Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  Venetia cut it off directly using her sewing scissors. But she also checked in her looking glass, against her graver judgement, to see if her skin was any better.

  SIR KENELM HOLDS A PRESS CONFERENCE

  ‘Sir Kenelm Digby was such a goodly handsome person, gigantique and great voic’d, and he had so gracefull elocution, and noble addresse, that had he been dropped out of the Clowdes in any part of the World, he would have made himself respected. But the Jesuites spake spitefully, and said ’twas true, but then he must not stay there above six weekes.’

  John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 1669–96

  WORD WAS SPREADING of his voyage, and Kenelm received letters from men requesting to visit him, some wishing to see his treasures, others to discourse with him about his exploits, so that news of his discoveries might be spread abroad. Well, thought Kenelm, since Venetia keeps me at Gayhurst still, so let the world come to me.

  And here they were, men with a strange thirsty curiosity that tipped so quickly between sycophancy and impertinence. Young scholars, who wrote everything he said down in tiny handwriting; older men, whose fighting days were over and made a living from telling tales as gleemen or pamphleteers. Some were genuinely interested in Kenelm’s voyage, others merely keen to win his favour, or take from him something that they could use, for their weekly corantoes, digests, news packets, or their own prestige. They crowded round him, asking him to pose and to show off his treasures, and he happily acceded to their requests, for he never needed much encouragement, and soon he was standing upon the table in the great hall, demonstrating how he defeated the French and Venetians with thrusts and parries.

  Yet he felt his visitors did not look upon him as a man like themselves, but saw him as if through an eyepiece or a view-finder: their interest fell upon him like white light, lightning fast and interrogative. And so, entranced and blinded by the imaginary flashbulbs and the glaring light of attention, Sir Kenelm gave his first press conference.

  ‘Is it true you seized more than a year’s revenues in your escapade?’

  ‘How many French cutlasses brought you hither?’

  ‘On what day fell this sea-battle at Scanderoon?’

  ‘But how many French men died?’

  ‘So, gentlemen,’ said Sir Kenelm, answering the question he liked best, ‘the great battle fell upon my birthday, the eleventh of June. I dare say some errant wit and companion of Ben Jonson – one of the Tribe of Ben – will make a pretty verse of that. Luckily “June” goes well with “Scanderoon”, as you see.’

  Digby did not mention that he had commanded his ships to sail around the Gulf of Iskenderun for two days, treading water and polishing their muskets, in order that they might attack on the auspicious day of his birth.

  ‘Your crew were set about by pestilence?’ asked one man, a Polack with a long nose called Samuel Hartlib.

  ‘Yes, a swinish fever brought aboard from Spanish ships. We had not reached Gibraltar but three score of my men were already dead . . .’

  This had them all scribbling in their wastebooks. Samuel Hartlib, who was compiling a grand Encyclopaedia, wanted to know about quarantine and the prevention of infection, and so forth, but most of the other visitors had no interest in long and complicated truth. They wanted him to say something quick and epigrammatic, preferably exciting or bloody or moralising – any of these would do.

  ‘You’re not the kind of man who turns back, though, are you?’ said Michael Parkinson, ingratiatingly.

  ‘Are you an authoritarian below decks? Do you swing the cat-o’-nine-tails?’ said Jonathan Ross, a fool with weak ‘Rs’.

  ‘Ask my crew,’ said Kenelm.

  ‘We did,’ said Ross. ‘Some of them liked it a lot.’

  Ignoring the hubbub, Kenelm told them how he picked up hands at Tangiers, poor Scots and English sailors whose liberty he bought at some expense. ‘I will be repaid by the Crown very shortly,’ he told the assembly.

  There was a small communal sigh, as if the company did not believe the Crown honoured its dues, but none knew the worst of it, which was that the debt would remain unpaid until the reign of Charles II, thirty years later.

  ‘And did you divide your profits amongst your crew?’ asked Paxman, wincing with his own pertinence.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kenelm. ‘On modest terms, their liberty being their main reward.’

  A soft Irish man called Wogan said: ‘I’d be frightened beyond my wits if this happened to me, but tell us, is it true your crew fell to mutiny?’

