Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  ‘What does your pouncing say?’

  ‘It is like an amulet or sigil, darling, to draw heavenly influences to my backbone, and assist me in my Work.’

  ‘But who is the little man?’

  ‘That is the alchemical sign of Mercury,’ he said slowly, on the brink of sleep. ‘Not very expertly done.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Not your name, my darling. That is on my heart.’

  ‘Oh, very prettily said,’ she scoffed, and in a few moments they were both soundly asleep.

  MOONBEAMS ARE COLD AND MOIST

  ‘One would think it were a folly that one could offer to wash his hands in a well-polished silver basin, wherein there is not a drop of water, yet this may be done by the reflexion of the Moon beames only. Hands, even after they are wiped, are much moister than usually.’

  ‘A Late Discourse by Sir Kenelm Digby in a Solemn Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpelier, Touching on the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathie’, 1664

  ALL WEEK, HE studied long and late in his laboratory. One night, when his candle guttered out after many hours, he was left in a bluish darkness to which his eyes quickly grew accustomed, and he saw it was a night as bright as day outside, and the gardens of Gayhurst were drenched in moonbeams. He stood at the open window of his laboratory, catching them in a glass bubble. He turned it wonderingly in his hand, sending two dashes of moon-juice chasing across the orb. Moonbeams are cold and moist, he noted in his ledger. They leave an acquatic and viscous glutenising sweat upon the glass.

  He tipped the moonbeams onto the back of his hand, where he saw them dissipate into a silver sheen on his skin, waxy like the belly of a snake. Could lunar rays assist in safely beautifying a complexion? He made a private note in Latin.

  The next night was cloudy.

  The night that followed, he and his wife stood out in their garden under the huge moon, two owls in flapping nightgowns. Sir Kenelm held a silver basin up to catch the moon-dew, and Venetia dipped her face into the splashing shimmers. The pores across her nose and cheeks were picked out by the light, and he angled the basin, so the light caught the places under her eyes where the skin was very thin, the veins standing out like the underside of an ivy leaf. The softness twisted across her face, like an inverse sunbeam. If men tanned by daylight, wherefore could they not be healed by night light? As above, so below. ‘It is a potent moisture,’ breathed Sir Kenelm. ‘I can see the refulgent beams at work.’ Venetia shut her eyes and inclined her face deeper inside the basin, until a cloud on the silver formed in the shape of her sigh.

  She looked up at him. The elms waved violently behind her. She was radiantly beautiful again. The cure had worked already. She was her Platonic self, ageless, transcendent. Or was she only softened by the moonlight? He reached out to put his arms about her, to claim and hold this sepia-tinted, black-and-silver Venus, but she was already gone, hastening back across the lawn to bed, her nightgown wind-swollen, her hair flying.

  After a week of nightly moonbaths, she could discern no improvement in her complexion, although her husband maintained there was a new, subtle, luminosity. His well-meaning comments, his encouraging tone, hurt her more than anything. She found herself commenting on his alchemical work in a sarcastic, disbelieving tone, as if her pride were a debit and credit sheet. Come, she told herself, be bigger than that, but it was not easy.

  On the Sunday morning, Kenelm lay half asleep in her bed, while she sat in front of her glass at her toilette, making ready for their private mass held by Chater in their chapel, with a few other recusants from the other side of the shire also in attendance. He asked her if she could see the good effect on her complexion. She did not answer. He suggested that he could see the blue vein on her forehead better than before, as this usually pleased her. It was one of her marks of beauty. He asked if she wanted to try the lunar cure again tonight. Silence. He looked at the stiff outline of her shoulders as she sat at her dressing table, and inferred there was trouble coming. Her voice was strange and cold: ‘I cannot go with you to court.’

  ‘Venetia, come—’

  ‘I cannot bear it. I do not know why you persist in this nonsense of moonlight – this, ha, lunacy – when there are other, better cures available, which you well know.’

  ‘Other cures? What do you mean? Have I not provided you with every safe cure I know of? Have I not imported snails into our grounds from distant climes, at some cost? And yet you will not have them for healing purposes, neither taking their slime to drink nor submitting to have them crawl upon your face.’

