Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  ‘Chater, my dove, I fear Kenelm needs you – he was asking for you earlier, as soon as we could spare you . . .’ Venetia knew how to play Chater. He headed for the door without demur.

  Chater had no sooner left the room but he heard them begin laughing and casting dice. Kenelm’s hat was missing, which meant he was out. He had been duped, again. Oh, she was magnificent! He walked off, fuming, getting his revenge by thinking about Olive – yes, putting Venetia entirely from his mind for a moment or two. He wondered how he could obtain a personal appointment with Olive. She should not be wearing quite so many bows and rosebuds in such bright, divers shades. He loved her for her daring, but he could not let it continue. She should wear cream or goose-grey, with a plain stomacher. None of these virago sleeves, thank you. He would help her find a new safe apparel. She was a lost, brittle thing – perhaps he would be able to steer her to the safety of the Old Faith. Her conversion would be a great coup.

  Olive’s face had been meddled with by a physician, that was evident. She seemed proud of the fact; she presented herself like a gift to the world. She had the air of one who felt they had got away with it. He admired and envied her, and yet the righteous part of him wanted to smite her vanity. Yea, smite with a thunderclap and lay bare her real face, which, however raddled, would be more beautiful than the painted, fake version – more beautiful because it was, above all things, true. And then, when her finery was gone, she would need Chater. He imagined Olive weeping for him through the night. Then he would lead her, through suffering, to His redemption.

  Chater whistled as he walked through the garden and about his business, knowing none of this would come to pass, but daydreaming about how he might attend church with his convert, the new humble, penitent Olive, who would be modestly dressed and leaning on his arm.

  Inside, the ladies were absorbed in a new game. For a few weeks, it had been Glecko, then farthing-gleek and toe-gleek. Then they had moved on to beast, and angel-beast, which diverted them for a while. Now they were playing one-and-thirty, which called for more subtlety of method, and projects of collecting and discarding, which the ladies enjoyed. They removed the eights and nines from the pack and threw them on the floor; they sipped their Malaga sack and focused on their hands, except for Lettice, who was full of information.

  She told them about the Queen’s new pet, a Welsh giant called Evans. Lettice had seen him and been too afraid to approach. ‘I do not know what it is in me that holds back when everyone else is leaping forth, but I could not approach the giant, could not accost him. Could not!’ She then told of the damage done by fire to Master Jonson’s lodgings, reciting with great sadness an inventory of all the masterworks the great man had lost to the flames. When Venetia observed, showing the suggestion of a smile over her cards, that it was typical of dear Ben to make the most of any calamity, Lettice replied pertly that these were uncopied, unpublished works, and Ben had told her so himself. She sighed quietly, as if Venetia were sadly ignorant of Ben’s talent, and said to herself, ‘A very great loss.’

  Venetia felt a small comforting throbbing at her temples, which reminded her that the Viper Wine was at work. When she was annoyed or discomforted, she often let herself listen to the Viper Wine’s good music, beating in her veins, across her brow. As she assessed her hand, she tried to listen to Lettice, who was still talking.

  ‘Ben Jonson has told me that he will write it whether or no the Earl commissions it, as he has the rhymes of it already in his head, and conceived to do it the first time he saw me . . .’

  ‘To do what, Lettice?’

  ‘Write a sonnet sequence in my honour. I am to be set within a talking garden, a pleasant place, where all the vegetables have voices, a bed full of herbs and sweet plants – for my name, of course. It is to be a celebration of all things new-grown.’

  Venetia put down her cards. She started to speak, and then could not. ‘My dear . . .’ The truth was that Ben had always written for rich women, or women that he thought might have rich suitors or husbands, or when he spied an occasion for self-promotion. And he so seldom wrote from his heart, as he had done for her, Venetia, back when he was half in love with her, and they used to speak in their own language together. And at any rate, whatever he wrote these days would be empty, worth having only because it was by Ben Jonson, not because it was good. None of this, to be sure, could be expressed to the sweet little leaf sitting opposite her, so very pleased with itself.

