Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  Speaking? said Kenelm. Hello?

  He knew that birds often imitated bells and whistles, calls and ringtones.

  Beep, beep.

  Ping!

  With his arms raised to heaven he span around the glade in a circle while the birds quizzled and cheeped and sang to him in tongues, and his spirit resounded with joy because he was a knight who lived by reason and logic, and knew these birds were not mechanical trifles from a sorcerer’s foundry, or enchanted prisoners of Circe, but only poor little living creatures, escaped. He felt as if he had cut himself free from cobwebs of illusion, and he was resolved to live without them, in the open air of rationality. Experiment, observation, inductive reasoning – these were his methods. Metamorphosis was Ovid’s way, a classical delusion. The ancients’ age of prophecy was over. No longer would men live by myths and children’s stories.

  When Kenelm descended from the hill, healed as ever by the efflorescence of new ideas in his fertile mind, he saw that the green silk pavilion had gone, and there was no sign of it except for a stain on the grass, some charred debris and a few loiterers. Chater was waiting with the horses, and Venetia too, her head poking out of the window of her carriage alertly, like a lapdog; confident and hopeful that she was about to see him arrive safely, yet physically unable to relax until it happened.

  As she waited, watching the trees blowing, she sang to herself at first, and then, growing bored, and fearful, she thought of all the things she would like to say to Kenelm: first, there are too many books in the house, there is not room to shelve them all, and yet you insatiably buy more, at what cost? All the penniless antiquarians know you for your tender heart and come to our door hawking books in Aramaic script and suchlike fustian babble. And this business of the bathysphere. What fantastick invention will you ride next upon the waves? A harnessed dolphin, or torpedo . . .?

  Staring at the Greenwich grass, she was so expectant, consumed, for once, with looking rather than being seen, that she had forgotten that her face was bare and unadorned, with the morning’s paint worn off – until the moment when Kenelm appeared, when the strain seemed to widen the crack in her nature, and she remembered to half-cover her face and look coquettishly at him. They held each other tightly, and pressed their cheeks together. In her happiness she forgot every complaint she had against him. When he held her close, his smell touched her like a drug. He breathed her sweet pomander, and closing his eyes he saw the figure

  OR7D4

  in his mind’s eye, and he knew it to be the codename given to the isolated genetic olfactory receptor in Venetia’s blood which made her swoon for his tired body’s smell, because they were mathematically matched as lovers must be, their sequences interlocking, their separate selves fractions and the sum of their parts a whole number, prime, indivisible.

  Chater looked on with long face and bulging sad eyes as they embraced. Venetia went on ahead in her carriage, trundling lightly over the grassy tracks, while Kenelm mounted the horse brought for him by Chater.

  Kenelm felt wrung dry. Today he had breathed underwater and drunk sunlight, he had been cheered as a hero, taken part in an enterprise worthy of a new Atlantis – and yet at the last his old dishonour had come up, bringing out the bitterness in his blood. Chater intuited something was amiss by Kenelm’s stiff bearing, his troubled eyes. They talked as their horses ambled home, and gradually Kenelm spilled his heart to his family chaplain, as if in an open-air confession.

  ‘Of course, I have heard people speak about my father’s crime all my life, talking, supposing, casting slurs or looking at me with a curious eye . . .’

  ‘Were you there that day?’ asked Chater. A good priest knew one essential question would open up a story, like a key.

  ‘At my father’s ending?’ said Kenelm blankly. ‘I was.’ He kept a heavy silence, but Chater could feel there was more to come.

  ‘I saw him tied to the wicker hurdle, face-down that his breath might not pollute the common air, as the sergeant put it. My mother drew my face into her skirts, but I peeped a look anyway. I was not yet three. He was hanging by his heels, his face twisting, very red. I think I thought it was some horrid game. There was a great noise of halberdiers’ drums. I remember nothing else. Later, my mother told me she held me up to see him for the last time. We were not allowed to touch him, only stand in the crowd and shout. There was another plotter – Bates – whose wife forced herself through the guards, and flung her arms around her husband, who whispered where his gold was hid. We were not so canny. I’m told my father smiled at me and that he told me to look after my mother. Though I have never done so. I am a bad son to her.’

