Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  The lily, looking back at her, creaked fibrously into bloom, exhaling a breath of musk and cream and incense, inviting Venetia closer until she could smell its glandular undertow. As she closed her eyes, its rusted stamen stained her neck with two brown imprints, fang marks that smudged into love-bites.

  Tansy, or Mugwort, or Gold Buttons – by any name it was as helpful to a woman with the smallpox – was sprouting in the medicinal section of the nursery, and the gardener cut her a good quantity. It cost, but of course it cost. They stoked the fires here constantly, and watered as frequently too: there was foetid greenness growing on the window casements, becoming thicker all the time, blotting out the light more now than when she had stepped inside, as if the pace of life in here were unstoppably quick, and oppressed by the close atmosphere, she darted outside into the wholesome cold.

  The Gardener saw her scratching herself surreptitiously under her shawl, and he moved in front of her, blocking her path, looking intently into her eyes, scanning them with his own. Even in the garden light, her pupils were too wide.

  ‘Papaver somniferum,’ he said, more to himself than to her. ‘I wish you joy of your dreams, my lady.’ With a small bow, he pointed her towards the tiny door in the wall. ‘Take care to waken from them.’

  Penelope had her tansy by nightfall, but the lily pollen stains clung to Venetia’s skin until evening when Kenelm, searching her body and breathing her incense-scent, found the yellow smudge of them on her neck, and removing them with his thumb and his hot tongue, covered that spot with loving kisses, which suck’d the vessels under her skin so gently she could barely feel them breaking, and pleasured in the feeling, until she realised what he was doing and told him to stop, in the name of her honour.

  Now Venetia was herself again, Kenelm’s life was full of luxury. He was like a greedy bumblebee rolling in pollen. At their table they took baked venison, from Gayhurst, cooked as Kenelm directed, so it could be eaten with a spoon. Gellied bones, and whipped-cream syllabub; veal with sweetbreads, champignons and truffles: what a banquet of the senses they enjoyed! He felt the fitness of his tongue through much licking.

  He had the bare plaster wall in their chamber covered with leather, tooled into fleur-de-lis patterns, and its richness went in at the eye, yet pleased the fingers, without touching.

  Godly men and women, Puritans so-called, preferred plain things, of lasting quality. But Kenelm was in love with decoration, opulent colourings and fretwork. To his mind there was nothing that could not be improved with a few swirls and spandrels.

  He bought young Kenelm a pistol, inlaid with pearl and chased with silver. It had the enchantment of all miniature things, and its cartridges were pluggits of cork.

  The sound of Venetia approaching made him weak: the sigh of her skirts, the lush heaviness of them. He pinched the lawns and tiffanies she wore between his fingers, feeling their fine grain, marvelling at the abilities of worms.

  Whenas in silks my Julia goes

  Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows,

  That liquefaction of her clothes . . .

  Venetia’s silks were a fetish for her admirers, who used to crouch at keyholes to watch the rhythm, the pattern of her walking, and the flare of her gown as she stooped or stepped. It gave young men a frisson to think that the silk moved because she had a pair of legs, independently articulated like a perfect doll, which (yes, no word of a lie) divided at the top . . . For Kenelm the doll was gone, replaced by the woman he loved, but an echo of the fetish remained, in the rustle of her silk, and the flow of her sateen, its indecent slipperiness.

  Next, when I cast mine eyes and see

  That brave vibration each way free;

  O how that glittering taketh me!

  Venetia’s hair was curled with the expensive new pomander he bought her, which was spiced with bergamot and ambergris from the belly of the whale, a scent that came to define that time of their lives even as they were living it, so that whenever Kenelm caught it he sighed for last week, last month, last year.

  He wondered: was his wife his greatest luxury of all? It was the other way round. There was no luxury without Venetia.

  When Kenelm sat at his desk he closed his eyes and ran his fingertips over the tooled letters of his newly bound books, reading in the ridges and grooves the deep and light luxuries of his life, and imagining he was touching Venetia. He almost went to her, so they might roll all their sweetness up – but he stopped himself, and opened his book instead. They had time enough for that to come: tonight, after dinner; tomorrow; a lifetime, indeed. Was this not the blessing of marriage?

