Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  She indulged Davenant with gossip about legendary masques and their writers, and he lapped it up, impressed by her experience, cajoled by her warmth and familiarity, and yet how grand she was, how grand! She made him feel he was nothing and something all at once.

  When Lucy Bright called out for her, Venetia’s work in the wings was already done.

  ‘Write me some lovely lines, dearheart,’ she cried as she left the writers. Both thought she was talking to themselves alone.

  ‘Dear hart of the forest . . .’ Jonson began; Davenant gave her a comprehending look and a deep bow.

  ‘Make them good lines, won’t you?’

  ‘Lines? Lines are of no account,’ interrupted a loud, disembodied voice that was Inigo Jones in the gantry, using a megaphone. ‘These shows are nothing else but pictures with light and motion.’

  He started the special effects with a signal. Hot white dots danced across the backdrop, then focused into concentric circles, as a mechanician in the pit played with candles and a mirror. ‘Spectacle and motion pictures – this is what they want,’ said Inigo, sitting in his director’s chair.

  Using a paper cut-out, the mechanician made Inigo’s moon wax gradually into a round, bright Harvest moon.

  ‘Light and motion,’ he said.

  A diffuse glow spread across the stage, then turned pink.

  ‘Motion and light,’ said Inigo. ‘And – action.’

  Outside, the sun had risen in the sky, and as the clouds shifted, an errant sunbeam thrust its way through the Banqueting Hall’s black-out windows, piercingly bright. It cut through the hall’s darkness to the stage, illuminating dust dancing in its beam, picking out Venetia’s form and face in a spotlight.

  ‘And there we have it,’ muttered Inigo, crossing himself. ‘All my invention is eclipsed by God.’

  ‘Women goe up and downe with white paintings laid one upon another soe thick that a man might easily cut off a curd of cheese-cake from either of their cheeks.’

  Thomas Tuke, A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing, 1616

  ON FRIDAY, NO delivery came from Dr Choice.

  Venetia shrugged it off, being busy with the household, but found herself out-of-sorts and listless. It was particularly hard to get through the afternoon, when she had a habit of sipping her Wine continuously, as if it were a posset cup. She reached for the vial three times, forgetting it was empty. The day seemed wasted, and she did not even feel like playing cards. By evening she was in her closet, licking the old vials for any remnants of liquor, swilling them out with angel water and gulping it down. She took herself off to bed early, and slept lightly, stirring at every sound in case it was her delivery.

  She woke from angry opium dreams feeling full of self-reproach. She heard her boys calling for Mistress Elizabeth and chastised herself as a bad mother, and a tough old hen, not fit to tread the Queen’s stage. How did she think she could compete? The more paint she applied, the more she would be a figure of fun, like the curd-cheek’d woman in the popular song.

  Most people would tell you that vain women drank Viper Wine, and drinking made them vainer. But that only showed how little understanding most people had. The Wine had freed her from her riddling disquiet about her own appearance, so instead of squandering her time on looking in the bottomless glass, she could turn her powers outside herself, free to go into the world and do better deed, as far as she was able.

  She reckoned that so much Wine was in her blood – that her veins were now made of Viper Wine – that she had the strength to be herself for the day, even without her dose.

  She would put on her shield and vizor and go forward. It was vital to resemble oneself, even at home. From her private cabinet she took a pot of Spanish red, and a squirrel-hair brush, and drew herself a pair of rosebud lips.

  Upstairs, Sir Kenelm was looking over his son’s shoulder at his wastebook, and saw he had been copying the sign of Mercury, doodling, deforming the shape. ‘No,’ he chided. ‘Symbols have power.’

  She used a tiny trowel to mix up some ceruse, adding pearl dust and vinegar.

  ‘Symbols work upon men’s minds more directly than words,’ said Kenelm.

  She used a sponge to pat white ceruse across her chest.

  ‘Words equivocate, and words are used in sophistry, and words turn back and forth and obscure the truth . . .’

  She worked the ceruse up into her neck and jaw, and patted it into her pores so she was as smooth as an ivory chess piece.

