The Remedy by Michelle Lovric

capillaries of passageways, communicating secretly between friendly houses.
    They pass on to the baker’s and Valentine hellos his platter-faced friend already at work inside, on a batch of hollow loaves for the concealment of whatever morsel’s currently attracting the interest of the Excise. Cooling in his storerooms are trays of the aforesaid Maternal Wafer, excellent business at a penny each.
    One of Valentine’s quacks passes in his trap pulled by a white donkey painted with purple spots. He brandishes a bleached female femur at his employer and indicates, with his hands, the airy lightness of his cart: Today he has sold many dozens of his bottles of nostrums, each one enriched with brandy poured from kegs damp with the slime of Romney Marsh. Valentine scowls and the quack lowers his head. Too late, the man has remembered the effect of his proprietary escharotic ointment on the sensitive back of his patron. Despite the application of a cabbage leaf, the caustic salve hascaused a weeping lesion that still troubles the laundrywomen beating the linen shirts of Valentine Greatrakes. When he sees the quack who is the author of his discomfort, the delicate skin of Valentine’s back contracts painfully and he is forced to remember the words of the advertisement that he himself had written: “It prevents Inflammations, Festerings, and Running of Matter, in any of which cases this great Vulnery has never yet been known to fail of effecting a perfect Cure in a few Days.”
    The public girls are out on the streets still: all faces and figures he knows well one way or another. For Valentine frequently sends the skimpy south London prostitutes on jaunts across the Channel so that they might return crinkled and snowswept with lace: Apparel in use upon a living body is not liable to duty. Moreover, he most heartily enjoys the unwrapping of his lacy girls when they come home to him, dipped in cognac and juicy for the tasting. Those more lively in their wits double up as assistants to his quacks, posing as deathbed cases who are instantly revived by the latest miraculous nostrums.
    Now the carriage is drawing into the depository in Stoney Street and two of his sleepless men, having observed his arrival through a spyhole, open the discreet gates and close them again behind him.
    Valentine vaults down from the carriage and runs up the stairs into his office where his assistant, Dizzom, hunched over a burner worries a piece of hemp into charred segments that will be sold for a guinea an inch as hangman’s rope, which is known to be efficacious against the earache. Behind the man a row of bottles glow hellishly in the firelight: The heat agitates the liquid inside them, so that slow and graceful ballets are now performed by the corpses of rats and mice preserved in their death throes and other, less familiar, abortives put up in syrups. Dizzom’s experiments with embalming fluids have proved grimly and unexpectedly useful: This week nine gallons of them have already been dispatched to Venice, so that Tom’s body, packed in a lead-lined coffin, will soon be on its way back to them, without growing inconveniently ripe. Valentine wants Tom’s remains laid out in state at Bankside, for all their friends to pay their last respects.
    “What’s new?” Valentine asks affectionately. Since Tom’s death he takes the lives of none of his manor for granted.
    Dizzom smiles. Due to a tendency to taste his own potions and resultant encounters with dental quacks, he displays a giddy rush of forward-leaning wooden and gold teeth at the front of his mouth.
    In the pleasure of seeing his master, Dizzom has forgotten the task at hand. A segment of rope catches fire, releasing sharp tarry fumes into the room. He plunges the rope into ajar of something that makes it fizz and spit. Some drops splash Dizzom’s low forehead, which is oppressed by a coarse pinkish wig that is heavy with grease and waved in stiff little peaks like innumerable tiny ears.