  She turned to look at him, and her skin was blotchy with tears.

  ‘I will not speak of those snails! I would have thought that you, a man of Physick, schooled in chemistry, would know better than to chase after village remedies.’

  Sir Kenelm leaned forward, very serious. ‘It is because I know the power of Physick that I caution you against it.’

  ‘Other ladies drink preparations.’

  ‘You have no need of other ladies’ cures. You barely have any need of a cure at all.’

  ‘You do not understand.’

  ‘I do, my love.’

  ‘And yet you do not, my darling.’

  That evening, though the moon was a bright crescent, they lay abed all night.

  OF FOUNTAINS AND THE CREATURES IN THEM

  ‘At Sir Anthony Cope’s a house of Diversion is built on a small island in one of his fish ponds, where a ball is tosst by a column of water and artificial showers descend at pleasure. But the Waterworks that surpass all others of the country, are those of Enston, at the rock first discovered by Thomas Bushell Esquire.’

  Dr Robert Plot, Natural History of Oxfordshire, 1677

  ‘Quaesisti nugas, nugis gaudeto repertis’ – ‘You were looking for trivial amusements – here they are, enjoy them.’

  Inscription on people-squirting fountain at Augsberg, recorded by Michel de Montaigne, 1570

  WHEN KENELM WAS fifteen, and under the tuition of Bishop Laud, he was given leave to go home for the feast of Trinity, and spent a day riding slowly east across the sun-parched countryside. As he rode he felt freed, gradually, of all the stiff, correct conduct Laud enforced, and their continual, courteous conflict on matters of religion. Kenelm had smuggled a copy of The Odyssey out of Laud’s library and plodding along, sometimes half-sleeping in the saddle, his mind drifted to monsters, whirlpools and mermaids’ tails. But whence did they propagate, if they had no legs?

  In Oxfordshire, on the homeward stretch, he rode up through Pudlicote towards the River Glyme and spied a fine church tower and brook. This would do as a place to water Peggy, his pony, whose real name was Pegasus, but who was definitely a Peggy. As he approached, the bells began to ring out.

  ‘What church is this?’ he asked a woman passing by.

  ‘St Kenelm’s,’ she said, and left him standing all ablaze, as Peggy cropped the grass.

  Such a feeling of special providence is always pleasant, but for a fifteen-year-old boy it was intoxicating. He had heard of the church, but had never seen it before. Well pleased with the form and shape of his church and particularly its solid tower, he surveyed it twice on foot in a circle, and lit a candle at the shrine of his namesake Saxon child-saint, before journeying further into the gold-green countryside.

  He paused to cross himself in front of the lichen-mottled megalith at the crossroads, some giant’s old plaything with flowers tucked into its pock marks, and a bowl of milk left at its foot for Robin Goodfellow. A long stately drive, unmarked, attracted his attention and he wondered if it was Neat-Enstone, famous for its pleasure park and water-grottoes, built by Thomas Bushell, seal-bearer to Sir Francis Bacon. Kenelm had heard about its marvellous fountains. He turned his pony into the drive, though he had no invitation, and with the impunity of youth, headed straight ahead at a casual rising trot.

  The trees along the drive were alternately tall then squat, so they resembled, to Kenelm’s eye, an Irish stitch
. The trees barred the sun rhythmically so as he moved forwards he was dazzled by stripes of brightness, then shadow, brightness, shadow. The drive was quiet but he could hear in the distance, so he thought, a roar of water.

  He tethered Peggy and proceeded down a curved, deserted forest path. Sensing he was being watched, and feeling, as teenagers do, that this moment might be of great import for the rest of his life, he removed his hat and ran his hand through his sweat-darkened hair. When he turned the corner he saw an open garden lawn before him, fringed with trees like a stage’s curtains, and hung with a very fine mist, resting on the air. A perfect rainbow arched across it.