  ‘Mutiny is over-putting it. It was a small act of lower-deck rebellion amongst my new crew, bold fellows, worn down by their privations. A skipper hurled his trencher at the galley cook because he would give him no more biscuit. Some other men rose and started shouting also. I resolved this by means of diplomacy and pickled beef. First I put this malcontent in irons, but then since I could not send him home, the English packet being days away, I resolved to break his will, so I had him ducked and towed behind the ship, after which he confessed to his secret guilt of having previously raided the purser’s store, which was a great mercy since it made him only a thief, not a hero. To the honest men, I made a speech, praising them, letting them know they would all be fairly dealt with, and that our mission would bring us gold, and more than that, gold with the King’s blessing, and all the men cheered, and I rolled out the kegs of salt beef I had been saving for just such an occasion.’

  ‘How came you then to land?’ asked Dimbleby, trying to hurry him.

  ‘By signals between ships, and by secret confabulation with my navigator Sir Edward Stradling, and Captain Woodcock, who commanded our third ship, the Janus, I resolved to change our convoy’s course so that we might stop within seven days to buy provisions at Zante.’

  Never, never had he felt such relief as when they dropped anchor in the bay at Zante and he knew that full-scale mutiny had been avoided. When the old women came down to the harbour hawking their foodstuffs, and the men waded ashore eagerly, he could have kissed the deck for gratitude. He saw a turtle waving to him from the shallows, and he dived into the lapis-blue waters to take him for a trophy. Hermes had made a lyre out of a tortoise shell as a gift for his brother Apollo. What was it that Apollo had gifted him in return? Some choice planet. But then as he swam closer he saw the turtle appeared to be at prayer, with his flippers together, and his wrinkled eyes shut fast, and Kenelm knew he must spare the turtle.

  ‘And how came you to do battle with the Venetian galleasses?’ asked Anthony à Wood, scribe and antiquarian, who had lately incorporated the distinguished ‘à’ between his born names.

  ‘Well, sir, like a swan with young they hissed at us. They wished to protect their convoy of French ships, and I wished them to know that the French were our enemies, and our enemies’ friends are our enemies. We drew back, gathered up our strength, and came down on them like Englishmen. The battle we fought was close to, or something like, three hours in length, and each fought well and bravely. Load, aim, fire! Load, aim, fire! We were working under Phoebus’s glare, to which our Celtic skins were not well-disposed, but the tiger was up in our blood, and so we loaded, so we aimed, and so we fired – until very timidly, like a ladies’ petticoat, the little white Venetian handkerchief rose . . .’

  Sir Kenelm did not mention how furious the English vice-consul in Iskenderun had been. The first he knew of Kenelm’s attack was the noise of his cannonade resounding across the bay. He called the angriest alarum possible. Kenelm’s actions jeopardised years of his diplomacy, he said. ‘Your privateering, sir,’ he roared, ‘will cost the honest English merchants of Aleppo in fines, in lost trade, and in goodwill. They may never recover this route.’

  ‘I heard the vice-consul was full of condemnation,’ said John Aubrey, with relish.

  ‘He was apoplectic, wasn’t he?’ said Paxman.

  ‘Well, he lamented exceedingly the loss of his toy pigeons’ eggs,’ said Kenelm, speaking slowly, with a subtle purpose. ‘A few of which were cracked b
y the resounding noise of my English cannonade, which made the hens and chicks afrit. We were in the midst of battle, but his chief concern was all for his pet eggs,’ Sir Kenelm said with a note of regret in his voice that the vice-counsel should be so odd a fellow. The company laughed knowingly; canned laughter rang through the hall at Gayhurst.

  ‘So we routed Venice. None of my crew were lost, but one of the Venetians’ number died, I heard. I was graceful in conquest and I did not burn or scuttle the galleasses, though I could have. But I was mindful of the harm this would do our British traders. So I left with honour only.’

  The assembled company raised a cheer and poop-pooped as if it were the Last Night of the Proms; Digby did not think it necessary to tell them about the reaction of the Venetian ambassador in London, or the royal summons he received shortly afterwards:

  ‘Sir Digby is to leave those seas and come home so that further opportunity for offence may be removed.’

