The Remedy (38 page)
The girl was clever with a rag of silk and flower, I observed. She had dressed herself in what was possibly the one color that flattered her:
soupir étouffé
, stifled sigh, a wan kind of lilac. But
nothing could disguise what she was lacking of character in her features.
Even though she was too tightly packed in her dress, she had learned the art of walking as if she were gossamer light and it was the uninformed beholder who might think himself wrong if he observed the thickness about her midriff. She was not professionally trained, so she must have spent a great deal of time watching herself in the glass.
I could see that she had a vile temper upon her, and that crossing her would be an unpleasant business. This was proved to me when I followed her to her bedchamber, as if in proper attendance. She was not aware of my presence and walked in her natural way. Then she was heavy as a veal calf, bumbling into the corner of a credenza, which the maid had pulled away from the wall so as to dust behind it. That maid had the benefit of a stream of the bluest language I heard in London, not excepting the Dottore and the Zany in their cups, but worse was the shrill and insistent tone of it. Pevenche shrieked at the maid like a crazed ape, like a monkey to whom someone had administered an over-stimulating nostrum.
I watched with interest.
Her self-centeredness and laziness, combined with that temper, were the very ropes that would bind her to my plot. With Pevenche at my side, my lover could not long stay far from me.
And I liked the poetic nature of the justice of the thing: Pevenche had tried to kill our love and had almost succeeded. I had not wanted to see her as a rival. But as she had thrust herself forward as such, well, then, I would bury her.
Bury her alive, that is, in a place that swallowed young girls like sweetmeats.
A Temperate Pearl Cordial Julep
Take waters of Borage, Woodsorrel, each 4 ounces; Damask Rose, and Barley Cinnamon water, each 2 ounces; Pearl prepared 1 dram; white Sugar candy 3 drams; Oil of Nutmeg 1 drop, mix.
It brings an exceeding grateful and present Relief to those that are troubled with sick Fits, and Anxieties in Fevers; for it neither exagitates nor rarifies the Blood; neither doth it promote or increase its effervescence; and yet nevertheless, succours the Ventricle, labouring and almost sinking under the oppression of sharp Feculencies, and adult Humours flowing from the Blood, endeavouring Despumation, and excocted by preternatural Fermentation: And all this it does, by imbuing the Stomach with a sweetly pleasing Gust and Flavour, whereby it being recreated and rejoiced, the Spirits (both indwelling and inflowing) through the whole Machine, are inspired with fresh Vigour, at an instant recruited, and mightily supported.
I had told Dottore Velena that I needed to attend to family matters in Venice.
And he tried to believe every word, unlike the Zany who listened in silence and rolled up his eyes, as he had done when he noticed the new dulled color of my hair. Nevertheless I kissed the Zany fondly on the cheek, and though he rubbed at the spot, he did not recoil from me, nor did he expostulate when I promised to rejoin them both if I ever returned to London. At this Dottore Velena waxed a little Italian, and became sentimental, and called for a bottle of port to lubricate our valedictory coddle of sausage and onions. Needing my wits, I only pretended to
drink it. After a roistering final evening at the Anchor, the Bell, the George, and the Feathers, I negotiated the purchase of one of my costumes: The padded apron that gave me the silhouette of middle pregnancy, which was used to illustrate the goodness of our nostrum for painless childbirth. The Zany did not for one moment let up from his disputatiousness with the Dottore or express regret at my imminent departure, but, for the first time, he stood me a small gin.
Before settling into sleep in his parturition chair, Dottore Velena delivered a speech that meandered into romantic declarations, and he even tottered over to my basket to make a hazy approximation of an attempt upon my virtue. I clipped his ankle with a candle-snuffer and he fell headlong into the fireplace, smiting his forehead with a smart clap. He fell asleep there, shuffling in the ashes, muttering about the tragic impossibility of “sewing up a broken heart without the aid of fairies.”
