I’m sure the worm can never have dipped a finger in her. She’s not been touched by him. I would need to see her in the act of it to believe it for the truth.
It is searingly easy to imagine her in the act.
He feels the bile rising in his throat, and it occurs to him that this kind of suspicion is like the nausea that precedes a needful vomit. It is the same dilemma: The bitter impurity of doubt and hope must be cast up and out, however painful the purging convulsions, however vile the taste of the truth.
He is in no condition yet to judge the actress on her continence. But he must acknowledge at least the bare facts. Lord Stintleigh has enjoyed an overnight intimacy of one kind or another with the actress and there is but one possible outcome of this outrage.
He thinks wildly of challenging Stintleigh to a duel at Leicester Fields or the Field of Forty Footsteps. But he’s stopped in his tracks by the impudent truth: Why should an aristocrat accept an invitation from one such as Valentine Greatrakes? The weazen bastard would laugh at such a challenge, fleer and toss his nose at it. Valentine cocks his eyes at bizarre angles to avoid thinking of this.
No, better to do things in the time-honored, unwhisperable way.
• 10 •
A Cataplasm in a Quinsy Sore Throat
Take Figs 4 ounces; Album Gaiacum half an ounce; Flower of Sulphur, long Pepper, each 1 dram; Brandy 2 ounces; Chymical oil of Wormwood 16 drops; Diacodium as much as will serve, beat them all in a Mortar till well mixt. To these may be added Swallows or Pigeons Dung, lay it to the Throat, from Ear to Ear, and renew it as often as it drieth.
In the end, he decides to watch it done, to make sure it is so.
At the appointed hour, at the corner of Hyde Park, he sees Stintleigh swinging his cane and whistling as he walks toward the apartments of Mimosina Dolcezza. A sneer of a smile curls his thin lips, just such a smile as had been imagined by Valentine Greatrakes, and the politician hums a little refrain from the actress’s London role, L’Italiana a Londra’s final aria.
In this vile appropriation, he marks his territory, thinks Valentine, like the dog he is.
As he passes Valentine, who is concealed behind a tree, Stintleigh’s hothouse lapel flower releases its perfume. Even this delicate invasion of his nostrils enrages Valentine, who snorts and champs until he is free of it. He has awoken this morning molested by a husking cough, and the politician’s sharp musk-rose has served to scourge the painful muscles of his throat.
Well, I. shall have my revenge for that, among other things.
Valentine watches the bunch of amusers close around the politician, the leader already dipping into his pocket for the snuff to fling into the eyes of their victim. Stintleigh utters a high-pitched squeal and covers his face with his hands. The amusers push him through the gate into the park and suddenly they are alone with him in another world, a tenebrous dangerous world a thousand ages from the elegant thoroughfare. No one can see them through the evergreen foliage and the pitiful demurrings of the politician are muffled by the trees.
They surround him in a tight circle, pushing him from hand to hand. They taunt him with mock begging, all the while rubbing their hands suggestively around his pockets.
“Gi’s a farthing, SIR! —be so kind and ’umble as to bless us with a little something…”
Lord Stintleigh writhes in their midst like a piece of paper in the fire. The leader draws his blade: His is the glory of the kill. The others smile, waiting their chance to rifle his body, for what they find there shall be their payment.
Sitting on the park bench, as Dizzom has suggested, Valentine waits to see it through. He does not flinch, but he finds it hard not to utter the ticklish cough that lurks dangerously in his throat. He’s gumming for a glass of beer to lubricate and refrigerate the parched linings of his gullet. While Stintleigh utters his thin screams, Valentine is gulping on the dry fibers at the rear of his tongue.
He releases the cough at last, spitting its feathers into the air, but only when the leader has prodded all Stintleigh’s vital organs at least once with the glass dagger. Then he throws a branch thick with leaves over his victim, addressing the dying politician with exaggerated courtesy, “Keep your guts warm, Lord Stintleigh, SIR! The devil loves hot tripes.”
Valentine explodes in a jerking chain of coughs. Too discreet to acknowledge the noise, the leader finally leans down and pushes the stiletto into Stintleigh’s groin and twists it slightly. Valentine is so close he can hear the pretty, musical crack as the hilt separates from the glass blade.
