Use it warm with a Sponge, to the Temples, Forehead, whole Head and the Feet. It deserves to be employ’d, where “tis not altogether safe to give Hypnotics; namely in Fevers that rage Impetuously, with Fervour, and pulsing pain of the Head, pertinacious Watchings, and danger of a Delirium: For by its soft Cherishment, kindly Warmth and temperate Humidity, it humects, mitigates and appeases acrious, boiling Juices, and drives them from the Head, either by Perspiration or Circulation, and so disposeth the weary, worn-out Spirits to rest and procureth placid Sleep.
It was only two days later that I remembered Pevenche. My lover had not remembered her at all. How I envy men those strange membranes round their brains that make them impervious to anything that is not convenient!
“What shall we do about your war … my daughter?” I asked him that morning, my bare thigh cosseting his.
“My God! Pevenche!” He leapt up and paced naked in front of me, a most appealing picture of self-reproach. “How could I have forgotten about her?”
I wanted to say, “Because it was such a pleasure to do so,” especially while my eyes roamed over the fine, firm tracts of his breast and limbs.
But I answered, with equal sincerity, “I have been entirely lost
in you. I was not able to think of anyone else. How selfish I have been!”
“No, no!” He sat beside me and stroked my hair. I hoped his feet would not meet the bottle of gin I had ordered while he slept and had hidden under the bed. “Think of the shocks you have endured. And you are not accustomed to thinking of her as your daughter. It will take you some time to absorb your joy”
“My joy?” I repeated faintly.
“That your child survived and was not murdered by the doctor and the nuns! That Fate put her back in your hands. You know, I have long suspected that it was some kind of veiled maternal instinct that drew you to her.”
“Yes, darling, perhaps it was like that. I did always have a strange feeling about her.”
As I said these words I wished with all my heart to make them true. For the sake of Valentine Greatrakes, I wanted to learn to love Pevenche.
“I knew it!” he said, elated. “And of course
my
unconscious eye realized the resemblance but my brain was not absorbent to it—that was why I caused Cecilia Cornaro to draw her face instead of yours!”
If I had not loved Valentine Greatrakes for his shapely limbs and ideally creased face, I would have loved him for his optimism. Truly, to wake up beside that man was to feel every morning the first day of an exceptionally promising spring.
Logically, my lover should now have been rushing to dress and to make for the convent of Sant Alvise to liberate his little ward. I saw that he did not do so. It was sad to watch the struggle in him, between duty and desire, and worse, to see him realize for himself that he did not crave her company or look forward to seeing her again. His eyes closed up and his shoulders hunched.
It was then that I thought of a way to help both him and myself in this.
“There is something about Pevenche that you should know,” I said quietly, toying with his fingers.
“She is quite safe, yes, isn’t she?” he gabbled, in a panic at my tone.
“Oh she is indeed safe and happy just as I told you. The point is that she is so happy at Sant’Alvise that I believe that we would be doing her a cruelty to take her away from the place where she is at last content.”
My honest feelings were catching up with my words, even as I spoke them.
“You and I must decide if we shall sacrifice our own happiness for hers. I mean our natural desire to have her with us always”—his eyes contracted with misery at this vision—“must be countered by the felicity she has unexpectedly found for herself.”
He followed my words with a boundless eagerness, as I told him about her astonishing talent with the pastries, about her ease and indeed preeminence at Sant’Alvise. Some of her creations, I said, were destined to become famous. I had tasted them myself. They were causing a stir in Venice, bringing unsuspected wealth to Sant’Alvise.
I declared, “If Pevenche were not a woman, she could command a ducal stipend. She would be sought after by any court. At last, her energies are channelled into their God-sent purpose. All that strange behavior of hers—why it was frustration that she could not express herself in sugar, as she does now.”