We parted in good, if subdued, spirits, the next morning. The Zany had already slunk out before dawn, perhaps in search of “combustibles” but also, perhaps, to avoid the final embarrassment of a farewell. I had expected nothing more, so I tucked a small eel pie, wrapped in a beautiful silk handkerchief, into the angle of the plank where he slept.
Then I walked out into the dawn of the Bankside morning, holding a valise that I had forced to accommodate sundry items plucked from the quack’s surgery as well as my old grand clothes. As I listened to the pigeons croodling in the privet hedge of Southwark Cathedral, I stopped a moment, looking back up at the Feathers and the grimy window behind which the Dottore was shuffling about his toilette. As if he felt my gaze, his face appeared at the window and he saluted me with a silent blizzard of blown kisses. I kissed my fingers back to him, unexpected tears on my lashes. A tender part of me was sorry, and also a little afraid, to leave the scene of so much rollicking amity, but I knew that it was time to move on, and to bring my lover to me.
I didn’t have much time: He’d be back in London within days.
I turned my back on Bankside and set off for Mistress Haggardoon’s Academy for Young Ladies in salubrious Marylebone.
Pevenche had decided that it was beneath her dignity to talk to me, so the first part of our journey to Dover passed blessedly in silence, apart from her disbelieving snort at the inelegance of the equipage. She herself had dressed in a lilac silk gown and sported a white hat lined with dusky pink underneath, causing her oblong pale head to resemble the pitted stalk of an overgrown toadstool.
“Only two postilions!” she muttered, jangling the steel-sprung carriage with her weight as she lumbered aboard. Although there was space for four passengers, we were fortunately alone, so I had no need to fear her indiscretions. I passed the entire distance fretting at the cost, which would run high at threepence a mile. I was already afraid of the furious sums of money that it would take to transport my spoilt hostage across Europe. My plan, more viscerally than intellectually made, seemed insane even to me then. But it was too late. I was committed to it, however thin its logic and however fragile its framework. And I had no other.
At an urn on the way to Dover Pevenche and I consumed the first of several cheerless deaf-and-dumb dinners together. I suspected that she also feared to enter into conversation with me, for such talk would expose the shameful truth of her capacities in French and German. I had a hint of her deficiency already. If she was forced to address me, it was as “Madame Joanfloor,” her crude approximation of “Jaune-Fleur.”
I was speechless when she pushed her plate of cutlets in front of me and thrust her knife and fork into my hand.
“Cut them up,” she ordered.
Why not?
I asked myself fiercely.
Anything to keep her quiet, to let her think that she rules.
I obeyed her, though I could not resist saying lightly, “I’m not quite old enough to be your mother, my dear.”
From the look I received I saw that she considered me decrepit enough to be her grandmother. But she was soon deep
in the consumption of the cutlets and speculating on the manner of their flavoring. It seemed a point of intense interest to her whether thyme or bay predominated in the marinade. This girl was the stuff of nightmares. Why had I done this senseless, dangerous thing of stealing her?
The answer was always the same:
She is bait, Like any worm or maggot.
When we resumed our journey, she pretended to doze. I pretended to read—a guidebook for the Grand Tour—and so had an opportunity to watch her covertly.
While not quite formed yet, hers was a face that did not make any rash promises to deliver ecstasy. It was, I thought sourly, a typical English rose, sodden and parboiled in complexion. Even its freshness was not unimpeachable. Her small features were strictly consonant with the limits of her personality.
Yet she was extraordinarily adept in the artifice of juvenility She contrived to display her mouth perpetually open, revealing a natural gap between her two small front teeth. Her upper lip did indeed overhang in a childish manner. The two pretended milk teeth above rested on the lower lip like a doll’s. She cultivated a fixed, averted gaze, that seemed to be full of delight sacred to the private world of childhood, and then sometimes her eyes were full of wist as if she listened to a faraway nursery rhyme.
Eventually, we were forced to talk a little. Carefully, in the manner of a respectful governess, I asked her about her accomplishments, avoiding the subjects of French and German. It appeared she had no talents, and no energy even to develop such skills. She did not busy herself with embroidery, and certainly not with charitable acts, which would be natural to one of her ambiguous station, being a way to establish her superiority. She had a strange, obsessive, and unseemly interest in food, and could take on that bootless subject with surprising eloquence. Music was not her delight at all, despite the dreaded ukulele. I noticed that she had brought it with her, clearly thinking that she would soon be using it on her guardian.
