overie Dock. At dawn it will unload the bales of hops with which Valentine Greatrakes quite legitimately supplies the Thrale brewery at Bankside, the brave parapets of which he salutes with a wave as they pass over London Bridge. Those bales are looped by rope twined with smuggled tobacco. They lie next to feathered heaps of headless geese, whose innards have been replaced with bottles of rum that shall be discreetly removed before the birds are delivered to the butchers of Smithfield and crates of living parrots destined to amuse affluent homes, having been schooled in speech by sailors on long journeys aboard illicit slavers’ ships.
Occasional forays by the excise men into the tenebrous vaults of the depository of Valentine Greatrakes reveal nothing to incur a penny of duty, but plenty to baffle and torment the dreams of the officers. For their lanterns discover many unblinking drawers of glass eyes, hard clutches of false hands made of leather, racks of wooden leper-clappers, trays of artificial ivory noses for syphilitics, and miniature anatomical models of pregnant women with removable parts peeling back to reveal a fetus or two in residence.
The Revenue never stay long. Cupboards specially hinged to utter dying groans swing slowly open to reveal rows of pink Bohemian tincture bottles, hallmarked silver nipple shields, earthenware posset pots, tin-glazed bleeding bowls, iron scarificators for blood-letting, and pewter enema syringes. Strung up in cloudy luminescence are necklaces of dentures fashioned from hippopotamus ivory (less liable to stain than that of baboons and goats). Lifting a trembling lantern, the excise men then gasp at the
vision of a biblical plague of locusts apparently come to life—only to be reassured by their genial host that these creatures, mounted on velvet screens, are merely a craze of recent years: Algerian amulet brooches in the shapes of locusts, studded with what might credibly be described as, and is, purest turquoise from the mines of the Americas.
And not a single item of it culpable for duty.
The dim catacombs of Bankside are suddenly lit up by a providential shaft of pure moonlight, as if to welcome home its most illustrious son. Late as it is, men tip their hats to him and women bob as the carriage of Valentine Greatrakes passes by.
The horse goes like an eel down the slyest alleys. Valentine surveys his domain with a certain amount of smugness. What he slips in and flushes out has made Bankside what it is today. No public house rollicks without the illicit life-blood he porters to it. Every local magistrate, if he does not sup off the discreet back-handers of Valentine Greatrakes, at least dines on the affordable commodities he has free-traded all the way to his kitchen door. No babe is born without its mother first partaking of his Maternal Wafers. No man goes to his marriage bed unfortified by his excellent preparation, the Husband’s Friend. It is these last two items, and many related confections, that please Valentine above all items of commerce, that raise him higher than all other gentlemen free-traders in London, and not just in his own eyes. For Valentine Greatrakes, while not disdaining Ginevra from Amsterdam and Bohea from India, has taken it upon himself to specialize in certain liquid and powdered pharmaceutical substances that come only from the tiny aquatic Republic of Venice: universal balsamick cure-alls for the people of London.
The quack doctors of Valentine Greatrakes thrive richly on the credulity of London’s afflicted. And such lovely nostrums, so sweet and grateful on the throat, are those he provides to ease them of their money. And if their narcotic or purging qualities do sometimes prove destructive to the patients, why, his quacks will always mention that this is because they have been taken in insufficient quantities. A man killed by taking thirty of these wonder-pills would have been saved by the thirty-first. If only he had not lacked
of courage at the last moment: Why then his vital spark would not only have been prolonged but fully renovated.
And how picturesque are these potions, these Balms of Gilead these Macassar Oils, these Odontos and these Infallible Balsamicks. Their labels are the poetry of the streets, and the stanzas are their lists of fantastical ingredients. And indeed they appeal infallibly to that majority of Londoners who bear a love of the incredible and marvelous. Sometimes it is no mere congenital deficiency of brain that sends people scurrying for these nostrums but a special form of blindness: They might read any newspaper with all the cynicism of a Frenchman, yet, when they scan the quacks’ handbills, they respond as if to an article of the catechism, with an instinctive and deep belief.