  ‘A garden that talks! Of course. What a lovely idea, and lovelier still if he were not to profit by it,’ she said crisply. She had gone too far: the child’s smile chilled.

  ‘Are you quite well, Venetia?’ said Lettice. ‘It is just that, every now and again, your face twitches, and the pretty blue vein on your forehead throbs.’

  But Venetia was absorbed in the delightful patterns of her hand of cards, which she had carefully swapped and traded so it was a perfect flush, spread neatly across the baize. The sight of the cards themselves alone gave pleasure. They were so regular, so impervious.

  ‘I think we are ready for some more hot caudle, ladies, are we not?’ she announced, with satisfaction, as she stood up and scraped all the coins in her direction, and everyone gave in, and started fishing in their purses. They did not begrudge Venetia her winning. It was expected. How could she lose? She was herself again, and they felt more beautiful just by being near her.

  A long and powerful rat-at-tat-at-tat at the door did not trouble the ladies, as they bet a higher stake on their next hands, which was in turn higher than they had bet yesterday. But when Mistress Elizabeth answered the door, she found no one there, only a huge nail, rammed into the wooden door, skewering pages of parchment that flapped alarmingly in the wind.

  Kenelm found this letter on his desk when he came home. It was a censorious age, and they lived with a good deal of show, and Venetia attracted a number of correspondents with faltering itchy-scratchy nibs and raving minds. She had already been told by one that she was a celestial harpy, and that her ‘cunning device’ of keeping her wings underneath her dress did not fool this correspondent, oh no. He culminated with the leering: ‘I seeth you as the lord seeth you.’ She had inflamed enough hearts in her time – and now their ashes were returned to her in twists of parchment. Only mad people wrote, because only mad people dared. Kenelm and Venetia could easily have the authors arraigned before the sheriffs, but instead they shrugged them off. They took the attitude that burning the letters destroyed their malice, so it became no more than smoke. In Kenelm’s Sympatheticall universe, the authors felt their minds tingle as their letters were consumed by fire, and the hands that wrote them blistered.

  This letter was headed ‘Hoplocrisma-Spongus, Or, a Sponge to Wipe away the Weapon-Salve’. It ran to ten pages of tiny handwriting, all disparaging Kenelm’s Sympatheticall Cure. He scanned the looping, regular script; the author, one Parson Foster, a Protestant divine no doubt. ‘A treatise wherein it is proved that the cure late-taken up amongst us, by applying the salve to the weapon, is magical and unlawful.’ So this was war.

  ‘Blimey,’ said Kenelm, meaning to say ‘Blind me’ but coining the modern version accidentally. He read the treatise against him in full, and stormed upstairs to find Venetia, and then he stopped outside her bedroom, hesitating to show her the letter with all its injurious claims. He told himself it was because he did not want to worry her. He also knew it was because he needed her admiration, and did not want it shaken. His world of happiness, his mighty encompassing O of safety, was all in her belief and trust in him. With the letter’s angry words ringing in his ears, he walked out of his garden, and through the streets, at odds with the tide of people who were hurrying home against the gathering rain, and yet he pressed onwards to the Thames’s bank, where he climbed out upon the jetty of Garlickhythe. The busy river seemed to pause, and the docks were unusually quiet. The wind inflated Digby’s collar, lifted his hair.

  He tried to make his thoughts methodical. The problem: many m
istook his Cure of Sympathy for a Magicall Art. The reason: it appeared to work upon an object like the witch-cures often did – a shoe strung up to warn a spirit off, or a sleep-worn pillow chanted over, or a cup buried, to stop a man drinking too much, or a clock to be set at the time of a robbery to help return some stolen goods.

  These were the Old ways, and yet there was truth in them. He believed they were possible, because the air was thick with purpose. The air was full of Atomes, tiny invisible particles, the smallest part of matter, also called Minims, that moved through the air, tumbling and whirling, moved by Heat or still’d by Cold, constantly turning, had we but vision to see them . . .

