The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

  At this, Pevenche turned to me and smiled. “How well do you smell, Madame Joanfloor! Remember witched have very poor sight but a monstrous good sense of smell.”

  It was only then—how had I been so blind until now?—that I noticed that the silent couple were not French but bore a Venetian crest on their luggage. They were Golden Book, but a far-flung branch, to be traveling in relative humbleness like this. I tried to contain an involuntary shudder, for on that dark nig ht, with the coils of the fairy tale tightening round me, it was hard not to fantasize that here were two more spies in the pay of my employers, set to follow me and report on my movements. Having failed to track me down, Mazziolini had handed over the baton to this unlikely couple, more discreet and more dangerous even than he.

  The wheels rolled on ceaselessly and I had never felt so trapped, not even in San Zaccaria. I thought of Valentine Greatrakes, and how much I would have enjoyed this journey if I’d had his hand to hold as we hurtled over the stones, and his sweet shoulder on which to rest my head. I mused on, uncomforted, with painful thoughts pricking me like knife blades. Without realizing it, I had opened the flask in which I kept my emergency supply of gin, and drained it. Pevenche leaned over to our companions, indicating me with a turn of her head. She told them confidentially: “Poor Miss Joanfloor. The consolations of her antiquity should include a natural softening of the temper. But she needs the gin, you know.”

  The horrible little polecat had made sure that no one would forget this journey! Through the medium of the fairy tale, she was telling them that she, a young innocent girl, was traveling in the thrall of a hard-drinking older and duplicitous woman. Like a wicked stepmother! A perverted kind of mother-figure who meant her no good! It followed that she had been kidnapped, surely. Whether she knew it or not Pevenche was laying a trail by telling this story, just as Hansel left his little white pebbles. I must watch her like a falcon: make sure that she left no actual scribbled notes to this effect in that false childish script of hers.

  I hated to admit that the poisonous chit could have an effect on me, but I did not like to be painted like that. It spoke to all the weakness in me that had made me so sad and passive when my first lover abused me. I was furious, helpless, out of breath. I sat brooding on my revenge and how to take control of the situation again, while Pevenche, inspired by the success of her story, talked continually in her wood-scratching voice, pronouncing, with a very important face, a number of banalities.

  That night, in my only moment of laxity, I did her a small violence.

  She had been complaining of the smallness of the signet ring I had presented to her over dinner, pretending it was a gift sent from her guardian.

  After the usual “poor me’s” and sundry accustomed laments, her voice suddenly changed to a steely tone and she fixed a superior, reproving look upon me.

  Admit it,” she said. “You chose this trifle. He would never have insulted me with something so light. You bought this cheap ring and you have kept most of the money for yourself.”

  You are wrong,” I lied evenly. “The ring arrived from your Uncle Valentine. I had no say in the transaction.”

  She snorted.

  Then it became too much for me. The fact that I had gone without gin so that she might have this ring. The fact that she was fortunate to be given any gift at all, that she insulted me so relentlessly, that Valentine Greatrakes had refused me a ring at last.

  I reached over and pulled the ring off the tip of her littlest finger where she had placed it to show her contempt.

  “I agree,” I said, holding it up in front of her face. “It is a poor morsel of a thing. Much too delicate for you to wear.”

  And with that I pushed it deep into her mouth which snapped shut with surprise, and before she knew it, Pevenche had swallowed the ring.

  She was shocked into silence, and then I saw a peculiar smile of satisfaction illuminate the liverish fat of her cheeks. I had made a grievous error. I had finally given her some ammunition against me. She had known from the first that I did not admire her, but she had made herself very easy about that. She had been waiting for me to put a foot wrong. I had just obliged her most handsomely. She could now, to her mind, denounce me to her guardian, and have me banished, like everyone else who had stood in her way.

  Quickly, I decided to say nothing, not to corroborate the fact of what I had done. If I apologized, it would acknowledge my crime. Then at some point later it would be her word against mine.

