The Remedy (26 page)
Dizzom needs to say none of these things. His own shabby gray valise and his fierce expression of bravery say it all to Valentine, who, in his weakened state, is touched almost to tears. Or perhaps the tears are just seeking pretexts for showing themselves. But he will not hear of Dizzom coming with him: He needs him back at the depository, to take care of business. With both of them gone, there are elements of their fraternity who might become a little frisky, a little reckless of authority. And there is much work to do at home regarding the proposed Venetian nostrum. Dizzom must busy himself at his
bain marie
, his powders, his bruised seeds and his dried herbs. He must also consult with the metal-workers and chymists of Bankside, for it has already been decided between them that this nostrum shall contain, as far as the consumers are concerned, a vast number of—apparent—flakes of gold, which is widely known not only to prolong life but also to retard the unsavory symptoms of old age.
Yes, while Valentine makes his journey Dizzom must perform some credible counterfeits of alchemy, so that a preparation is ready on his return that does not kill the patients before the blame for their death can be diffused over any number of circumstances. A nostrum that produces fatal grimaces and kills at a single mouthful, no matter how lucent its golden depth, will be no good to man, beast or business. Whereas great expense is no object: In fact the monstrously high price of the Venetian nostrum will only serve to increase its desirability.
Dizzom and his master shake their heads, discussing the finer details over a large English steak pie studded with oysters, the like of which will not be seen by Valentine Greatrakes for many a week. He lays in store a plentiful amount, washed down with beer. Valentine has long since learned to regard every foreign table with suspicion and depression, arising from the impossibility of a plain
chop. He tries to encourage Dizzom, who nibbles sadly, and takes no beer at all. “Look now, eat up, you’ve got a face on you as long as today and tomorrow.”
Neither of them speaks of Mimosina Dolcezza, and so they pass the time in manful, hearty ways before the Calais packet is announced.
Valentine, waving to Dizzom from the departing boat, calls out to him unheard above the moiling of the waves… “Take care of Pevenche. Just give her any little thing she asks for.”
And Dizzom, scampering up and down the jetty, calls back to him, in a sentence that likewise perishes in the wind, “I shall visit Pevenche every week, and take her for outings! And any little thing she needs.…”
As Dizzom disappears from view, Valentine jerkily paces the wind-scoured deck until his damp hair whips his face. It feels good to be traveling south across the water. He feels fractionally less helpless; he has found his direction.
Yet his cheeks burn bright with the humiliation of it all. All the way across the guffawing water, he thinks that he should have waited for a letter from her imploring him to come.
Take Roots of Turmerick, Madder, each 1 ounce; Celandine roots and leaves 2 handfuls; Earth worms (slit open and washed clean) 20; boil in Water and Rhenish Wine (added towards the last) each 1½ pints to 28 ounces; to the strained Liquor, add Tincture of Saffron (with Treacle Water) 1 ounce; Syrup of the 5 opening Roots 3 ounces; mix.
It inspires the Mass of Blood with a fresh, yet mild Ferment; searcheth the Hepatic Glands, and specifically cleanseth and cleareth the bilious Passages.
Venice flutters in a light wind that pleats the water and tousles his hair in an insinuating manner as he passes under the bleached sternum of the Rialto bridge.
The winking fanlights, the flapping curtains, the beckoning aroma of coffee, too much seems to be trying to attract his attention at once. Everything is arranged to entice: shop windows, cages of exotic birds, and silk hangings. He feels faintly bilious, too much sought after. Yet he feels the charm of it all stealing over him. And what strikes most of all at the affections of tired, travel-soiled Valentine Greatrakes are those guileful Venetian faces and those sweet, beseeching looks bestowed on ladies of even mild attractions. Even now, in the working hours of the afternoon, there is time for each Venetian to be made pleasantly aware of the particularities of his or her gender.
It is two years since he was last in Venice. For some time Tom has handled the Venetian business with such a flourish that Valentine has had no need to be there. So he’s forgotten how women here practice the art of being watched, and of making it
worth the watcher’s while. In London the women hold their necks up as if nailed to the sky; they keep their hands rigidly to their sides. Venetian women are infinitely flexible and always in movement, be it a graceful inclination of the head or a subtle flaring of the fingertips. It’s all finely nuanced so as to be above any reproach of unladylike attention-seeking Yet it’s impossible to take one’s eyes off these fluid women, even those who bear no resemblance whatsoever to Mimosina Dolcezza.
