Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  She was unashamed, therefore, by her decision to introduce Lancelot Choice to Aletheia Howard. Yes, she had been encouraged to keep him secret, but she could not resist the double boon of pleasing Aletheia, while spending more time with Mr Choice. He was so personable and his cure so efficacious – what harm could it do to extend their circle of confidence to include Aletheia? Besides, Aletheia had worn her down, prodding Olive for her beauty secrets with the force that her character and degree conferred, until Olive gave way. Aletheia had not yet thanked her as such, only given a long snort of satisfaction, and called her ‘good girl’; Lancelot Choice, moreover, merely treated this engagement as another job of work, rather than a special favour, but it was, she felt sure, a matter of time, before he saw her differently.

  Syringes and Lemons

  Say the Bells of St Clement’s

  By the darkening river, at Blackfriars, in the studio of Van Dyck, a paid model wearing Venetia’s clothes had been sitting with her left arm suspended in a graceful arc across her belly since noon. She gratefully heard St Clement Danes strike a third hour, and hoped a fourth was coming. The Digby double portrait must be nearly done. Her arm’s posture was intended to express marital fertility, but it was arse-work to maintain. She would be glad to get out of this horse-piss-stinking gown before dark. She was chosen for the elegance of her wrists, not her mind – that much was certain. Her long tapering fingers were seen on almost every Van Dyck beauty, and she slept in kid-leather gloves lined with suet.

  The painter, who was not Van Dyck, but his hired fabric master, hummed as he worked; Van Dyck was next door with a new client, always too busy to paint anything but the preliminary under-sketches, the faces and the final flourishes. Margaret Lemon, Van Dyck’s mistress, was pacing about the private side of the studio with her gown unlaced, chomping from a pot of pickled cherries. She ignored the paid model but stopped to watch the sleeves and kirtle of Venetia’s dress fill out.

  ‘Dainty work,’ she said, looking at Venetia’s likeness closely, chewing, her head on one side. Feeling as if Venetia was watching her in return, Margaret Lemon ceased to chomp so noisily, and straightened her back, although she did not feel the need to fasten up her bodice, because in Venetia’s example there was grace, but not correctness.

  Absorbed in his work, the fabric master built upon Van Dyck’s under-sketch with washes of azurite and smalt-blue, creating with utmost care the effect of casually falling fabric, glowing cloth which appeared to pour in random folds from Venetia’s waist. It was the master fabric painter’s job to ensure the viewer’s eye was never drawn to the fabric, never questioned it, but only looked beyond it to the subject’s face; he knew he was little better than a skilled scenery painter. And yet, breathing slowly, holding four paintbrushes in one fist, he was deep in the bliss of creation as he romped across soft peaks of sateen and wallowed in deep, blue-shaded valleys . . . Van Dyck would never know this suspended world, this peace, this playfulness, for he worked always on a knife’s-edge.

  Here comes the candle to light you to bed.

  Dang!

  The last bell in the city struck four.

  Here comes the chopper to chop off your head.

  At Tart Hall, Lancelot Choice prepared a soupçon of Viper Wine for Lady Howard.

  Venetia crossed herself and prayed to win at cards that night.

  The rat-meat fell into the adder pens, and the pouncing jaws began.

  Lady Howard wiped the winedrops from her smiling, bloodied chin.

  Van Dyck’s studio boy lit a lamp, killing the daylight, and the fabric painter surrendered his brushes.

  The palace of Whitehall, that august labyrinth of two thousand rooms, resembled a great hive or nest, built with blind diligence and no design. Each generation added their own improvements, so brick-built chambers extruded off the old stone halls like Gothic red growths, fashionable red telescopic chimneypots sprang out of old eaves, fingering the sky, and all was supported by half-timbered council chambers put up temporarily two hundred years ago.

  The Queen’s Garderobe was formerly a Council Chamber, where feudal lords once carved up the kingdom, and sleepy ministers scratched through endless dispatches, but its pews were now given over to the spectacle of the Queen’s habiliments, where she was dressed in ceremonies of long and stifling intimacy.

