The Remedy (42 page)
She left without a word, moving faster than I had ever seen her, ducking her fat neck down in a poor approximation of humility In her rush she dropped the ukulele on the floor, where it issued a more musical complaint than her fingers had ever sent forth from it. She started at the noise but did not stop to retrieve the instrument as she fled. Thoughtfully, I picked it up, thinking it might be useful, marveling at her panic.
I suddenly realized that what she feared was that I would take her away from there. The irony had not escaped me that the girl was insensible of every service I had done for her except this one—to leave her at Sant’Alvise, the single action of mine that, in my own opinion, fully amounted to a crime against her.
Pevenche seemed altered, not just by her extra weight and evident felicity. She seemed somehow more handsome, or at least less wholly unprepossessing. You could almost see a shadow of beauty in her when she smiled at her young companions.
This gentle thought was immediately electrified by a wild conjecture that came bustling into my tired brain and which I was helpless to repel: that Valentine Greatrakes’s devotion to
Pevenche could be explained by the fact that
he
was truly her father. The improvement in Pevenche seemed to make her resemble the person I thought most attractive in this world.
Surely he would still come to me, if only to fetch his child back.
Take Asafoetida half a dram; Castor, Camphire, each 1 scruple; Oil of Amber half a scruple; mix, and tie up in a rag or piece of Silk.
Being often held to the Nose, it helps Vapours and Fits, for it represses the raging Spirits, drives them back from their wild excursions and exorbitancies; forces them into order, and hinders ’em from running into Tumults and Convulsive Explosions.
In the end, the letter, so long stopped up inside me, poured out in a rush. I had meant to draft it point by point, explaining as briefly as possible why he must meet with me and a priest and marry me immediately. I had meant to be cool. I had meant to spell out the fact that this was a marriage of convenience only to rid me of certain encumbrances in Venice, and that while I regretted causing him worry over Pevenche, it had been necessary to achieve my ends. I had meant to preserve a delicate balance: a stiffened tone of injury underlaid with inescapable tenderness. My ultimate aim was to make him feel guilty for forcing me to such lengths, not having the greatness of heart simply to take me to himself and marry me all those weeks ago, when the time was ripe and our love perfect.
I wrote no such thing. I wrote of how I had suffered for his absence, about how I longed to be in his arms again. I reminisced about our brief time in London, deliberately using words that had been currency between us then: terms of endearment, jokes, phrases that still gave off a faint perfume of certain unforgettable moments. I candidly admitted to feelings for him that I had never experienced before. I told him how I had returned to
London and sought him out, though incognita. I explained, as delicately as I could, that I knew all about his business now, and that I forgave him his deception—as he would surely forgive mine—because everything each of us had done was to one end, which was to find one another again. Subtly, I reminded him of his heroism at the frost fair. Now, I explained, I had dire need of a heroic rescue, for I faced perils too dangerous to explain in a letter.
When the letter was done, I folded it quickly. I did not want to reread it. I wanted to trust my instincts, not treat them to a surgical examination. I hoped the letter would have the same effect upon the instincts of Valentine Greatrakes.
But how to deliver the letter? There was no one I trusted here, except perhaps the nuns at Sant’Alvise, and they had no reason to be sending couriers to London. If I sent it via a Venetian messenger, he would be questioned at every customs house and how long before the letter was opened and its contents fed back to the wrong people in Venice?
It was Pevenche’s new profession as
pasticciera
that gave me my idea. The convent of Sant’Alvise was famous for its marzipan cakes, so famous that even well-informed foreign tourists in Venice sent orders to the bakery. For many years the nuns had produced their own paper boxes decorated with a woodcut of their convent and a smiling angel rising above it. In these boxes they placed twenty-four of their little cakes between delicate sheaves of scented rice paper, cakes so delicious that people were known to consume the entire contents in a single sitting.
Now I asked myself: Would it be so strange that an English gentleman, a frequent visitor to Venice, might conceive a craving for those unparalleled delicacies he had tasted in the city, particularly when back in London and forced to wean himself back to the unfortunate local cuisine? Might he then not send for a box of his favorite sweetmeats to console his saddened palate?
So on one of my visits to Pevenche, I begged a box of cakes from the nuns and took it back to my rooms. They had been happy to give it to me, patting my pregnancy apron, “for the little one, too, of course.” They also pressed on me a can of creamy
milk. I carefully lifted the cakes and lined the lower part of the box with my letter. The cakes smelled so good that it was hard to put them all back. Too hard for me. I had eaten four before I knew it. They made me thirsty. I drained the can of milk. Then, disliking its maternal taste, I took a little gin.
I restacked the sheets of lining paper interleaved with cakes and sealed the box. I then packed it in a stout pouch of parchment loosely tied with twine and labeled with the address of Valentine Greatrakes at the depository in Bankside. What a tug of nostalgia I felt, merely writing that name, not just for my lover and our happy time together but even for my eccentric adventure with Dottore Velena and the snug company of that room at the Feathers. I sipped a little more gin, raising my glass in a silent toast to my old colleagues.
In my mind, eye, and ear, the Zany lifted a tankard, saying “Here’s to a Glimmering of our Gizzards” as I had seen him do so many times before. I smiled fondly at the memory.
I surveyed my work. There was nothing exceptional about this packet. People dispatched such gifts from Venice all the time. The parcel begged: “Open me, if you must! I am, however, innocent.”
