The Remedy (17 page)

Even the fugitives who inhabit the concealed stairwells of the Anchor have exposed themselves to danger today. In Tom’s honor they have staggered on their cramped legs round Bank End into Clink Street and processed unsteadily up Stoney Street to the depository, draped with purple silk banners at each window.

The preceding group is ushered out of the receiving chamber. The double doors at the end of the purple room swing open to allow the new swarm of grievers to enter. Mimosina Dolcezza is borne in by the crowd. A gallant gentleman of the lock-picking persuasion has even seized her elbow, and is valiantly clearing a path for her all the way to the coffin, little knowing this must be the last thing she desires. Her face is a picture of miserable confusion and helplessness.

Looking down from above, Valentine tells himself that he does not even feel sorry for her: Her timing’s bad; by some strange fatality she has arrived at an awkward moment. It is not his fault, and nor can he be held responsible if she’s never seen a corpse before. Will he rush to help her if she faints?

Not likely.

It will do her good to see a real tragedy, instead of those picturesque dramas she likes to confect, built of nothing but hysterics and jealousy and fanned by her petty obsessions, culminating in the petulant act of allowing Gervase Stintleigh indoors. Still. Valentine keeps an eye on the lock-picker, making sure his attentions remain in the realm of decency. He would not like a coarse act to defile Tom’s day, he reminds himself.

I want Tom buried in all manner of pride and splendor.

In the surge of the crowd, Mimosina Dolcezza is brought ever closer to Tom’s coffin. Valentine sees her grow suddenly even paler. Her eyes widen. All around her, people are gently lifting Tom’s hand to kiss it, taking away white powder on their lips. Men are thumping the coffin with emotion and women are throwing rose petals and carefully folded notes inside it. Mimosina Dolcezza alone stands still, staring at Tom’s face, her own features immobilized by shock. Her white face glistens with perspiration.

No, it must be tears.

It is pity she’s feeling for the poor unknown creature, lying there on the purple satin. She must have realized who he is and who he was to me.

Or it could even be that she weeps for Valentine Greatrakes himself, witnessing the grim reality of his great loss and finding it hard to bear on his behalf.

Unlike the weeping actress, he himself has not been able truly to look at the corpse, not to meet its closed eyes or touch it. He has dealt with it as if it were a precious possession of Tom’s to be honored and looked after. When Tom arrived, and Valentine went slowly down to greet the coffin, he had tried, though without success, to stop himself sniffing for the putrid signature of the violating fish. Smelling nothing but Dizzom’s medicinal desiccants, he had simply nodded, accepting this box of flesh as Tom’s. He had not even shed a tear.

And look now.

Even though this man can mean nothing at all to Mimosina Dolcezza, she is showing more emotion than Valentine has displayed in the entire span of the last weeks. She trembles visibly; she wavers on her feet.

Then she inclines her head upward and meets the eyes of Valentine Greatrakes. She holds them. He reads terrifying pain in her pupils, and in a moment she distils a new tear from each lid. Now he is sure of it. The sweet lady is grieving for this stranger because the man who is now this corpse was once beloved by Valentine Greatrakes.

A sudden scream breaks their silent communion. A woman is shrieking and pointing to the corpse. Now men are shouting and pointing too. Through the glass their distress is muffled, as if underwater. Valentine cranes his neck to see what has caused such outrage.

Tom’s white-wrapped chest is flowering with blood. The red stain spreads so fast that it is as if the life-force is still pumping the fluid from his body. Valentine turns to shout for Dizzom but sees his assistant already scuttling down the stairs. In the mourning room, his men are pushing the grievers away with the unnecessary force summoned by their own fear. Men and women are weeping, and one voice above them all howls the words everyone is thinking: ‘The murderer must be in this room!’

Someone has locked the doors and all are pressed against the four walls, panting and pawing at the floor. Everyone is looking at everyone else with narrowed eyes.

Until this moment Valentine has easily dismissed as a fairy tale the belief that the corpse of a murdered man would bleed again if
his killer drew near. Too picturesque, too fanciful to be true. In the real world of murder, nothing so fair or clean as cruentation ever really happens, except onstage in the theater. There must be a real reason for the eruption of blood from Tom’s corpse, and he is hot to deal severely with Dizzom who should have plugged all such possibilities, and who has clearly been negligent with the chemicals on this of all days.