  It was important for every lady-in-waiting to attend, as no one wanted to give the impression they had been uninvited, and the Queen liked to have massed ranks of assumed friends around her. She spent a good deal of time changing in a withdrawing room, however, and there was no denying that the event would have been extremely boring for those ladies sitting in the upper tier of the chamber, had they not a million matters to talk of: friendship, and the hidden causes of things; the nature of their dreams, the habits of their servants, and the sayings of their children; of great occasions past and forthcoming, and, most of all, of who had said what, to whom, and what they really meant by it. The tone of their conversation was quick, informative and frank – at least, on most matters.

  When the Queen emerged from her private room, many of the ladies held prospective glasses up to their straining eyes, the better to see her fashions, the pattern of florets and lozenges stamped in hot indentations across the cloth, or the pinking about the cuffs. But as the session wore on, her ladies turned these prospective glasses to other uses.

  ‘I fancy Dame Digby has a brand-new face,’ said little Anne Ogilvy, slowly, glued to the sight of her.

  ‘Cosmetic improvements are of no interest to me,’ said Belinda, Lady Finch, trying to take her glasses back from Anne.

  ‘She does not exercise her face as much as she used to. It seems almost . . . immobile,’ said Anne, holding her ground, and focusing the glasses with her thumb.

  ‘Smiling is plebeian,’ said Lady Finch, ‘and frouncing the brows together gives a woman a mannish look. I have long perfected the art of an immobile countenance. Give me back my glasses, dear.’

  ‘And yet there is something new-born about her, which I cannot place . . .’ continued Anne.

  Straining with barely contained impatience, Lady Finch’s face was far from immobile.

  At that moment, the Queen walked out in a stiff silk of butter-yellow, and the ladies clapped. The Queen appeared not to hear them, as she was caught up in an enquiry over the dress’s hem length. Conversations around the chamber continued at a peaceable hush.

  Venetia turned away from general view, inclining like a heavy-headed lily towards some confidence from her companion, Lucy Hay.

  ‘And now she’s occluded, and I shall see nothing of her,’ fumed Lady Finch. ‘It is all to the good, for I take no interest in the complexions of Catholics, be they never so fair.’

  She remembered that the Queen was Catholic, and said quickly, ‘I jest, of course. Une blague, ha ha.’

  ‘It is a shame and a pity when good women use medicines to make themselves new faces,’ said Mistress Daubigny, joining their conversation. This put Olive Porter in the middle of them, and without the least hesitation, she agreed with Mistress Daubigny.

  ‘Oh, the abuse of cosmetics is a terrible shame.’

  All the ladies turned to look at Olive, and her tightly tweaked cheeks, and her dilated pupils, and her unnaturally smooth skin – and none of them said a word.

  ‘I don’t know anyone who does it,’ continued Olive, to fill the silence. ‘I would not myself, certainly.’

  They were kind ladies, and they all ignored her.

  ‘It is indeed a great pity to meddle with one’s face,’ said Lady Finch, squinting through her spyglass as hard as she could.

  ‘It is terribly sad,’ said Mistress Daubigny, leaning dangerously far over the balcony, the better to see how sad it was.

  ‘I think her neck is lovelier than ever,’ said Anne, unguardedly.

  Indignantly, the ladies in possession of glasses scrutinised Venetia’s neck. Intuitively aware of the attention, Venetia turned her face to the gallery, t
o indulge those who watched her, and display her most serene countenance. She fanned herself, looking upwards with a contemplative expression she copied from a carved Madonna.

  ‘Oh,’ sighed Lady Finch.

  ‘Ah,’ sighed Mistress Daubigny.

  ‘Ha!’ said Anne, with youthful excitement. ‘I told you!’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ murmured Mistress Daubigny.

  There was silence while all absorbed as much detail of Venetia’s physiognomy as they could.

  ‘There is not so much gold in the world that would persuade me to take whatever cure she has taken,’ said Lady Finch.

  ‘There is no cure can do that. She is younger and more beautiful than I remembered, that is all,’ said Mistress Daubigny.

  ‘Pah!’ said Aletheia Howard, coming back from what she called ‘taking the air’ outside (by which everyone knew she had been smoking her pipe). ‘Lady Digby has been at her husband’s cabinet of medicine, I wouldn’t doubt. She’s married to an alchemist who supplies her with the ultimo, the finest treatment.’

  ‘What treatment would that be?’