  ‘Come, sir, that is not true,’ said Chater, hoping Kenelm would go back to the more interesting matter of the execution, which he did.

  ‘We did not see his ending. My mother and I were led out of the crowd quickly, so we might be spared the next sight. The crowd they say was very silent. That was a great comfort to my mother: a silent crowd.’

  ‘You are very brave.’

  ‘I am not brave, nor was my father brave, nor my mother unfortunate. All these words are forbidden if your trouble has been brought upon yourself by plotting and powder. You bear it, no more, no less.’

  Their horses snorted to one another, sharing irritation at the early-evening flies.

  ‘They say my father’s heart was plucked before his eyes. The man who looks at his own heart and speaks is a candidate for Catholic sainthood. There are other examples recorded. But as Laud would often tell me, my father was a good man misguided. He did not wish to kill the King and Parliament, only to frighten James. It was the others who were treacherous. I like to think it might be true. Laud said my father was the kind of man who believed that every beggar deserved payment; he was too tenderhearted. Once when he was young he came home shoeless, because a poor boy had asked for his shoes. Two hundred years ago they might have canonised my father. Instead, he is a two-penny pamphlet, a shudder, an effigy for the bonfire, a tale to tell while feasting, no more.’

  Chater did not like to see Sir Kenelm so disconsolate, and wanted to say something cheerful. ‘Still you were exceeding fortunate.’

  ‘Of course. To keep his lands and property was more than we had right to hope for – to be his son and yet be knighted, that was a true kindness. He liked to make a show of forgiveness. Beati pacifici was James’s motto . . .’

  ‘Blessed are the . . .’

  ‘Cheesemakers,’ said Kenelm.

  ‘Peacemakers, surely . . .’ said Chater hastily.

  ‘I only meant to have my sport with you, Chater,’ said Kenelm. ‘Perhaps the old Scot bore my father love. He’d an eye for a lovely lad. You know those men who dote on men.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Chater, looking down at his bridle.

  ‘They have in the composition of their bodies too much blood, it is said. In Siena the Duke of Tuscany’s old apothecary assured me that leeches judiciously applied – you need not ask to which part of the body, sir – took away those desires that they wish to be rid of, by destroying the excess of manliness and laying siege to those particular atoms charging about their blood – and so restoring them to their wives. But occasioned by the use of male leeches only, I am told.’

  Chater looked uneasy and made an equivocal expression of interest, and in his momentary distraction he let his horse pause to crop the green grass, and fell behind Kenelm. In silence they trundled back to east London across the Isle of Dogs, where the King’s kennels yelped as the knight and chaplain passed by, silhouetted against a peachy early-evening sky.

  SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE

  ‘I wax now somewhat ancient . . . one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.’

  Sir Francis Bacon, 1593

  TWO LADIES WEARING fashionable vizard-masks were walking along Cheapside, in fast and purposive unison, towards the physicians’ quarter on Fenchurch Street. They passed three children fighting for a farthing in a puddle, who stared up at them as if th
e ladies were creatures of a different species. A manservant stepped aside to allow them passage, deferentially looking away. A woman collapsed in a doorway watched them, her eyeballs liverish yellow.

  ‘No one has seen us,’ whispered Venetia, clasping Olive’s arm. Venetia had taken the precaution of wearing mourning clothes, so as to be more anonymous. Her dramatic soul enjoyed this and she declared that she was dressed ‘for the funeral of her own honesty’. This was the first time that she had deceived her Kenelm. Well, the first time she had deceived him explicitly. The first time she had deceived him explicitly in a long time. Quite a long time. There were always matters untold between a man and a woman, of money, and trifling secrets of past affections, were there not? And all those abstruse points which one already understood, and facts one already knew, but allowed him to explain high-handedly, because it pleased him to do so. But this was disobedience. She trod a little faster.

