The Remedy (10 page)
“Well, indeed, and it’s about a woman,” declares Valentine a little shyly, and at this Dizzom chuckles aloud, revealing the full treasury of hollow back teeth, in each of which, on certain business trips, he may lay up a ruby or an emerald. Or even a tiny phial of poison or sleeping philter.
It is something between the latter two that Valentine Greatrakes requires.
Take Ox Eye Daisy flowers dry’d 1 handful; Snails wiped clean 3; Candied Eryngo Root half an ounce; Pearl Barley 3 drams; boil together in Spring Water from 11/2 pints to 1 pint, and strain it out.
It smoothes and restrains the saline turbulent Particles of the Blood, so as to hinder it from rushing impetuously through the Canals.
The next morning opens the sky like a bank vault. Valentine reads the crackling golden light as a good omen, but cannot decide whether it instructs him to take in one more stage show by the actress before he allows her to perform intimately for himself alone. To do so might dilute or it might enhance the effect she achieved the previous night, and he is perfectly happy with the sherbet of excitement that currently enlivens his blood. In a strange and pleasant way the certain prospect of her, confirmed in an oblique note from Massimo, makes it easier to concentrate on the demanding business of the day.
With Dizzom, he dispatches some Venetian glass daggers to St. Giles, and oversees the packaging of some Antiphthisic decoctions for a Mayfair destination. He checks the inventories of their nostrums, finds a certain depletion in the Balm of Gilead. He has himself composed some alluring texts for the bottles of their latest confections from Italy, borrowing from Shakespeare and Galileo, melting down the language of literature and science and fusing them for his purposes.
Perhaps it is the Irish in him, but no one can match Valentine Greatrakes in the kind of wordsmithery that provokes a rumpus in
the chitterlins, a sudden thirst for the contents of a petite green bottle and the conclusive symptom of the opening of the purse.
The luminous words of Valentine Greatrakes are rarely read in the newspapers, for since 1712 a scurvy law has placed a duty even on advertisements. But in the depository at Bankside he has his own small press, where handbills by the hundred are printed, full of learned miniature essays on the latest scientific discoveries, with many references to the great physicians of the day and the arcane past. Valentine knows his audience, he knows that they long to hear not of homely garden cures but of atoms charged with the Quintessence and Virtues of Chymical Oils, and secrets unearthed from the tombs of pharaohs.
Here at Bankside he also prints and stores the labels for his quacks’ potions. These square tickets may be indifferently applied to any bottle of their cures, to flatter the needs of each separate market. So, arranged in neat piles, are labels that bear the legends. Digestive Bolus for Aldermen, Sublime Elixir for Poets, Consolation Cordial for the Bereaved, and solutions for many other retail opportunities. These colorful labels Valentine sells to his quacks at almost no margin at all, just for the joy of their manufacture.
Errands of mixed sociability and profitability detain Valentine around Bankside until late evening: Even if he had chosen to do so, there is now no time to see the actress reprise her role on the stage. From time to time, the thought of her suddenly rinses all other thoughts from his mind and he must stammer apologies to his colleagues and friends. He wonders if she speaks English. He would like to ask Massimo, but he somehow scruples to send a messenger, lest this interest drive up the cost of the favor.
Returning to his desk, Valentine is already dragging the cravat from his neck in preparation for changing into his evening dress. He greets his assistant, immediately aware that something is wrong. From the pink rims of Dizzom’s anxious eyes he knows that there is a new communication about Tom to be found there among the papers. Sure enough, here it is, atop everything: The news that Tom’s body is now approaching Basel and that all goes safely with the couriers appointed to bring it, but the delays continue with the paperwork. It occurs to Valentine that it is easier to bring contraband
back to England than a dead Englishman with expensively immaculate papers. For once, everything about Tom is above board, something that never happened in his lifetime.
Valentine approaches the theater to the thunder of the final applause, and remembers how last night Mimosina Dolcezza was held up to the crowd, impaled on the arms of Massimo Tosi. He hears the drumming of appreciative feet and the cries of pleasure from the audience, if anything louder than the previous evening.
