To Venetia’s guilty eyes, Kenelm appeared to be looking straight up at the house of Lancelot Choice, but in fact he was calling up to the window of the physician Robert Fludd, whose rooms were next door.
In the open air, the wind catching his voice, Kenelm was saying loudly: ‘The very same came to me this morning.’ Or something like it, Venetia could not catch every word. ‘So let me come up,’ said Kenelm, his hand on his sword. ‘Are you not with any customer? Aye, so I shall.’
And so Kenelm was gone from Venetia’s sight, stepping into the house of Fludd.
Inside Fludd’s hallway there was one of his famous automata: the dragon and St George, its metalwork very fine if now a little dull with age. Kenelm wondered if it was still in working order. He looked about the hallway, but there was no one watching him, and he tipped with his finger very gently the lance of St George, which made the snakeskin-bound dragon rear up and backwards – his articulated wings spreading with a smooth and subtle motion – and then after a click let the counterpoise within the dragon spring, its mouth shot forth a long red fabric tongue. Kenelm was disappointed; this creature did not appear to be ensouled, only clockwork. The best Thaumaturgic models surprised you, since you could not see their workings . . .
Then, poof!
A tiny flare of flaming gas issued from the creature’s nose, burning up all the dust in the air with a bang, and startling Kenelm so he flinched. A thin thread of satisfied smoke issued from the dragon’s warty nostrils.
‘Ha!’ said Fludd, who was watching from a mirror positioned at the top of the stair.
Fludd was a dragon-tamer, and a bull-keeper (he had also made a Minotaur that bellowed and ground its hoof) and he was master of a lyre that played itself. He was the esteemed author of the Catholica Medicorum, which ran to five volumes already and was not finished, and though he lacked the personable, solicitous nature that some require in a physician, he had built up a considerable practice.
No doubt that dragon trick is played several times each day, thought Kenelm. He suspected that during the evening hours Fludd was also a Philosopher, practising the Great Work, but by day he was a physician who cured by means of metallurgy, healing plants, natural amulets and, yes, weapon-salves. He was Kenelm’s foremost fellow practitioner in this, though the two of them preferred to be unique than to be allied, and they maintained a watchful, distant cordiality, preserved by the fact that they did not often meet.
They sat in front of Fludd’s fire upstairs, under a dozen bladders that were hanging up to dry, and Fludd fetched them a small tot of plague water – ‘Keepeth me, keepeth thee,’ he said, knocking it back.
‘Is this the receipt of de la Porta?’ asked Kenelm, after he had taken a sip.
‘No,’ said Fludd. ‘It is my own, of rue, agrimony, wormwood, celandine and sage; of mugwort, dragon’s-eye, pimpernel and marigold, clarified with featherfew, burnet, sorrel, scabius and wood-bellony. After it is steeped in avence, tormentil, cardus benedictus and rosemary, with angelica, burdock and green walnuts.’ Fludd had such punctiliousness in his personality, he was himself rather like an automaton.
‘Delicious,’ said Kenelm. ‘Let me have the recipe? But to the matter of the moment. May I see your letter?’
Fludd, glowering, pulled the Hoplocrisma-Spongus out from under a cushion, and Kenelm saw as he scanned it that they had received documents that were very like.
‘The Parson Foster, hungry for fame, it seems, has already published this at Powles.’
Published the Hoplocrisma-Spongus? Kenelm smote with his fist the chimney breast that abutted the room in which Venetia sat. She did not hear it, though in Lancelot Choice’s grate, an ember collapsed.
‘I intend to respond with a pamphlet vindicating my method,’ said Fludd. ‘Or else my practice will fail by it. I must write a Spongus-Sacerdotus – a sponge to wipe away the parson.’
‘You must, Fludd. If I may, I will pay for the printing. We ought to stand together in this bad business. He says – look, here – that in the process of our weapon-salve, we anoint th’offensive weapon with moss grown on a human skull.’
‘Now did I tell you, he’s a jake’s-head.’
‘He also has it that we apply the flesh of a hanged man.’
‘He’s an imbecilic syphilite.’
