My mind had previously skittered away from the subject. But I now spent a great deal of time thinking about the girl. My captors left me strictly alone: I had ample hours for reflection. The more I thought about her the less I could conceive that the flinty chit once quickened in my belly. And yet, and yet, when I pictured her face, I knew that there were elements of it that were not unlike my own. Buried in that barely animate porridge were lineaments I had seen in my own mirror: the shape of her nostrils, the curve of her brows. There was more. She had my own gift for histrionics; my own sweet tooth. And the deception that prized her from me at birth, the cruel he about the cranioclast,
that
was so very like her father. I could not think of another man who would devise such a plot. Between us we might well have sired such a brute as Pevenche. I began to accept that my interlocutor had told me the truth, and the full irony of the situation flooded through me.
Now I remembered things that my lover had told me about his ward; of how her father had been entranced by the baby but
how he had soon lost interest. Yes, the span of my first lover’s attention had been by no means generous, when it came to sentimental attachments. So Pevenche too, though but a tiny child, had known the inexplicable waning of his affection, and no doubt she had felt his noxious choler too. I would not be surprised if he had beaten the child. Probably, all her ridiculous pretensions to juvenility could be traced back to a desire to return to that infant state when her father had truly seemed to love her. The same with the clothes—Tom had always insisted on picturesque, if gaudy, dressing. And the food! My lover had tried to tell me how Tom had encouraged her naturally large appetite, for satirical motives. He had fashioned her as a monster for his own amusement. How confusing it must have been for her, and she without the sense of a flea to start off with. The comfort of a warm belly must have won out in the end, further consolidated by that surprising talent of hers in the kitchen.
This was the girl I had regarded as an enemy. Now I saw her as purely pathetic. But I could not warm to her. And nor would the world. The trouble being that pity is more easily evoked by beauty and delicacy than by disgust and a dark desire to sneer, the only human responses to Pevenche’s grotesqueries. She had no natural melody of character to counteract them.
“Did you not see the tragedy of the thing?” Valentine had asked me in London, reproaching me for my lack of compassion for the then-unmet Pevenche.
Yes, but still no maternal affection rose in me for the girl, and little compassion. I could not sentimentalize her: My actual experience of her was too fresh. Her situation was sad, I acknowledged, but mine was perilous, and of course much more compelling for me.
I continually wondered if Valentine Greatrakes now knew the truth too. Or how much he had discovered. If he knew that Pevenche was my daughter, then he would also know that his precious Tom had once upon a time been my lover. And he would know that I had concealed this very salient fact after seems the corpse. How would that make him feel? Betrayed by me, certainly But would he be disgusted to share a woman in
that way? Or would it, as I hoped, raise me in his estimation? Some men are so intimate in their friendships that sharing a lover only unites them more. Perhaps he would now think that my abduction of Pevenche was a wild expression of unconscious motherly love. How very wonderful, and how very convenient if that could be true.
Now that I knew he meant, however hopelessly, to rescue me, I could not refrain from warming speculations that his feelings for me had survived the shock of what I had done and what I had dissembled. When I thought about it clearly, I knew that my own affection for him had remained untainted and that I cared as much about seeing him again as I did about saving my life and escaping this prison. Perhaps more. If he felt what I felt, or even a fraction of it, all was not lost.
Diligently, I watered the bars with acid, as if they were precious orchids and I was sprinkling the Balm of Gilead about their roots. I fancied that I saw a discoloration at the base of the metal. I imagined that when I shook the bars myself a little tremor of looseness rewarded me. But it remained well beyond my strength to extract them from their wooden casings. These too I bored with dozens of tiny holes. Every night I awaited the idiots in such a high state of suspense that I felt as if I lay a full inch above my pallet.
When they finally came, they leapt on the bars without ceremony, swinging all their weight, so that at last the groan of metal rent the air. A shuffle in the corridor announced the curiosity of a guard, and I motioned to them to disappear. When the guard peered into my cell I was giving a notable performance of sweet slumber. He stared at me for hateful moments, and finally disappeared. I waited until I had heard his footsteps turn a corner before I ran to the bars and whispered to the idiots: “Come back!”
This time they were quieter but more determined. There was no doubt that the bars were starting to buckle, but try as they might, they could not bend them enough to allow me a clear passage out. Their contorted faces showed me they were close to tears, when they finally slid down the wall and fumbled away.
I sank to my knees, retching dry, ugly sobs, nothing like the silent, decorous teardrops I had for years conjured up professionally.
A few moments later they were back, and from the number of footsteps it seemed to me that they were reinforced in numbers. I hoped against hope that I might now see the dear face of Valentine Greatrakes. Instead a pale and ugly countenance was lifted up to the bars. It resembled that of Dizzom, except that the man was Venetian. He nodded to me and inspected the bars. Then he slipped below and consulted in whispers with the others.
A new pair of hands appeared at the bars. And I knew those long fingers. I knew them by heart.
Take Tent Wine 2 quarts; White Sanders, Acorn Cups, each half an ounce; candy’d Eryngo Roots, Dates, Figs, each 4 ounces; Nutmegs sliced thin half an ounce; Archangel 2 handfuls; boil to 1 quart, strain it and while it is yet a little warm, add the Yolks of 4 Eggs, white Sugar Candy 1 ounce: mix all. To these may be added shavings of Harts-horn, Ivory, Priapus of the Sea-Horse, Calry, &c. give it warm for Breakfast every day.
The wood supporting the bars, fatally weakened by the holes I had made, soon gave way with four of them at work. I was out of the cell in a very few minutes and then passed hand by hand over the barricade to a
calle
where a gondola waited to bear us away.
The idiots and the Venetian Dizzom saw us safely into comfortable quarters at the back of a familiar noble palazzo at Rialto.