My lover took this in, straining to believe me. My eye fell on the blue cake box, which had housed my letter to him. I rose from the bed and walked to it, not insensible of the effect of my naked form. I brought it back to the bed, and refocused his attention on it, by remarking, “Could we not involve Pevenche and the convent in a little quiet business, as couriers for some of your own items? We have seen that as a discreet method of transportation, it certainly functions. I was wondering about the Venetian Balsamick …?”
He said nothing, but he fingered the box thoughtfully.
He was already persuaded, really, but I wanted to make sure that he would never regret the decision we were taking.
I had heard from the nuns and seen with my own eyes that Pevenche showed particular kindness to one of the younger girls.
“It is a very delicate matter, and I barely know how to tell you.”
His brows furrowed instantly. “Tell me what?”
“You see, something a little unusual has come to my attention regarding your—my—Pevenche.”
He leaned over toward me.
“You know that I am very aware of the way that nuns live and conduct themselves? I of all people know that many nuns have no true vocation of their own. They are unwilling brides of Christ. If the sacrifice of chastity is not made willingly then … well, then there are ways around hated vows made under force.”
“You mean the child has escaped, and taken a lover!” he exclaimed.
My voice was a little steely when I said: “She is not a child. Nor did she escape. Pevenche did not need to escape in order to find a lover.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She has all the lovers she needs around her. From what I hear, she has already made a selection.”
“You mean …?” he gasped.
“Yes, I believe that Pevenche prefers her own kind. That is what I meant by the felicity she has found. At the convent she may discreetly pursue her own nature. Outside it, she would be ostracized or misunderstood.”
The Zany’s voice rattled my inner ear: “What a load of spiced brown trout!”
And yet I wondered—Pevenche was without doubt superlatively comfortable in the company of women, and showed no interest in men except as objects of derision. I remembered how intimate she had seemed with the girl who accompanied her at the convent.
My lover was striding about the room in an agony of indecision. I could see what he was thinking: Perhaps it was our responsibility to rescue her from the depravity of the nunnery and to take it upon ourselves to educate these tastes of hers that ran against nature. Kind as he was, he wished for her to sample
some of the joys we two knew together. Thinking of Pevenche, I doubted if they would impress her.
I did not feel guilty. She had shown me quite clearly that she was abundantly content where she was, as sole queen of her narrow kingdom, the object of reverence and fawning. And it was true, cooking made her happy on her own terms. She would not be willing to do what was necessary to obtain and keep a man in her life. And she would not find it easy to attract one in any case. Outside the convent, Pevenche would be only an object of mockery wherever she went for her vanity, corpulence and pretensions to juvenility Inside the convent she was safe from the sneers of the world. Her father’s blood made her competitive and aggressive. Her incarceration in Mistress Haggardoon’s Academy had already atrophied her emotional development. She would always have the maturity of a thirteen-year-old. She was a natural nun! Even if her God was sugar. None of this, of course, could I articulate to my lover, but I trusted his intelligence to draw the obvious conclusion.
To test him, I suggested: “Perhaps you are right. We should go and seize her, even against her will, and drag her away from there and confine her in some quarters with us. I expect that eventually we shall tame her anger. We can teach her some more ladylike skill than cooking. Flower-painting, perhaps. It may take years, but we shall persevere, no matter how fiercely she fights us.”
His eyes were dull with grief at this desecration of our happiness, so new and so hard won.
I imagined Pevenche lying, as I had once done, on the cold marble of the church floor, happily ignorant of the vow she was making, thinking only to ennoble herself to the rank of the Golden Book nuns, and preserve her dominion in the kitchen. I saw the priest struggling to force the large ring on her fat finger. I saw her spread-eagled from above, a lumpen black figure, agreeing, without comprehending, to a living death.
I ran to my lover and flung myself into his arms. “Tell me what to do, my love,” I sobbed. “I just do not know what is the right thing for her.”
And so I let him persuade me to leave Pevenche in the convent.
How surprised she would be when we went there to take her the triple good tidings of her own situation, my true identity, and our imminent marriage.