  The artist William Peake, son of the court painter, had lately come to take their double portrait. Venetia felt kindly towards him ever since, ten years ago, he made a divine little painting of her in masquing costume at the request of the Earl of Dorset. This time, she began the sitting in good faith, putting her confidence in him as he turned over his sand-timer to measure out his fee at four-pence the hour. She felt they presented a goodly show to the world, a handsome couple, on the cusp of new things. They sat for him in brightest daylight by the window of their great hall, which warmed Venetia, and helped to calm her.

  ‘How are the cheekbones? Do they need shadow underneath? Is the make-up excessive? In colour shots, this is disaster. If the jawline is dubious, try to avoid being shot from below. If you cannot relax, for heaven’s sake, take a tranquilliser before shooting starts.’

  Princess Luciana Pignatelli,

  The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book, 1971

  Peake sketched while looking at them with an unkind intensity, as if he saw them as planes and surfaces and colour-contrasts, rather than as people. It made Venetia feel, she whispered to Kenelm, as if she were ‘a cut of veal-calf’.

  Kenelm’s moustaches twitched but he suppressed a laugh. They both sat very still, listening to Spenser, which Chater read aloud, while Master Peake’s light-maker held up a frame of white cloth, to reflect the best of the winter sun upon them, and Mistress Elizabeth hovered, as instructed, with a box of pearl-powder and a mortar of egg-white, ready to tend to Venetia’s face if she asked for it, as he sketched them, first with chalk on blue paper, while an assistant mixed his paints. Halfway through, Master Peake asked her to relaxez-vous, madame.

  ‘I feel perfectly relaxed,’ said Venetia, ‘so what can you mean?’

  He asked Venetia if she would mind showing a serene countenance.

  ‘I am filled with serenity, sir, it flows quite through me!’ said Venetia.

  ‘No, no, madam, just . . .’ He gestured with two fingers to his forehead, as if wiping away a frown. Venetia did not reply. She did not think she had been frowning at all, sitting here with Kenelm, holding the attention of this roomful of people, The Faery Queene echoing in her head. With a muscular effort she widened her eyebrows, to remove this alleged frown. After a minute or two, however, with her mind on the Queene’s noble knight Artegal, her face must have fallen into repose, because Peake made again his encouraging hand-gesture to her forehead.

  ‘Sir, do you not need those two fingers for your painting?’ she said, through her teeth.

  There was only the noise of his brush on canvas.

  ‘You might do better to change your painting rather than my countenance,’ she said. This artist had made an ominous beginning.

  Perhaps her hands were ill-positioned, but it was too late to move them, and soon she lost the feeling in her left little finger, and then her whole arm. Her head swam with Spenserian dreams. Kenelm nudged her twice, because he thought she was sleeping.

  It was not until the end of the day that they saw Peake’s double portrait.

  His sense of perspective was very poor, so that while Kenelm looked fit and lean, she had been rendered plump and dwarfish, with chins that redoubled and a non-existent neck. Her eyes were flat and gazing, like a dead hare in a Dutch still life, and the expression in them was nervous and doubting, while her lips smirked and her cheek was sallow. Poor artist! He could not manage to bring off a face at all any more. He had, admittedly, done her hair well.

  ‘Master Peake, we have wasted your time,’ she said.

  Kenelm started to say something, until she gave him a look.

  ‘I think you are more suited to painting cheeses and pieces of fruit, no? At least they have no friends and relatives to say whether it is a good likeness or no. No; dear sir, you would make a lovely painter of inanimates. But for women you have no longer the knack. We are so sorry that you shall not have this commission from us, for you are a good man and you used to be a good painter, I remember. You will have your money for today’s labour. But your skill today, sir, why is it so much less than when you made my portrait last time?’

  Peake was already packing away his brushes brusquely, and he stopped to look Venetia significantly in the eye.

  ‘Madam, it must be because I am ten years older.’

  Peake’s words echoed loudly in the panelled chamber, so resonantly that everyone must have heard him, through the household and beyond, and in the garden the leaves on the trees trembled, and the dandelions shook, and the clodded earth rumbled, and even further away, in a Hollywood screening room, Marlene Dietrich froze with fury as she turned to listen to her cameraman deliver the same wasp-sting words. Sir Kenelm ducked out of the room, pretending he had not heard, leaving Venetia in charge, as usual.