  Kenelm’s eyes welled at this sign of peace and forgiveness. Soon the rainbow would be dissected by Descartes, and anatomised by Newton, but from where Kenelm stood it was a symbol, mystical, allegorical. He knew, of course, that it was made of rain and sunlight and eyesight, and he knew that what he saw was an artifice, conjured out of carefully created spume. Because he had a mind that liked to understand what moved him – the type of mind that would, by degrees, create the modern age – he decided the water must have been forced through a very narrow fissure to create such a delicate spray, and he wondered how such pressure had been attained.

  He thought he heard a laugh, or the rush of water, and turned around to follow the path till he could see, some way off, an ornate dwelling, perched at an improbable angle on the hillside, with rocks below it forming a cataract and tumbling cascade.

  He followed the path onwards as it took him back into the hill, towards a fantastical grotto set into the cliff. It had been bricked all about, like a saint’s cave built into a cathedral, but it was still clear that it was nature’s work; no craftsman could obtain these molten patterns in the stone, curves and drips as from a frequently lit tallow candle. Inside the grotto it was cool and peaceful. He sang a few notes, just to hear the echo. Some of the rock-drips were protuberant, like long noses, polished by the action of water on them over hundreds of years. No doubt since the Flood. The villagers probably said a dragon had died here and these stones were formed by its blood trickling through the rock. In some ways it was a more compelling solution than ‘the sustained action of water on a particular rock’.

  Crossing a bridge he glimpsed, through the leaves of a tree, girls splashing in a pond – sunlit, laughing, dancing whirlygirls. Three of them were playing catch, the water dragging their dresses as they leaped about. They were of different ages – sisters, maybe. Two more girls were lying talking together on a rock shaped like a lily-pad. He did not like this attitude of being a peeping Tom, so he walked boldly towards the nymphs.

  ‘One cannot imagine Kenelm Digby being, at any age, not a man of the world.’

  E. W. Bligh, Sir Kenelm Digby and his Venetia, 1932

  Kenelm aged sixteen

  They did not stop to notice him, and he saw that in the middle of the pool, there was an island, and on the island, inside an oversized, open oyster shell, lay a girl.

  She was on her back looking bored, with her heels kicking at the shell’s point, and her arms stretched slothfully behind her head. She wore a nymph’s silk gathered dress, which was – Kenelm swallowed – wet through. She did not appear to have noticed Kenelm; in fact, her eyes were closed, but he felt sure she knew he was there. She was the apotheosis of this pleasure ground, the spirit of the place. She was part of the display, exuding sensual luxury and extravagance from all her parts, in her dark tumbling hair, in her amused smiling mouth, in her curved cheek, in her breasts, rising and falling as she breathed. Lucky air, to penetrate her body. He could bear it no longer. Approach her, his instinct told him, accost her! He reached out to do what only a boy would do when confronted with this apogee of beauty – to splash her with pondwater.

  But before he could do it, a shaft of water bounced onto the path in front of him, as if aimed by a cannon. And the next second, cold and unexplained, another shaft hit him in the face, slapping him back. The indignity of it! The water techniques that delighted him had now been used against him for a sportive soaking. This was a very trivial garden indeed.

  From the house there came a catcall of triumph and a smattering of applause. Kenelm had no sooner regained his composure than another squirt got him in the chest. He fell backwards on his bottom like a toddler, and heard the girl in the shell laughing at him. Her laugh sounded like sunlight on the sea. Would he have a chance to tell her this? They looked at each other in the eye for the first time, and he felt her look echoing into his past and future, through all the caverns of his soul.

  For her part, she saw in that one glance that change was possible. Her life need not be spent idly lying in a shell, a job that any plasterwork nymph could do. She became instantly conscious of the dubious nature of her current situation, and decided she must do something about it.

  In other words, they noticed one another.

  But the people in the house were laughing, and Kenelm saw he was now part of the entertainment, punished as any trespasser would be for enjoying the private pleasure gardens, like a churl in a morality tale who reaches for another man’s wife and finds her shrivel to a hag in his arms. Kenelm would fight the operator of this pleasureground, Sir Thomas Bushell, for this nymph’s honour, any day, with any weapon.

