To test him, I suggested: “Perhaps you are right. We should go and seize her, even against her will, and drag her away from there and confine her in some quarters with us. I expect that eventually we shall tame her anger. We can teach her some more ladylike skill than cooking. Flower-painting, perhaps. It may take years, but we shall persevere, no matter how fiercely she fights us.”
His eyes were dull with grief at this desecration of our happiness, so new and so hard won.
I imagined Pevenche lying, as I had once done, on the cold marble of the church floor, happily ignorant of the vow she was making, thinking only to ennoble herself to the rank of the Golden Book nuns, and preserve her dominion in the kitchen. I saw the priest struggling to force the large ring on her fat finger. I saw her spread-eagled from above, a lumpen black figure, agreeing, without comprehending, to a living death.
I ran to my lover and flung myself into his arms. “Tell me what to do, my love,” I sobbed. “I just do not know what is the right thing for her.”
And so I let him persuade me to leave Pevenche in the convent.
How surprised she would be when we went there to take her the triple good tidings of her own situation, my true identity, and our imminent marriage.
• 6 •
An Alexiterial Julep
Take Alexiterial Milk Water, black Cherry Water, each 4 ounces; Rue Water 3 ounces; Epidemial 2 ounces; Tincture of Saffron (extracted in Treacle water) 1 ounce; Syrup of Gillyflowers 2 ounces; Goa, and Contrayerva Stone, each 1 dram; Confection of Alkermes 2 drams, mix.
It’s useful and necessary in putrid and malignant Fevers, where the Spirits are overborn, and almost slain, by a deleterious and mortifying Venom, namely, to give them a lively brisk Expansion, and to rouse ’em up, and make ’em able to recover the due Mixture of the Blood, vanquish the Venom, and expel it.
Ah, the relief of confession! Of honesty! When I had told my—husband—of all that I had done in the pay of the Venetian Inquisitors, I felt the sordidness of my employment expunged from me.
He forgave me everything, and every note of my confession was waylaid by his endearments; even my pitiful account of the blinding of the cruel nun accidentally impaled on the icicle.
It had been a risk. He might have found me sullied by what I had done. Instead, he chose to see me as a victim of the cruel yet impersonal machinations of the Venetian state. He chose to know that I never loved any of those men I was sent to seduce, and that it had revolted me to behave with them as I did. He declared that my true purity had not been touched. This was all proved to him by the fact that when for the first time I truly fell in love, it was with him, someone forbidden by my employers.
With astonishing optimism, he decried any disappointment that I had not such a large stock of virtue as he had thought: Perhaps in his mind he traded it against certain damaging discoveries I had made about himself. I did not draw his attention to all that I now knew about his past, and his present. Instead I told him the truth: It had come to mean nothing to me. I cared not if, for example, those diamond brooches were acquired in a fully legal manner: I loved the romance of the gesture. It was true. I still simply liked the style of the man, gentleman or not, and all my inbred Golden Book scruples could not make me dislike him simply for not being a nobleman. I had proved renegade to my class, after all, and turned actress. Could not a London criminal rise above his station and become in life and habit noble? And in this way did we not meet exactly in the middle of some nationless, classless, amorphous pool?
After hearing this he stood in silence for some moments. Then there were other matters to consider, melancholy ones, but much mitigated by our turtle billing and mutual caresses.
He did not like to blame his beloved Tom for anything, of course, but I could see that he too wished to build a solid base on which to proceed. So he even admitted that it was Tom’s usage of me that set me on the terrible path I was forced to take.
In this way he forgave me everything, from beginning to end. He found goodness and transparency in all my motives, and reasonableness in all my responses.
It is, I reflected, listening to his words, possible to see very clear things that are not true.
“And so,” he asked me, tenderly, “you never saw Tom again, after that terrible time in San Zaccaria? All those times he was in Venice, and you never once came across him?”
I shook my head.
“And you never sought him out to avenge what he had done to you?”
His eyes were soft and moist while he marveled at my gentleness. I looked at him with satisfaction. He was so exceedingly well made! Such long legs and such slim, shapely thighs, and a torso with enough meat on it to be manly but not enough to lose a sliver of useful flexibility.
With lowered eyes, I reminded him that most of the time I had been abroad, on my “missions.” Tom had been in Venice only occasionally. It was very unlikely that our paths should cross here. Anyway, my employers kept me under close supervision. I met no one they did not put in my path.
“And I never felt anything but regret for him,” I said. “When I saw him in his coffin, I felt nothing but shock. I loved him once, but by then I was yours. For the residue of our lives, I am yours.”
He pressed my fingers, one by one, his handsome face fixed on mine.
There was one last question from my lover.
“Can you think who would have wished to kill him?”
I shook my head again, sadly.
“Such a beautiful man, so full of life.” I added quickly, “So he must have been, even after all those years.”
Then he surprised me. “I always thought that the man who followed you—Mazziolini—must have had something to do with it.”
“Because Tom started bleeding when he was in the room? You thought Mazziolini came all the way to London to gloat over the murder he had done?”