Only then does he rise to leave, coughing freely. There is no hope of salvation now for Stintleigh and in any case two of the gang will stay with him in case anyone stumbles upon the dying man to hear his incriminating last gasps, or lest the man himself writes some inconvenient message on his white linen with his own blood. Valentine hurries away, suddenly fearing to hear the name of Mimosina Dolcezza bubbling from those dying lips.
And of course it has become harder to watch these necessary executions since Tom died.
He knows that she must be aware of the murder, for every headline has screamed of it for days. Not just because of the importance of the man, but because of the final detail of his dispatch. Finding his anger not quite absolved by the mere extinction of the politician, Valentine has decided to refresh a colorful old tradition of London Bridge. Though it is a hundred years since the last decapitated head was displayed on a pike there, he has ordered the surprised face of Lord Stintleigh, impaled on his own elegant cane, erected in one of the neat and cozy stone alcoves that recently replaced the leaning riot of old shops and houses on the bridge.
Of course the constabulary have promptly removed it and it now rests in close proximity with the body in the family crypt, but not before its ghastly likeness has graced several handbills, for the London hacks like nothing more than a bit of horror. They have wasted no time in finding a graphic portent that might, if but noted in time, have saved poor Lord Stintleigh. One of the lions in the Tower of London menagerie died the night before, always a sign of calamity to come. And even the satirists find humor in the grim discovery on London Bridge. Valentine sees a cartoon of two Irish thugs looking at the decapitated politician.
One says to the other, “Didn’t your old mother tell you that it’s past joking when the head’s off?”
Valentine flinches because this was one of Tom’s favorite and most morbidly cruel jokes.
He can barely breathe without her and yet he is afraid to approach her now that he has cleared the way.
Cleansing it of Stintleigh should have restored order to the world, and erased the intolerable humiliation that he visited upon Valentine Greatrakes.
There is no longer a richer man, a better-spoken man, a man of impeccably blue blood, to call upon the actress.
But now this act, this impaling of Stintleigh, becomes his excuse for not seeing her. What if she reads it in his eyes? What if he reads grief for Stintleigh in hers?
She has become among the most fearsome objects in all creation. Just the thought of her twists and ties his tongue. Even internally, he cannot muster eloquence enough to face her. Can he merely blurt out the words she frames inside him, as if they were not the most important in the world? He’s acting the maggot in not asking for the thing he most wants, making a bags of doing it, foostering about doing naught. Standing in the depository late at night, he touches his mouth to practice the necessary phrases, but the peccant part refuses to cooperate with his thoughts.
He cannot even ask her: Would you ever think of coming back to me? He cannot say the truth: I’m heartscalded at the loss of you.
He hates himself, not for the killing, but for his lack of following the matter through. The logical conclusion of the extinction of Stintleigh should have been the winning of the actress. The obstacle is removed. She is his, exclusively. Indeed, probably was so all along. Now that the deed is done, he grows hourly more confident that Stintleigh has been sacrificed to nothing more
than a jealous suspicion. Not much of a sacrifice, true, but such a thing can haunt a man’s night and disgust his conscience, on occasion, if he’s lonely.
He realizes that the humiliation of the nobleman’s corpse was more poignant to him than the actual murder: He does not enjoy discovering this motivation in himself. It does not make him worthy of the love of an exquisite woman.
My nature is too coarse for her. She’ll be fading and dying from my boorishness in a month. Now isn’t that the cruel duality of it all in one? She’s sweet enough to make a man throw stones at his own grandmother—and commit other acts of a brutal nature—and yet it’s kindness herself the woman entirely.
That’s the irony. He has connived this sinful act for her, who would faint from horror to know of it.
But he has done it because he wants her. Because, to admit the truth a moment, he sorely needs her. Now is the time to speak.
Yet look at him skulking on the edge of life! He has stopped at the last hurdle, refused like a sick horse. And, for all the coin stashed under the floorboards in Stoney Street, has he ever done any better? Does this crisis with the actress not insinuate what’s amiss with his whole life? Valentine assesses himself with a grim eye. Always a here-and-thereian, never settled in any one business, always sniffing after something new, leaving Dizzom to pick up the pieces of each discarded enthusiasm.
