I remained silent. I knew that if I spoke of Pevenche I’d be opening my grave with my mouth.
And so I protected my secret. He grew bored, and gave orders for me to be locked away.
I lay on a plank in a ground-floor cell, and listened to the impatient scratching of the rats. Despite the bleak nature of the accommodation, I was relieved to be alone. It had been too much to absorb, the story I had been told. I pictured Pevenche happily snoring in her comfortable quarters at Sant Alvise, and tried to summon some motherly feeling toward her. Surely it was better to have a living child, even one like her, than a murdered infant? The truth was that I felt nothing except shock, and a great longing for the arms of Valentine Greatrakes. He felt like family, like home, like refuge; Pevenche felt foreign to me in every way One does not become a mother merely by receiving news of it. But when my lover discovered the truth, would it endear me to him? Given his own tortured feelings about the girl even before this latest revelation, now he would surely find me more problematical than palatable.
Then I laughed bitterly at myself, for such projections of the future were entirely in vain. If I did not prove cooperative, my employers would have no reason to keep me alive, despite the threat of San Zaccaria. I was already a disappeared woman, officially deleted from their record books. It would be the merest thing to dispose of me, and to rest a last piece of paper in my dossier.
And I remembered, with a storm of palpitations in my breast, that it was yet easier than that for them to dispose of me. For of course, in the eyes of the world, Catarina Venier was already dead, and buried near but not inside the family crypt on Giudecca.
• 2 •
A Cataplasm of Webs
Take Venice Turpentine 2 ounces; juice of Plantain 1 ounce and a half; Figs 3; the yellow paring of Orange Rind 2 drams; Bolus 1 dram and a half; Soot half an ounce; Pigeon’s Dung 1 ounce and a half; large Spider Webs 6; black Soap 4 ounces; Vinegar enough to unite it.
To drive an Ague, tie this about the Wrists, so as to make it bear hard upon the Pulses, two hours before the Fit.
My cell faced a calle that was not frequented, probably being blocked from the street. I could smell and hear the waves nearby but no canal was visible, except for the teasing reflection of water that sometimes ht a tiny corner of my ceiling when the sun shone. I lay on my plank and watched the muscular wriggles of light, following each radiant sinew to its conclusion. Those were my short stories, my plays, and my songs with which I beguiled the untold hours.
They allowed me to wash and brought me clean clothes. Each day I refastened the pregnancy apron over my chemise. It made lying face-down on the hard bench just a little more tolerable. My stomach continued with its cruel distempers and ventiferous humors, encouraged not a little by the direful pap they brought me to eat.
I was conscious of the dye fading from my hair. I felt my skin sagging on my poor rations. Hourly I expected a summons to the noose or the arrival of hard-faced women with a bottle and a tube. I lived my death continuously until it was life itself that seemed the other side of a cloudy pane.
Of course it was not the first time that I had endured solitary confinement. The difference was that this time I had known true companionship, both with Valentine Greatrakes and also, I had to admit, with Dottore Velena and the Zany, and the remembered affection of these three friends threw my current isolation into an ever crueller relief. For all their tricks and monkeyshines, in each of those men was the soul of decency. And they had all shown me the human warmth that I craved for now, more than food, more than light, more than air.
I took to talking to them under my breath, with my eyes squeezed shut. I used my skill as an actress to mimic their answers. Even the Zany took his part in these little playlets I performed. When I fell asleep I sometimes curled up as if in my basket at the Feathers, and when I dreamed, they were London dreams, in English. Or London nightmares infected by Venetian memories.
I longed for gin, and there was none to relieve me. I was shocked to see how I had come to rely on a dreamy tide of the spirit rising in my blood to protect me from unhappiness. It was hard to lose consciousness without a glass of its cooling fire. Without it, I dreamed more vividly, when I finally fell asleep.
