Free The Remedy by Michelle Lovric Page A

to something much more refined. She has claimed the contraband quality of chastity.
    Contraband is something that Valentine Greatrakes understands with all his heart, to which all his faculties are perfectly honed, and for which all his considerable resources are available. To this end, he whistles up his carriage to take him back to his Bankside depository.

• 3 •
    Horse-Dung Water
Take Brooklime, Water Cresses, Harts tongue each 3 handfuls; juicy Orange peels 3; Nutmeg 6 drams; succulent fresh Horse dung 3 pounds; Whey 9 pints; juice of Scabious. Dandelion and Hyssop water, each 1 pint. Draw off the Water gently, in a cold Still, for three days in an Alembic (which is used for expedition’s sake).
Tis used in Juleps, in the Pleurisy, Scurvy, and vagous Pains.
    For a man of his genre, Valentine Greatrakes is a great pacifist. He hates to do a body violence, positively tries to avoid it, and when it must happen he sincerely regrets it. But there is one war he fights gladly, with relish and with glory.
    Only to press him lightly on the matter is to be rewarded with a sturdy barrage on this theme, at the core of which is this: It’s a party’s downright duty and not just his inalienable right to fight against horse-dung taxes.
    Just such a flight of eloquence—not a little inspired by another blockade, that of Mimosina Dolcezza—is the treat bestowed by Valentine upon his driver, jolting by moonlight over luminous cobblestones back to the place where he conducts his personal vendetta against unjust harvesting of revenues.
    “Iniquitous!” he bellows, “infamous!”, as he calls the roll on the taxes that snack on every article that comes in at the mouth, or that shelters the skin, or is placed underfoot; taxes on all things that are lovely to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; there are taxes upon light itself, upon warmth, upon methods of locomotion; taxes on the raw materials; taxes on those things enriched in value by human labor and ingenuity; taxes on all things that stimulate the appetiteand all things that satisfy it, on the judge’s ermine and the criminal’s noose, on the pap and the spoon of the baby, the toys of the child, the horse of the man and the road he rides it on, the ribbons of his bride, the brass nails of his coffin, and the marble of his tombstone.
    To each item the driver assents with a great flourish of his whip and so they progress down the Strand at a cracking pace. The horse anoints the cobbles with a superabundant stream of piss.
    The mullioned water of the Thames winks from between the riverside buildings. Valentine and his driver lean forward to examine a squat vessel that weaves toward St. Mary Overie Dock. At dawn it will unload the bales of hops with which Valentine Greatrakes quite legitimately supplies the Thrale brewery at Bankside, the brave parapets of which he salutes with a wave as they pass over London Bridge. Those bales are looped by rope twined with smuggled tobacco. They lie next to feathered heaps of headless geese, whose innards have been replaced with bottles of rum that shall be discreetly removed before the birds are delivered to the butchers of Smithfield and crates of living parrots destined to amuse affluent homes, having been schooled in speech by sailors on long journeys aboard illicit slavers’ ships.
    Occasional forays by the excise men into the tenebrous vaults of the depository of Valentine Greatrakes reveal nothing to incur a penny of duty, but plenty to baffle and torment the dreams of the officers. For their lanterns discover many unblinking drawers of glass eyes, hard clutches of false hands made of leather, racks of wooden leper-clappers, trays of artificial ivory noses for syphilitics, and miniature anatomical models of pregnant women with removable parts peeling back to reveal a fetus or two in residence.
    The Revenue never stay long. Cupboards specially hinged to utter dying groans swing slowly open to reveal rows of pink Bohemian tincture bottles,