‘And he says that we require the sacrifice of a cockerel.’
‘Maggotty-brained abortionist.’
‘And he says that we use magical invocations rather than natural Physick.’
‘Injurious toad.’
‘He also says we recommend the wound be washed in the patient’s urine.’
‘Ah, now there he is not without reason.’
‘Oh, suffer me,’ muttered Kenelm, who had long suspected he differed with Fludd on matters of the application of the salve. ‘You still practise that old habit? You will tell me next that you dress the wound with suet.’
‘A nice and proper setting of suet does help the wound to become in-crust.’
‘And you bathe it with turpentine and camphor?’
‘Indeed, it must be bathed thus every day.’
‘This is abhorrent to the rules of nature, Fludd.’
‘This is often the only hope for saving a desperate man.’
And thus the two of them fell to disputation, calling one another very curtly by their surnames, until Digby told Fludd his malpractice had brought the parson down upon them, and Fludd told Digby that without camphor he would suffer a mouldy grave. Digby said he had seen men die of it in France; Fludd accused Digby of being a Catholic conspirator, and got up and showed Digby to the door, where Digby bowed angrily, although Fludd would not look at him, resembling, in his wobbling and ill-suppressed anger, an automaton with a valve or spring missing.
Venetia, still in Lancelot Choice’s study, heard the door slam, and she started as if she were attached to it by a string.
‘Is it him? Is he coming?’
‘No, my lady,’ Lancelot Choice said, standing suavely by the window, watching her husband’s form striding off down the street, his hat in hand. ‘And so he is gone, and we can continue.’ He smiled, showing teeth that came from the bottom of the ocean.
She did not feel relief exactly – the double-quantity of Viper Wine that Lancelot Choice had given her protected her from such vulgar emotion – but she felt a warmer glow than ever. Choice had spent this half-hour or so asking about her health, which interested him to the minutest detail: her new disposition to take only broth until dinner, and how much vigour she had now, compared to the old tiredness she used to feel when she was fasting, and so forth. It had been a pleasant enough way to pass the time, and she almost forgot he was doing it for reasons of professional flattery. It did not occur to her that he asked all these questions because he knew so little about the workings of the Wine.
To allay Venetia’s fear of discovery, Choice had got Margaret to draw her a large cup of newly decocted Viper Wine from the stills, which scalded and burned her throat; she could feel it altering her as it went, flaying the back of her mouth into a new texture, and sitting on her heart like a lump of iron-ore. She made a burp that was richly purple, and tasted of thin metals. What moreish torture! It was what she needed. If she was not to be caught by her husband, she had better be punished by the Wine.
The bell of St Michael Paternoster sounded, and she was glad to think it was pealing for her reprieve. She was passionately grateful she had escaped discovery. But then her mind swerved in a doom-laden direction, and she imagined the bell had a different purpose in its tolling, and in her self-involved way, she began to dramatise in her mind this day, this hour, this instant, as the turning point, the moment she could have been saved, but was lost.
Choice seemed to enjoy the drama, and put his feet upon his desk, showing off his ankles in their fine new thrummed satin stockings. He told her that he was in receipt of a stronger, more efficacious beauty treatment, by which she might easily profit.
‘Your friend, wit
h whom you first visited, whom we call discreetly Proserpina . . .’ said Choice, although he now knew she was Olivia Porter. ‘I cannot say she has taken the benefits of the Drink so well as you have. You have not such a history of tending your beauty already as she has. You are a fresher canvas. And you have taken the Viper Wine up into your breast, your cheek, your brow. There is no stop to what we might achieve,’ he said, stroking his thumb thoughtfully across her forehead. ‘We have means of going deeper. The Viper Drink is only the beginning. But for the giddy instant, my lady must rejoice that so much of her beauty is restored.’