  ‘How so, what treatment?’

  ‘Do tell.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Aletheia, savouring this moment, ‘the one they say “Ripens Wives”.’ She smiled mischievously, and stroked the spot on her chin where the wine had dribbled.

  ‘Ripens Wives?’

  ‘Oh, there are plenty of them about. The ripening wives. They are everywhere!’ She tried to catch Olive’s eye, to wink at her, but Olive had busied herself with reading her prayerbook. Aletheia continued: ‘No, come, come – Ripens Wives is an anagram for Viper’s Wine, which is her new beauty cure.’

  ‘It sounds like a most dangerous tonic, and I should have none of it,’ said Mistress Daubigny, her glasses still focused upon Venetia.

  ‘Nor I, never, no, not a drop,’ said Lady Finch, also looking intently at Venetia, like a feline at prey.

  Then one by one, they all said to Lady Howard, urgently, as if they were very keen to protect themselves from this dangerous cure, ‘Tell me again. What is it called?’

  It was the last Levee before Christmas, and the Queen’s costumes were grander than usual, and she now emerged wearing a dress of silver and gold, with a rebato collar, and yet the spyglasses of all the ladies were focused not on the Queen’s high collar, but in the wrong direction entirely.

  ‘It must be a most choice decoction.’

  ‘It’s the drink of choice, my dear.’

  ‘Indeed – Choice on Fenchurch Street.’

  ‘Choice would be a fine thing.’

  Choice, Choose, Chosen. A bird, a turtle dove loosed or lost from the royal cages, flapped around the hall, struggling to get out. Its beating wings against the high ceiling created such an atmosphere of distraction in the Chamber, that much delay and chatter followed, and the whispers of ‘Vein Wiper’ and ‘View Repines’ and ‘Ripen Wives’ chased one another across the benches, as the letters were rearranged in the slipstream of its wings, and word continued to spread until the only male present in the room, the young Prince Royal, burst into loud tears, and the Queen’s Levee was adjourned.

  INIGO JONES’S MOTION PICTURES

  ‘These shows are nothing else but pictures with light and motion.’

  Inigo Jones on the court masques, 1632

  CHRISTMAS WAS COMING apace, and Lucy Bright wrote to Venetia asking her to attend a rehearsal for the Queen’s Twelfth Night Masque. Venetia went unmasked, wearing her silver slippers and her gladdest attitude. The court had removed to Somerset House for the holidays, and the north courtyard at Whitehall was like a builders’ yard, all sawdust and commotion, with stage flats and props stacked against the fountains. Lucy Bright was in the courtyard, watching carters unloading a vast tree made of wire and silk. She came to greet Venetia as soon as she saw her carriage, and took her on a promenade of the set.

  The palace, seat of power in England, was urgently busy: a joiner was making a chariot without any back, and two set-makers painting wooden trumpets. A queue of apprentice stagehands were watching a demonstration on the art of gently agitating false trees, so their silk leaves rustled as if in a breeze. From a wagon came bales of flocked azure sea.

  Stepping inside the Banqueting Hall, the ladies found it semi-dark, the windows blacked out. A stage had been erected at one end, with rigging, ropes and a ladder 40 foot high. A huge consignment of boxes stood in the middle of the hall. ‘These are full of pink-coloured glass,’ said Lucy, opening one and holding up a rose-tinted glass candle-shield. ‘They will create the stage-effect of dawn. The effect will last perhaps three minutes, but the cost is almost a thousand pounds.’

  They exchanged looks. The cost sickened them both. It was wasteful, and wrong, and Venetia loved it.

  ‘Worth every penny,’ she said.

  Venetia opened a box containing mirrored candle-shields. ‘These are very like the ones we used for the Masque of Blackness,’ she said. ‘They caused a sudden éclaircissement when the deity appeared – Queen Anna was quite blinded by her own entrance.’

  ‘The mirror shields are another essential expense,’ sighed Lucy. ‘Though why they must buy new ones for each masque, I do not know. People hear the words “for the Queen”, and pull a price out of the air.’

  ‘The Queen says the Medici have masques six times a year,’ said Venetia.

  ‘And Valois, and Lorraine,’ said Lucy. The names were current and powerful, and simply saying them conferred sagacity.

