“And her age?” asked my accomplice, busy at his calligraphy.
I realized that I knew it not, but instructed him to write “twenty,” my original guess on first seeing her.
I had the document drawn up in French, trusting that she would not interest herself in anything so impenetrable.
Now Pevenche’s face was frozen, listening to and pretending to understand my fluent French. My explanations, similar to those I had given Mistress Haggardoon, were accepted and we were gallantly waved away by the officers and set free upon our road almost instantly.
I decided not to stay the night in Calais but to leave immediately for a town more obscure. I did not believe that we had been followed, but I could not afford to be complacent.
By now my hostage had begun to fascinate me. I had never come across such a grotesque creature. Nature had justly denied her charm, having endowed her richly with conceit. In every carriage she behaved like the reigning beauty at a ball, condescending to meet the admiring glances she imagined by turning her head from one fellow passenger to another, as if to linger too long on one might utterly rum him. Her artillery of giggles, winks, and lash-fluttering was unleashed on both men and women. I am sure they thought her deprived of her senses by some accident.
The only accident that has befallen her, I wanted to say, is a surfeit of tolerance regarding her monstrous vanity.
My lover, and evidently also her father before him, had fondled all her fantasies about being an invincibly charming young woman of heroic intelligence.
When she saw our companions looking at her curiously, she whispered to me: “You see! Do I not intrigue them? Do they not all think that I am a foreign lady? A foreign lady, bred abroad? Do I not have fascinating graces and airs that mark me out from other English misses?”
She fully believed that no male could behold her squab charms with impunity. If a man’s glance strayed involuntarily in her direction, she would squeal in a whisper, “Oh no! He’s looking goats and monkeys at me! I dare not meet his eyes! I’m so shy!”
At the end of one meal I watched in astonishment as she carefully wrapped the well-gnawed bones of her fowl in a napkin. When I asked her why she did so she told me in stiff terms that these delicacies were for the coachman’s horse. My heart was too cold to disabuse her and I admit that I enjoyed the spectacle the next morning when she, simpering, presented the bones, and the incredulous coachman looked over her head to his friend the ostler, who was making a pretty pantomime of her bizarre ignorance.
Myself she regarded with exaggerated pity The fact that she condemned me as dowdy was so ridiculous that I should have been able to dismiss it. But the poor opinion of anyone, no matter how contemptible, is wearing, and I found my self-confidence mysteriously wilting under the power of her scorn.
She would ask with mock concern, “Oh dear! Have you sore eyes today? They are so very small and red!” or “Have you dyed your hair freshly this morning? It looks dreadfully darker again, but I think all the gray is gone.” And my hand, all involuntary, would dart to the insulted part of me, while I blushed. It was true, my homespun efforts at hiding the gold of my hair were clumsy, the tincture I’d bought at Bankside no doubt too cheap to be efficacious.
If a man glanced at me with admiration she regarded him with pity too, as if he had been shockingly swindled in the gift of discrimination. And it happened that every time I looked up I was confronted by her small but vivid eyes, the blue pupils taking up the entire cavity and seeming like opals sinking in the cream of her fat cheeks. When she was caught out by me like this, she lazily swung her glance away, as insolently as possible, as if to convey that I presented not the slightest object of interest to her.
Nor was she concerned with the towns and landscapes we passed through, rarely glancing out of the window, and always rejecting my suggestions of making a visit to a famed church or view. She was entirely resourced from within, and passed her time in happy speculations about what awaited her when we finally caught up with her guardian. She shared her thoughts with whichever companions were in our carriage, entirely without self-consciousness, or perhaps so utterly racked with it that the close little chamber seemed a kind of theater to her in which she must perform.
She invariably introduced me as “my spinster companion” to travelers who kindly lowered their eyes with embarrassment. With the rejection of Valentine Greatrakes so painfully on my mind, the discouragement of that fatal denomination struck me most cruelly.
It was a theme Pevenche mined richly.
“I imagine that you shall soon be returnin’ to London, to some garret where you may live cheap and retired, until some man takes you up. But do you know,” she added, “your prospects are dim, for there is a vast superabundance of women against men there.”
She then stared at me in silence, as if to say that with the market so hard against our sex, someone of my feeble attributes was not likely to prevail.
“But where is my guardian?” she asked continually.
“An urgent matter came up. He has gone on to Nice,” I told her. Or to Lucerne, or to Freiburg. Each place where we arrived, I pretended to receive a letter from him, explaining that he awaited us in the very next town. I gave the letters to her. I had written them in the same masculine hand, full of love and concern for his little ward, late the night before, while she snored.
“I hope that my Baby P. does not find the journey too hard,” I scribbled. “I cannot wait to see her again.”
Like a fish pulled on a gentle and sweet-baited hook, she swam voluntarily in the direction I hoped. Of course she behaved mutinously at times, particularly in regard to her dresses. She had kicked up a considerable storm in Paris, refusing to leave until every last promised chemise was delivered.