  Smiling so as not to betray his feelings, he raised his hat and bowed, offering a graceful surrender and apology. They could see by his bearing and his dress that he was no lout or roaring boy. Soon the host, Bushell, came down to speak to him. After establishing his family and his nobility, which interested Bushell but little, Kenelm asked him many intelligent questions about the manipulation of the water, the contents of a rainbow, and so forth, and Bushell was only too happy to describe the hydraulics, showing him the various water cocks that were turned behind the scenes, and the tricks that could be thrown up by fountains, and the highest they could shoot, and soon the pair were conversing very like equals.

  All the while Kenelm was thinking of the nymphs, and wondering if they were kept by Bushell as his secret harem or if they were Ladies disporting themselves in the fountains because it was a hot day. It was hard to say which was more likely. Kenelm fancied there was an air of luxury, a whiff of licence about the place. He asked, as casually as possible, who the dark maid was. ‘Venetia Stanley,’ said Bushell brusquely. ‘My ward.’

  Later that day he finished his journey and was home again, sunburned and thirsty. He stabled Peggy, kissed his mother, and played catapult and Jack-a-rabbit with his younger brother, running together into the dead rooms of the house that had been shut up since his father’s execution. He puzzled constantly on the name of Stanley, turning it over in his mind, until, at dinner that evening, he asked his mother if she knew it. Mary Mulsho, the widow Digby, stopped with her soup spoon half-way to her face. ‘Why, Venetia? She was your playmate, your little friend. When her family were staying at the Abbey, your nurses put you together so you would sit there gabbling at one another, all nonsense, of course, and she being older than you would crawl away, but you could only lie there gurgling . . .’

  Kenelm went bright red, and told his mother please to stop, but he also felt a deep sense of calm, as if his planets had simply turned in harmonious alignment. ‘She is fallen into a rare dishonour,’ said Mary Mulsho excitedly, forgetting, for a moment, her own despised state as the widow of a Gunpowder plotter.

  ‘Venetia’s father having lost his faculties, Thomas Bushell has bought her wardship, and keeps her as one of his marvels at Enstone House, like a fountain or a fancy rock. And they say,’ she added with heavy significance, ‘that Thomas Bushell’s friend Edmund Wyld has her portrait.’ She shook her head censoriously, and if that dear brother of Kenelm’s, John Digby, had not at that moment held up triumphantly one of his milk teeth, which had just fallen out, and wanted praising as he beamed gappily at them, then Mary Mulsho would have remembered to forbid Kenelm from associating with his former playmate.

  Instead, Kenelm rose expressionless, and went cal
mly upstairs, until reaching his bedchamber he threw himself down on the floorboards and started performing exercises, fencing thrusts and lunges, lifting himself up by his forearms to the roof-beam, again and again. He used as weights the precious stack of books in his bedroom, the heavy volume of Ephemerides and the Hebrew Bible. He needed to build up his strength before he saw Venetia again. He worked on his learning, too, to make himself worthier of her love, and was very often lifting one book at the same time as reading another. It felt the right thing to do as he passed the unbearable time while waiting to see her. And so it was that Mary Mulsho spent the summer believing her son was riding out every day to make an antiquary’s record of the standing-stones and monuments in the district, as indeed he was. Apart from every hot day, when he went directly to Enstone House, to talk mechanics and hydraulics with Sir Thomas Bushell, and gazed discreetly, across the ponds, towards Venus in her shell.

  ‘It is believed Sir Kenelm brought edible snails from the South of France for Venetia, as these were thought to have curative properties . . . It is true that this species of snail is still occasionally found in the district.’

  Stoke Goldington history society, 2013

  THE HOUSEHOLD WAS in chaos, packing for London. Upstairs, Venetia was standing at her closet.

  ‘Red shoes, red waistcoat, Bible, sal aromatica . . .’ she said, passing the items to Chater, who stood behind her in black priestly vestments, his big sad eyes bulging, the better to look over her shoulder into her closet. He loved seeing all her apparatus of womanhood, the pads which shaped, the strings which bound. It was marvellous to think how this stuff came together to create a lady.

  ‘Rosary, sweet bags, pearls to be restrung. Will you have command of bringing with us my writing things, Chater?’