He looks down on his assistant, even now bending desperately over the corpse below, tenderly sopping the blood with his own handkerchief and searching its face as if Tom’s plugged eyes and sewn-up lips might suddenly burst open with some eloquent explanation of their own. Dizzom’s shoulders are shaking: His tears drop into the pool of blood in the hollow of Tom’s chest.

Valentine cannot stop himself from looking around the room at all the distorted faces to see if there is a relic of guilt written upon any of them. Yes, he sees three weeping Venetians of their business acquaintance but they are old friends of the enterprise, men he has trusted with all manner of opportunities, whose children he knows. They loved Tom as a brother and could not possibly dissemble at this unrestrained grief. Valentine knows that the Venetians are the most superstitious race on earth, and surely these men would not have attended if they had been responsible for the outrage in their midst. No, none of these men is capable of killing Tom and none has ever been furnished with a motive. Valentine’s eyes rove around the room, looking for strangers.

He has momentarily forgotten Mimosina Dolcezza but suddenly he sees her cowering in a corner and is overcome with shame and pity for her; alone, in a strange city, a woman of acute feelings, she has been forced to witness a complete stranger’s corpse perform a gory miracle. Now she is trapped in a room with a hundred vengeful strangers, and indeed they are eyeing her now, full of venom, for everything about her features and dress indicates that she is a foreigner. A foreigner killed Tom. There is no doubt in their minds. What is she doing here, if not gloating? Valentine feels his belly contract with fear: What if they should turn on this poor, innocent woman? Those who have come to mourn Tom are mostly of their own ilk: Violence, though regrettable, is a necessary
tool. If they believe her the author of Tom’s murder, by act or even by commission, then there is nothing he shall be able to do to save her. The men have killing in their eyes: He sees it. He knows it. Several of them are edging in her direction; one has snatched up a pole from the curtains.

Then he notices something else: Behind her stands the one man in the room upon whom Valentine has never laid eyes before. It is not the actress drawing the glares of the Banksiders: It is this man. He’s an Italian, Moorish in coloring, but somehow refined.
Curiously over-refined
, if anything, thinks Valentine. His nose and lips are but barely in relief. It is as if the modeling of his face has been executed so obsessively that his features have been almost smoothed away.

With a face like that he’ll not be needing a conscience. He’ll be available for any crime, a complete creature of his masters, whoever they are. Such a man has no will of his own: This makes him more efficacious at the worst work.

The man stands too close to the actress and it seems as if he is breathing into the very tendrils of hair at the back of her neck. He barely glances at the corpse; when he does, it is with a faintly amused expression. He has eyes only for the woman.

Only a murderer
, the thought suddenly strikes Valentine,
could be so callously lewd in the face of his cruel work. That look’s so dirty that if you threw it at a wall, it’d stick.

Perhaps this man has arrived in London with a mission to torment Valentine Greatrakes himself! He has taken Tom from him and now he plans to murder the woman who has stolen his heart? Perhaps those fixed looks at the back of Mimosina Dolcezza are serving to set her firmly in his memory, so that when he comes upon her silhouette in some darkened street he may know to rush at it with a knife…

Valentine crashes down the stairs and into the reception room only to find its weeping population surging out into the street. They have pushed aside his men and burst open the double doors. The murderous Italian has melted away with them. Only Dizzom remains, bent over the corpse, and Mimosina Dolcezza, who is rooted to the spot, staring at a point somewhere above the lid of the coffin.

He’s burning hot. The crush of people has raised the temperature of the depository to that of a summer day. Behind the doors the spurned refreshments are already raising a questionable odor. The fine native Melton oysters and hogshead ordered to give Tom’s lying-in-state some substance—all seem to wish to join Tom in grim putrefaction.

As he enters the room, the actress is already murmuring feverish apologies—she cannot ever forgive herself for intruding, she had not the least idea, how could she have done this to him? And he is interrupting her every phrase with inapposite exclamations,

“Sure, you’ve no call to be sorry. Sure, you’re more than welcome,” he responds, ridiculously. They continue to speak together at the same time for many seconds, both drawing to a sudden stop at the same moment.

