The Remedy (6 page)
Take Canary 4 ounces; Oil of Turpentine 10 drops; Sealed Earth, Dragon’s Blood powder’d, each 1 scruple; white Sugar 2 drams, mix
.
It absorbs acrious, extravasated Serum, preserves the due mixture of the Blood, impresses on it a Balsamick Consolidating Character, and stints inward Bleeding.
I did not mean to hurt the nun. I intended only to terrorize her into immobility, to permit my escape. It was not my fault that she ran into the icicle I still brandished in my hand. It was to be a warning, not a weapon. But, in the dimness of my cell, the translucent ice must have been invisible to her when she ran toward me shouting threats. I felt it meet her eyeball and penetrate its jelly In God’s name, I did try to pull it out then. But it slid out of my hand and deeper into her eye until the makeshift hilt snapped off and fell to the floor. I was left looking only at my own finsers, slick with blood and melted ice.
For a moment all of us stood motionless. But as she collapsed to the ground and the other two nuns rushed to her, I glimpsed the open door to the stairs at the end of the corridor, and I ran out of the cell before I even had time to think of what I had done.
Trailing blood from my calf, weak from my long incarceration, I staggered down to the source of cold light in the first cloister and limped along its periphery. Seeing no one, I boldly ran across the second courtyard and rushed to the orchard of the convent. At the far end of the trees was another door, the one with the grille and the
ruota
beside it.
There was the remotest chance that the door might be open. But
I found it locked against me. I raked my hands over its surface, poking my fingers with painful splinters. I threw my weight against it. I beat my head on it. I knelt and scrabbled at its base. Finally I spat at it, again and again, as if some venom in my saliva might dissolve it. By then the throbbing in my leg had spread through my whole body, which was at the same time devoured by a fever.
That was how they found me, spitting at a door and screaming. By then, they had summoned some serving boys from the nearby tavern. My pursuers had tracked me by the blood that gushed from my wound. I was soon restrained and tied to a wooden plank, which they rested between two tree stumps in the orchard. There they left me, in the cruel cold, for many hours, to cool my murderous rage, they said. They made no move to clean or dress my leg, perhaps hoping that I would die without their further intervention and that they might then say it was of natural causes, that I had hidden myself in the garden and frozen to death in the night.
I almost wished to satisfy them. I felt no guilt for harming the nun, though she must have been suffering unspeakable agonies from the wound I had inflicted: Someone had come to whisper the news to me, to tell me that the contusion had spread and both eyes were thought beyond repair. My informant took this opportunity to empty a pitcher of foul water over my head. The water soon turned to ice, so that my hair hung down in whitened stalactites. Eventually the cold brought on a pleasant kind of delirium. I fancied myself toast-warm in front of a fire with my lover, and I murmured lewd words to him. I imagined us engaged in amorous congress and I raised my frozen hips to meet his again and again. Perhaps it is in this way, by keeping in motion, by not succumbing to torpor, that I stayed alive.
As the birds began to open their throats in the pearly darkness just before dawn, I started to feel the cold again, and to ponder the consequences of my act. I was so young, so ignorant, that I had no idea if the nuns might commit me to a summary justice of their own, perhaps stoning me to death, or if I would be bundled into a carriage and sent to Rome to be quartered and burned in the Campo del Fiori.
I began to be conscious of sounds and smells: the unmistakable rustle of a large rat, the stale stench of the dirty water thawing in my hair. The darkness was leaking by increments from the sky to reveal the black tracery of winter-stripped branches overhead, those same branches from which the nuns had hung sweet jellies to tempt me when I was a child. I licked my dry lips and tried to swivel my head, but they had bound me cruelly across the neck and forehead, even tying string, ignominiously, around my ears.
I was falling into delirium again when five of the s
ignori di notte
came to take me away, four to carry me and one to guide our way with a flaming torch. They bore me, still on the plank, through the gate held open by the abbess and two of her hench-women, who saluted me with grim smiles.
First we crossed the
campo
of San Zaccaria diagonally. The church leered up like an Oriental ziggurat. There was nothing of Christian kindness in its barbarous frontage. We left it behind and proceeded into the throat of the
calle
that led toward San Provolo. Passing under the arch, I glimpsed the exquisite relief of the Madonna to whom I had once compared myself. After a moment, that was gone and I heard one of the guards grunt. The night sky then swung round and I was semi-upright, looking on stone: they were carrying me over a bridge. From the top of the bridge, where they levelled me again, I had a glimpse down the canal all the way to the lagoon, which loosed on me a spiteful tongue of gelid air. I was tipped backward as we descended again. My stomach rose up in rebellion and I choked on bile. Then I was righted, and we continued on our way.
Above me the first tatters of dawn light struck the sneering snouts of stone lions on marble balconies. Beneath them the ivory-coloured teeth of the cornices gnashed in and out of the shadows. In serried stone arches, wrought-metal lanterns dangled from their chains like hunting spiders, as our silent passage disturbed the dead air around them.
I stared on my city as if it was a dream. The dark canals, the Gothic windows, the courtyards, and the bridges all appeared unreal to me. I looked up at towering walls, everything distorted by my strange viewpoint so that the
palazzi
loomed over me like
bewitched trees in the dark-hearted forest of a nightmare in which a black-clad, hooded troop of men carried a girl with frozen hair on a plank.
The crust that had formed over my leg wound broke open. I felt the warm trickle of blood—we must have left a trail of drops in our wake. In time to the officers’ steps I whispered, “Please, please, please, please.” They looked away. I continued to keen, “Please don’t hurt me.” They marched on like enchanted toy soldiers. I soon lost my bearings and eventually closed my eyes.
