Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  Many things put My Lady on her nerves. The use of a spoon on an earthenware dish, raised servants’ voices, the barking of dogs, Papists, and saying ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, which is uncouth. I tried to guess what would please and what displease her, until I came to see that displeasure was her natural condition, and that to sigh and cavil gave her greatest satisfaction. And so as soon as I knew I could do no right, we began to be friends, and she would have me plait her hair and talked to me of how she was once to be married to a man who was lost in the Armada, and she would make noises as if she was crying, though I could see she was not. Mrs Able the cook told me later that he was not lost, only lost to My Lady.

  My nickname in the house was ‘Only By Marriage’, since My Lady used the words so often to describe me. When she had company, she would say it hushly after my name, and sometimes also when there was no company, so I would know my place. So ‘Only By Marriage’ or sometimes simply ‘Only By’ was my name, and I would laugh about this with the other Marys, two servant maids also in the house. Other times I thought that ‘Only By Marriage’ was her way of explaining that she had no consangernooty with the Strawberry Mark that sits across my cheek. I have not looked often at myself in a glass, but I have always known my Mark is there. First because my mother used to kiss it and tell me it was a special prettyness and that a fairy had touched me there to protect me always. Later, because I was so often looked at askance, and held at a distance.

  A surfeit of pilchards eaten on a Sunday brought My Lady very low, and she was sick for weeks, her mind tending in a curious direction, namely against those who would help her. Sometimes she would abuse us, and once, in her lady’s maid’s face she tipped hot caudle. Another maid she – no, I should not tell such tales. But one by one, her servants quit her, knowing that in her Will and Testament there would be nothing left for them, due to the entailing of the property, so the servants took with them divers plate, trinkets, bellows, and so forth, till it was only me and My Lady Pickett living together in that once-great house with no cushions upon the chairs or pots upon the fire and even some tiles pulled up off the floor, to cover unpaid wages, so they said.

  I tried to keep her comfortable, and from the village John Tupper brought us fish from the stock pond and helped chop firewood too, for he was a kind fellow, and he was unafraid to look me in the face moreover.

  I found some companionship in books, as I have ever been a great lover of books, and when My Lady was ill, I would sit with a book beside the fire some nights, or to seek out new favourites from about the house where they were half-hid, as silver might be. Books are like a special kind of silver, the shine of which only some can perceive. In all, I had three books, one prayers, I think, one of flowers and one in tight little script which smelled like tree-bark. My mother was also fond of books and like her I love to hold them and regard their pages, although I cannot read.

  Our vicar, Dr Jonas, came to sit awhile with My Lady (she was meek with him, mercifully) and afterwards he took a cup of plain posset with me and told me he had been thinking that I would take passage. Take passage? Said I, though I knew his meaning, which was to send me to the New World. I quickly said I could not leave My Lady, and as he went on talking, saying (as I recall) ‘well, well, we shall see’ and ‘there are many better girls than you sailed already’ and ‘you would do well to be useful, a girl like you’, and all the while my head was filling unexpectedly with all the things I did not want to leave behind, as the firm English soil, and a good pot of gravy, and even John Tupper’s freckled face, as I confess ye now.

  Some days before My Lady died, the sun was bright, a dazzle-day for February, so I cast ope My Lady’s curtains, though she always pleaded for the dark. The light in her sick room was like the sudden violence of angels, and My Lady covered her eyes with her skeleton hand, aghast.

  ‘Damn thee,’ she mews and I do not reply, for she is not well, mind nor body.

  Some portion of the curtain, rich red oneside and sun-stained pink the other, has come away in my hand, and I look down to see the fabric turned to mealy matter, all string with tiny eggs a-laid in. A Mothy creature has made of it their home, and quite all of it had, so I saw, tiny worms struggling through the tatters, squirming against the daylight. As I gathered them up for burning in the grate, I considered how they came to be growing there, these white little live things, and I felt sorry for them as they popped and browned.