Take Alexiterial Milk Water, black Cherry Water, each 4 ounces; Rue Water 3 ounces; Epidemial 2 ounces; Tincture of Saffron (extracted in Treacle water) 1 ounce; Syrup of Gillyflowers 2 ounces; Goa, and Contrayerva Stone, each 1 dram; Confection of Alkermes 2 drams, mix.
It’s useful and necessary in putrid and malignant Fevers, where the Spirits are overborn, and almost slain, by a deleterious and mortifying Venom, namely, to give them a lively brisk Expansion, and to rouse ’em up, and make ’em able to recover the due Mixture of the Blood, vanquish the Venom, and expel it.
Ah, the relief of
confession!
Of honesty! When I had told my—husband—of all that I had done in the pay of the Venetian Inquisitors, I felt the sordidness of my employment expunged from me.
He forgave me everything, and every note of my confession was waylaid by his endearments; even my pitiful account of the blinding of the cruel nun accidentally impaled on the icicle.
It had been a risk. He might have found me sullied by what I had done. Instead, he chose to see me as a victim of the cruel yet impersonal machinations of the Venetian state. He chose to know that I never loved any of those men I was sent to seduce, and that it had revolted me to behave with them as I did. He declared that my true purity had not been touched. This was all proved to him by the fact that when for the first time I truly fell in love, it was with
him
, someone forbidden by my employers.
With astonishing optimism, he decried any disappointment that I had not such a large stock of virtue as he had thought:
Perhaps in his mind he traded it against certain damaging discoveries I had made about himself. I did not draw his attention to all that I now knew about his past, and his present. Instead I told him the truth: It had come to mean nothing to me. I cared not if, for example, those diamond brooches were acquired in a fully legal manner: I loved the romance of the gesture. It was true. I still simply liked the
style
of the man, gentleman or not, and all my inbred Golden Book scruples could not make me dislike him simply for not being a nobleman. I had proved renegade to my class, after all, and turned actress. Could not a London criminal rise above his station and become in life and habit noble? And in this way did we not meet exactly in the middle of some nationless, classless, amorphous pool?
After hearing this he stood in silence for some moments. Then there were other matters to consider, melancholy ones, but much mitigated by our turtle billing and mutual caresses.
He did not like to blame his beloved Tom for anything, of course, but I could see that he too wished to build a solid base on which to proceed. So he even admitted that it was Tom’s usage of me that set me on the terrible path I was forced to take.
In this way he forgave me everything, from beginning to end. He found goodness and transparency in all my motives, and reasonableness in all my responses.
It is
, I reflected, listening to his words,
possible to see very clear things that are not true.
“And so,” he asked me, tenderly, “you never saw Tom again, after that terrible time in San Zaccaria? All those times he was in Venice, and you never once came across him?”
I shook my head.
“And you never sought him out to avenge what he had done to you?”
His eyes were soft and moist while he marveled at my gentleness. I looked at him with satisfaction. He was so exceedingly well made! Such long legs and such slim, shapely thighs, and a torso with enough meat on it to be manly but not enough to lose a sliver of useful flexibility.
With lowered eyes, I reminded him that most of the time I had been abroad, on my “missions.” Tom had been in Venice only occasionally. It was very unlikely that our paths should cross here. Anyway, my employers kept me under close supervision. I met no one they did not put in my path.
“And I never felt anything but regret for him,” I said. “When I saw him in his coffin, I felt nothing but shock. I loved him once, but by then I was yours. For the residue of our lives, I am yours.”
He pressed my fingers, one by one, his handsome face fixed on mine.
There was one last question from my lover.
“Can you think who would have wished to kill him?”
I shook my head again, sadly.
“Such a beautiful man, so full of life.” I added quickly, “So he must have been, even after all those years.”
Then he surprised me. “I always thought that the man who followed you—Mazziolini—must have had something to do with it.”
“Because Tom started bleeding when he was in the room? You thought Mazziolini came all the way to London to gloat over the murder he had done?”