When he’s not watching the women, his eyes keep falling on gavotting liquid light: His spirits dance too, despite his exhaustion. Observed from the gondola, every coralline, banner-streaming palazzo is lengthened by a good six feet or so—and, by God, what this adds of grace to the spectacle! And of course there is always something offered to fascinate the gondola-borne eye: tiered rolls of wainscoting, as he calls it, at the foot of each building, all grimacing with lions and gargoyles, glimpses through water gates into paradisical, rampant gardens, the striped poles of the noble houses standing sentry, but in fancy dress, for no serious threat can be made against a city as beautiful as this.
The Venetians think themselves unsinkable
, he reflects with a smile, for the city proves that they are. It is infectious. He bounds ashore from his gondola, convinced that all things will stay afloat for him here.
Hoarse voices salute him; hands reach out for his.
“Bentornato! Ti vedo in forma splendida,”
he hears from all sides.
“Signore Greet Raikes! Che piacere!”
He does not know the words, but he feels their warmth, and feels the better for it. He has forgotten the flattering effect Venice always has on the spirits, washing the blears from the eyes in an instant.
He nods and ducks his head, murmuring, “Sure you’re more than welcome,” and the boatmen take these incomprehensible words with evident delight, pointing at him, announcing excitedly “
Eccob quà!”
to one another, “Here he is!”—as if the presence of Valentine Greatrakes was the very thing required to perfect their day.
He is well known in Venice, for he has done a little business with everyone here. He has his Venetian Dizzom and his own Venetian
depository. Smerghetto, part interpreter, part lawyer, part chemist and part pimp, lives in some unknown part of Cannaregio and materializes at Valentine’s side like an inescapable thought every time he goes abroad by day. Somehow, Smerghetto is waiting at the exact point and time when the gondola brings him ashore at San Silvestro, and together they walk down the Campiello de la Pasina to the apartments that Valentine rents there on a permanent basis.
The Venetian headquarters of Valentine Greatrakes boasts a garden, something that is beyond the realms of possibility in crowded, smoot-sprinkled Bankside. Every time he comes back to this city, he must force himself to accommodate not just the aqueous sensations of her arterial traffic but also the scarcely less distracting ones of being in the country. On opening the secretive gate to the Venetian depository, Valentine always feels that he enters a separate world, not in Venice but perhaps in Tuscany. Closing the door, Venice is excluded.
At the other end of the garden is the depository, with convenient access to water-doors on the Grand Canal. The street façades of the building are eaten into by various professions and their needful ingresses. Valentine Greatrakes has the store space, the garden, and the second-floor apartments it overlooks at the back. A tavern with a separate entrance in the street occupies the ground floor and lets rooms on the first. A little shoemakers is etched into an alcove of the west
pianoterra
—a pie shop dedicated to the appetites of the wharfmen occupies its twin to the east.
Another workshop, this time connected to Valentine’s own business, is let in through a discreet street-side hole to the garden: Here he employs skilled craftsmen to damage rare antiquities from Rome. They must do so in a way that is easy to repair, but the missing noses and lopped ears facilitate the export licenses that will allow them to reach London. This studio conducts a thriving double life as a Knickknackatorium, selling historical trinkets of fresh manufacture,
ex-voto
paintings of a cunning naïveté, and lifelike effigies of their deceased friends, on moderate terms, to Grand Tourists. For the Italian pilgrims, who have a taste for the morbid, his craftsmen toil on
memento mori
of all kinds, but particularly miniature ebony coffins with ivory skeletons inside, the smaller the
better, and holy-water bottles exquisitely painted with the likenesses of saints. The studio is of course conveniently situated to fill these bottles with small measures from the Grand Canal, a liquid which in no way other than visually resembles the pure spring waters from consecrated streams eulogized upon their labels.