“And there should have been fittings. Lots of fittings, with lots of little girls fussin’ around me!” she wept, genuine tears spurting on to the fatty slabs of her cheeks.
When we stopped in towns, I was obliged to stay with her every moment. Otherwise she was capable of tripping into the establishments of milliners and mantua-makers and bludgeoning them into some costly service, despite her lack of language. An account would be delivered forthwith to our rooms, along with some fashionable garment, like a caraco jacket à la polonaise, pleated and flared at the back and cut away at the front, or a pink silk mantle figured in hideous red spots, always too tight for her and frequently discarded after one breathless wearing. When questioned by me, she riposted: “You told me Uncle Valentine wants me to lack for nothing. I ask the bare minimum, y’know.”
Or she would ask me for “a little loan until Uncle Valentine can take care of it.” For obvious reasons, I dared not refuse her. Looking into her cold blue eyes at moments like that, I thought she must see through me, and that she mocked me with these requests, and it seemed that this monster stayed with me only because this journey, in some bizarre way, suited her own purposes. I trembled then, and wondered if she would denounce me at the next town, or in front of a carriage full of strangers.
It took a little gin, but I always soothed my fears. The same thought came to rescue me on the balmy wings of the drink: Pevenche was malicious as the devil on his throne, but she was not burdened with his wits. She lacked the native cunning to play me for a fool. What I saw of her was what she was: a fat, dull girl who thought of nothing whatsoever beyond her next dress or dinner.
A new problem was bearing down on me. I was running out of money, despite my generous cut of the nostrum profits. I plainly could not afford to keep indulging Pevenche.
So she simply helped herself. One evening, returning to my room at the inn after a blessedly solitary stroll in the garden, I found her sitting on the floor, raking through the contents of my valise. When I entered the room her eyes flickered over me but swiftly returned to the pile of clothes.
My first throat-tightening thought was that she was spying on me, and I was too frightened to speak. I tried to remember if there was anything incriminating amon
g my personal effects. Nothing came to mind.
Meanwhile she continued to paw through my possessions, discarding most items with exaggerated disdain. But two or three items she laid on one side, as if they alone were worthy of consideration. She did not look at me, and I stood silently regarding her.
Eventually, with a sigh, she gathered the chosen garments—some ribbons, a shawl, a spotted jacket that would never stretch to her girth—and rose gracelessly to her feet. Then she walked out of the room without saying a word.
Stupefied, I remained looking at my pillaged valise for many minutes. Then it came to me—the manner of her thinking. She saw nothing wrong in this behavior. To her I was merely the employee of her guardian. I was his creature—and he, he was her creature. My possessions, by this construction, were her possessions. I shook my head, unable to feel anything but wonder.
I was not inconsolably distressed by her thievery of my clothes. It kept her quiet a while. But when the spotted jacket, ripped across the shoulder, was flung back at me, I hit upon the happy idea of setting small mousetraps in the pockets of my favorite things. After one encounter with a jacket that bit back, Pevenche desisted from rifling my valise, and instead adorned her injured finger with a sensational bandage of red silk.
Such a sturdy creature as she was, Pevenche was still born to act the martyr and it was a constant struggle for her to maintain her victimhood without any ill-treatment to support it. She had a wonderful power for making people feel that they had done her a great wrong. I ceased to wonder why Valentine Greatrakes had felt himself so obliged to make everything up to her. Poor tender-hearted man, what hope had he against such assaults? As we traveled in our carriages, she often stared vacantly straight ahead, uttering a long and eloquent sigh. When asked what troubled her, she would wave away the question with a resigned hand.
She complained of everything. Her vocabulary was pulvilled with schoolgirl words. To be rid of the sniffing lady to her left would be “killing fine.” She herself was “up to the ears in love” with the pink satin slippers worn by another. And nor could she live without the “darlingest” parrot-feather muffetees sported by a woman of fashion we glimpsed at an urn outside Nice. For days afterwards she stared pointedly at her naked wrists every time she caught me looking at her. In the end I found her some, but they were made of swan feathers and she professed herself heartily dissatisfied with them.
I was lonely, missing those evenings with Dottore Velena when we sat up late gilding pills by rolling them in coconut shells lined with powdered metals. I missed the company, I missed the sordid comforts, that close little room at the Feathers, and it behoves me to admit that I missed the gin. At this realization I sternly resolved to divest myself of the pernicious habit of taking most of my fluid in that form. It was sorely difficult: Every time I looked at the girl, my bile rose and I craved a glass of something warming to wash away its bitter taste. But I could not afford to be overtaken with the gin in her company, nor to be seen engaged at the bottle.
There were times, when looking at Pevenche, that the Zany’s voice struggled to burst out of my own mouth. Such as now, when he bellowed in my inner ear at her, “Never mind the pelted lip, you sulky cow. I won’t be taking you any kind of shopping with that face tripping you up.”
When her maneuvers drove me to a pitch of distraction, I started to dose her with various condiments I had taken from Doctor Velena’s surgery, just spoonfuls here and there, nothing seriously damaging to her health.