  My Lady starts conversing with herself, or with an absent other, a phantasm from her youth, perhaps. She smiles flirtishly, and talks of spring and laughs and then her mood changes and she looks serious and names me ‘Mary, my husband’s sister’s child – by marriage only’. I had thought that I had served her so long I had become something more like kin to her, but ‘only by marriage’ was I ever. I cannot help but smile. ‘What a little vole of virtue,’ she says and sighs and seems to look right past me.

  ‘Poor lass,’ she says. ‘There’s none will take her. We thought the townsman John Tupper might, but he’s appalled of her, they say.’ She sucks at where her teeth once were. ‘No man will take a girl as plain as her.’

  I don’t suppose she meant to be unkind. The strawberry mark on my cheek burns as I brush away the tear which has fallen out of my left eye, and quickly my mind fills with thoughts of the curtain. My next duty should be to tear the curtain down and make of it a bonfire. But I look back at My Lady, who is sunk back into a snoring sleep, her mouth agape. I have already salved her gums that morn with aniseed. And I say aloud, ‘Mary, let these curtains rot.’

  I left them hanging. I cared for My Lady and fed her broth, and comforted her through her final days, though she never spoke again, and the departing of her soul was very slow, so for several days I was not sure of whether she was there or not, and I ope the window to let her soul out and when it went, pray God it was upwards.

  They say the truth shall set ye free and with her harsh words My Lady loosed me like a hare from a trap. I no longer had so much doubt of myself, and I was content to please myself, since I would please no man; and I made a promise that since I would not be loved nor give love to any one, that I should endeavour to be good friends with every one and all the world.

  I shall tell more next time, but now I must rest in this warm under-tree hollow, where the sheep have left white wool-trails on hawthorn hooks. I can journey on apace tomorrow. My dear kinsman, the closest I have to kin, lies sick of a wound at home, and his only hope rests in me. I seek the Keeper of the Powder of Sympathy, Sir Kenholme Diggy. I do not know where he resides, nor whether he will be able to cure my friend’s mortal wound. All I really know is his name, and this, I trust, will be all I need.

  ‘There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.’

  Helena Rubinstein, My Life for Beauty, 1966

  AS WINTER DREW in, each day dawned colder, but Venetia awoke feeling stronger, and more hopeful. Venus was in her smile again. The highways frosted, and the geese’s down thickened, and every day the garden died a little, while Venetia grew more pert. It was like an artificial spring. The mirrors that she had packed away, turned to the wall or stacked in the cellar began to reappear about the house.

  Every day, she drank her Adder juice. It thickened her veins, and filled her up with all its magical properties – later understood as iron from the vipers’ blood, ascorbic acid from the tartar, artificial hormones from the urine of pregnant mares, and hope, faith and comfort from the dribble of delicious opium.

  Venetia even took a bath, her first since spring, turning the house into steaming, rose-scented commotion of slops on the stairs and the maids running up from the scullery to the dining room where the tub was set, the males of the retinue obliged to busy themselves away from the house, and all the housemaids waiting to use the hot water after her in order of rank, and preparing to be sewn into their winter clothes.

  She was suspicious of baths – it was often said that the last thing Lady so-and-so ever did was take one; or that Master this-and-that was
never the same after his bath in 1603. A bath taken for too long seeped in through the skin and damaged the organs; it was important not to wallow. On the appointed morning, she held young Kenelm especially tight and kissed sleeping John’s feet, muttering a blessing of love over them.

  But who could not enjoy being immersed? It was like a second baptism. She lay bobbing back in the tub looking at the withdrawing room – fireplace, ceiling, tapestries – from this new angle of repose. As she rose steaming from the waters, which were grown cloudy and scummed with petals, she glimpsed herself naked in the mirror – pink flesh like hot roast gammon, curved and wobbly as Rubens’ Susanna bathing. She grasped the sponge to cover herself, even though there was no one watching but her own reflection.

