The Remedy (44 page)
What does she want, herself?
This is the only thing that Valentine wishes to know.
He must force his mind to enter into the deep waters and false channels of her own.
The actress has gulled him. She has raked up a great dunghill of lies for him. She has taken the girl—why? To extort money? Was it all about that, in the end? Or is it to punish him for neglecting to marry her? Has she found out about the murder of Gervase Stintleigh? Did she in fact love the political fop, and is it that she now wishes to avenge him?
Valentine recalls how they had argued about Pevenche. How the actress had accused him of being twiddled by the wiles of a little girl.
A little girl!
He grimaces to realize how his white lie has been exposed. Mimosina Dolcezza has now seen with her own eyes that “Baby P.” is somewhat mature for her epithet. In fact, he reflects, Pevenche is considerably larger than her kidnapper, longways and widthways.
He takes comfort from the fact that he surely has not long to wait for an explanation. The one thing he knows—better than anyone—is that kidnappers soon reveal their requirements, and that they are usually of an urgent and financial nature.
He returns to the depository, where he is not sparing of the lights and livers in his conversations. A tremulous Dizzom, still besuited in his gray travel furs, fusses over his master until the latter sends him flying with a brusque gesture and then apologizes, again and again, in an absentminded way. He asks repeatedly emphasizing each of the five words in sequence: “There is no ransom letter?”
Dizzom tells him of the inquiries launched, the embassies made, the messages dispatched to contacts all over London and the Continent since he discovered the abduction two days after it happened.
“I was so sure,” sniffs Dizzom, “that we would find them that I did not trouble you with the news. I hoped to tell you the problem and the solution at the same time.”
It is unlike Dizzom to put a false gloss upon things.
He is so sincere in his abjection that Valentine has no desire to punish him further. Dizzom has been doing everything that he himself would have done. He has even taken the packet to Calais to investigate all possible inns: This is where he had been on his master’s return. They had missed one another by a few hapless hours.
But nothing has emerged. Nothing at all.
He tries to lose himself in work. That should sustain him until Dizzom’s researches begin to bring forth results. Without Pevenche and her caprices, he has more time on his hands and he finds
them full. The Venetian nostrum is making its demands: What he set in motion before his departure has now acquired an imperious momentum. Estimates of costs are starting to arrive from the bottlers and the distilleries in Venice. He needs more items to trade for the bottles.
To pay for the wool that will finance the new nostrum, he has decided to go into the antiprocreation business. For some time he has been interested in the
Capotes Anglaises
, made from the blind guts of lambs. He has Dizzom set up an experimental studio in one of the empty rooms in the depository. Daily he strides among the chattering young ladies hired for washing and drying the intestines and then rendering them soft and pliable by rubbing them between two palms anointed with bran and almond oil. Among them is Sylvia Grimpen, whose mantua business has fallen on hard times, and who is looking hungry. Remembering the incident with Pevenche at the Bond Street coffee house, he avoids her eyes, but he tells Dizzom to put a little extra something in her pay.
And still no letter arrives from Mimosina Dolcezza. He hates her and he misses her too, and he misses her viscerally and painfully. Without her, and without news of her, he’s dangling like a frayed rope in the water. He does not go to take his once-accustomed balsam at the Seven Dials. He cannot contemplate it. It does not escape him that his manufacture of devices for carefree lovemaking is most bitterly ironical in view of the fact that the one woman he desires is not available to him.
There is something wrong. The ransom letter should have arrived by now, unless the delay is specifically calculated to reduce him to the weakness of desperation.
It doesn’t take three weeks to dip a pen in ink and put a letter on apiece of paper, does it?
Again and again, he says to Dizzom, “I just can’t understand it. What are her intentions? Does she do this to drive up the price?” Seeing Dizzom’s strained face, and ashamed of his own weakness, he tries to make light of their trauma: “Dizzom, dear friend, it’s all dark as your grandfather’s nostril to me.” He attempts a comical elevation of his brows, but his lip trembles underneath.