What would I be without Dizzom? A mouthful of moonshine, nothing!
Confronted with—yes, he must admit it—love, he has failed at the first post, He has made a holy show of himself. Just one taste of love and he’s caught in its seductions like a spotty poet, unable to do anything about it except wallow in its mires, condemned to suffer the craving forever after blundering through the blood like a large beetle.
How pathetic is that? asks Valentine Greatrakes.
He is less than nothing. He is less than Dizzom. He is less than Dizzom’s dog, Foible.
If Foible can survive a good drenching mouthful of one of Dizzom’s nostrums, then it’s fit enough for the denizens of Bankside. There have been more than several Foibles, none lasting more than a year.
That’s me, Foible, thinks Valentine. Just a dog on which a tender woman practices her sweet-seeming potions, with no life of my own but that which I am allowed by her grace, goodness, or skill.
And he’s had just a dog’s portion of the actress too, just a lick and a smell of her, and she’s gone, yet taking the most sentient parts of him with her, it seems.
How dare she be doing that!
He will not go to seek the actress.
If she must have him, she must come and find him, and prove to him that she is worth all this devastation.
In the meantime Tom’s body has at last arrived in London, and there is a funeral to arrange.
• 11 •
A Traumatic Decoction
Take Roots of Burdock 3 ounces; Madder 6 drams; Rhubarb 2 drams; Herbs of Dittany of Creet, St Johns Wort, Sanicle, Bugle, each 1 handful; boil in Water 2 pints, and white Wine (added towards the last) 1 pint to 28 ounces; when strain’d dissolve in it Venice Treacle 2 drams; Honey 3 ounces; Oxymel simple 1 ounce, mix.
It dissolves concretions of the Cruor, wheresoever extravasated, and returns it again into the circulating Channel.
It is a symptom of love to want love.
So Valentine thinks when he looks down from the gallery to see—of all people—Mimosina Dolcezza in the reception room below his office. She stands there pale and rigid against the freshly painted purple of the walls. The public rooms of the depository have gone into mourning for the viewing of Tom’s corpse two days before the funeral.
He marvels at her persistence and her intelligence. How has she found him here? He tells himself he feels not a flicker of shame that she should see him at his business, in his place of work. He has not lied to her about it; it’s just that there are certain items he did not mention. The depository is enormous as any Venetian palazzo and run tightly as a battleship. There is nothing shabby here, and all his employees are well fed. And yet he finds himself coughing and swallowing hard to irrigate his dry throat.
She is distinctive among the shabby multitudes who are crammed down there, awaiting their turn to pay their respects to Tom. Still, he turns on his heel and pretends not to have seen her. This occasion is dedicated to Tom, not Mimosina Dolcezza. Even if she has innocently stumbled upon the day of mourning, she should have had the tact and discretion to leave at once. What right has she to be standing there, beautiful as a lake, demanding attention that today of all days belongs exclusively to Tom—and poor Pevenche, who has silently viewed the body alone with him this morning and is now safely back at the Academy?
Below him, Tom lies in his purple-fringed coffin, recognizable instantly. Valentine tries to forget how Tom’s vascular organization has been injected with oil of turpentine and camphorated spirit of wine, his viscera drained away and the cavity of his abdomen packed with powdered nitrate and more camphor. A carminative solution gives his skin that lifelike rosy hue. Yet all the orifices are plugged, his lips are invisibly stitched together and wadding of cotton has been slipped under his eyelids as the balls of his eyes have long since collapsed inside his skull. Dizzom’s solutions, relayed via their couriers to Italy, have worked almost perfectly. Yet still there are touches of violet about the skin of the hands, which have been rubbed with white lead to disguise the blackening. Tom died before the gangrene could fur his tongue and distort his mouth. And thanks be to God, thinks Valentine, the murderers did not much mark Tom’s face, a sure sign in their world that they wanted his identity known. Just a cut to the lip, little damage upon his features. Otherwise Tom’s body might never have come home to London to be wept over; it would have ended up in a poor’s pit in Venice, unidentified and unmourned.