One night I fell into a dream that on waking could be traced to a story I had heard at Bankside. The Zany had come rushing into the Feathers with the news of a baker who had rid himself of a troublesome apprentice girl by pushing her into the bread oven at the peak of its heat. In my sleep the London sojourn was erased, in the way of dreams, and I saw myself among the capacious ovens in the kitchens of San Zaccaria once more. Faceless nuns surrounded me and, deaf to my screams, started to strip me of my clothes. When I was naked, they basted me with olive oil and butter and wrapped my head in muslin, like a pudding. Trembling and blind, I felt them grab at my slippery limbs and lift me up. The heat snapped closer and closer to my flesh. I heard the slow shriek of the oven door opening. Then I was gagging on my own screams and they were pushing me through the maw of the oven. The flames licked my skin, found it to their liking, and fastened themselves upon me. I writhed in the ashes, devoured by the flames. The muslin bag on my head was burned away, and then I watched my own skin melt and perish in the fire.
It was a dream with the sound all drained out of it: In a roaring silence I felt and smelled myself roasting, and saw the flesh fall off my bones like that of a joint on a spit. I awoke gasping and weeping to see the red rim of dawn stripe the windowsill of my cell. I took scant comfort from this reality. For all I knew, it would be my last dawn. For all I knew, just such a fate as I had dreamed awaited me at San Zaccaria. When they gave me back to the nuns, there would be no one to protect me from their vengeful plans.
That dream brought all the pities welling up, all the cruel things that had ever hurt me. I wept for them all, from the day my parents abandoned me to the time when my former lover, the father of my murdered baby—no!—the father of Pevenche!—first began to abuse me. All these things came to rack me with fresh tears. Other griefs came too, ones I thought long buried, until I was wheezing sobs in the back of my throat. I remembered the day, ten years past, when Mazziolini came to me with a miniature Brustolon carving of three chained blackamoors holding up a marble tabletop. Their eyes of vitreous paste glared at me, forcing me to remember where I had seen them last—in one of the reception rooms of my parents’ palazzo, where a life-size edition of the same design dominated the room.
“My parents are dead then, I suppose?” I said in a toneless voice, “and this is my inheritance.”
I did not ask how they died; there were tales of typhus in Venice at that time.
Mazziolini had whispered, “A dead woman cannot inherit. Even a Golden Book corpse may not live off the family spoils.”
I realized then how much humble-born Mazziolini hated me. This was the only emotion I had inspired in my sole companion of the last decade and a half, and I could barely conceive of what trouble he must have put himself to in order to extract the Brustolon and taunt me with it.
Even Mazziolini, I realized, had his miseries. He too was exiled from his beloved Venice to serve as ignominious guard to a woman he despised.
And these cruel fates reminded me yet again of my own, and I wondered when they would come to kill me, and began to hope that I would not be left long to contemplate it, for surely this fear was worse than death.
And lastly I thought of Valentine Greatrakes, and how I had failed to win his enduring love. Instead, with me, he had merely sent his heart out in holiday dress, for a little recreation. Just as it is said the French queen plays at being a shepherdess in prettified pretend-humbleness at Le Petit Trianon, so this false English gentleman had gone a-slummmg with a Venetian actress for a while, little dreaming of my noble birth. I thought I had seen love in his eyes—perhaps I had. Perhaps I had made a cull of all my hopes by concealing too much from him. Could it be that he had scented my dishonesty? Maybe he could not believe in my love, sensing som
ething awry?
If only I had confessed the whole truth to him when there was an opportunity to hold his hand while doing so, and to appeal to all his faculties for clemency! Those precious weeks together in London, when we might have lived in an atmosphere of truth, I had hidden the real events from him. And why? Because to tell him the truth of my birth would entail other confessions of a less palatable nature. And I had not trusted his love sufficiently to make him the companion of my clean, confessed heart.
Would I have won him with the truth? Would he have returned the compliment? Did I at that time have heart enough to accept him for what he was?
I did not know. I would never know.
When the fearful thing happened, it came not from the door to my cell but from the snow-lined windowsill.