  She was so full of her victory that she had no need of confirmation from me. She hugged her happy prospects to herself and retired to her bedroom without any further word. It was contiguous to mine, and I ascended shortly afterwards. I heard her draining another bottle of the Drops, and soon after her familiar snores that throughout the journey had forced me to shrink my head under my bedclothes.

  I sat at my table, thinking hard and fast. I was amazed that she had perforated my self-control, as no one else had ever done, except my first lover. I could not allow it to happen again. But how was I to prevent it?

  Finally the answer came to me.

  If her greatest subconscious fear was being eaten alive like Hansel and Gretel then I would work on that! If she wanted to paint me as a witch—I a professed nun—and a wicked stepmother—I who was no one’s mother!—then she would have witches and wicked stepmothers by the spadeful.

  It was an old actor’s trick, but new to her, as was everything of course, the booby. I had stripped to just a black shift, and prepared one ounce of oil of almonds, with half a dram of phosphorus and two grains of the flour of sulphur in a thick bottle. I held the mixture in a candle flame for a moment to dissolve it, then I shook the bottle and drew the cork … a fine glow-worm of light shimmered inside. When I was ready I rubbed a line of this mixture along the edge of my arms, the outline of my cheek and nose … and I entered her room mildly aflame.

  I saw her eyelids snap up as I slammed the door open. I spoke through the haze of her sleep: “If you betray me or even behave badly, I shall eat you.”

  She was too drugged to scream but I saw her eyes widen, and the helpless small convulsions of her fingertips. I stopped in my threats only when I thought she might die of a seizure brought on by her inexpressible fear. She closed her eyes, hoping to eliminate the vision I presented, and rolled upon her left side, away from me. As she turned I had a glimpse of her breasts sliding from the lace-daubed mouth of her chemise; they were mismatched and already swagging southwards, I noticed.

  I placed a little chicken bone in her hand so that she had something to wake up with to remind her of what had happened, a tangible souvenir of her dreadful dream.

  After that, she was mine. She was mute all the way, eating what she was given, including the drugs.

  • 11 •

  A Cataplasm of Bitters

  Take Venice Treacle, Lupine Meal, each 3 drams; Wormseed 1 dram and a half; Species of Hiera picra half a dram; Chymical oil of Wormwood 16 drops; Juice of Tansey, enough to embody it, mix.

  Apply it to the Navel, against Worms in Children.

  When we arrived at Mestre, it was early evening. The color drained from the sky seemed to have come back in the form of piquant aromas. Pevenche emerged from the carriage blinking and sniffing at the stink of seaweed and the rasping odor of hot stone suddenly cooling as night descended.

  I hurried her into a gondola.

  “Sant’ Alvise,” I said, in as calm a voice as I could muster. Distressed women rushing to nunneries were always good fodder for gossip in Venice. I was glad of Sant’Alvise’s solitary situation at the northwest extremity of the town, perched on the very edge of the lagoon and so remote from the fashionable hustle of San Marco and the crowds of Rialto.

  When Pevenche saw the gondola she started spluttering and carrying on in a good simulation of a hysterical fit, till I was obliged to dose her with a swig of one of her Specificks.

  “She suffers from the seasickness,” I told the gondolier, who nodded s
ympathetically, saying, “Imagine, una Veneziana who cannot bear water, poveretta!”

  I was relieved that he had called her “una Veneziana.”

  He asked me no questions as we boarded and the boat slid into the slate-gray water pointed toward Venice. The waves hastened to embrace the prow, like the eager and thorough touch of a blind man.

  Pevenche arrived in my city semiconscious, and lay back on the cushions of the felze, looking out of the window with slackened eyes. As the bell towers arose before us, she burbled in a simple-minded kind of way “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”

  That was more or less all she said until, a merciful half-hour later, we were grinding into the upper steps of the water gate at Sant’Alvise.