  It was fanciful talk to most people. King James I had suspected him of witchery. Kings are often suspicious, and James had the habit of seeing black magic everywhere. He was on the very point of knighting Kenelm, with his royal sword ceremonially drawn, when he paused and asked him if he dealt with the devil, believing the nearness of the sharp steel would put Kenelm on his mettle. Kenelm answered frankly, looking him directly in the eye, and telling the King that his Sympatheticall Cure worked by means of Art and Nature, harnessing the cavalry of the air that charged about unseen. At which the King had looked askance, but knighted him, and all the court exhaled.

  Plenty of men found him Overreaching, or Heretical, because he believed the air was full of thousands of tiny invisible particles, darting about in the void, giving life and breath, without divine direction. This was clearly heresy, and the Jesuits even made a prayer to deny it: ‘Nothing comes of Atomes . . .’ Kenelm had doubted it himself, at first – who could easily believe that the air was not empty, but vastly manifest and substantial?

  But then he read Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, lent to him by Sir John Scudamore one night with a wink and a candle as he went to bed. And Digby stayed up until dawn reading of Venus and the urge to reproduce that overtakes us all, and how the stars are made of the same matter as us, and we of them, all tumbling together in a universe in which the divine spirit was immanent, rather than directed. Kenelm drank it in one intoxicating draft, committing as much as possible to memory. He never saw the book again.

  To possess De Rerum Natura was heresy in Tuscany, punished with a fine and a personal invitation to eternal damnation. In England, it was a secret that people passed around and kept to themselves, and used as they wished. After reading it, Digby became an Atomist. He did not let go of any of his other beliefs or callings. He was a Catholic by birth, a Protestant by education, a melancholic by affectation, an alchemist by vocation, a Rosicrucian in aspiration, and an Atomist by imagination.

  ‘Digby . . . joins the Medieval to the modern world.’

  Introduction to The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Open’d, 1910

  The wind tore over the sludgy Thames, and he was lit up by a flash of purple-neon lightning. He would, in time, become a so-called crypto-Catholic; a ‘Renaissance man’; an emblem of mourning; a dilettante avant la lettre (and before ‘avant la lettre’); a touchstone for Nathaniel Hawthorne, named in The Scarlet Letter; a cameo in a novel by Umberto Eco; and, possibly, the hero of a subscription-channel costume drama.

  Born in the 116th year of English peace, he was one of the rose-wreathed cavaliers, unwitting architects of the cataclysm of Civil War. His name would be used by Aldous Huxley to sum up the backwardness of the seventeenth century. It would be used to invoke the fertility of the Renaissance mind, and its happy union of disciplines artistic and scientific. He would be ridiculed as the last of the crackpot experimenters before the Scientific Revolution. He would be the subject of a reverential biography written in 1932 by an infatuated don, in prose that yearned for Sir Kenelm, but also for his successors, lost in the trenches of France and Flanders. He inspired myriad fantasies.

  ‘Sir Kenelm Digby . . . loved to talk in six languages. He was a bold, sexy pirate, a wide reader and an even wider knower.’

  Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History, 2006

  Kenelm was haunted by the future, which announced itself in echoes and pratfalls, in twitches as his body fell asleep, or hypnagogic visions as he fasted or daydreamed, when ideas from the far future sounded to him as if they came from the near past.

  His modesty did not prevent him from wondering if he was an angel. Angels were said to live in many times concurrently. While heads were bowed in pews, he scanned the fiery-footed angels who flared across rood screens and murals, looking for likenesses of himself.

  To him, time was circular, and alchemical Wisdom was a golden chain, never-ending, eternally returning. The ourobouros eating its own tail was an alchemical cypher, later taken up by mathematicians. To Kenelm, the mathematical symbol used by Einstein to represent infinity was instantly legible:

  Sometimes, in the right conditions, when he had an empty belly and a clear head, and he was moved by singing, poetry or the heart-suck of his wife’s kiss, Sir Kenelm grasped the roundness of existence – its simultaneity – encircling him, and he knew that he lived concurrently with what had been and what was to come. Most of the time, though, he felt the blessed lack of hindsight each of us needs to be at peace.