  ‘It was [my] fortune to fall into the company of a Brachman [Brahmin] of India . . . which man was one of those that the Indians held in great veneration for their professed sanctity and deep knowledge of the most hidden mysteries of theology and nature. [The Brahmin enlightened Sir Kenelm so that] . . . after much patience, and by abstracting my thoughts from sensual objects, and raising my spirit up to that height that I could make right use of these powerful names which this art teacheth, I got a real and obedient apparition as I desired.’

  The Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1631

  ‘A button of gold could stretch, as thin as a hair, from Montpelier to Paris.’

  Sir Kenelm Digby, On Bodies and the Immortality of Souls, 1659

  ‘OMMMMMMM.’

  Sir Kenelm was meditating. His pantalooned legs were crossed beneath him, his lacy cuffs rested upon his knees, his dark gold hair lay upon his collar, and his thumbs and first fingers pinched together into a point, like Bodhisattva’s teardrop. His pale eyelashes were closed.

  Thoughts of worldly advancement – Sir Francis Windebank said more monopolies were being offered by the Crown, for loans – entered his mind, and he cast them away. He breathed in light, and breathed out darkness.

  Thoughts of the tightness of his garters entered his mind, and he cast them away. He breathed in darkness, and turned it into light – for was the meditating subject not using his body as a jordan? As a flask or alembic, for the transmutation of base matter into higher thoughts?

  ‘Ommmmmmm . . .’

  Sir Kenelm had come across his old chest of relics from his teenage travels, rare trinkets he had collected on his journey through Alexandria and Anatolia – tiny jangling bells from a temple; a representation of the evil eye; his Persian cloth, decorated with a design of palms that would in a few decades be called Paisley; some scented sticks that were even now giving off a thoughtful odour; and some rolls of parchment painted with Buddhist mandalas, which had greatly interested him, since they were so similar to English astrologer’s wheels.

  ‘Ommmmmmm . . .’

  There was also a small holy statue which he had bought at great cost, having been assured it was an ancient relic, even though after purchasing it he discovered underneath it a small stamp saying ‘Made In China’.

  Sir Kenelm vibrated with the irenic sounds that the Brahmin had taught him would lead first to visions, then to Vedic flying and finally to divine Atman transcendence, as he fingered his Catholic rosary beads.

  ‘Ommmmmmmm . . .’

  Downstairs, in her bedroom, Venetia was standing, an empty vial in her hand, staring at a grey stitch. Innumerable grey threads, twisted together, created one grey stitch. Next to it was a yellow stitch, and next to that another grey stitch, then a green stitch, an umber stitch. Grey, green, umber.

  There was no design or purpose to them. They were unreasoning, varicoloured stitches only. As she blinked, her eyelashes were like a heron’s wings flapping.

  Grey stitch, yellow stitch, green stitch, umber.

  The colours were a jumble-pie.

  She took a step back.

  From here she could see that each stitch was packed together like sacks of wheat, making up the smoothish surface of a textile, bunched a little with the tension of warp over weft.

  She blinked, and the glassy blackness of her iris tightened as she stepped back again, widening her f
ield of vision.

  From two steps away, she could see the dark stitches represented depths while the lighter ones were sun-glinting peaks. Each thread of colour served a larger purpose in the picture; her step backwards had created order out of chaos. Perception was everything. She reached for the word pixelated – but it was three hundred years away.

  Three steps back, and she saw the stitches were part of the tapestry on her bedroom wall depicting the myth of Hero and Leander – Leander was peeping around a rich curtain, which was made out of yellow and grey stitches, its folds falling in dark green and umber stitches.

  So one textile creates the illusion of another, thought Venetia. Each stitch both is a stitch and represents a stitch. And she went close to the tapestry again, and repeated the words, and together they made mad music:

  ‘Each stitch is a stitch.’

  ‘Ommmmmmmm.’

  ‘Is a stitch is a stitch is a stitch . . .’

  ‘Ommmmmmmm.’

  ‘. . . is a stitch is a stitch.’