As it is, they have come in their hundreds for Tom. They have come from their stalls, lock-ups, inns, digs, and garrets in Paris Garden, Bear Gardens, and Rose Alley to see him and weep their tears over his body. Valentine nods to each familiar face. His own tears form to replicate theirs as he acknowledges the pain of softhearted thieves, quacks, whores, and many other notables of Bankside.
Even the fugitives who inhabit the concealed stairwells of the Anchor have exposed themselves to danger today. In Tom’s honor they have staggered on their cramped legs round Bank End into Clink Street and processed unsteadily up Stoney Street to the depository, draped with purple silk banners at each window.
The preceding group is ushered out of the receiving chamber. The double doors at the end of the purple room swing open to allow the new swarm of grievers to enter. Mimosina Dolcezza is borne in by the crowd. A gallant gentleman of the lock-picking persuasion has even seized her elbow, and is valiantly clearing a path for her all the way to the coffin, little knowing this must be the last thing she desires. Her face is a picture of miserable confusion and helplessness.
Looking down from above, Valentine tells himself that he does not even feel sorry for her: Her timing’s bad; by some strange fatality she has arrived at an awkward moment. It is not his fault, and nor can he be held responsible if she’s never seen a corpse before. Will he rush to help her if she faints?
Not likely.
It will do her good to see a real tragedy, instead of those picturesque dramas she likes to confect, built of nothing but hysterics and jealousy and fanned by her petty obsessions, culminating in the petulant act of allowing Gervase Stintleigh indoors. Still. Valentine keeps an eye on the lock-picker, making sure his attentions remain in the realm of decency. He would not like a coarse act to defile Tom’s day, he reminds himself.
I want Tom buried in all manner of pride and splendor.
In the surge of the crowd, Mimosina Dolcezza is brought ever closer to Tom’s coffin. Valentine sees her grow suddenly even paler. Her eyes widen. All around her, people are gently lifting Tom’s hand to kiss it, taking away white powder on their lips. Men are thumping the coffin with emotion and women are throwing rose peta
ls and carefully folded notes inside it. Mimosina Dolcezza alone stands still, staring at Tom’s face, her own features immobilized by shock. Her white face glistens with perspiration.
No, it must be tears.
It is pity she’s feeling for the poor unknown creature, lying there on the purple satin. She must have realized who he is and who he was to me.
Or it could even be that she weeps for Valentine Greatrakes himself, witnessing the grim reality of his great loss and finding it hard to bear on his behalf.
Unlike the weeping actress, he himself has not been able truly to look at the corpse, not to meet its closed eyes or touch it. He has dealt with it as if it were a precious possession of Tom’s to be honored and looked after. When Tom arrived, and Valentine went slowly down to greet the coffin, he had tried, though without success, to stop himself sniffing for the putrid signature of the violating fish. Smelling nothing but Dizzom’s medicinal desiccants, he had simply nodded, accepting this box of flesh as Tom’s. He had not even shed a tear.
And look now.
Even though this man can mean nothing at all to Mimosina Dolcezza, she is showing more emotion than Valentine has displayed in the entire span of the last weeks. She trembles visibly; she wavers on her feet.
Then she inclines her head upward and meets the eyes of Valentine Greatrakes. She holds them. He reads terrifying pain in her pupils, and in a moment she distils a new tear from each lid. Now he is sure of it. The sweet lady is grieving for this stranger because the man who is now this corpse was once beloved by Valentine Greatrakes.
A sudden scream breaks their silent communion. A woman is shrieking and pointing to the corpse. Now men are shouting and pointing too. Through the glass their distress is muffled, as if underwater. Valentine cranes his neck to see what has caused such outrage.
Tom’s white-wrapped chest is flowering with blood. The red stain spreads so fast that it is as if the life-force is still pumping the fluid from his body. Valentine turns to shout for Dizzom but sees his assistant already scuttling down the stairs. In the mourning room, his men are pushing the grievers away with the unnecessary force summoned by their own fear. Men and women are weeping, and one voice above them all howls the words everyone is thinking: ‘The murderer must be in this room!’