Of course he already knows the rear entrance and all the passageways to the female dressing rooms. He enters the dim back hallway that stinks of the cheapest tallow candles—backstage Massimo has no need to maintain an illusion of luxury—and strolls without hurrying down the threadbare floorboards. He knows, from experience, that Mimosina Dolcezza is at this very moment walking toward the same dressing room, though from the other end of the theater. He can almost hear her light tread and the whispering drag of her gown. If he maintains a leisurely pace then she should arrive a minute or two before him, have an interval to restore any dishevelment in her person, attend to any bodily functions, indeed discard any distracting preoccupations of the day, so as to be ready to meet her short-term destiny—that is, Valentine Greatrakes—in a state of pleasing expectation.
Young dancers start to helter past him, not bothering to change their gowns before falling into the arms of the beaux waiting for them in the street. He smiles, noting the comfortable fullness of several faces more familiar in an emaciated state. He often places lace-girls of his own with Massimo when they have done a few too many errands to France and their looks have become known to the excise-men. One girl stops and looks at him, jerking her head back in the direction of the dressing rooms with an interrogative expression. She looks concerned and opens her mouth to say something, but another dancer rushes past and seizes her wrist: She disappears with a light clatter of heels. He tries to remember her name, but such memories are swallowed up in the all-consuming thought of what awaits him.
Valentine reaches the corridor where the more elegant dressing
rooms are to be found. He is uncharacteristically unnerved and slightly light-headed. His back itches painfully—he has, of course, forgotten to apply a buttercup decoction—and he pauses to rub it against a plaster column.
What does he know of this woman except that she dissembles professionally? And that she is a Venetian, and therefore capable of any amount of subtlety. He is starting to shake off his enthusiasm for her company. Too much has been made of the occasion, and it’s putting him off the prospect.
But then his trout tickles hard at its cloth encasement and Valentine realizes that no one else will ease him tonight, though he might spend himself—if he can manage it, a shuddering blush recalling last night’s failure with the flower-girl—a dozen times in different women. He continues to pad toward the room he knows at the very end of the corridor, the one with two windows looking into the well of the courtyard, both swathed in silk and hung with Venetian glass baubles he himself has supplied, for Massimo Tosi considers the dressing room of his leading lady the very front of his house. Indeed, sometimes it proves more profitable than the stage: a wealthy patron who enjoys himself with one of Massimo’s protégées is usually inclined to pleasant flights of generosity when it comes to subscribing to new productions.
This very thought jars Valentine so that he stops in his tracks. Massimo, who will lie as soon as pick his teeth, may well have invented the story of the Venetian ice maiden. The production is three days old. Perhaps he has already sold her on a nightly basis to different clients.
Isn’t the wish of the world to be in her arms?
—
Massimo’ll not have been backward in auctioning off the pleasure.
The notion of being gulled by Massimo Tosi raises a trembling in the bowels of Valentine Greatrakes.
If the swarthy little parasite has misspoken
, he thinks,
he’ll be laughing at me now.
The thought is intolerable.
I’ll be eating the head off him if he’s sold me some midden of a girl here.
His hands have commenced to shake and he feels a tear of
sweat peruse the blistered hieroglyphs of his back on the way down to the cleft of his buttocks.
Valentine has secreted about his person a phial of one product he distributes with great success. “Quietness” is a tincture with one grain of morphine per ounce of sweet crimson syrup. This bottle is intended to still the nerves of Mimosina Dolcezza, who after all must be mightily unsettled by the prospect of an evening with so important a gentleman as himself. She’ll be nervous, no doubt, with a hungering wind excavating her belly, and her heart battering away at her lungs. He feels for her. He will distract her momentarily and decant a few drops into her glass: Afterward she shall feel calmer and happier, and matters will move more smoothly toward their natural conclusion.
But what is this? Valentine Greatrakes, who has been turning the bottle in his hand, suddenly stops in a dark corner, lifts it aloft, and removes the miniature cork with a deft tooth. He swigs briefly on the bottle, checks the level (half full), and recorks it. Whistling, he moves on toward the fateful door.