As a lady she did not handle her own coin, except at cards, but her will to secrecy meant she had brought a full purse, to pay for this session, and for her next three months’ drink in advance. The coins seemed to her so bright and slippery, and counting them out was harder than usual. ‘I am faster at the card table!’ she laughed. Margaret Choice helped her into her over-clothes, which Venetia laced with trembling fingers, and leaving the house of Choice it struck her out of the fresh blue sky that there were so many places she wanted to visit, now she could put a face to the world again – so many friends and former suitors whom she longed to behold, to hold in her arms. She would go to the Tower later and pay a visit to her old step-granddam, whom she had not seen for years. She passed a market stall with little cloths hung up for sale, embroidered with mirrors, and although she had seen this sort of cloth many times before, she was drawn to these, marvelling at them, touching their rich fabric.
‘Cry for a beautiful lady, cry for a beautiful face!’
An old beggar woman was shouting at her, thrusting something into her hand, a lavender bag.
‘Cry for me, lady, for I’m almost dead and gone.’
Venetia walked on, not looking at the woman. Passing a stall laid out with tubs of beans, she threw her hands into them, just to feel her fingers in amongst their round smoothness, until the stall-holder shooed her away.
She knew this for what it was – a heightening of mind caused by the Wine. The Wine had made her concupiscent, yes, but not for any man. She was mad for the whole world, the great jarring sensuous wonder of it. She had never walked the streets like this before, as a man might, without direct purpose, simply free to wander. She was becoming brazen.
A tradesman sharpening a knife turned to stare at her, and she gifted him a smile. She had smiles enough now, smiles to spare. I should be punished for this, she thought, as she drifted down the street. So much pleasure cannot come for free. She saw a donkey’s load about to slip off its back, and she ran across the richly muddy road and righted the pack with a huge heave of her arms, and when the carter thanked her, she lifted another heavy box over to him, just to feel her new strength and suppleness.
I will pay hereafter, she thought. My wits will wander; surely I will come to grief. And yet – she clutched her purse – I am safe, I have my senses. It is my sensibilities that overflow. Ahead of her, a bucket of filth splattered onto the road from on high with slow, luxurious inevitability. As her nose twitched it felt as good as scratching an itch. In a morality tale, I would lose my way, here in the streets, and be brought low, and punished – but this is not a morality tale. This is my brief and insignificant existence, God forgive me.
Venetia stopped at a fabric shop and asked if they sold Ultramarine, but the shop girls looked blankly at her.
‘The colour made famous by Venetia Stanley,’ she explained.
‘There’s no call for that shade any more, madam,’ said the shopkeeper. Perhaps she meant, it is too expensive for our clients, Venetia thought, as she walked off, humming a favourite jig as she went. She wondered if they would play this jig at court, after the Candlemas Masque, during the dances. But then she realised it was an old song, which had been popular when she was first come to court twelve – no, fifteen – years ago, and she guessed that it would not be played any more. And she remembered that she could not follow her plan to visit her Percy granddam at the Tower, because she had died last spring, and Venetia felt suddenly old, older than she looked, and out of step with herself, as if she had a double rhythm to her dance.
Seeing Tuttle’s Fields she knew she was nearly home. The chill air felt delicious on her hot lungs, and the early-evening darkness struck her poignantly, a deep, animal reminiscence of all the winters of her past. She was preternaturally thirsty. The sky began to spit sleet that settled in cottony clumps upon her cloak, but as she looked on them they turned into the wettest black-wet water-drops.
When she came into the house, Kenelm looked at her intently. ‘Venetia?’ he said.
So here we have it, she thought. Finally he notices the new enchantment about me. She walked daintily over to him, and took his hand. ‘Yes, my darling?’ she said, with her eyes closed, waiting for his words of love.
‘Have you not heard the news? There is word from Sir Francis Knollys about Penelope. She is sick with smallpox.’
‘Please God she will not be pitted,’ said Venetia.
‘Please God she will not die,’ said Kenelm.
‘To prevent marks after smallpox: Take oyl of sweet almond newly drawn by expression without fire, and with a feather or other fit means anoint all over the face and that it runneth down backwards by both ears, as the party lyeth on their back. Cover carefully with gold leaf – wherever there is a defect of Gold there will be a scar. Leave 10–12 days until it has grown to a hard crust. Do not cover the eyes, but come as close as you can get to the hair.’