  Kenelm stood on Garlickhythe jetty, breathing the fish-ripe Thames, his hair rising in the wind like tentacles around his ears. He was convinced: if the air was full of invisible Atomes, then extraordinary things could be accomplished through the air. Messages and thoughts could be conveyed, signals given.

  In times to come, everything would be done from a distance. Power would be maintained, peoples directed, healing performed. Signals would be sent and received, voices heard, hieroglyphs exchanged.

  Sir Kenelm heard a metallic swishing of the wind, so bright it sounded almost musical, very like the noise of the wind playing his obelisk at home. He wondered if it was a sign or portent, come to him across the air, to tell him that his Cure was right, and Parson Foster wrong. He thought of his Pylon, his Mast of Divination standing in the garden at Gayhurst, the wind playing it like a lyre, and he felt certain he could hear it, jangling sweetly.

  He had a vision of power cables and pylons bridging the countryside, singing in the wind, like vast Aeolian harps.

  The wind hurled a drop of rainwater in his face, then another. He wished to know if he was practising quackery, or if his Cure was a just Cure, a true Cure. He screwed up his courage and asked the obelisk:

  Do Atomes travel in the air?

  The sky looked full of thunder, and Digby held his hands out in front of him, in the position of the alchemist at his labours, and at that moment the wind reached into Digby’s purse – and while Digby did not cause this, neither he did not stop it – and the wind caught one of the sheets of Parson Foster’s letter, raised it up and away, down the Thames, and then another sheet peeled off, and another, and another, until the Hoplocrisma-Spongus was scattered and floating down the rain-swelling river.

  ‘Honey bee venom is used cosmetically to fool skin into thinking it has been lightly stung with the toxin melittin . . . Experts collect bee venom by placing a pane of glass alongside a hive and running an electrical current through it which encourages the insects to sting the surface.

  Because the bee’s lance remains in its body, it does not die. Tiny quantities of venom are so valuable that it costs up to £30,000 for one ounce . . . The Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Cornwall are already fans.’

  Daily Mail newspaper, February 2013

  Venetia was lying on her daybed, exhausted after her game of cards, and Chater was sitting at the other end, rubbing her feet.

  She was teasing Chater, because she had discovered that his Christian name was Posthumous.

  ‘Thomas Posthumous, my lady.’

  ‘Why did a letter come for Posthumous Thomas Chater, then?’

  ‘My mother is old, she becomes confused, she has them the wrong way about.’ His eyes bulged when he became agitated, so Venetia made an effort to hide her hilarity. She perceived his name had been a trouble to him in the school-room. />
  ‘I know the reason for your name is solemn, Chater.’

  ‘My mother would have done better not to compound for me the loss of my father with such a name.’

  Chater kneaded the sole of her foot.

  ‘My lady seems so happy,’ he said reproachfully.

  ‘My Chater seems happy too,’ she parried.

  He made an equivocating wiggle with his head.

  She had no idea; she did not know what it was to behold an angel of love, bearded and strong like a prophet, and to talk soft words with him, and burn with feeling for him, and yet not to be able to hold him, or touch him, though the will to do so was as strong as Holy Fire, which raged over him and yet would not consume him, so he stayed blazing all the livelong day, like the priest in the temple at Jerusalem, because Chater was righteous, and would not touch Father Dell’Mascere. But her – she was married to her love. What a waste. Sir Kenelm would have made an excellent priest.

  ‘My lady is fortunate that she is not like the other ladies at court,’ he said.

  ‘How so?’ she asked.

  ‘Some of them wear their improvements so openly, it is hard to see the woman behind the handiwork. They are like St Paul’s – an old cathedral with a new frontage.’

  Venetia laughed, but she knew he meant to disquiet her.

  ‘Oh, how lovely that you compare them to that holy place. It is true that some of the women at court are as celebrated as St Paul’s, and they have many devoted pilgrims, too . . .’ She laughed naughtily, thinking to make a bawdy joke about the ladies’ suitors going always in and out, but then she looked at Chater and decided that was going too far. He was become more pious since they came to town.