Free The Remedy by Michelle Lovric Page B

hallmarked silver nipple shields, earthenware posset pots, tin-glazed bleeding bowls, iron scarificators for blood-letting, and pewter enema syringes. Strung up in cloudy luminescence are necklaces of dentures fashioned from hippopotamus ivory (less liable to stain than that of baboons and goats). Lifting a trembling lantern, the excise men then gasp at thevision of a biblical plague of locusts apparently come to life—only to be reassured by their genial host that these creatures, mounted on velvet screens, are merely a craze of recent years: Algerian amulet brooches in the shapes of locusts, studded with what might credibly be described as, and is, purest turquoise from the mines of the Americas.
    And not a single item of it culpable for duty.
    The dim catacombs of Bankside are suddenly lit up by a providential shaft of pure moonlight, as if to welcome home its most illustrious son. Late as it is, men tip their hats to him and women bob as the carriage of Valentine Greatrakes passes by.
    The horse goes like an eel down the slyest alleys. Valentine surveys his domain with a certain amount of smugness. What he slips in and flushes out has made Bankside what it is today. No public house rollicks without the illicit life-blood he porters to it. Every local magistrate, if he does not sup off the discreet back-handers of Valentine Greatrakes, at least dines on the affordable commodities he has free-traded all the way to his kitchen door. No babe is born without its mother first partaking of his Maternal Wafers. No man goes to his marriage bed unfortified by his excellent preparation, the Husband’s Friend. It is these last two items, and many related confections, that please Valentine above all items of commerce, that raise him higher than all other gentlemen free-traders in London, and not just in his own eyes. For Valentine Greatrakes, while not disdaining Ginevra from Amsterdam and Bohea from India, has taken it upon himself to specialize in certain liquid and powdered pharmaceutical substances that come only from the tiny aquatic Republic of Venice: universal balsamick cure-alls for the people of London.
    The quack doctors of Valentine Greatrakes thrive richly on the credulity of London’s afflicted. And such lovely nostrums, so sweet and grateful on the throat, are those he provides to ease them of their money. And if their narcotic or purging qualities do sometimes prove destructive to the patients, why, his quacks will always mention that this is because they have been taken in insufficient quantities. A man killed by taking thirty of these wonder-pills would have been saved by the thirty-first. If only he had not lackedof courage at the last moment: Why then his vital spark would not only have been prolonged but fully renovated.
    And how picturesque are these potions, these Balms of Gilead these Macassar Oils, these Odontos and these Infallible Balsamicks. Their labels are the poetry of the streets, and the stanzas are their lists of fantastical ingredients. And indeed they appeal infallibly to that majority of Londoners who bear a love of the incredible and marvelous. Sometimes it is no mere congenital deficiency of brain that sends people scurrying for these nostrums but a special form of blindness: They might read any newspaper with all the cynicism of a Frenchman, yet, when they scan the quacks’ handbills, they respond as if to an article of the catechism, with an instinctive and deep belief.
    And the trade is all the smoother for one fact that became apparent to Valentine when he was just a young entrepreneur, thin as a shorten herring and half hazy on the excitement of it all. Bankside, as he has known since childhood, is excellently attired to be the disseminating headquarters of the business. For Bankside is the Murano of London, the site of a hundred glassworks, all churning out clear containers for the soothing and uplifting liquids that must be free-traded through the city, commencing their journey in the