My lover hung his head, ashamed to put credence both in the superstition and in such a far-fetched theory. He said, defensively, “Well, it is a known thing in murderers to be drawn to the corpses they have made.”
He then recounted the story of the whore and the Sternutatory Powder, concluding: “Mazziolini could have done it. He has it in him to kill. And the timing wad possible. After all, your troupe did not leave for London until after Tom died.”
It was true. Our living bodies had traveled more expeditiously than Tom’s dead one, held up by customs officers, by paperwork, by unwilling porters and even adverse weather. We had sprinted ahead, arrived in London nearly two months before his preserved remains did.
“What would be Mazziolini’s motive though?” I asked.
“Perhaps he knew about you and Tom. Perhaps the man loved you? Following you around for years, how could he not? Perhaps he was jealous?”
I said sincerely, “Mazziolini feels nothing like love. Believe me, I have known him these sixteen years. He feels only hate. He merely serves, without relish and with distaste. I believe his affectionate feelings were cauterized in the womb. He’s an automaton for the Council of Ten. There is no goodness in him.”
Unlike myself. I did not know if I was a good woman or not. It had hardly been my choice to make, between virtue and evil, the way I saw it, not since I was forcibly confined in the convent at the age of fifteen. Until now Fortune had thwarted any laudable intentions or instincts on my part and had drawn me toward the cruel path I had taken. The flaws of my disposition were on a natural convergence with the route of the greatest evil, otherwise I should not have done anything blameworthy. Though swarming with faults, like every other human being, I never did, or only once did, something bad that was not a forced choice between extremities, finely calculated to save my life or my sanity.
But it would be better to close the subject of Tom between us. It was too painful for my lover. I mused, “Of course my employers might have set Mazziolini to do it.”
“But why?”
“Think of all the mischief Tom was making in Venice. I don’t mean what he
did to me. I mean the little ‘businesses,’ the free-trading. They would not endear Tom to them.” I reminded him: “They hinted as much during my interrogation.”
“They would have him killed for such a little motive?” My lover found this reason unpalatable. If Tom was killed for reasons of commerce, then he himself had sent his friend to his death. Tom had died on his behalf.
I saw no reason to torture him further. He was miserable enough, missing his friend. A sad husband is a dull affair.
So I suggested: “It could perhaps have been because of his cavalier treatment of me. A Golden Book daughter. A Venier! When a noble is slighted, the whole of Venice is humiliated. In their perverse logic it might have become a matter of state honor.”
He nodded with relief. “That’s likely, isn’t it? That they were angered by it, and that Tom was killed because of that. They bided their time, waited until he felt secure, and then struck. That is the way of the Venetians, is it not?”
I reassured him it was entirely likely that Tom was killed for this reason and in this way.
“So this Mazziolini killed Tom. So I must kill Mazziolini,” he said, with a quiet steadfastness as if promising to remember a saint’s day or some dietary observance.
Mazziolini was a dead man then.
The more I thought about it, the more satisfactory was this conclusion. I kissed my new husband.
And that was an end of it.
Epilogue
Venice, March 1787
Powder of Crabs Eyes Compound
Take Crabs Eyes ground on a Marble 1 dram; Cream of Tartar half a dram; Salt of Wormwood, Prunel, each 12 grains; Salt of Amber 6 grains; make all into a Powder for 6 Doses, to be given twice or thrice a Day.
It restoreth the ferment of the Viscera and Blood, when almost lost and gone. Fuses thick Blood, promotes the Secretion of Febrile Matter, and by way of Precipitation, throws it off into the Emunctories.
Dear Signore Mazziolini,
It is many months now since I first set my mind to solving the mystery of my father’s death.
Certain items of the subsoil I have pieced together from fragments of fact. Smerghetto has been useful, without realizing it. So have Momolo and Tofolo. For other matters, too dark to be noised about even over a bulging glass of a racy Canary, I have relied on my instincts and my wits.
It is my opinion that it started on a Thursday.
An icebound winter’s night in a narrow alley behind San Marco. That’s where she lodged; that’s where she left the drunken maid asleep, in those precious days of freedom when you had gone ahead to London to set up rooms and servants. Remember?
This is how I see it, in my mind’s eye, a year ago now, before I myself ever came to Venice, the city I now know like the veins of my wrist, perhaps better, because of course the place is in my blood.
The bird-framed Venetians stumble past one another, bundled in shawls and capes, slipping on the ice, grazing their hands on windowsills and door-knockers in an effort to stay upright.
In that eerie frostbound light, a woman and a man collide. He is bulky and tall. She is small and finely made: She falls on her back. When he reaches down to help her, his apologies sound heartfelt. But something in his accent—foreign—and in his face—handsome—causes the woman to recoil.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says, kneeling down to meet her eyes.
But when he sees her face, he too recoils.
“Catarina,” he whispers, “I thought you were…”
He does not finish the sentence because she has fastened her lips on his.
So two lovers have found one another again, after a decade and a half apart. What matters now, it seems, is not what separated them but what apparently brings them together: It is the same desire, the same unexpired heat, the same thing that made me.