“You poor child,” I would say, “you look a little peaky. Your guardian would never forgive me if you arrived in his presence sporting such a pallor.”
She laced herself so tight that I feared for her viscera and it was all to no use anyway, for the confined flesh merely migrated to rolls under her shoulders and below her hips.
Of course the drugs made her hungry. To keep her subdued, I did not give her quite enough to eat—enough to satisfy a normal creature of her age but not her sweet tooth. My purse was running to speedy decay in trying to support her appetite. The hours she was sleeping, as I saw it, were hours in which she was not eating.
After the second day on the road I had put on my pregnancy apron. It felt in an odd way comforting on my belly. I remembered my own true pregnancy sixteen years before: This one was definitely more comfortable. I was curious to see how Pevenche would react to it, but she appeared not to notice it at all.
When, however, men started to offer me extra attentions such as handing me in and out of carriages, and when women started to stroke my cheek sentimentally and ask coy little questions, then Pevenche was forced to mark the difference in my shape. I caught her looking at me with a superior smile. With amazement I realized that she did not understand the implication of my enlarged belly. Despite her great age she had not the least idea of the facts of life. She merely thought me grown fat like herself and this diminishing of my attractiveness gave her no little pleasure.
• 10 •
A Pacific Mixture
Take Liquid Laudanum tartarised 2 drams; Oil of Nutmeg and Cinnamon each 4 drops, mix.
It has the common Virtues of Laudanum, but in a more especial manner, respects Vomiting and Looseness; besides which, it’s a good blind for Laudanum, to hide it from the knowledge of Patients and By-standers; which Trick is sometimes exceeding necessary, when they are curiously impertinent and meddling, or have taken up a foolish aversion to Opium.
The closer we came to Venice the more genial grew the climate, and the more nervous I became. Undermined by Pevenche’s thick-spread contempt, I was losing belief in my flimsy plan.
How was I going to drag this great blouzed lump of a girl, taller than myself and far wider, through Venice and have her shut up in a convent without attracting attention? The last rumor I wanted spread around the city was one of a foreign girl imprisoned in Sant’Alvise, the convent I had decided upon for her.
And in the middle of my worries Pevenche appeared to do something that chilled my blood.
I had always known her for a girl who made a solid treasure of her infancy; I had seen for myself the miniature ukulele, so ridiculous in her fat arms, the nursery vocabulary. In general, alone with me she did not make a feature of her juvenility but whenever there were other people around, she fell into the performance of it. She also cultivated a fondness for fairy tales and one of her affectations was to refer to the characters in them as if they were historical personages. I reflected sourly that she would have evinced a belief in fairies if they could make good strawberry pies.
One day, as the carriage jolted interminably through a mountain pass, she was put out by the crying of a small child whose voice lifted in lament above the fug of the little chamber we shared with four other travelers. The mother was too motion-sick to pay attention to her little boy. She wilted against the window while he howled. Our other companions were a fiftyish, elegant man and a sharp-eyed widow, possibly a Frenchwoman, of some forty cruel winters and apparently rather fewer renewing springs. If they were together, it was in some kind of decayed clandestine rapport, for their eyes never met. There was something about them that made me uneasy. I tried to reassure myself that everyone aroused my suspicions in my fugitive state, and that there was nothing of worrisome note about these middle-aged travelers. As the little boy wailed, both of them stared out of the windows, clearly wishing themselves a thousand miles away, but too unversed in child matters to take things into their own hands, and full of distaste at the thought of addressing themselves to the squirming boy, who probably numbered about four years.
Suddenly Pevenche’s voice rang out above the child’s wails, the clattering carriage wheels, and the wind’s whine outside. It was not a pretty voice but, like her ukulele, it penetrated the brain and claimed attention, without hope of escape.
Here, in the middle of the fabled forest, she had decided to make a great flourish of her own babyish nature—clearly reading competition for that status in the cries of the little boy. She had chosen to
tell her unwilling audience the tale of Hansel and Gretel.
The child stopped crying and was listening. I have no idea if he spoke English but he most certainly knew from her tone of voice that she was telling a fairy story. I did not know if the mother understood either. She smiled wearily as her child snuffled into a rapt silence and took the opportunity to stuff the bead of his anodyne necklace into his mouth. This he sucked contentedly as Pevenche carried on relentlessly in her high, artificial, storytelling voice, reserving a hissing stage whisper for every appearance by the monstrous stepmother. I could not guess if the older man and woman were able to understand her, but in my paranoid state I imagined that I saw the twinkle of comprehension in his eyes, anyway. Hers remained opaque.
Pevenche concluded triumphantly, “And the stepmother had already expired in convulsions.”
I hated every word of this story and I hated her way of telling it, in her childish affected lisp. As ever, she was representing herself as a splay-legged little faun instead of the thumping heifer she was.
Meanwhile, caught in the story’s thrall, the small boy had soiled his wraps. The close air snagged on the salty rottenness of his effluvia. I sniffed loudly to alert the mother to her duties.