  Edict from Charles I, 1629

  Instead, he demonstrated many wonders to the gentlemen of the press, such as the size and motion of a dolphin – which he re-enacted with his arms stretched wide – and, to keep them entertained, his oldest trick: picking up a chair with one hand by its leg, until he became red in the face and the veins on his neck stood out. He offered the chair to the nearest visitor, the Pole and polymath Samuel Hartlib – ‘Your turn.’

  By the expression on his face, Kenelm feared Hartlib had a physical deformity that he kept well hidden. But then Hartlib smiled, and said he must be heading towards Banbury before the light was lost. Kenelm felt sad and foolish that he had played the martial, warlike side of himself today, when he should have spoken like a scholar.

  ‘Will you go hither again?’ called out one of the crowd, holding out a black baton at him as if it were a poignard, aimed at his mouth.

  ‘What present did you bring to your wife?’ called another, not looking at him directly, but through the mask of an artificial eye.

  ‘Snails!’ cried Sir Kenelm. ‘For the restoration of . . . any lady’s complexion, they are mightily good.’ He felt he had said a wrong thing, and resolved to comment no more.

  ‘Do you still love your wife?’ asked a woman with a notebook marked ‘Viper Wine’, who had somehow infiltrated the throng.

  ‘More than ever,’ said Sir Kenelm. ‘And who are you, miss?’

  ‘I am the author,’ she said.

  Exasperated with all of them, and wanting finally to communicate something that was close to his heart, his higher self, Kenelm told them about the archaic sculpture of Apollo he found on the isle of Milos. ‘I tried to bring it home with me, but a hundred sailors could not move it. These sailors must be kept busy, you know, or they will fall to other fancies . . .’

  It was such a figure, this Apollo. So full of prophecy. His blank eyes stared and his hair was wild, flaring. As Sir Kenelm looked at his full lips, heavy with breath, he thought he saw Apollo speak.

  ‘All men should seize control of their lives,’ said Kenelm, determined to finish on a rousing note. ‘Look, we change, or else we must be overtaken by change. It is my motto, you know – not my family motto, which is “None but one” – but one far more meaningful to me, my own adopted aphorism, taken from Seneca – “Vindica te tibi” – “Vindicate yourself for yourself!” Or, indeed, “To thine own self be true”. Or, my favourite rendering . . .’

  Sir Kenelm, standing upon the table, staring, wild-eyed in imitation of Apollo cried: ‘You must change your life!’

  ‘Vindica te tibi.’

  Motto stamped on the books in Sir Kenelm Digby’s library, now held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford

  ‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern’ – ‘You must change your life.’

  Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, 1908

  ‘When I went on my voyage to sea, shee [Venetia] so wholly retired and secluded herself from the world till my return . . . All the while she kept only with her ghostly Father.’

  Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to his sons, 1633

  When he was first away, gliding towards Scanderoon, he was in love with the sea, with the changefulness and power of it. The Eagle leaped and dived, and he laughed as it threw him forward mid-step and jogged his hand as he drank. The sea teased him, and caught him out; at night, it rolled him over and about, until he retched and longed for land and puked into his hat.

  At home, on the solid grass of Gayhurst, young Kenelm ran round and round, roaring, trying to become dizzy. Venetia stood on the steps as if she were watching him, but actually staring into the green-shaded distance, baby John over her shoulder.

  Just off the coast at Deal, the spyglass told them that an enemy ship was rising on the horizon – their first prize. With greatest haste, the Eagle’s quadrant and maps were hidden, the men mustered, games of dice put away, salt pork stowed, muskets powdered, cannon loaded with ordnance, private prayers whispered, and everything made ready for attack. The ship was now so close it was possible to discern, with the naked eye, that it was a Dutch vessel, and therefore unassailable, neutral. Glumly the crew watched it sailing past.