My mother must have had her reasons for embracing my Pa, for letting him lift her up and half-carry her to his gondola where he cradles her in his arms until they arrive at the landing stage near San Silvestro.
My Pa leads my mother through the remembering gates and up the stairs to his bedchamber where they stay locked in each other’s arms for two nights and days, eating nothing, drinking only stale water from the ewer and never once putting on the clothes they discarded that first hour.
So then it is Saturday.
This is when things must have started to go bad.
On the third evening, he must have told her that he had to attend to certain business affairs. His eyes are vague; perhaps it is exhaustion. She lies centered in the listless bed without saying a word while he calls over-heartily downstairs for hot water, and then pinions the door shut against prying eyes with a dextrous ankle when a discreet scuttling announces its arrival. He turns his back on her and washes, dresses, and gathers together a sheaf of papers into a goatskin pouch.
No doubt he tries to joke, something typically crude about being an empty goatskin himself—she has drained him of all his vital juices, but it comes out badly—as it so often did—and she does not smile. It is already night again and her eyes, yellow in the candlelight, follow him around the room like those of an ancestral portrait.
He does not tell her to stay and wait for him. He does not tell her when he will be back. He does not ask where she lives or request another appointment. He looks at her clothes, blossoming in circular heaps on the floor, and then back at her.
So now she must understand that this was all he wanted. To renew the pleasures of an old acquaintance and leave it at that. She nods her head, letting him see that she has understood. She too looks at the pools of skirt and petticoat on the floor, recognizing the need to put them on and leave. After all, this is not a place where she has any right to be unless her presence is specifically sanctioned by him. I imagine the merest sign from her: Her breath catching in her throat, as if to acknowledge that she is also dispossessed of the right to breathe in this room once he leaves it. My mother would never betray her true feelings in a natural manner: In this alone she would have made a worthwhile nun; otherwise she is no loss to the vocation.
While he retires to the necessario downstairs, she leaps out of bed, extracts the papers from the pouch, and fans them out. She nods and smiles. She dips a quill in ink to amend an address on the uppermost one. It’s subtle as a sigh but she has perhaps changed “1st” street on the left to “4th” and made assorted tiny amendments of this style and minute substance. The ink is dry and the paper back inside the pouch before he returns to gather his possessions.
She is lying in the bed, clutching the blanket to her breasts.
“I’ll leave you to dress,” he says, embarrassed. It is the first conversational phrase he has used in two days. All this time he has moaned and whispered words of passion. The prosaic now falls heavily, and he knows it.
She nods again. Her eyes are still. Her mouth inclines neither up nor down.
He leaves, closing the door behind him. He does not pause on the threshold. There comes the noise of his heavy but agile steps on the stairs and then the opening and closing of a door below. A snake’s breath of cold surges up the stairs and under the door of the bedroom.
But the naked woman is already dressed, and in a moment her light step murmurs down the stairs. No one saw her arrive and no one sees her leave. Not even the man she now follows under the ghost-limed beams of the Sotoportego de la Pasina and across the empty Campo San Silvestro, where she ducks behind the stone well for a moment, until he has passed beyond her sight. She runs the remaining diagonal, skirting the campanile.
Watching her darting figure it would be hard to say what she seeks. Perhaps she wants to know what business calls him from the bed they have shared, and why it should do so in this late hour of the evening. Perhaps she merely cannot bear to be apart from him after the intense intimacy of the last days. It seems that the latter is the case, because she draws closer and closer to him, and the expression on her face is avid, though the detail of what it is she craves is not clearly inscribed on her
features.
The unwinking moon follows her progress with a baleful eye. A sudden wind flaps her skirt up like a sail, revealing cruelly bare legs. There was no time to pull on her stockings nor tie their bows. They are thrust in her pocket. She continually tugs at the chafing brocade at her neck, for nor had she waited to whisper her silk and lace chemise over her head. It still lies on the floor in the apartment. The thought of this freezes her for a moment in reflection.
Now the Rialtina chimes in the campanile of San Giovanni Elemosinario, so it must be some time between nine and ten at night.
He walks slowly, breathing in the gelid air, flexing his shoulders. She trips along lightly, looking from left to right at frequent intervals, up into doorways, down into stairwells where weeping pipes have sent long fingers of ice to seek but not quite find the ground.
They pass into quiet streets. At the Calle del Stivaleto, where we nuns go to have our boots fitted, my father stops for a moment to pull a paper from his goatskin pouch, and scans it, perhaps confirming some directions. When she sees this, my mother looks pleased. They move on, down the Calle del Paradiso, toward the water.
It is there that she notices one stalactite that has formed itself with elegance so that it resembles nothing more than a slim white dagger. It is hanging from the grating of an ironclad window. (There is a broken pipe there—it’s still unfixed, and leaks profusely.) She tiptoes up and snaps it off. The length of the ice shard in her hand is twelve inches.
At the tinkle of ice my Pa looks around but she is already in the shadows, clutching her prize. She kneels quickly and rubs the blade of ice in the filth of the street. When she raises it again the ice has lost its transparency beneath a sheath of dust compounded of particles of ordure, detersives, dressings and other nameless, rampant toxins.