He crushes her into his arms, kissing her eyes, her hair, her ears, no matter who sees him at this soft work, and he calls his carriage, never taking his eyes off the sobbing woman. His antique Irish namesake, the famous healer Valentine Greatrakes, was said to be able to cure scrofula with his bare hands; now Valentine Greatrakes of Bankside uses his fingers to stroke away the fear and trembling of Mimosina Dolcezza.

He takes her home, holding her fast against him the whole way. He thinks he can erase the thought of her betrayal with the desperate quantity of his own feelings for her. But there’s a cruel reminder on the stairs: They brush past a pile of discarded newspapers shrieking Stintleigh’s death, his portrait uppermost on the front pages. An example of every newspaper printed in London is here, it seems, all obsessed with the same crime. He hurries her past, hating the rustle of newsprint raised by her trailing skirt.

Back in her sullied room, when she excuses herself a moment, he can’t stop looking in her gilded Venetian mirror and regretting mirrors don’t keep diaries that a man can get his hands on and consult for interest. Now the straining—not to do himself the damage of a whiff of something male—lies heavy on his ribs. He’s singeing hair roots with a bargain: The act itself he’ll almost live with on condition she’s not kissed or said or gazed or, worst of all, admired when—
0 Lord here she comes herself
—swimming up
behind him, and she ought to touch him now and she ought to kill the thought but no, she stands still and lets him drown gold-rimmed in the lens of petrified water.

He doesn’t turn his fizzling head, instead he meets her smoky look in glass. The mirror’s blear-eyed, nazy on fermented mold, a little piece of Venice she’s brought here with her to distort everything with mystery. He hates that mirror.

Is it bilious with the witnessings laid up?

He cannot keep the question down. So he by-the-ways as if he doesn’t care: “D’you know at all that fellow, the politician, the dead one?”

The words jangle bitter as small change in his mouth and he’s struggling to keep down the truer definition:
that humming man, that smug man, that nobler man than me.

In the mirror, her face is blank.

“Did you not read about it? Are they not your newspapers we passed just now out there, out there on the stairs?”

“What stairs?” she asks.

“Your stairs,” he says, “the stairs into your house.”

And she says absolutely not, why should she? She shakes her head in vigorous agreement with everything she says. She enumerates. She lays down as obvious.

He feels the individual fronds of hair curling and uncurling on his head, when, his belly stuck to his back, he tows Stintleigh’s shadow to the bedroom. They lie down and make dizzy the mirror’s pocked and perished silver.

Pleasantly occupied, he’s not quite deaf to his heart’s howling its bereftness and his head’s aching dread that something fine has fallen off and rolled away, underneath this very bed.

Nevertheless he holds her all afternoon and night, never once closing his own eyes, lest there should blossom under their dark lids the vision of Tom bleeding to death when already dead, or the pallid face of Stintleigh grimacing at the end of his stick.

Valentine makes no more mention of the politician or of his murder. He’ll not ask for any more lies, whether it’s the little one, that she never saw the man, or the greater one, that she has not lain with him. There are of course a million and six reasons why
she would utter the smaller, almost harmless one: She would be afraid of his jealousy, not wish to hurt him, be embarrassed at the connection.

She says nothing about it either, merely gazing at him with an illuminated and tearless face. She clings to him. She submits to his lust meekly. She has need of forbearance for in the last Mimosina-less days he has not been able to find relief elsewhere.

She must take responsibility for what she has pent up.

So thinks Valentine, as he kisses her reddened eyelids, trying not to see the head of Lord Stintleigh as she caresses the back of his neck, or the drench of blood on Tom’s breast.

He has hated her, and he loves her again, and the sweets of possession amply compensate for the bitters.

And how she inspires him!

For lying in her arms, Valentine Greatrakes comes up with the very best idea of his business life. Perhaps it is the joy she has distilled in him, perhaps it is a galvanizing relief at their reunion, but he awakes with a plan of crystalline perfection. Mimosina Dolcezza has brought such clarity to his private life that its illumination leaks on to the business ledger. He will market not just Venetian liquids, Venetian doctors and their doses, but Venice herself.