  Of course the city stunned her. She had arrived almost entirely ignorant of its appearance. She had read nothing and showed no interest in the guidebooks I pressed on her, and yawned widely at the snippets I read to her unless they were of a retail or culinary nature. I think that before seeing it she must have perceived Venice dimly as an inconvenient city without carriages and with many shops of cunning glass beads, which she had swiftly and conclusively disdained in advance, saying, “My guardian insists I wear only real precious stones.” And of course she saw no benefit in covering her face with a mask, Carnevale or no Carnevale.

  It was clear that my explanation of the gondolas, the canals and the Carnevale still in progress had passed her by. As we entered Cannaregio, she roused herself somewhat from her stupor. She looked fearfully at the boats and the masked figures hurrying along the rive as if they inhabited a demented dream. It was too much for her. By the time we reached Sant’Alvise she was in what I suspected to be the first genuine swoon of her life. Her Gothic hauteur had slumped into the dumbfoundedness of a country bumpkin.

  And she had not even seen the glories of the Grand Canal, a glimpse of which I craved like cake but which I dared not permit myself. I contented myself with breathing great gulps of the sweet sea air and let my eyes devour the dentillations and ancient reliefs on the façades of sundry small palazzi that we passed. It gave me inexpressible satisfaction to think that I had returned to Venice, from which my employers had so long banished me, as a free woman.

  Apart from its convenient remoteness, I had chosen Sant’Alvise from the kindest motives—it had a reputation as the best bakery in Venice, and for a motherly regime that regarded a weakness for the pleasures of the table as the very least of sins.

  At least Pevenche would be able to indulge her sweet tooth while she awaited her fate. I had a fondness for the place myself with its companionable little campo spilling on to the canal of Sant Alvise and the sweet lineaments of the brick convent placed at comfortable right-angles to the church. It was closer to the salty haunts of the fishermen than the perfumed offices of the Inquisition. And there was something precious here that almost all of Venice lacked—a high sky and a far horizon, speckled with hazy islands. The quietness was palpable, broken only by the lap of waves and the subdued cries of the seagulls: even they seemed to respect the peace of Sant’Alvise. The church had always been my favorite, simply for the delectable cobalt blues of its ceiling. How different it was from the stern chessboard blacks of San Zaccaria! Even the grilles that separated the nuns from the congregation, so rigid and prison-like at San Zaccaria, were airy and light-heartedly curlicued at Sant’Alvise, seeming more an expression of pleasure than enclosure.

  When I handed Pevenche over to the nuns, I did have a moment of feeling sorry. I knew what she was about to go through, after all. But I comforted myself that her blood now ran with an equal proportion of opium to vital fluid, and that she was lost in her own world, awash in the scum of trivia that enslaved her brain. She would be scarcely conscious of her privations. I had left enough of the nostrum—“’without it she’s a dead woman in a day”—with her new guardians to last until my plan came to fruition.

  “She also suffers horribly from worms,” I told the abbess and her colleagues, whose round faces creased immediately with a tender concern for Pevenche’s infested belly, “and needs this cataplasm three times a day, laid on the navel in a bag.”

  I put a jar of paste into the hands of the nearest nun. I was embarrassed about the grossness of her appetite, and that I tried to excuse it with this tale of vermin.

  Sant’Alvise was far more humble than San Zaccaria. The nuns were grateful even for the small sum I now offered for her care. “It is just until her guardian arrives,” I told them. “A matter of a week or two at the most.” This short time made my ducats look larger and they thanked me with seriousness.

  “She’s a sweet child,” I told them. “You’ll find her quite tractable. In spite of an aristocratic education in London, it seems that they have neglected to teach her Italian, but she will respond to whatever way you communicate with her. She is an extraordinary girl.”

  I fused every stage skill I’d ever possessed in a gesture that conveyed and transferred to them a heavy wonder at her magnificence.

  The nuns looked gratified that I had brought them such a pearl, as I hoped they would. By stressing her particularity, I hoped to persuade them to find her strangeness becoming and even attractive. Novelty appeals to all Venetians, and most particularly to the city’s enclosed nuns. My parting words brought smiles to their kind faces: “She shows an extreme partiality to sweet foods.”