  ‘But a symbol is worth a thousand words. Symbols, sigils, hieroglyphs – these are dangerous in and of themselves. They do not correspond to power. They are not analogous with power. They are not translations of power. They are power . . .’ Sir Kenelm realised he was talking more to himself than to his son.

  She clipped a pearl into her right earlobe, and tied black ribbon in her left. Thus she was adroit, pas gauche.

  ‘If you write out a holy acrostic, it can protect you.’

  Now she spread a little blush into her cheek. She was coming into being.

  ‘And if you write a low symbol, it can summon injurious notions, spirits and malevolent will.’

  Her finger slipped and she put a great dark shadow under her eye by mistake. She corrected this with honey water and a rag.

  ‘If we could engrave the perfect symbol, the world would be made anew.’

  Young Kenelm sighed and scratched his leg.

  ‘Cattle die, birds eat their young, it rains flies and the sun is covered over by the clouds for months when this sign is shown abroad,’ said Sir Kenelm, reaching to show young Kenelm what he had drawn.

  Venetia’s left eye was now blue-shaded and beguiling.

  Kenelm showed his son a swastika.

  Venetia put down her brush and smiled at what she had created: the representation of a beautiful woman. Not quite herself, but certainly, a beautiful woman. For when we dress, we symbolise ourselves.

  Kenelm ripped out the swastika and threw it into the fire. He then addressed himself to the page and drew it again, curving its spurs in a different direction.

  ‘But this sign, its mirror opposite, means peace which surpasseth all understanding.’

  In the afternoon, Venetia played with baby John, who looked at Venetia’s bright face wonderingly, and tried to pull off her nose. They babbled to one another, until he was taken away by his nurse. Venetia went to linger by the scullery door in the kitchen, watching the back path and listening out for a messenger’s tread, hoping her delivery was about to arrive.

  Mistress Elizabeth and the under-maid became very self-conscious, fearing she was checking up on them. Venetia started looking through the larder, out of boredom, and telling the servants it was organised all wrong, when a rap came at the scullery door, and Venetia looked up with a glad smile, and rose to answer the door herself. Mistress Elizabeth was brought to doubt her whole understanding of Venetia. Was she cuckolding Sir Kenelm?

  Lancelot Choice was at the door, breathless and hatless, but with one hand on his hip, in affectation of a careless pose. He handed her a crate marked TURNEPS, which she took quickly out of his hand.

  ‘At last,’ she said. ‘My turnips. I have been waiting for my turnips.’

  ‘I am sorry, my lady,’ panted the physician. ‘No staff, and Margaret indisposed, and—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Venetia, ripping off the lid of the crate. Only her deeply engrained femininity prevented her from taking one and drinking it down in front of him. ‘They’re here now.’

  ‘’Tis freshly culled, though not without risk. Our crop of living worms is not easily harvested. Margaret is bitten.’

  ‘Three vials only – you might have brought me a full complement.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said stiffly. ‘And she shall surely recover.’ Venetia realised she had been talking without listening properly, or understanding his meaning, and she impulsively reached out and seized Master Choice’s arm.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. The marriage betwee
n her handsome apothecary and his maternal, grey-haired wife intrigued and touched her. ‘Poor Margaret.’

  He nodded. ‘One escaped brute. Biding its time, brooding in the corner of the pits. Margaret, barefoot in her nightclothes, checking the furnace. In the dark she happened upon him, underfoot, but she swears the viper was laying in wait for her, and as he pounced, the other vipers in their pens were roused and joined in a chorus of hissing rebellion. I say she raves in her mind, but she swears it true. I made good work of him with a shovel, after he bit my Margaret.’

  ‘You lodge above the viper pits?’ She had believed, for some reason, that the vipers lived in the countryside.

  ‘Oh no, madam, they are farmed a good distance hence,’ he said, scratching the back of his neck. ‘We were with them not they with us. Forgive me, I am confusing you with my worry. I have dressed the wound with a good quantity of millipedes, washed in white wine and reduced to a powder. She will be perfectly cured withal. Her ankle is in a state of paralysis, though, my lady, so I must—’

  He turned away, making for the road.