This personal frustration leads him into new professional paths with the Venetian nostrum. Out of this darkness churning inside him Valentine conjures up an inspired idea that sparkles with potential profit. Until now he has conceived the Venetian nostrum as the usual universal specific, able to cure the habitual infinite list of complaints, simply endowed with the added glamor of a beautiful bottle and alleged Venetian provenance. But in his misery Valentine has now perceived a hitherto unsupplied niche in the market. He is groping his way toward an original idea: a nostrum specific to the enhancement of the act of love.
The Venetian nostrum shall be a love potion! It shall invigor even the most depleted of libidos!
The mind of Valentine Greatrakes twirls with words for his handbill, and the title of the new creation is molded and remolded in his brain. He whispers aloud combinations of alluring words. By the end of the day he has dictated a list as long as his desk, and scribbled out half the attempts. By the next, he has narrowed the title down to seven key words, which he pens with a flourish in red ink:
Sovereign
Empirick
Venetian
Balsamick
The Remedy
He lays his head on the desk. When he raises it again, long minutes later, the words are staining his cheek.
Two weeks later, and he is still deliberating over titles for his Venetian nostrum, when Dizzom hands him a disintegrating letter dusted with icing sugar and smelling of marzipan. Valentine knows he should be asking questions as to the provision of the letter and the manner of its delivery but he is too feverish to be sensible. Or to listen to Dizzom’s quiet urgings that something is amiss, must be explained and dealt with. It is like his first meeting with the actress herself. He wants possession unburdened with information.
He takes the letter to his lips and sniffs all along its fore-edge. He draws back in shock. Yes! Its authenticity is entire and faultless. Her every note was always perfumed with a delicate sweetness, just
like this letter. Its narcotic aroma hangs around his face now. It must be from her, of her. It is only after fondling it with his lips, fingertips, and nostrils that he finally looks in detail at its contents.
And looks again, in disbelief.
The letter from Mimosina Dolcezza bears no recognizable words. Somewhere on its travels it has suffered an immersion, perhaps, or the natural grease of the almond paste has invaded the ink like a cancer and replaced the words with its own vital substance. Or the ink has proved evanescent and faded prematurely. How could she economize on such an important item as ink? She must be in dire straits!
To think of her in bad circumstances! I’m sick as a small hospital just wondering what’s befallen her.
Only now does he hear Dizzom’s discreet cough and feel his friend’s kind eyes upon his trembling back which, in response to this tragedy, has broken out in welts down which eddy long tongues of sweat.
“I believe I can help, Valentine,” murmurs Dizzom. “Would you let me handle the letter, boy? Would you let me try?”
Valentine does not wish to hand over the letter. Not one fiber of him inclines to let go of it.
Dizzom gently prises it from his hands. Valentine Greatrakes flinches as the decayed letter is placed on a sheet of board reminiscent of the horrors of the operating theater. He hovers, barely restraining himself from snatching it back.
Understanding how Valentine positively needs to keep touching the letter, Dizzom asks him to hold the top two corners while he performs his ministrations, and he keeps talking in a soothing voice, explaining every action before he undertakes it, like a tooth-puller who prepares his patient for the wrench.
Dizzom thoughtfully consults a cupboard, makes a selection and places a series of bottles on the table with ritualistic solemnity. He thrusts a soft tallow candle on to a pricket and lights it. Then he reaches for a large egret quill, uncorks one bottle and dips it in. He explains: “First you cover the letters with philogisticated alkali—spreading it thus with a feather, like this, look, thin as a poor gel’s shawl.”
Valentine cranes his neck, and grimaces with disappointment.
Dizzom reassures him: “Indeed, no sensible change of color results immediately, but just see… Now, with the addition of a diluted mineral acid… I use marine, but vitriolic and nitrous will also serve you to a nicety, my dear—and as you observe, the letters have changed very speedily to this mighty blue color, of great and beautiful intensity, beyond comparison stronger and more vivid than it was even on the day it was written.”
