Description
So at fifteen, spread belly-down upon the floor, a black sheet bunched over me and a candle at my foot and head, my lips pressed on stone, litanies in my ears, as the priest broke and entered my shocked fist to slide the ring on my finger, I promised to take no other husband than Christ. I almost meant it. In that heady moment the vow itself seemed no great sacrifice: I'd never known a man, but I had tasted chocolate.One unforgettable night in 1785, in a theatre in Drury Lane, the alchemy of love and murder suddenly fuses the lives of a Venetian actress and the prince of London's medical underworld. Dangerous secrets and elaborate lies soon send the lovers spinning in different directions, desperate for the truth not just about one another but also their own pasts.
It's a time of astonishing remedies - peacock dung and millipedes are thought as efficacious as gold dust and crushed serpents - and the lovers seek a balsamick, a sovereign cure to palliate every human ill, every wound of love. Their quest takes them from the dank environs of London's Bankside to the enigmatic city of Venice: her playhouses and brothels, apothecaries and quack doctors, spies and noblemen, her covenants and crypts. ISBN:9781844081356