  ‘Go quickly then, and . . .’ She was going to say that she would ask Kenelm for his advice on snakebites and their antidotes, but she remembered she could not, for reasons of her own vain secrecy. ‘And thank you, sir.’

  She saw him walk off down the low brick path, by the South Ditch, which ran like an open sewer along the backs of the houses, a busy crossing for men and women who lived in the new tenements now built over the land between Smithfield and Etheldreda’s at Ely Place, where Chater sometimes went to minister to the secret Catholic congregation.

  She shut the door on him, and there, hidden in the dark privacy between the curtain and the scullery back door, Venetia, Lady Digby, scion of the Northumberland Percys, and the Shropshire Stanleys, Earls of Derby, set her lips around the cold neck of one of her draughts, her throat pulsating as she drank it down. Afterwards, she breathed a deep sweet breath, and her body felt at ease once more. As her strength returned, she ran to tell Master Choice that Sir William Paddy had once cured Prince Henry of a viper rash, her feet carrying her lightly across the road.

  ‘Master Choice—’

  Lancelot Choice had untied his horse, which was in a dancing mood. As he pulled its bridle towards Venetia, a sharp movement in the riverside bushes, a rat or a weasel, startled the horse so it bolted across the sewer-bridge. It was almost an open bridge, wide enough but built with scanty railings, and at that moment a young girl was crossing the bridge in the other direction. For fear of being trampled by the bolting horse, the girl, little more than a child, sprawled off the bridge and was sucked into the grey tide of the South Ditch.

  Master Choice pursued his rearing horse. The girl was struggling in the water, almost submerged. Venetia looked around. This was the drainage for brewers and tanners, lime-burners and beet-boilers. It was scummed and murky. But there was no one else to do it. She did not stop to think of herself, or to face her Maker. The Wine had made her a Virago. Doubtless the girl, a city child, had not learned to swim; Venetia had played a water nymph at Enstone House for a summer. She threw her fur off her shoulders and kicked off her slippers, and shut her eyes and leaped, and then she was cold, and wet, and she was grasping a handful of the girl’s hair, and her coat, and they were kicking one another, strangers keeping one another half alive, as the river carried them along.

  Venetia felt that she might not live to perform in the Queen’s Twelfth Night Masque, and she imagined all the courtiers observing the briefest silence in her memory, before beginning their merry dance again.

  As they seemed to be going under, Venetia felt the Wine kick in her gut, and give power to her shoulders. In childbirth or in feverish fits, she had clung to the thought of Kenelm, and how she could not leave him, and this had kept her alive. But now the Wine insulated her, so the violence of the water did not scare her. She could not die; the sweet Wine needed her. The South Ditch was deep and its currents were strong, and Venetia managed to cling onto a branch, but it was only floating, brought down by the autumn flood, and the current sped them onwards. The girl screamed. Venetia managed get hold of the bank just past the brambles, and to cling on, and so drag herself and the girl onto land.

  They lay there, filthy and panting.

  The girl spat brown water. Venetia had managed to keep her mouth closed.

  ‘So there we are, lass,’ she said, rubbing the girl on the back.

  ‘Ah-boo boo boo hoo,’ cried the girl, holding up her grimy skirt, and showing she had lost a boot. ‘Booo, boo, hoo.’ She cried like a bad impersonation of someone crying. The ill-tempered horse was now tied up safely, and Lancelot Choice approached them, holding out Venetia’s slippers.

  ‘You poor ladies,’ he said gallantly, as if they had both befallen a misfortune, but he had luckily come to the rescue. ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘Give me my slippers, sir,’ she snapped. ‘I shall carry them safely home. But I thank you for your kind consideration.’

  ‘My lady, be careful on the stony ground,’ said Choice, gesturing to the broken path that lay between her and her home.

  ‘Thank you, but I think it can do me less harm than your horse can,’ said Venetia. ‘Besides, I want to get back to my box of turnips. And you to your Margaret, no doubt. My best to your poor Margaret.’