It was in the early hours of the fourth night that four huge hands appeared on the grilles that strained the light. A few seconds later those hands had hoisted two large and stupid heads up to the windowsill from where they regarded me with a manifest delight. It was evidently a near thing that they had found the right cell.
“Momosina Gentilcuore?” mumbled one of them, in a brutish terraferma accent. A smell suggestive of pancetta and garlic suddenly enriched the air of my cell.
From this name, however muddled, I was filled with the hope that the se men came from Valentine Greatrakes, and that they meant to take me away with them. I leapt to my feet, gathering my shawl.
It seemed that I was both right and wrong. Yes, they explained, in a dim-witted chorus, they had come from the English Lord (they too, I sighed!) Great Rakes. But it was not possible to bear me away in this instant. They gestured briefly at the bars, as if I might not have noticed them.
Steeling myself to be patient, I asked, “Then why have you come?”
For a moment this befuddled them, and they looked at one another in some desperation. Then one of them fumbled a bottle out of his pocket. This he placed carefully on the windowsill before giving up on the battle to stay aloft. He slipped down from view, closely followed by his companion. I flinched as the walls reverberated with the impact of their landings. I heard their running footsteps and then the sound of their huge bodies clambering over a barricade.
This was followed by a sharp scratch of whispers and one angry groan, which sounded to my eager ears something like the voice of Valentine Greatrakes. I craned my neck upward but I could see nothing.
One of the idiots lumbered back over the barricade. His fat palm gripped a bar and his face swung into view.
“We forgot to tell you. Use what’s in the bottle on these bars. A bit each day. Just two bars. Enough to let you out. Don’t drink it.”
Having gabbled this message in a monotone he slipped out of sight. In spite of my plight, the Zany’s voice rose up inside my head: “You sordid Hunks. You niffy-naffy persons! Come back, you idiots, don’t leave this half done.”
I reached up and carefully pulled the bottle down to me. I opened the stopper and sniffed it. A stench of sulphur assaulted me. I slammed it down on the windowsill.
I sat on my plank and cried.
Was this how they planned to rescue me? After the years it would take to corrode the inch-thick bars with drops of acid? Did they really think that the Inquisitors would allow me to live that long? I would almost rather die immediately than wear out my strength with this pathetically comic plot. I lay on my back and thought of drinking what was in the bottle.
But soon the moon came up to push fingers of white light through the cell. In that eerie radiance the contents of the bottle glowed with a potency that seemed credible.
I picked it up and stood on tiptoe by the window. I chose two bars and irrigated their bases with a splash of the liquid. I heard a faint fizzing and immediately pulled with all my strength, to absolutely no effect.
I almost flung the bottle out of the window then. But instead I hid it carefully in a dusty corner and went back to my plank, where I slept.
• 3 •
Unguent for Shrinking of the Sinews
Take Nerve Ointment 1 ounce; Neats-foot Oil, Oil of Earthworms, Bullocks-fat Marrow (that droppeth out of a boil’d Marrow-bone) each half an ounce; fine Turpentine 2 drams; liquid Storax, Spermacetti each 1 dram; Oil of Aniseed 12 drops: Mix up an Unguent.
When a Limb, struck with a dead Palsie, begins to grow cold, waste away, lose its motion, and shrink up: In this difficult Case, such a remedy as this, used with good friction, sometimes is helpful. For by means of its suppling, oily Substance, it mollifies and relaxes the dry, hard, contracted, carneous Fibres; by means of its Balsamic, and Aromatic Parts, it revives and roborates the benumbed, weak, nervous Fibres. And lastly, when good rubbing is added to the rest, one may well hope, that the Blood, and Spirits may be drawn more plentifully into the part; and that natural Heat, and Tone, and Nourishment may be restored to the Member again.
Three days later I still could not discover the slightest effect of my acid irrigations on the bars. I had seen nothing more of the idiots, heard no more of my lover’s voice. If the bottle were not secreted in the padding of my apron to allay such thoughts, it would have been easy to imagine the whole episode a dream.
On the eighth night of my imprisonment the idiots visited me again.