And the trade is all the smoother for one fact that became apparent to Valentine when he was just a young entrepreneur, thin as a shorten herring and half hazy on the excitement of it all. Bankside, as he has known since childhood, is excellently attired to be the disseminating headquarters of the business. For Bankside is the Murano of London, the site of a hundred glassworks, all churning out clear containers for the soothing and uplifting liquids that must be free-traded through the city, commencing their journey in the capillaries of passageways, communicating secretly between friendly houses.
They pass on to the baker’s and Valentine hellos his platter-faced friend already at work inside, on a batch of hollow loaves for the concealment of whatever morsel’s currently attracting the interest of the Excise. Cooling in his storerooms are trays of the aforesaid Maternal Wafer, excellent business at a penny each.
One of Valentine’s quacks passes in his trap pulled by a white donkey painted with purple spots. He brandishes a bleached female femur at his employer and indicates, with his hands, the airy lightness of his cart: Today he has sold many dozens of his bottles of nostrums, each one enriched with brandy poured from kegs damp with the slime of Romney Marsh. Valentine scowls and the quack lowers his head. Too late, the man has remembered the effect of his proprietary escharotic ointment on the sensitive back of his patron. Despite the application of a cabbage leaf, the caustic salve has
caused a weeping lesion that still troubles the laundrywomen beating the linen shirts of Valentine Greatrakes. When he sees the quack who is the author of his discomfort, the delicate skin of Valentine’s back contracts painfully and he is forced to remember the words of the advertisement that he himself had written: “It prevents Inflammations, Festerings, and Running of Matter, in any of which cases this great Vulnery has never yet been known to fail of effecting a perfect Cure in a few Days.”
The public girls are out on the streets still: all faces and figures he knows well one way or another. For Valentine frequently sends the skimpy south London prostitutes on jaunts across the Channel so that they might return crinkled and snowswept with lace: Apparel in use upon a living body is not liable to duty. Moreover, he most heartily enjoys the unwrapping of his lacy girls when they come home to him, dipped in cognac and juicy for the tasting. Those more lively in their wits double up as assistants to his quacks, posing as deathbed cases who are instantly revived by the latest miraculous nostrums.
Now the carriage is drawing into the depository in Stoney Street and two of his sleepless men, having observed his arrival through a spyhole, open the discreet gates and close them again behind him.
Valentine vaults down from the carriage and runs up the stairs into his office where his assistant, Dizzom, hunched over a burner worries a piece of hemp into charred segments that will be sold for a guinea an inch as hangman’s rope, which is known to be efficacious against the earache. Behind the man a row of bottles glow hellishly in the firelight: The heat agitates the liquid inside them, so that slow and graceful ballets are now performed by the corpses of rats and mice preserved in their death throes and other, less familiar, abortives put up in syrups. Dizzom’s experiments with embalming fluids have proved grimly and unexpectedly useful: This week nine gallons of them have already been dispatched to Venice, so that Tom’s body, packed in a lead-lined coffin, will soon be on its way back to them, without growing inconveniently ripe. Valentine wants Tom’s remains laid out in state at Bankside, for all their friends to pay their last respects.
“What’s new?” Valentine asks affectionately. Since Tom’s death he takes the lives of none of his manor for granted.
Dizzom smiles. Due to a tendency to taste his own potions and resultant encounters with dental quacks, he displays a giddy rush of forward-leaning wooden and gold teeth at the front of his mouth.
In the pleasure of seeing his master, Dizzom has forgotten the task at hand. A segment of rope catches fire, releasing sharp tarry fumes into the room. He plunges the rope into ajar of something that makes it fizz and spit. Some drops splash Dizzom’s low forehead, which is oppressed by a coarse pinkish wig that is heavy with grease and waved in stiff little peaks like innumerable tiny ears. His hands are delicate rose-pink on the inside, hornily skinned and heavily downed with gray hairs right up to the second joint of each finger. Dizzom has long adopted a habitual posture in which he holds his digits curved to his breast with the roseate skin upward. When he must use them he turns away from any witnesses and busies himself with astonishing rapidity, so that, as now, all that may be seen is a shadowy blur about the ends of his wrists, as if someone were scribbling above them with a soft lead pencil.
Valentine takes a step forward, and puts his arm on his employee’s shoulder.
“What can I do for you, my dear?” asks Dizzom fondly. “I see you have an idea about you.”
He lays down his task and stands up to look his master in the eye.