Out of curiosity, I asked her to play for me. She sniffed petulantly. “I only play for my Uncle Valentine. He would not like me playin’ to
you.”
I was in a condition to slap her face, and would have taken a bare delight in doing so. But that was not to my purpose. The tindery aspect of my character was not to be provoked by so poor an adversary. With caution, I changed the subject, groped for one that would please her. I soon found it. Pevenche was full of grievances for the way she was treated by the other girls in her school. Her complaints were as the tides of the sea, but sadly none so subtle. She recounted triumphs of humiliation she had visited upon girls who offended her, and of mistresses dismissed and servants demoted: All the amusements naturally dear to a young woman who was no prodigy of wit but a genius of spite-fulness. In talking of these tiny wars and her victories, she grew flushed and happy. English boarding schools, like Venetian convents, were evidently prime breeding grounds for monstrous bullies.
And so we whiled away the remainder of the journey to Dover, and the wait in the customs house, where we were but lightly examined. The weather was fair and we entered our vessel with ease, the journey running to less than six hours. Neither of us was taken with the seasickness. I fully expected the girl to part with her copious breakfast. She turned out to be fitted with a surprising pair of sea-legs, though as far as I knew she had never been upon the water before. At Calais we were disgorged with facility on the quay where the usual porters seized our baggage and conducted us to the municipality to obtain our
passe-avant
and show our own documents: mine hastily aged to look much-traveled and that of Pevenche, white and crisp. I had commissioned them hastily from an amiable forger I’d met in the Anchor. I had stood over him anxiously in his discreet cubicle, giving her description, trying to find neutral words for her appearance.
“And her age?” asked my accomplice, busy at his calligraphy.
I realized that I knew it not, but instructed him to write “twenty,” my original guess on first seeing her.
I had the document drawn up in French, trusting that she would not interest herself in anything so impenetrable.
Now Pevenche’s face was frozen, listening to and pretending to understand my fluent French. My explanations, similar to those I had given Mistress Haggardoon, were accepted and we were gallantly waved away by the officers and set free upon our road almost instantly.
I decided not to stay the night in Calais but to leave immediately for a town more obscure. I did not believe that we had been followed, but I could not afford to be complacent.
By now my hostage had begun to fascinate me. I had never come across such a grotesque creature. Nature had justly denied her charm, having endowed her richly with conceit. In every carriage she behaved like the reigning beauty at a ball, condescending to meet the admiring glances she imagined by turning her head from one fellow passenger to another, as if to linger too long on one might utterly rum him. Her artillery of giggles, winks, and lash-fluttering was unleashed on both men and women. I am sure they thought her deprived of her senses by some accident.
The only accident that has befallen her
, I wanted to say,
is a surfeit of tolerance regarding her monstrous vanity.
My lover, and evidently also her father before him, had fondled all her fantasies about being an invincibly charming young woman of heroic intelligence.
When she saw our companions looking at her curiously, she whispered to me: “You see! Do I not intrigue them? Do they not all think that I am a foreign lady? A foreign lady, bred abroad? Do I not have fascinating graces and airs that mark me out from other English misses?”
She fully believed that no male could behold her squab charms with impunity. If a man’s glance strayed involuntarily in her direction, she would squeal in a whisper, “Oh no! He’s looking goats and monkeys at me! I dare not meet his eyes! I’m so shy!”
At the end of one meal I watched in astonishment as she carefully wrapped the well-gnawed bones of her fowl in a napkin.
When I asked her why she did so she told me in stiff terms that these delicacies were for the coachman’s horse. My heart was too cold to disabuse her and I admit that I enjoyed the spectacle the next morning when she, simpering, presented the bones, and the incredulous coachman looked over her head to his friend the ostler, who was making a pretty pantomime of her bizarre ignorance.