  She saw that Venus had breathed upon her, reddening her cheek, plumping the flesh around her collarbone, and stroking her neck softer and smoother. Her whole form was wet and strong and smoking in the shaft of light penetrating the room above the curtains. She felt unexpectedly forgiving, as she looked at this person’s pink, vulnerable body. She had a waist again, she noticed. There was certainly less of her than before. Her worst fear – an incipient dowager’s hump – seemed to have been allayed by the rubbing and palpations she had lately required Chater to perform upon her shoulders. She stood a little straighter, then turned so she might look back at her bottom. It was a good enough bottom. She exhaled. It was not a reconciliation with herself, but it was a truce.

  Two grooms were at that moment sitting outside in the mews, eating a pease pottage and talking about horses’ flanks, then cows’ arses, then women.

  – I’d say she was like two fine shaddocks.

  – Aye, like a great big pompkin.

  – Cleft before and aft.

  – And soft as you like.

  – Heavy to lift and good to taste.

  – Not the greenest.

  – Nay but sweetest.

  At the naval office in Greenwich, Kenelm put down his pen and daydreamed about his wife. He imagined her lace garter, and the soft bite it left on her thigh. He thought about her plumpness, and her seashell-smelling parts, and her grip and her buck, and then a maid came in with his ale, and broke his reverie.

  When Venetia was upstairs recovering from her bath, Chater came to her door as directed with a pot of quicklime and arsenic mixed with water into a depilatory paste. Kenelm had these in his laboratory but Venetia was too proud to borrow them for her purpose and she sent Chater out to buy them from the apothecary. Chater stood at her bedroom door, with one hand across his heart, frozen with anticipation of being invited inside the sacred boudoir. His eyes were very large, trying to take in everything at once. Venetia shut the door casually in his face. She tested the quicklime with a feather, and while she was waiting for it to be ready, she rubbed rose wax on her heels and nipped her eyebrows, looking intently at the gluey white root-tip of each black hair. She wondered if all women’s hairs had these, or if hers were especially disgusting. She checked the quicklime and saw that all the feather had dissolved, leaving a wand of cartilage, which meant the mixture was ready, and she spread the gas-smelling paste across her legs, knees to ankles, while it curdled and bubbled. The quicklime should be left on the skin for no longer than the time it took to say three Ave Marias, and Venetia whispered them as she lay there, rigid and sweating through the burning. She knew well this friendly agony. The more it hurt, the better it worked. She smelled the pleasing whiff of shrivelled, sizzling hair.

  Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death, Amen. Holy Mary . . .

  Next she spread across her hairline a blue preparation of blackberry leaves, walnuts, gull turds and cypress nuts, to try to touch up the greys. It stung her scalp, and she tipped her head back so it might trickle further, like a path of delicious fire-water across her brain. Her scalp would scab and then she would idly pick it off, feeling the fascinating grit of it between her fingers. Oatmeal, bran and lily water were pasted across her face when she answered the door to Chater, who had come to take away the ill-smelling package of quicklime. She showed him her face, painted dead-white like a mummer’s.

  ‘Well, sir,’ she said, ‘does you like my new look?’

  Poor Chater stammered tactfully, and his confusion was so entertaining to her that her face-mask cracked into a thousand tiny lines.

  Finally she rang for Elizabeth to help her get dressed. Her costume must be put on each and every day. She sat at her dressing table, painting. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another, she heard Hamlet’s angry words in her head, and she thought what a tiresome person he was, licking the tip of her sable brush and dipping it in carmine. Poor Hamlet was ever a booby. The poison-pen letter she had received had gone into some detail about her painted lips, ‘her rubious o, her bright fornicator’s mouth’. She wondered if the writer of the letter had formerly been one of the boys who chased after her carriage shouting hallelujahs.

  As she went about town that afternoon, helping Chater distribute her pamphlet of domestic wisdom, A Mirrour for a Modest Wife, she was both pleased and displeased by her unaccustomed cleanliness. It made her feel brand new but invisible, as if she had no shadow, no presence. The comforting musty aroma of self was gone. It would take weeks to recover it.