When I woke I was inside a large room and a man was looking down on me with a kindly expression. My leg felt tight: In the warmth the wound had sealed itself again.
He must be the torturer
, I thought, wary of his smile, for it is well mown that the se men love their work, and therefore the beings on whom they practice their arts.
But he was elegantly dressed, well shod, and did not stink of beer or urine. His hands were beautifully kept, I noticed, as he brushed the hair from my forehead. He was of my own class. I did not know if this was better or worse for me.
“So this is our saintly little vixen,” he said. “You have put us in a considerable dilemma.”
His voice was smooth, his accent patrician. I wondered how well he knew my parents. Did they wait outside to beg for my life? But if they cared not whether I froze to death in the nunnery, why should they want to save me now?
I was soon enlightened. My companion explained that my parents were even now being woken with the news that I had died in the struggle with the nun I had stabbed.
It had been decided that this was the best course. A Golden Book daughter, he told me sternly, could never be brought before the court for a violent act. The whole city would be destabilized by such an event. Golden Book daughters were not permitted to be guilty of such crimes. And if I were to be cleared: Why, that would be worse. Not just noble nuns but also the daughters of merchants and the daughters of glassmakers would get it into their heads that they might take a knife—or an icicle—to anyone who displeased them.
My companion shook his head sadly. “You see what difficulties you present,” he said, gently.
For the first time I spoke. “Why don’t you strangle me now and burn my body? It is the only solution.”
I had blurted out my worst fears, hoping to have them assuaged. He smiled again to let me know that my fate would be otherwise.
“It is not the only solution. We can offer you another.”
The room was growing hot. My hair was melting and water trickled from it, noisily striking the floorboards, forming a glistening puddle that glowed like blood-flecked gold powder, reflecting the fire that roared menacingly in the grate.
“But of course, you are in discomfort,” he said kindly, “and in no condition to consider our proposal sanely.” He rang a bell and two women appeared. They cut my bonds with little stiletto daggers and helped me rise. I stood unsteadily, and peered around the luxurious room, which was decorated with frescoes of a grandeur I had not seen since my parents expelled me from our home. Meanwhile the man gave instructions to the women, who regarded me with blank eyes.
They took me to an antechamber, and pushed a chamber pot beneath me. While I sat on it they filled a large tub with jugfuls of warm water and gently removed my clothes. They washed my aching limbs and my matted hair, leaving me to soak for many minutes. The warmth of the water rinsed all thoughts from my tired mind, and soon the room grew dim about me. I smelled the rich clot of an ointment gently rubbed into my wound. I closed my eyes then and when I opened them again, the water had grown cool, and the room had been lit with dozens of candles.
Twelve men surrounded me. I felt their eyes on my nakedness, on the pale curls that had dried in a cascade that spilled over the edge of the bath. My nipples, rising above the water, were puckered in the cold air. I was unable to move or speak.
Among the men I detected my recent companion. He told me: “You have no reason to feel afraid.”
I said nothing. How could I answer such a patent he?
Sweet Glyster
Take New Cows’ Milk 6 ounces; Melassos 2 ounces, mix
.
This Glyster is to be made use of, before the bitter one, whilst the Worms lying in the small Guts bite and gnaw and cause the Belly-ache. For they will greedily make to the Milk, which is sweet and delicious to them, and so leaving off biting, will come out of their lurking Holes, and crawl downwards and lie ready easy to be cast out by Siege
.
When they murdered my Pa, that was a good day for me.
For a start, I was made ward of the handsomest man in London, my Pa’s best friend, Valentine Greatrakes.
And after that there were plenty of treats with Uncle Valentine, very nice indeed, even with his long face about my Pa’s passing.
He kept all the details prodigious snug, as if I were a little girl. So, soon as I could, at Don Saltero’s Coffee House, I went foraging in the pockets of his greatcoat while he went out to buy a newspaper, and that’s when I found the letter from Smerghetto, the man who conducts the Venetian end of their business.
Smerghetto had identified my Pa’s body on the slab in Venice, and this was his report.
I scanned the letter quickly and replaced it in the pocket before my guardian returned. I resumed cheering him with choice conversation. The day proceeded to our joint satisfaction, including a vastly good spread of cakes and two cups of spiced chocolate. Then we went to Madame Cornelys’ in Knightsbridge for some sweet Asses’ Milk, which is always so renovating to the appetite. Afterward we ate cutlets and damson pudding. I like to think that I consoled Uncle Valentine considerably. He really was very finely cut up about my Pa’s death.
“Poor little Pevenche,” he whispered sorrowfully, when he took me back to the Academy. For some reason he had not invited me to
go to the theater with him. Yet it seemed to me that he could scarce stop himself weeping at our good-bye. You see, they were of the same age, and my Pa’s cut-short life must have made him think to himself. Also, my Pa was in Venice on their mutual business. You
could
say Uncle Valentine had sent him to his death. I saw all these thoughts soaking through that remarkable face of his when he turned it in my direction.
Then he was gone, not before thoughtfully reminding Mistress Haggardoon to administer my Sweet Glyster without fail.
Later, over supper, I reviewed the contents of the letter, which listed every wound on my Pa’s body in a businesslike way.
Only the last words puzzled me: “And his face was raped with fish.”
Smerghetto wrote as if it was clear, but for me the words conjured only blurred visions of thrashing fins and white eyes marbled with blood. I supposed that Smerghetto had botched the translation.