  As Sir Kenelm meditated, he flew about the world like one of Lucretius’s Atomes, unfettered, unmotivated, drawn by forces of heat and light.

  He felt tiny neutral particles, neutrinos, passing through his body, a million squared per second, perpendicular to the sun. The antineutrinos, shadow mirror images, passed behind them.

  Venetia picked up one of her fallen hairs, long and gracefully curved, particoloured, silvery at the root and rich black thereafter, where she had coloured it.

  A button of gold could stretch, as thin as a hair, from Montpelier to Paris, thought Sir Kenelm. He saw the string, reaching infinitely far like saliva, growing telescopically ever thinner. He plucked at it, and like a harp string, it played a note for a long time, vibrating back and forth across itself.

  She took out of its velvet drawstring her black obsidian mirror, a scrying glass. A steel glass showed the truth unpartially, as Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem told, but a scrying glass was much more sensitive. She breathed upon it, and when the white cloud cleared she looked into its deep lake, dark and still.

  Kenelm thought about telescopic string, and how it stretched, and yet retained its usefulness, and how a tied piece of string was the strongest thing he knew, and he wondered if Atomes that sailed through the air were string-strung, flying Frisbees.

  Venetia looked into the abyss, and saw you looking back at her.

  The atom split. Kenelm’s mind snapped back on itself like a rubber band and flew into the future, into particle physics, string theory, superstring theory, supersymmetry, Higgs boson theory, M-theory – all flashing fast and faster, turning like a zoetrope, changing and improving with every spin of the wheel.

  Isaac Newton’s mother, still only a child, danced around a maypole in the Lincolnshire countryside.

  Venetia lying on her stomach, gazing into the dark lake, looked straight at you and asked: ‘Well, what did you expect? What could I do – except become Narcissus?’

  Kenelm felt a tug on the golden string that ran through him, into the future, in the direction of a unifying theorem that reconciled general relativity with quantum mechanics, which they called A General Theory of Everything. Currents of exhilaration pulsed through his vibrating body. Ommmmmm. Alchemy’s Great Work might yet be achieved, three hundred years hence.

  Ping! Sir Kenelm lost his concentration momentarily, and celestial spam arrived in his brain: ‘14cm black Wiccan obsidian scrying mirror, highly polished both sides. Dispatched within 1 day, seller guaranteed . . .’ He tried to clear his mind by breathing.

  In her mirror, Venetia saw acres of Dark Matter, streaming like fast-forwarded clouds, vapid cosmic gas, the ego in sublimation. She saw herself in eleven different space–time dimensions. At eighteen, at twenty-one, at thirty-three. She saw herself as others saw her, not directly, but in the third person, as object not subject. The string between the first person and the third person broke, and she saw herself as a stranger would see her, with an objective eye. Venetia fished into the darkness and trawled up photographs.

  Now she took Sir Kenelm’s hand and made him look into the mirror also, so he could see them streaking across the skies.

  Sir Kenelm soared amongst the Dark Matter of the heavens, the distant shores of the cosmos that had no name and no definition, and he was as happy there as he was exploring the terra incognita on his own maps, the Dark Lands beyond the known perimeters of the Indies and the Americas, beyond which a man might found a kingdom in his own image, or at the very least, in his own name.

  She dived deep into her glass, falling into her scrying mirror plundered from an Aztec kingdom, made of obsidian glass polished by the excrement of bats – half-digested beetle wing-cases, baby bird bones and enzymes – which had scrubbed its surface into a mirage of almost-wet smoothness, potent as an LED screen.

  The Dark Matter swelled and irradiated, bright as sky coral. Venetia and Kenelm fell out of the sky together and landed on their bed, holding each other fast, their ideas tumbling over one another like clattering shells. The signal was lost.

  A mouse ran, a dog barked, a bell rang and the display screen flickered and cut out. The visitor from Porlock had arrived, and Mistress Elizabeth was knocking at Venetia’s locked door, calling that Olivia Porter was here and was refusing to take off her outer-garments, saying she was ready to accompany her to the Strand.

  VENETIA FURIOSA

  IN WHICH OUR HEROINE, TOGETHER

  WITH HER LIEUTENANTS-AT-ARMS, MAKES AN

  ATTACK UPON THE BRITISH BOURSE.