Sir Kenelm Digby’s Receipts in Physick, 1668
Burning the cushions in her sitting room, and burning the cards they had played with, and smashing the cups that Penelope might have drunk from – all this was probably in vain, and yet Venetia did it anyway, with a fast and trembling hand.
She was furious with Penelope, and burned the things that Penelope had given her, the handkerchief she had stitched for her and a book of poems set to music. She sprinkled lavender water in the places Penelope had walked in the house, and she set fire to a fistful of rosemary and waved it around and about her doorstep in a circle. She drank a draft of Viper Wine, and then gulped down a foul pox-repelling tincture of rue, wood worm and antimony, which Kenelm prepared for her. She had never had smallpox, and to catch it now, at her age, would be less life-threatening but could lead to face-pitting, pock-marking, cheek-scabbing, a life of wearing patches and black spots, of people peering at her with curious pity. At her darker moments she felt the easeful shadow of death would be preferable to scarring. Venetia prayed for Penelope, to be sure, but she cried for herself. When Kenelm caught her crying, she hoped he would think she was moved with anxiety for her friend, but he knew her better than that.
‘Venice,’ he said, holding her, ‘you must not be afeared. I have a recipe for the pox so it leaves no scars.’
He imagined the patient, mummified with gold, like a Myrmidon. He would use the Highest substance to purify the skin. His fingers danced to get to work.
‘I call it the cure of aurum dixum. ’Tis of mine own devising, based upon receipts from the Duke of Tuscany. I would take more care over your face, my darling, than Rubens does of his ceilings. I would make you a perfect mask of gold.’
‘Thank you,’ sniffed Venetia.
‘And afterwards, I would have the gold melted into a tiny spoon, and keep it in a drawer at Gayhurst.’
‘Have you ever tried this cure before?’ she asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Sir Kenelm, trying to hide how keen he was to try his cure out upon Penelope. ‘Not yet . . .’
‘I tell you this,’ said Venetia, her voice low and awful, so that even a dog would have understood she was angry. ‘You will not bring Penelope’s pestilence into this house. If you tend to her bedside, you shall not come to mine.’
Sir Kenelm found he was very busy with other matters.
Venetia had a new friend in Morpheus. Oh, how she slept. Sleep had never been so exquisite to her, and she could pass whole days in its arms, rolled in brigh
t drifts of dreams. She was able to wake up, perform some little action, kiss her boys and say a prayer with them, perhaps, and then dive straight into the depths again, taking up her dreams where she had left off, chattering into her pillow and smiling as she slept, while her bones stretched, and the incipient dowager’s hump she dreaded disappeared, her shoulders dropping, her spine straightening, her marrow regenerating. Sleep seemed to heal her from within. Her dreams were more vivid than daily life.
‘How does she do it?’ remarked Aletheia Howard to her dog Lemuel, as Venetia trounced her at Glecko. Now Penelope was sick, Venetia needed to look elsewhere for card-playing companions, and she had been picked up by Aletheia Howard, Countess of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk, who loved to have a quick young woman playing at her table. Indeed, she seemed almost pleased to be beaten by her, more amused and admiring with each trump, calling ‘Good girl!’, as if she were allowing her to win, except Venetia knew no gambler ever allowed another gambler to win. The sums Lady Howard played were more than Venetia was used to, and this quickened her enjoyment, sharpening her mind.
Aletheia was the granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick and she had inherited both her desire for independence and the fortune to achieve it. She lived most of the year alone in a mansion near the woods of St James’s called Tart Hall, where her husband the Earl was not allowed to visit. Tart Hall was like a nest, full of strange objects Aletheia liked to keep about her. A gondola was suspended over the doorway to the main hall, and one chamber was titled the Diana Room, for its friezes of the huntress showing muscular thighs in sportive poses. In the Peacock Room were set many-coloured tiles arranged into Moorish arches, and there were tall teapots and a Venetian mooring post of striped red and white, and feather fans and letters and miniatures and a weeping head of Christ set with rubies, and Aletheia sitting in the middle of all this on a low daybed, eyeing her cards shrewdly, pausing only to draw upon a Tobacco Pipe, and narrowing her eyes against its smoke.
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