  She took pleasure in dismissing Peake. He was lucky to be paid at all, frankly.

  Venetia thought of the old pagan goddesses with their smashed noses and their broken arms. The acolytes turn against their queen, she thought, once her powers start to wane. The old statues have to be desecrated, reviled, to make way for the new.

  So here she was, marching through Eastcheap in search of medicine that would improve bad painters, and cause rude old courtiers to remember their manners, and turn her inside out, so the serenity she felt was visible again. They came onto Fenchurch Street, where the physicians’ premises were close beside each other, signed by the mortar and pestle. Some had reassuringly expensive facades, painted with College crests and appended with prestigious names: here was a foreign physician; there was Robert Fludd, under a Barber Surgeon’s sign. The clients going about the street – a gent with a bandaged jaw: and a man and woman holding each other closely, with shy hope on their faces, as if they had come for a cure for childlessness – seemed to be persons of quality. There were no beggars with wailing brats or old women selling heather, as there usually were hanging about outside an apothecary’s. They entered a door under the sign of a star, painted with the gold letters LANCELOT CHOICE.

  Inside the air was close, spicy, and tickle-your-nose. In spite of the dark atmosphere, the ladies did not remove their veils. They stood silently in front of the grey-haired woman who climbed down off a ladder to serve them. Venetia and Olive both drew breath, but neither spoke. It was unexpectedly difficult to say for which preparation they had come.

  The old woman introduced herself as Mistress Choice, and said softly, ‘Is it a private audience you are desiring?’ They nodded. In a sweet bedside voice she said, ‘Then I will procure the master for you.’ She stepped back from the counter, and hollered down the stairs on solid lungs: ‘Here’s CUSTOM!’

  In the privacy of the doctor’s consulting room, the ladies unveiled. It was tidy, stacked with tiny drawers and ceramic pots, and hung with fashionable embroidered fabric. There were none of the old apothecary’s trophies, no stuffed monstrous fishes or clouds of desiccated herbs, not even any pulled teeth or false limbs or old plaisters lying about. A window let in the cool light of day, and the room smelled faintly of soap.

  ‘Well, ladies,’ said Mistress
Choice, putting her hands on her hips. ‘Is it the usual?’

  Olivia and Venetia looked at each other, unsure what to answer.

  ‘Your courses are late and you’re wanting a help-me-along?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Olivia, colouring. ‘No, no. We want your Viper Wine.’ Mrs Choice looked surprised and gratified, and made a little non-judgemental curtsey. ‘Pleased to be of service, ladies. I’ll just fetch the Physician.’ Mrs Choice went away quickly, being certain not to look too closely at them, since she knew ladies who came for these treatments were often sensitive.

  Mr Choice entered. He was tall, and handsome, and he knew it. ‘Thank you,’ he said, dismissing Mistress Choice. Was she his wife or his mother? Venetia guessed wife. He had the air of one who liked to be the more beautiful one in a relationship. His face was remarkably well made up and smooth for a man. His hair was long like Kenelm’s except he wore, as a modish affectation, one lovelock behind his left ear, loosely plaited into a little tail. He was not wax pale, like some, but his paint matched his skin colour. His blush was subtle and his eye twinkling. Venetia felt the inadequacy of her own paint, hastily applied that morning. Perhaps Lancelot Choice drank his decoctions himself. He, and not his wife-mother was the bait for business, the model of what could be achieved. He greeted them warmly with a deep bow in front of each of them, then relaxed into his chair, which like a throne commanded the room.

  ‘I hear you are Viperish,’ he said.

  They laughed nervously.

  ‘We live in a wondrous age, my ladies, a golden time in which it is no longer necessary to present the marks of ageing and decrepitude. We improve our treatments all the time. You will find no puppy’s piss here – that charm is by the by. We have only the most infallibly efficacious cordials, wines, salves, unguents, ointments and still other guaranteed means of enhancing your beauty, and with ladies such as yourselves it would be a deep privilege to be of service. I will make a quick investigation first. If you would . . .’