  Folk from the household were running out, calling alarum, and Venetia looked back at the sobbing girl, and considered taking her into her house and making her clean, so she would not be in trouble when she got home – but then she decided she could not be bothered with it, and sent the girl on her weeping way. The proximity of danger had focused her mind. Trivial things will take up your whole life if you let them, she thought. Let someone else see to it the child is washed. I have saved her life.

  Mistress Elizabeth, out of breath and disturbed by all these odd occurrences, blurted out that to her mind, the girl was a baggage not worth saving.

  Stinking and bedraggled, Venetia went into the scullery and, ignoring everyone, opened up her crate of seething red vials. She held one up and drank it down. She did not care who saw. Afterwards she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, like a man.

  Later, as Mistress Elizabeth helped her out of her dirty clothes, and wiped her body with a cloth – this leap into a running sewer did not seem occasion enough for a bath, which would be too dangerous to undertake so lightly – Venetia talked aloud.

  ‘Women are precious vessels. We must comport ourselves carefully, and not spill or knock ourselves. With good cause. If any mishap befall, if you slip or sprain or twist, or get a fever, splodge or stain, then you are ruined. You are broken. It is not possible to mend any of us back again – no more men than women, but a broken man has given service, while a broken woman is a pity and a nuisance.’

  Mistress Elizabeth wrapped Venetia in a blanket, hoping to comfort her out of such speeches. Venetia tingled all over with strength, with pins and needles in her blood, and she wanted to run, or take another risk, or get out of breath, and she wondered what the drink had unleashed in her.

  She did not tell anyone about this incident, not even Kenelm. She did not mean to hide it from him, but she did not see how to explain it. He would only worry. The servants never spoke of it again, above a whisper, and the household somehow ended up believing that an accident had befallen their mistress, but that a handsome delivery man had saved her from the Fleet.

  In her head, the vipers were always moving, turning over one another, their hot smooth bodies restless and sleek. The three vials lasted her barely two days, and she went to fetch more from Choice’s lodgings herself. It was her last chance before the rehearsals for the Queen’s Masque, and she felt drawn there by the whispering silk-stiffness of her dress. She could have forced herself not to visit Choice, but it was so much easier to let herself go to him. As she walked, she could hear the vipers hissing in her skirts.

  ‘I go to Dr Sebagh’s and have the “vampire facelift”. They take a ph
ial of blood from your arm, separate the plasma, and inject it into your face. It helps the skin repair itself.’

  Actress Anna Friel, 2012

  At the entrance to Fenchurch Street she darted into a blind alley, because she saw Belinda, Lady Finch, coming in the opposite direction. She was accompanied by someone but Venetia could not see who it was; she heard a snatch of light voices as the ladies passed by. She wondered if another lady of the court was also hiding from Venetia, in a doorway, and another lady hiding from that lady.

  Perhaps Choice was now beset by ladies demanding Wine. Could that be the reason he had not supplied her with a full consignment of vials? Had she sunk so low in his esteem that the blood which was hers to drink went to other women first? Would the whole court now be growing dewy skinned, with deep black pupils? Indignantly she rapped at the door, which she noticed had been overpainted afresh, while above the door the sign of the star had been embossed in rich gilt.

  There was no answer. Venetia bowed her head and slumped her shoulders, willing herself not to be noticed, nor to stand out. She tried to blow herself out like a light, so no one would see her. It did not suit her. She was meant to flame, not cower. At last, the door opened a crack and a young apprentice, a boy she had never seen before, peeped out.

  ‘My lady, we can’t be having you today—’

  Venetia was not going to accept this. She laughed at the very idea that he would keep her on the doorstep.

  ‘Move for me, or there will be all hell cut loose,’ she said in a very icy, smiling voice.

  Stepping inside, she unveiled and, seeing a new smart leather book on the counter, which she judged was the book of appointments, she stood leafing through its pages avidly, while the apprentice shook his head and stammered. The clients were identified by initials and pseudonyms only, and she was idly puzzling over some of them when, screwing up his courage, the apprentice plucked the book out of her hands and hid it under the counter. To remove her from the main corridor, he showed her into the back room where there was a wooden chair. She sank into it gratefully. ‘Well, sweet boy, I must see your Master Choice. Where is he?’