  All the while I was thinking to myself: This Pevenche, she is indeed extraordinary. She is a girl one cannot love. Every attempt I have made to befriend her had been quickly decayed by her contempt. Anything I have taught her—that for her own curious motives she did not disdain to retain—it is like a diamond set in lead. I hope she does not abuse these kind women.

  Pevenche tottered from my arm to that of the abbess, a plump and homely nun, so unlike the hard-eyed anatomies at San Zaccaria. The abbess looked kindly on my fake belly, without any insinuations against the respectability of my incipient offspring.

  “We’ll take good care of this one,” she smiled, “and you, my dear, must take care of the new little one. These blessed months of gestation are not to be taken lightly”

  “You will be safe here,” I told Pevenche in English. She flinched away at the sound of my voice. Even though she was awake, she was still afraid of me. But whether it was her memories of my “ghost” or the knowledge that I was cold-hearted enough to torture her with its appearance, I would never know and I did not preoccupy myself with the question. It was nothing like as evil as the deceptions that had tricked me into San Zaccaria without a fight.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said one more time, and that was the last I saw of her: The abbess with a gentle arm about her shoulders, leading her down one of the innumerable corridors of cells radiating from the reception room on the first floor.

  • 12 •

  A Comforting Glyster

  Take Canary Wine 1 pint; Diascordium half an ounce; Yolks of Eggs 2, mix.

  What Cordial Juleps are to the Stomach, the same this Glyster is to the Guts. For it so refreshes them, as to raise an universal Exultation of the whole Systasis of the Spirits, whereby they are roused up, and enabled to perform their Business briskly; and throw out whatsoever is offensive to Nature, and noxious, vigorously.

  The last anyone here had knowingly seen of me was my back firmly turned from Venice. Even if they had discovered the true trail of all my perverse routes around the north of Italy even if they had followed me through France, it seemed obvious that they had not tracked me to London.

  Or, if they had, my shabby life as a quack’s assistant had given me sufficient cover from their vigilant eyes. Perhaps they never looked for me, a Golden Book daughter, south of the river, among the breweries and the glassworks and the humid parlors of the Blackfriars laundresses. They were probably still scouring Mayfair for a woman of my style and quality being kept by the kind of man who could afford me. Perhaps they were touring the theaters and the high-class brothels, thinking that the stage and
its related profession were the only way I might feed myself. Or having found that trail quite cold and dead, then they might have given up on London, and were perhaps even now looking up my old haunts and my former lovers in Paris, Vienna, or St. Petersburg.

  I imagined Mazziolini, his energy fed by fury, arriving in yet another city. For him, too, it would be a point of honor to find me, and to administer a little homely chastisement of his own before he handed me back to my employers. My escape would have disgraced him in their eyes, and only my recapture would restore him to their favor. He would be after me like a bloodhound, eyes splayed, fingers avid, that soft insinuating voice asking the same questions in language after language, in city after city, proffering a miniature of me: “Have you seen her? Was it recently? Where exactly? Do you know where she is now?”

  I dreamt of Mazziolini’s eyes. Eyes so pale a green that in certain lights and at certain angles they looked like tiny pools of milk, and the apertures too small in any case to give any access to a reading of his soul. I knew he would not stop looking until he found me.

  After consigning Pevenche to Sant’Alvise I hurried to a quiet parish in Santa Croce, where for the second time I rented a room by posing as a recent widow who awaited her inheritance. The story fitted with my naturalistic air of desperation and apparently swollen belly.

  I did not leave the house for several days. When I did so, my preparations were elaborate. I was masked and kept my cloak around me. I bulked myself up like a bear with concentric layers of clothes and on top of them all, beneath the ultimate dress, I tied the pregnancy apron from my quack days in London. To make me waddle, I wore a rolled chemise strung between my legs.

  After my first anonymous costumed circuit, I flung off all the dresses and petticoats. Dressed only in my chemise, I lay on the bed, panting.