And in a light-flooded room on the third floor, several lady artists blessed with tiny fingers bend their heads over freckled cowrie shells that have been fixed with secret hinges. On the pearly inner curves the ladies paint tiny tableaux of bishops unlocking the chastity belts of otherwise naked nuns and similarly instructive scenes. None of these ladies, of course, is directly employed by Valentine Greatrakes. In Venice, as in London, he makes sundry genuflections toward the rules, regulations, and shibboleths of the law.
Innumerable trackless staircases obfuscate the entrances from one part to another of Valentine’s enterprises in Venice. This is as it should be, lest Smerghetto or any of his employees need to deny knowledge of any part that might come under suspicion.
Meanwhile the great canal-side rooms of
the piani nobili
are still occupied by the elderly nobleman who inherited them, and who yet maintains a show of dignity, not to mention nonchalance, at even the most disastrous gaming table, while living off these diverse and shabby rents, which are in no way charitable. So fragile is his dignity that the diminutive nobleman cannot afford to acknowledge any of his tenants in the street, maintaining a taut, faraway expression on his powdered face, should he unfortunately cross their paths. This expression bespeaks, or so he believes, the delicate sensibilities of his class.
But should any tenant lapse, even by a matter of hours, in paying the rent, the shrill bark he emits through his tiny rouged mouth can be heard from the arches of the first
piano nobile
, and the nobleman himself is soon beating at the unpaid door, demanding restitution in a tight, pained voice that trembles between falsetto and tenor, the paint of his face peeling away in mange-like flakes.
Following his usual habit of discretion, Smerghetto has made sure that this never happens in the case of any premises linked to Valentine Greatrakes.
Tom of course used the place more than he did, and standing at the door to the second-floor apartment, Valentine faces down the pain of seeing the rooms where his friend last slept and woke. On entering, he sees with relief that Smerghetto has tactfully cleared Tom’s clothes and personal effects from view, and that the only evidence of the dead man is the goatskin pouch he used for papers. The pouch lies closed upon the table. Valentine already knows that it was recovered with Tom’s body. He wants to see what papers Tom was carrying, in case they can point to an explanation for the murder. They have yielded no secrets to Smerghetto’s examination. Perhaps Valentine can do better. He knows everything about Tom, after all.
But not just jet.
He has just seen one corner of the pouch is discolored with what can only be Tom’s blood. And although he has already beheld Tom’s body in London, somehow this crusted splash of dark brown is more hurtful, more terrifying to behold, fresher and more violent.
He sits heavily on the bench, with his back to the pouch, and asks Smerghetto, “Did you find anything else in here? Anything which might explain…?”
He already knows that no weapon was found, and that Tom’s own stiletto had been discovered here, in his trunk. This is another mystery. If he was out on the Venetian streets by night, Tom should have been armed. He knew the dangers better than anyone. Yet he’d had nothing in his hand but his fist when the time came to defend himself.
Smerghetto grunts and reaches inside a cupboard. He pulls out a froth of lace and shakes it open, spraying delicate petals of silk. It is a woman’s chemise. “It was on the floor,” he says simply.
So Tom had been with a woman before he died. Well, that is hardly unexpected. Tom’s nights were always as busy as his days in Venice. He had a known weakness for Venetian girls. Valentine Greatrakes spreads the chemise over the table.
He raises it to his nose for a moment, in case the perfume can tell him something of its owner. But the one sense, which, for the sake of greater felicity in Bankside, Valentine Greatrakes has
learned to keep blunt, is that of smell. Smerghetto tells him: “We gave it to a dog, of course, but it seems to have been too late to catch a scent.” The chemise is of expensive silk, but this scarcely narrows the field. The great whores and great ladies of Venice alike are clad in garments of equal luxury. And it is hardly one of them who has murdered Tom with such savagery.
Tom is tucked up by a spade, not by a woman any longer.
The answer must lie in the pouch.
He forces himself to turn and pull the thing toward him, though he recoils at the soft
human
texture of it, so like his own skin, so like Tom’s. There is no help for it—he must now open it, and there is relief in that, for with the flap spread the bloodstain is no longer visible. He fans out the papers. They supply no very special set of explanations.