  THE SCENE: THE New Exchange, or Britain’s Bourse. A proud building on the Strand, housing a great covered market, designed by the same hand that built palaces and chapels-royal (Master Inigo Jones) and shamelessly modelled upon a Mohammedan marketplace or Turk-like Bazaar. It is the Greatest Market ever to be filled up with such piles of specious rarities, toys and trifles. All the Exquisites and Epicures of London are gathered here, to see one another and to be seen; to see, to touch, to want, to wish, to buy and, on going home, to lose, break, spoil and forget.

  For Venetia and her friends, it is a place of surpassing vulgarity, which they fondly scorn, even as they hurry to visit. Entering by carriage, they pass through jostling sedan chairs and hot dung piles, shouting traders calling them in, and Puritans calling them away.

  Bourse Boy: What lack ye, ladies? Fair cut-work falling bands, vardingales, periwigs, polking sticks?

  Praise-God Jones: Leave Him to furnish you with everything you need—

  Bourse Boy (louder): China chains, china bracelets, china scarves, china fans, china girdles . . .

  Praise-God Jones (yet louder): Enter not this house of luxury, for all your food comes from Him—

  Bourse Boy (louder still): Birds of paradise, muskcads, Indian mice, Indian rats, China dogs and china cats . . .

  Praise-God Jones (sings very loudly): For He hath regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden—

  Bourse Boy (shouting): Umbrellas, sundials, billiard balls, purses, pipes, toothpicks, spectacles. See what you lack!

  [Bourse Boy’s words taken from Ben Jonson’s Entertainment on the Opening of the New Exchange, 1609]

  Shielding their faces and picking up their skirts, the ladies came through the din, Chater following behind. Once they were through the first portico they settled on the public seats, where one of the Bourse stewards gave them a cup of hot Bishop, while another kneeled and removed the pattens that the ladies wore to protect their shoes, and Chater went ahead to procure their small-change. Olive had clearly been waiting a while to speak privately to Venetia, and as soon as Chater was gone, she asked with big eyes: ‘Do you think “He” will be here?’

  When she realised that Olive was referring to Master Lancelot Choice, Venetia said firmly ‘No’, and called her a ninny, and a nodgcombe, hoping her tartness would bring Olive to her senses.

  Preparing herself for scrutiny, for eye-darts and gossip wounds, Venetia raised her veil, so it framed her face, and wi
th a small deliberate exertion of her facial muscles, like an actress warming up, she raised her eyebrows, lifted her chin, and prepared a gentle, smiling countenance to show the world.

  They had not come for anything particular, except for the easy fun of it, and she knew from experience that they discovered things they wanted to buy soon enough – that was the wretched cleverness of the place. But being efficient by nature, the ladies set out to cover the whole place in a clockwise motion, moving purposefully through the crowds and dawdlers. They only stopped to talk to friends, not every acquaintance, otherwise they would never leave. First, they toured haberdashery – fans, shoe-roses, a multitude of ribbons, collars and cuffs. They dallied, comparing prices and testing lace with their fingers. Chater followed, condemning every article as poor taste, sucking his teeth and shaking his head at the jewelled pill boxes and pink feather fans.

  Venetia and Olive inspected a set of fine marquetry chests, pacing around them like two hunters around a dying stag. Chater found fault with their inlay. He was very taken, however, by some calfskin gloves, and the ladies left him deliberating between grey and orange. They joined a small crowd and saw a monkey with a little hat on dancing a jig, though not as nicely as the Queen’s pet monkey Pug. The monkey somehow discerned that Venetia was his rival for the crowd’s attention, and made a great play for her, prancing at her feet, bowing, and hiding itself in her skirts, to the crowd’s delight.

  Onwards the ladies walked to the sweetmeats, the suckets and sweet-salats and sugar-puffs and fresh fried pain-perdu, for which the hungry crowd was ten deep. Venetia made Chater go and wait to buy some, so they could pass on without him to the penny pamphlets, to browse the poems, songs, recipes and popular stories of murder and woe.