The Remedy by Michelle Lovric Page A

His hands are delicate rose-pink on the inside, hornily skinned and heavily downed with gray hairs right up to the second joint of each finger. Dizzom has long adopted a habitual posture in which he holds his digits curved to his breast with the roseate skin upward. When he must use them he turns away from any witnesses and busies himself with astonishing rapidity, so that, as now, all that may be seen is a shadowy blur about the ends of his wrists, as if someone were scribbling above them with a soft lead pencil.
    Valentine takes a step forward, and puts his arm on his employee’s shoulder.
    “What can I do for you, my dear?” asks Dizzom fondly. “I see you have an idea about you.”
    He lays down his task and stands up to look his master in the eye.
    “Well, indeed, and it’s about a woman,” declares Valentine a little shyly, and at this Dizzom chuckles aloud, revealing the full treasury of hollow back teeth, in each of which, on certain business trips, he may lay up a ruby or an emerald. Or even a tiny phial of poison or sleeping philter.
    It is something between the latter two that Valentine Greatrakes requires.

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    Antiphthisic Decoction
Take Ox Eye Daisy flowers dry’d 1 handful; Snails wiped clean 3; Candied Eryngo Root half an ounce; Pearl Barley 3 drams; boil together in Spring Water from 11/2 pints to 1 pint, and strain it out.
It smoothes and restrains the saline turbulent Particles of the Blood, so as to hinder it from rushing impetuously through the Canals.
    The next morning opens the sky like a bank vault. Valentine reads the crackling golden light as a good omen, but cannot decide whether it instructs him to take in one more stage show by the actress before he allows her to perform intimately for himself alone. To do so might dilute or it might enhance the effect she achieved the previous night, and he is perfectly happy with the sherbet of excitement that currently enlivens his blood. In a strange and pleasant way the certain prospect of her, confirmed in an oblique note from Massimo, makes it easier to concentrate on the demanding business of the day.
    With Dizzom, he dispatches some Venetian glass daggers to St. Giles, and oversees the packaging of some Antiphthisic decoctions for a Mayfair destination. He checks the inventories of their nostrums, finds a certain depletion in the Balm of Gilead. He has himself composed some alluring texts for the bottles of their latest confections from Italy, borrowing from Shakespeare and Galileo, melting down the language of literature and science and fusing them for his purposes.
    Perhaps it is the Irish in him, but no one can match Valentine Greatrakes in the kind of wordsmithery that provokes a rumpus inthe chitterlins, a sudden thirst for the contents of a petite green bottle and the conclusive symptom of the opening of the purse.
    The luminous words of Valentine Greatrakes are rarely read in the newspapers, for since 1712 a scurvy law has placed a duty even on advertisements. But in the depository at Bankside he has his own small press, where handbills by the hundred are printed, full of learned miniature essays on the latest scientific discoveries, with many references to the great physicians of the day and the arcane past. Valentine knows his audience, he knows that they long to hear not of homely garden cures but of atoms charged with the Quintessence and Virtues of Chymical Oils, and secrets unearthed from the tombs of pharaohs.
    Here at Bankside he also prints and stores the labels for his quacks’ potions. These square tickets may be indifferently applied to any bottle of their cures, to flatter the needs of each separate market. So, arranged in neat piles, are labels that bear the legends. Digestive Bolus for Aldermen, Sublime Elixir for Poets, Consolation Cordial for the Bereaved, and solutions for many other retail opportunities. These colorful labels Valentine sells to his quacks at almost no margin at all, just for the joy of their