  When Kenelm had been gone a month, and no more letters came from him, Venetia deemed it time to give young Kenelm his present. It was a model ship, a galleass daintily made of wood and cork, with parchment sails and miniature oars and coloured paper bunting. On its deck was a built-in dish, designed to carry salt at a banqueting table. All its cannon were fixed apart from one which could be taken out and filled, if money allowed, with pepper. Young Kenelm took it as his solemn duty to look after this ship, which although it was as big as he could hold, he bore to his room at night and carried down with him each morning.

  In harbour at Lisbon, Kenelm was woken urgently and struggled on deck to see one of his ships, the Samuel, glowing upon fiery water. One of its tall masts was listing like a falling tree, endangering the deck of the Eagle, and there was much shouting to lookey-loo as it creaked, and the wind threw smuts at them and blew the flames brighter. Thus the second ship in Kenelm’s convoy was burned down to the waterline and scuttled and her thirty crew sent to try their luck in Lisbon or where they would. ‘The horizon is vast enough for each of us,’ he said, flinging a purse of coins to the sailors across the foreign sky.

  Venetia’s eyes began to get accustomed to the smallness of a new silk stitch. Her needlework, a bed-jacket decorated with leaves and strawberries, was designed in such detail that the berries were gilt with tiny pips, and Venetia had to unpick her too-crude work again, until her stitches were as small as pinpricks. Looking up from her lap to talk to her priest Chater, she caught baby John as he uncomprehendingly snatched at the toy ship, snapping away a splint off the mast.

  The Eagle suffered. It came on quickly one night, during supper. The first mate sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. Kenelm thought he was affecting Melancholy, or had lost his manners, until he saw several of the crew slumped in slothful postures, heads lolling, or laid out on the benches. A petty officer serving soup put down his ladle and grasped his belly, sinking to his knees as bloody bile issued from his mouth.

  That same day at Gayhurst the sky split open with rain that played like a band of drummers upon the roof and puddled underneath an open casement in the Hall. Young Kenelm sat up from his afternoon sleep with a cry and ran out of the nursery and downstairs, as fast as his legs could go. As Venetia saw him she remembered, too – and clasping John to her breast as he gurgled she ran through the rainstorm to the middle of the lawn where they had left their rugs and cups and the model ship. Rain had pooled in its salt-cellar, and the paper sails were dark and waterlogged.

  Before they reached Gibraltar, half his men were dead. The ship’s surgeon sewed the corpses into their hammocks as shrouds, and always drew his final thread through the dead man’s nose; a sea custom, a last chance. Every time Kenelm saw the surgeon sewing, and he knew the needle was nearing its final jab, he expected the body to sit upright and scream. But th
ere was no such resurrection.

  Venetia had Mistress Elizabeth make new sails for the toy ship, out of underskirts. They sailed her upon an old horse trough clouded with green weed. Venetia stared into its murkiness, and saw only her own reflection and a bottomless kingdom of water-fleas.

  Passing the Barbary Coast, he entered for the first time the Sea of the Middle Earth, or Medi-Terreanea. Kenelm hunched overboard looking for monsters in the sunny waters. He saw a long pulsing sea-beast with a head like ribbons that he thought must be a squid, and a bristling silver ball of fishes followed by a train of seagulls. Kenelm watched out to see if the horizon inclined, now he sailed closer to the round belly of the world.

  After stitching for so long, Venetia began to believe that the strawberry she sewed was the world, and each stitch a mile, and each seed a league, and the plumpness of the berry was the Equator, and its hasp the Polar Land of Ice, and the blood-drops accidentally shed by her needle were little planets, dribbled across the canvas.

  Had the largeness of Kenelm’s life diminished hers, somehow?

  Although they are not subject to our sense

  A world may be no bigger than two pence . . .

  For millions of these atoms may be in

  The head of one small, single, little pin

  And thus small, then ladies may well wear

  A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.

  Margaret Cavendish, ‘Of Many Worlds in this World’, 1650

  Kenelm paced back and forth his creaking cabin, preparing a speech the night before sailing into battle.

  Venetia paced up and down the upstairs corridor with baby John at her shoulder, rubbing his back.

  Kenelm heaved-ho, squinting in the glare.

  Venetia cried out in frustration and threw down her needlework.

  Kenelm felt his sword run through an enemy body, like a knife into a peach. It was his birthday, 11 June.