Then our companions tactfully left us. A fire was tickling in the grate and on the table glowed a decanter of wine surrounded by fine glasses. But neither of us moved toward these comforts. We stood staring at each other. I did not dare to embrace him, though I starved for his touch. His face was iced with anger, and he made no tender motion toward me.
Despite having risked his life to save mine, my lover seemed not much inclined to sweet reunions. I guessed that he required his pound of flesh still, the affront was too gross, that my letter had not proved sufficient to pacify him. How hard he seemed to me then, how much like a man grudgingly cut out of stone. His dry anger appeared unmitigated even by nostalgia for our time together or by simple kindness, such as he might show a dog he
had rescued. Just for a moment, he reminded me of the man I must now learn to call “Tom.”
It seemed too much, after the last months, after the past few hours, that I must still sing for my supper, grovel more for my deliverance. Stealing corner glances at his agate eyes, which roamed the room lighting on anything but me, I feared he had it in him to cast me aside even now. It seemed that he had taken me from my employers because I was
his
booty and not theirs. For him, the robbery of me was just one more act of free-trading, one more manifestation of the creed of that hard little kingdom of his, comprising the low life of both London and Venice. He would extract the information he required about Pevenche and then throw me friendless into the street, or deliver me back to my employers. Or hand me over to those two thugs who had contributed their brute force to my liberation. He might wish to do more than humiliate me. He might wish me hurt.
I had asked too much of that single letter. I had also depended too much on the hope that his own feelings for me had some true depth. Instead, it seemed at that moment as if he had made use of me, perhaps even more than I had made use of him.
So, having delivered me to his apartments, my lover did not wrap his arms around me or seek to blot out our individual and mutual alarms with a kiss that might at least have sapped the terrible tension from the room. Instead he now washed his hands, without offering me the same facility, and sat at his desk, where he lifted one paper after another. He did not quite keep his back to me, as if to show that he did not trust me, but neither did he show any interest in my presence or my welfare.
I threw back my shoulders and took deep, professional breaths. Then, in the complete silence, I began to recite in my head the first lines from the first opera I ever performed. I recited not just my lines but also the responses of the other performers until I reached the end of the first act, and then the second. Still my lover kept me tangentially in his view, and did not offer me a seat, or a word.
I felt my feet growing numb. I had begun to sway slightly. It had been hours since I had eaten or drunk anything, and the
drama of the day was beginning to take its toll. My 1 over had risen, some time during the second act, and barked down the stairs for some food. The idiots had arrived soon after with a great plate of bread and cheese, which he fell upon and emptied, without offering me a morsel. He washed it down with unwatered red wine. While my own lips parched and my tongue grew furred, I still thought:
Good, good, drink more. Drink is good for softening.
An hour later I was reaching the end of the first act in the fourth opera I had performed. I was so tired now that I did not bother to infuse my silent recital with any feelings. I spoke the words inside my head as if I was reciting numbers. But I was feeling better. To exercise control over the time by choosing my work and the speed at which I performed it gave me a calming sense of power. To be engaged in an activity of which he knew nothing also helped salvage my sense of self.
Two hours later I was not even mid-repertoire and he was still at his desk, nodding slightly from the wine.
When he finally broke down, it was to say; “Why did you not tell me that you were expecting our child?”
He stood up, pigeon-toed, grimacing with an effort not to burst into tears, and was pointing at my false belly with all the despair of a good man who has been comprehensively betrayed.
And suddenly it was clear to me: This was the reason for all his sulking. He was angry that I had hidden the greatest news of all from him. It was his own supposed act of propagation that obsessed him. The other issues—Pevenche, my true identity Tom even—were minor, compared with the apparent genesis and burgeoning of an issue from his own seed!
He clearly believed that he and no one else must be the father of the putative child. It had not occurred to him to doubt my fidelity.
I must work with this
, I thought.
For the first time, I dared to approach him. I moved toward the desk and sat myself on its corner, as close to him as I could contrive without actually touching him.
“My darling,” I said seriously, “I would give my own eyes for it to be true. There is nothing that I would desire more than to bear your child. Nothing that would give me greater honour than that.”
And my interior thoughts were even more fervent, for to them was added the piteous knowledge that, damaged as I was by the doctor’s instruments, I would never have his child.
His eyes moistened now.
I gestured toward the pregnancy apron and said, “But I confess that this belly is not my own. It is merely a disguise that I assumed to try to save me from discovery in Venice. Sadly it did not serve, and you know the rest.”
His shock was entire. He moved his blanched lips silently.
I was in agony. Was this the moment when I might touch him? Would this be the moment when he would surround me with his arms? Or must I still bear entire the burden of managing this scene, steering us through the dangers to a happy conclusion? I was sure that when he touched me, he would not be able to resist the pull of memory. His skin, if not his brain, would remember what pleasure was to be had in the holding of me. I was aching to feel his hands on me, to taste his breath, to touch his hair.
I decided to trust that instinct.
“Test it for yourself,” I whispered, knowing that he would not see this as a climbing down from his great height: After all, it would be a mere examination of the evidence and his dignity would lose nothing by it.
I did not lift my skirt or show him where to find the ribbons. I lifted my arms and allowed him to fumble around the sash and mantle himself. I stood as if crucified while he put his hand first on the outer padding of the apron, and then inserted it underneath that he might feel my own flat stomach beneath the wads of linen.
At the touch of his hand, tears exploded from my eyes. Then, at last, I raised my face to kiss him, letting him taste the genuine salt and know the truth and substance of my great regret.
Take Vine and Willow leaves. Lettuce, each 2 handfuls; whitewater Lily flowers, red Roses, each 1 handful; white Poppy heads (with the seeds) 2 ounces; boil in Water 1 gallon to 2 quarts; in the strain’d dissolve Opium 2 drams.