As he watches this alchemy, Valentine stands with his mouth open. When the words bloom on the paper he cries out and makes to seize it, but Dizzom halts him by pointing to letters already starting to merge into one another. The blue is now out of control, threatening to eat every inch of the paper and overwhelm the words again! Valentine groans.
But Dizzom continues: “Fear not. We have a remedy also for this. To stop this blue from spreading, we must quickly apply the blotting paper near the letters so as to imbibe the superfluous liquor.”
He dabs at the page with tiny scraps of blotting paper, which are soon speckled blue. There is frantic activity for a few minutes and then Dizzom stops and surveys his work. The letters are stable.
Valentine breathes, “Is it safe to hold now?”
“Yes, indeed.”
And in a moment the fragile paper is snatched up and secreted in his breast, as he stumbles away to the dim privacy of his bedroom.
He reads the letter standing by the window, again sitting on his bed, and then he runs down the stairs and walks to the river, to read it again out of doors, as if natural light will verify its contents.
The denizens of Bankside watch their favorite son and see his shoulders shaking. Oblivious to their clucks and sympathetic eyes, he strides back to the depository.
The letter has made him weep. It makes him dizzy. It makes him wild. Yes, she is in Venice now—no, she was not there when he searched the town the first time—and she suggests that he makes his way in that direction again with all possible speed.
It is not the letter he expected.
A Foment for the Pain of Haemorrhoids
Take Onion, Linseed, each
4
ounces; Herbs Henbane, Toad flax, Tarrow, Mullein, each 2 handfuls; boil in Water 3 quarts to 2 quarts; in the strain’d liquid dissolve Opium 2 drams.
It relaxeth the cruel tension of the Vessels, obtunds the Acuteness of Pain, melts down and discusses those viscid and grumous Feculencies, that lay Obstructions and Excite Tumors: And lastly, it repels the Inundation of the Blood.
The black humor of his situation does not escape Valentine Greatrakes, hurtling the other way down roads he has so recently traced homeward.
In less than three weeks he is making the same arduous journey, still beset with a cough and now with an ominous soreness in his nether parts—and for what? On the strength of scarcely credible words wrung from a greasy scrap of paper. Yet he’s cursing the notion that caused him to run all the way home from Venice, only to find the gold is still waiting for him at the wrong end of the rainbow. If only he had not lost courage and stayed a little longer. He has worked at the timings of it—she must have left London just days after he fled Venice. They must have passed each other at some point on their opposite journeys, even rested at the same inns, eaten off the same hostelry’s pewter.
That is, of course, if she’s not acting the lapwing, and leading me away from the nest, and the girl safely stowed in London all the while?
Mimosina Dolcezza has hinted that she has answers to more mysteries than she has cared to name in writing.
This time, at least, he can admit that he seeks the actress. It is no
shame to him now to say that he is going after her. A letter like that! And she has Pevenche!
Well, the women are physically safe, he tells himself again and again. He has already resolved that the actress shall not have it all her own way. It is his turn to be in control of the timing. Having manipulated him like a marionette, she shall herself now know the agony of waiting without explanation. He has no intention of going straight to the Black Bat.
Oh no. Indeed not.
First he will find out who she really is. When he condescends to meet her at the appointed spot, he will show that he’s not at all the halfwit she takes him for.
That is definite. That goes without saying. I’ll not be running to her with the intention of greeting her with caressing and kind words. Not till I do it in my own time. In the meantime, if I saw the devil running down the street with her crosswise in his mouth, I wouldn’t be after him to drop her.
And it does not escape Valentine that the actress has taken upon herself an awkward arrangement.
Pevenche would annoy a saint
, he thinks with a smile,
the hinges of her tongue clattering away without thinking of stopping. Let the actress have the care of that one for a while, why don’t I? She’ll soon see the error of her harshness to me on that score.
He smiles:
It was no great masterpiece of planning, was it? To steal the girl.