He is struck then by a sudden horror that perhaps his breath is no longer of the sweetest. He rummages in his pocket for one of his new bolus creations that is currently awaiting a patent. Dizzom has proofed up the handbill already, and he remembers all the maladies it cures: Mal-assimilation of Food, Coated Tongue, Bad Taste in Mouth, Bloating, Belchings, Sour Risings, and Restless Nights.
Restless nights!
He clamps his teeth on a bolus and identifies the sharp and infallible bite of rhubarb and cubeb.
His tongue soft and clean, he taps at the door once, and courteously awaits the formality of her request to enter. A baffling silence ensues. He taps again, a little more forthrightly and yet again she fails to acknowledge his presence. Without any consciousness of doing so, Valentine reaches into his pocket and withdraws the “Quietness.” He is tipping the dregs between his lips when he feels a faint, humid breath at the back of his neck. A few livid pink drops of “Quietness” spill on to his white shirt and the pale brocade waistcoat as he spins around, the bottle still upraised, to see who dares to menace him in this way. In his other hand he clutches at the tiny glass dagger sewn into the lining of his frock
coat against any unpleasant eventualities. Only Valentine Greatrakes knows how to liberate the miniature weapon without lacerating his own fingers, knows how to find the hilt, fragile as a sparrow’s breastbone, and where to thrust the beautiful sliver so as to launch it on a fatal voyage through human flesh.
For a dagger like this one has a special feature: On impact the skilled user simply twists the hilt so that it snaps off. The glass blade then sets sail through the nearest organs and nothing can stop it: no victim can reach in through the wound to clutch the blade, for on contact it slices his probing fingers. Slippery with blood and the slime of punctured organs, it tunnels deeper into the flesh. The more the victim thrashes in agony, the deeper voyages the little dagger. If the victim lies still, then so does the dagger, but even an intake of breath will send the knife on its way again, like a breeze lifting the sails of a lake-bound boat. No surgeon can reach the victim in time to stop the onset of gangrene. Even an unconscious patient starts to melt within a few hours of ingesting the glass through his skin.
All these images pass through his mind even as he spins on his left foot. His eyes must have snapped shut a moment, for now he opens them. He is astonished to see that his supposed attacker—still in translucent white and faintly haloed with dust from the stage curtains—is none other than Mimosina Dolcezza herself, who has stolen up on him from behind on her tiny slippered feet.
And it’s out of his mouth before he can stop it, an ignominious piece of Irish: “Holy Jesus, it’s herself. I nearly had a canary!”
Instantly, he blushes hotly, hating himself, every Cork corpuscle.
But her face is expressionless, allowing him to paint upon it the sentiments that best suit himself. She stands still. Her only movement, and that propelled by the hot breath of his exclamation, is the jitter of the bird-trembler ornament worked into the silver-gilt of her feathered hair clip.
She didn’t understand a syllable of it
, he tells himself.
And of course the poor creature is a-tickle with the nerves herself.
“Don’t be afraid, my dear,” he says gently, barely suppressing his breathless palpitations. “I have only come to take you to have supper.”
She smiles and fixes her eyes on his. She does not visibly notice the stains of “Quietness” on his rising and falling shirt.
Then she half curtsies, half bows, humbly indicating not only her agreement to his proposal but also her gratitude for it. The bird-trembler in her hair nods vigorously. As she rises she fixes upon him a look that could break more marriages than a war.
Thus shall all be as it should be
, he tells himself.
There’s been no one else at her; I can see it at a glance.
His breathing judders to a slower rate. He is even pleased that she shows no desire to change her costume, the same persuasive item low-cut in white, or clean away her paint. Her hair is still dressed as for the performance, fanned out in a graceful puff around her face and trailing in long curls down her back. She opens the door to her room, and without looking in the mirror simply draws on a ruffled cap and throws a cloak, also evidently from the theater’s wardrobe, over her dress. This shows a becoming degree of compliancy and eagerness. She walks quietly beside him down the corridors to the door where his carriage is waiting. Neither her footsteps nor her breath make any sound and he is forced to steal many glances to his side to make sure she still accompanies him. Each time he is more captivated by her sweet profile. It is but lightly swathed in stage paint, and he chooses to find it all the more modest for not being naked to his inspection.