In the sending, the normality of the package was proclaimed by the fact that everyone in Venice knew the boxes from Sant’Alvise. But in receipt the situation would be different. Valentine Greatrakes had no great sweet tooth. He had balked at my jellies and compotes and egg creams, preferring a haunch of beef boiled till the flesh dripped off the bone. He drank beer to my chocolate. His Venetian trade was in stronger substances than little marzipan cakes—he would not have come across the Sant’Alvise delicacies. Or so I hoped.
In my hopeful imaginings the parcel arrived at Bankside and was opened by Dizzom, who would be alert to the mystery of its provision and understand the importance of the contents. He would find the letter and pass it on to his employer, and soon my lover would come to Venice and all would be resolved and made happy again.
I had only to keep myself safe and discreet in the meantime.
And to somehow survive. After paying off the nuns at Sant’Alvise, I was down to my last fifty lira. Thinking fifty days the maximum time before my rescue I mentally divided the sum into fifty parts. One lira being twenty Venetian
soldi
, I now put myself on a regime of almost poetic frugality. I had already renounced every luxury. I had, of course, long since learned to live without perfume. (I had economized even on the ink, buying an anonymous bottle of powder to mix from a stationer’s in Cannaregio, instead of expensive liquid ink. Perhaps I diluted it too much, for it wrote palely, and dried paler, but I told myself it would endure its short journey without further impairment.)
I had eight
soldi
each day to spend on my bed—a tiny room above a tavern, five for a cup of coffee each morning, and seven to eat. I lived on bread and black olives, which made me thirsty enough to drink the brackish water instead of craving something more expensive. I rationed myself to one small glass of gin per day, and not merely for economic motives.
On this meagre diet, my stomach was constantly fermenting acid glandular juices and ironically I suffered as if with the early symptoms of pregnancy, including a severe wind colic that distended my belly and pushed out the profile of my pregnancy apron. On my retrenched expenses I could not afford any palliative drugs, but only an extra ration of gin, to soothe the pain.
And there was only gin to warm me against the bora wind that now hauled all the bitter cold of the Russias down to Venice. When you are poor and ill-fed, I realized now, the wind hunts you down alleys and disrespectfully lifts your too-light skirts in ways in which it never victimizes the rich in their heavy velvets.
It was fortunate that the
Carnevale
still raged in the city I was able to walk about in my mask without anyone looking at me curiously Even pregnant women went masked in this season. I did not draw attention to myself. My apparent state even ensured me indulgent extra titbits on my plate. It was thanks to these that I survived.
Despite the dangers of it, I had need to leave my lodgings every day and go to the place appointed for my rendezvous with
my lover. I did not know when he would receive my letter and when he would respond to it. For obvious reasons I had not given him an address at which to write to me directly.
There was always the risk that the letter might have fallen into the wrong hands, and for this reason I could not even be specific about the place of our meeting. I had embodied it in a subtle riddle, a reference to something that only he would decipher. I had decided to make use of his memory of the night when he believed he had found a bat in my bed, a feathered bat that was only my hairpin.
“I shall be waiting for you,” I had written, “at the place that takes its name from the thing that so falsely frightened you. I shall attend it each day at four, until you come to me.”
Thinking of my dulled hair and the pregnant disguise, I added: “You will find me changed, except in the part that loves you.” I hoped he would understand the hint.
I had reason to think that he would easily remember the apothecary known as the Black Bat in Santa Croce. I knew that it was the source of some of the most expensive Venetian nostrums. The day I saw the doors yawn open at the Bankside depository, I had glimpsed the shelves devoted to preparations from the Black Bat, and even a replica of the shop sign. I told myself it was not possible that my lover should fail to make the connections.
It was only a question of time now, until the letter reached him and until he came to me. Until then, all I had to do was shelter from the cold and snow, and from Mazziolini and my employers.
But they found me anyway.
One night, crossing the snow-muffled Piazza, I felt myself shadowed.
They have come for me
, I thought.
I’ll not make it easy for them.
I walked swiftly into the middle of the square, where the crowd was densest, knowing that if they wanted to take me, they would need to do so discreetly. But my captors were thick among the costumed crowds. A feathered Indian was soon jostling me north across the Piazza, and I found two tall white
birds at my shoulders, each with a claw gripping my upper arm. When I turned my head, I saw a Queen of Diamonds, implacably masked, blocking any rear exit.
In my cordon of outlandish creatures I was borne out of the Piazza and into the narrow streets behind. To my horror, I realized that I was being taken toward San Zaccaria. Then I began to scream.
They were too quick for me: a bitter liquid was thrown against my open mouth and, to rid my palate of its vile smack, I had swallowed it before I could stop myself. In a few moments my lips were numb and I was sagging to the ground. I have a dim memory of being carried through the gates of San Zaccaria but the drug had paralyzed me. I could not fight. I looked up into the face of the old abbess, horribly aged by the last sixteen years. She said, grimly, “Yes, it is her.” Then all went dark in a blaze of nausea. I thought I heard the Zany’s voice cry out, “Purr wee gurlie, she’s wrackt orf to the lees, now!”
When I woke up again it was because someone was holding a nodule to my nose that stank fulsomely of amber oil and asafoetida. I was no longer in San Zaccaria. Sixteen years had dissolved and I was again in the chamber of the dark palazzo where I had lam in the bath and received my original commission.
My old interlocutor again appeared, his head grayer, his eyes harder.
“You have become inconvenient for us,” he said. And once more the other men filed into the room. No one was interested in putting me in the bath. I lay on a vast table, a bitter crust of vomit on my unwiped lips.
“We have some questions to ask you,” he stated, with icy formality, when all were seated.
The first one was: “Catarina Venier, why did you kidnap your own daughter?”
