The Remedy by Michelle Lovric

half an ounce, mix.
It’s a singular Experiment in a Contusion; for it dissolves extravasated Clots of Gore, after a marvellous manner, drives it again into the circulating Mass of Blood; and there, partly by Diaphoreisis, partly diuresis, and sometimes by Purging, throws it out of the Body.
    Sometimes a man goes to the theater just to bury his troubles for the duration. And sometimes he comes home with new ones.
    Valentine Greatrakes, poached in hate and no wonder, cuts through the throng. Toes wince under his ebony cane. Theatergoers flitter like ashes in front of his livid eye. Yet what he wants is to inter his raving self, every Irish atom of it, among living souls.
    Like when a man whispers a blade between two ribs and lets it lie quiet there awhile in the meaty midnightish redness.
    There’s nothing else to be done with his great heart-broken self tonight. He needs the close company of others to sheath the stinging vision that’s driven him out of the house.
    “The wounds were not done with artistry.”
    That’s how Smerghetto, sparing of sentiment, phrased it in the letter that still stiffens the pocket of the heavy coat Valentine presently drops upon the buckling cloakroom attendant. He disdains the proffered ivory ticket. The clerk will not be forgetting him.
    That final insult Tom did not deserve. His own finesse with the knife is living legend round Bankside.
    Yes, several’s been the funerals of one of our enemies where the widow shyly complimented me on his neat work.
    One such once-wife had caught Valentine’s eye this May past and he had an entire mourning bed delivered to her, black posts, black pall, black blankets, even black sheets, and before long he his own great self was enjoying the black pleasures between them with her. But a widow is an exacting species of woman, and when that one grew needsome, not to say a little venal, he’d had the bed removed to the house of a pretty wife Tom had more freshly bereaved for him.
    Tom.
    There were no cuts on the dorsal plane of Tom’s right hand: He had not even tried to fend off his assailant. Nor were there lesions to his palm: So after the murderer fell on him, he had no time or power left for plucking out the knife himself. The fatal wounds to his neck and side were both inflicted while he was still alive, for there was a fast flow of gore and a rim of coagulated blood between the lips of each incision. Blood stops flowing after death, Smerghetto explained.
    As if I did not know that for myself.
    Tom was probably two days in dying.
    And all that time he was alone, behind the bridge at Rialto in the desert wakes of a Saturday night. So the body lay undiscovered until Monday morning, hidden under fish waste and, by that time, mingling with it. The sepsis, the report continued, started slowly and then came the gangrene, which requires no air to breathe but obstructs the blood to the affected organs. And then the mortification, the discoloring of the skin flagging the massacre of Tom’s inner particles.
    When they had finally found him, he was melting into the canal. Drop by drop, the gangrene had liquefied his flesh. No one could say, Smerghetto had written, when he had lost consciousness, for how long he suffered the pain of his wounds, if he could smell his own putrefaction, if he had time to ponder on his murderer’s identity or motive. Evidently, he had been too weak to scrawl the namein his own blood, the code of their kind, to help those who will avenge him, not least of whom is Valentine Greatrakes. No one could tell Smerghetto what poison was used on the tip of the blade: the murderer must have pulled the weapon out and made off with it so that it could not be examined.
    Valentine flows with the crowd into the gilded barrel of the theater.
    It simmers hot as a glassworks inside. The lace at his wrist wilts, embracing his fingers in a corpse’s handshake. Gasping candles dispatch gouts of wax down the walls, clotting the carpets below. The mumble