  ‘Ah yes, I have brought my gown,’ said Venetia, holding up a basket with a blaze of Ultramarine folded in it, her old treasure, her famous gown, now quite shabby, but highly coloured as a kingfisher. Lucy Bright had asked her to bring it for the Queen, who was considering a bright blue dress for the masque.

  ‘Of course,’ said Lucy, taking the basket from her in a demonstration of her superior authority at court. Dressing the Queen’s body was a matter of such reverential importance, governed by vast and elaborate protocol, that Lucy did not thank Venetia for bringing her dress, but Venetia thanked Lucy for allowing her to bring it.

  Sweeping up the shallow stairs in their skirts, they climbed onto the stage. Even in the half-light, the Banqueting Hall was wonderful from this perspective, a model of Palladian style, representing a kingdom of order, proportion and symmetry, where everyone had their fixed place. To Venetia’s eyes, its elegance connoted virtue. She felt safe and at home here; ready to shine.

  ‘Master Jones, come down! I have Lady Digby,’ called Lucy.

  Inigo Jones was atop the stage-ladder, hanging a smooth wood-slatted circular object from the gantry. He waved decorously. ‘Ladies, excuse me, I am raising a Harvest moon. If I desist now I will be eclipsed.’

  ‘You were eclipsed long ago,’ boomed Ben Jonson, lumbering out from behind a plaster urn, his big black smock pulled down over his tummy, his hands full of handwritten scribbled papers.

  When he saw Venetia he began, as ever, to extemporise a new panegyric for her:

  ‘Half the world in thy retinue would be too few

  And leave the odd in war against the even

  Competing to be the first to see thy face each morn . . .’

  Venetia knew this one. He was re-using the same rhymes from long ago.

  ‘As it slid gently off from heaven?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’ll do,’ said Ben, closing his eyes for a time as if in pain or dull remembrance. ‘Now I must off and finish this play, Venetia,’ he said, shuffling towards the wings. ‘I’ve a play to put out, you know. Yes, me—’ He broke off into one of his lyrics:

  ‘Me, the tardie, cold

  unprofitable chattel, fat and old

  who hardly doth approach

  but to break chairs or crack a coach . . .’

  He spoke almost entirely in his own verses now. Since his recent palsy-the-wits, conversation had become impossible. He talked in old bricks, laid together end to end. His brain was become the maggoty, abbreviated
book of his own quotations.

  He kissed his hand to Venetia, a gesture he fancied was more winning than it was, and turned to the wings, keen to give the impression he was busy. Venetia followed after him, whispering urgently so that Lucy Bright might not hear her.

  ‘Let me have a pretty part, dear Ben, and not be made to represent Night, or a hag, or a spider?’ She cultivated, as ever, a charming tone of speech, but the smile in her voice was as unnatural as the painted wooden oranges on the scenery behind her.

  ‘Night?’ asked Ben, jowls swinging with confusion. With one eye bulging, he peered into the shadows of the wings, looking for his help. ‘Where’s William?’

  A young man was sitting on the prompt stool, and Venetia guessed this was William Davenant, who was assisting Ben with his writing these days. He was wearing a collar in the style of his supposed illustrious father, and his hair parted in the middle, too, like the portrait in the First Folio, which struck Venetia as a pretty trick.

  Instinctively positioning herself so that her hair caught the light that spilled from the stage, while her face was held in the soft shadows of the wings, she breathed deeply, and Davenant looked up at her. She let him have one of her most candid smiles.

  ‘Is this him, at last? The young pretender. I have heard much talk of this Davenant who is to be crowned with a wreath of swan-feathers.’

  He was holding a quill pen, which she tapped with her finger. Davenant leaped up, guessing who she was.

  ‘He has the inky mark upon him,’ she said, looking at his fingers’ ends, which were bestained with black. ‘’Tis a pox can only be cured with candles and much parchment. I’ll warrant he was born with an inkwell in place of a navel. If only we had use of this Davenant in days gone by, when we were playing festivals outdoors, all summer long, and especially when we made the Tethys Festival. It greatly wanted wit, Master Jonson being out of favour at the time – or was he in Scotland? No matter; they are the same. So the writing fell to Master Daniel, and he struggled and he strained and in the end we had few lines, but much music . . .’