  That evening, Kenelm called her his strange new wife, and kissed her curiously. Usually Mistress Elizabeth unlaced her but tonight he did it himself, pulling at every string and bow he could see, even the decorative ones, and doing it badly, like a boy, unlacing everything in the wrong order, and tearing a few stitches in his hurry to see how clean she was.

  A few months ago, she would have doubted him, wondering why he was so excited, tormenting herself with suspicions and asking if his male psyche was pretending she was another woman, some cheap young doll or katy.

  But now her power had returned, and none of these cruel thoughts bothered her. When she was naked, she slowed him down, staying his hand and keeping him back, until he was the kind and gentle lover that she had taught him to be in their early years together. And finally, well pleased with one another, they fell asleep under her new coverlet, with their legs entwined the whole night through, waking only sometimes to kiss one another, as they had done at the very beginning.

  A cart had drawn up in Charterhouse Precinct, and men were fetching piles of books into the house. Sir Kenelm was amongst them, coming and going, his voice commanding where the next consignment should go, his arms filled with books, his face wet with tears that he did not seem to notice, as he continued to lift and stack the books into pillars, piles and tottering columns.

  There were vast folded maps, as tall as young Kenelm; flapping incunabula and sheaves of illuminated manuscript, not bound but tied with string, like parcels; doll-sized prayer books and gospels; Indian mandalas and Islamic calligraphy and books of Aztec illustrations marked ‘Ægyptian’. The sole extant copies of Anglo-Saxon poems were mixed in with tattered sheaves of church accounts and Medieval tithe books, alongside dozens of annotated books of geometry, bound in black with no markings, in order to disguise their dangerous content. It was the entire library of Thomas Allen, who had finally been released of this life in his rooms at Oxford, where he had been found dead in his chair, as if asleep. He had got up to put on his best clothes before he died – his Magus’s cloak of blue and threaded with silver stars.

  ‘It is as if,’ Kenelm said, pausing to wipe his face, ‘as if we carry his heart, his lungs, his spleen, and every part of his body into our house.’

  Venetia, who had come down from her bedroom to discover this excess of books, and her husband in tears, took in the situation immediately. ‘He speaks figuratively,’ she explained to the men. ‘He is only sad for the loss of his old tutor and friend. Whiles you are with us,’ she smiled airily, flashing her old power, ‘could you do us the great good action of moving this big old chest here, so, and heaving this cabinet here into the upstairs chamber . . .’ And thus Venetia had the men ru
nning about rearranging the house as well as filling it with books.

  ‘Like a number of mathematicians, Thomas Allen was popularly supposed to be a necromancer . . . As early as 1563 he began acquiring manuscripts and gradually built up one of the largest private collections in Oxford . . . which he bequeathed to Sir Kenelm Digby in 1632.’

  The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2012

  The books were in Digby’s mercy now, bequeathed to him as a child to a godparent: a blessing but a burden of care. They had come to him because he loved books; so our passions gather their own speed. Over the next weeks, he would furiously reprimand the servants of his house for using the books to hold doors open. It was the way people treated manuscripts, since the monks were driven out. He found a beer pot placed upon an Illumination. ‘I will not have these papers abused,’ he insisted. ‘Who harms my books harms my very person.’

  The air that night was sulphurous and syncopated with burst-bladder pops and bangs. A loud one, catching everyone by surprise, made the carthorse stamp, and the windows rattle. It was the fifth of November, and the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot was enforced by law, though the Digbys always spent the night holding vigil at home, even though one of them was now a Protestant. Kenelm was of the opinion that Venetia should retire and draw their bed-curtains against the noise, in case she was with child again, and the explosions marked their baby – he knew that by looking at an execution once, a mother had given birth to a headless child. He found he was crying again, for the woes of the world.

  Digby paused beside a stack of books in Italian, noticing a little volume wedged underneath, as big as the palm of his hand, in stiff goatskin the colour of dried blood, tooled with naïve, off-centre round Celtic designs. He held it gently, became caught up in its first pages, and fell to reading.