“Good evening, Momosina,” they smiled. “Griet Lord Rikes sends his … something … regards perhaps.”
“Please tell him that I long to see him,” I responded fervently. “Please tell him that I love him with my entire heart. That I adore him.”
The idiots frowned and blushed, covering their embarrassment by testing the bars. With all their strength they produced just the merest movement. We all stared at the black metal with hatred, they from their side, I from mine.
They dared not say anything to me, but silently slid down and made their usual noisy progress over the barricades where I heard more angry whispering.
One of them came back: “More from the bottle, ten times a day, just a little bit. And make holes in the wood above and below the bars. Little ones.” They handed me a long nail.
I nodded.
I was mortified that Valentine Greatrakes himself did not come to see me. Why had he chosen such crude messengers? Why did he send no message of love? The idiots did not even ask, on his behalf, how I did! He was prepared to save me from my prison, but he wanted me to know that he would take no personal risks to do so. He was of course angry with me for the abduction of Pevenche. Perhaps, like my employers, he was keeping me alive only so as to be able to extract information as to her whereabouts.
My mind had previously skittered away from the subject. But I now spent a great deal of time thinking about the girl. My captors left me strictly alone: I had ample hours for reflection. The more I thought about her the less I could conceive that the flinty chit once quickened in my belly. And yet, and yet, when I pictured her face, I knew that there were elements of it that were not unlike my own. Buried in that barely animate porridge were lineaments I had seen in my own mirror: the shape of her nostrils, the curve of her brows. There was more. She had my own gift for histrionics; my own sweet tooth. And the deception that prized her from me at birth, the cruel he about the cranioclast, that was so very like her father. I could not think of another man who would devise such a plot. Between us we might well have sired such a brute as Pevenche. I began to accept that my interlocutor had told me the truth, and the full irony of the situation flooded through me.
Now I remembered things that my lover had told me about his ward; of how her father had been entranced by the baby but how he had soon lost interest. Yes, the span of my first lover’s attention had been by no means generous, when it came to sentimental attachments. So Pevenche too, though but a tiny child, had known the inexplicable waning of his affection, and no doubt she had felt his noxious choler too. I would not be surprised if he had beaten the child. Probably, all her ridiculous pretensions to juvenility could be traced back to a desire to return to that infant state when her father had truly s
eemed to love her. The same with the clothes—Tom had always insisted on picturesque, if gaudy, dressing. And the food! My lover had tried to tell me how Tom had encouraged her naturally large appetite, for satirical motives. He had fashioned her as a monster for his own amusement. How confusing it must have been for her, and she without the sense of a flea to start off with. The comfort of a warm belly must have won out in the end, further consolidated by that surprising talent of hers in the kitchen.
This was the girl I had regarded as an enemy. Now I saw her as purely pathetic. But I could not warm to her. And nor would the world. The trouble being that pity is more easily evoked by beauty and delicacy than by disgust and a dark desire to sneer, the only human responses to Pevenche’s grotesqueries. She had no natural melody of character to counteract them.
“Did you not see the tragedy of the thing?” Valentine had asked me in London, reproaching me for my lack of compassion for the then-unmet Pevenche.
Yes, but still no maternal affection rose in me for the girl, and little compassion. I could not sentimentalize her: My actual experience of her was too fresh. Her situation was sad, I acknowledged, but mine was perilous, and of course much more compelling for me.
I continually wondered if Valentine Greatrakes now knew the truth too. Or how much he had discovered. If he knew that Pevenche was my daughter, then he would also know that his precious Tom had once upon a time been my lover. And he would know that I had concealed this very salient fact after seems the corpse. How would that make him feel? Betrayed by me, certainly But would he be disgusted to share a woman in that way? Or would it, as I hoped, raise me in his estimation? Some men are so intimate in their friendships that sharing a lover only unites them more. Perhaps he would now think that my abduction of Pevenche was a wild expression of unconscious motherly love. How very wonderful, and how very convenient if that could be true.