The chorus sang: ‘The bright perpetual traveller / Doth now too long the day defer’, which was the cue for the Queen, hiding in the wings, to make herself ready to mount her golden chariot without any back, and she and her ladies prepared for their entrance.
But first, Phosphorus the Morning Star came to light her way.
‘Out of the pale sky, Mother, descends a fiery white bark, sailing across the clouds, bearing the brightest mirror-lamp I could design.’
The audience sighed with rapture at the tiny white boat. Sitting in the prow of the boat were two figures: Lord Mountfitchet, dressed in white silk, paired with Lettice, who was wearing a gown that shone like a sapphire, or kingfisher’s wing. The spitting phosphorus lantern disclosed their smiling childish faces as they played a game of handy-dandy, their palms raised to one another in idle slaps.
Fond applause sounded like summer rain in the hall.
‘The twins of Phosphorus have been chosen to represent the loving unison of the King and Queen,’ said Inigo to his mother, as Lady Darnley stood in the centre of the stage and spoke her lines, clearly and with a sense of irony, even though she was a woman:
‘Their minds within / And bodies make but Hymen’s twin—’
‘A woman?’ asked Inigo’s mother. ‘Speaking?’
‘Aye, Mother,’ said Inigo, squeezing her hand, to indicate she should shew no alarm.
Backstage in the semi-darkness, two sweaty stagehands, Lubber and Vogg, turned the crank that made the Morning Star descend.
‘Ten more?’
‘Ten more and then we move to bring the dawn.’
‘Heave six.’
‘Heave seven.’
‘Think of the King.’
‘Heave nine.’
‘Ten for a job well done.’
‘There she goes,’ said Lubber, nodding his head to the Queen’s satin slippers, which he saw at eye-level through a chink in the wooden stage structure as she traversed the upper gallery. They were white and sewn with pearls, and Vogg raised his cap to the slippers, although their wearer would never see this act of veneration.
‘I feel towards her as if she’s my own daughter, but then my wife says that’s because I’m so often carpenter for her wooden boards and foot-rests, so it stands to reason.’
The music swelled. The architect did not know it, but the velvet black eye mask that his mother wore to hide her cataracts was damp with tears. In her mind’s eye the spectacle was unbearably rich. ‘And now the Queen enters,’ he whispered, getting to his feet, and taking his mother’s arm to help her up, as the royal trumpeters sounded her entrance.
‘She descends from the upper part, in a chariot heightened by gold. Reflectors set all about the hall redouble every candle’s light, which in turn reflexes onto the masquers, their silvery habits. The Queen’s majesty is highest, and several of her ladies are with her, seated somewhat lower. She wears a heavenly crown, ha. She cannot wear the crown of England, because of her religion, so the costume is chosen to make a point. About the Queen’s person are rays of sunlight, somewhat like the Madonna at St Sulpice. She smiles. The sky grows lighter, and more pink. This rare effect is created by reflectors being turned inwards, towards diaphanall glasses, filled with water that shews like the ruby stone of the orient. The habit of the masquers is close bodices, and their colour is Aurora, embroidered with silver. Diadems of jewels lie atop each head, and falls of white feathers, and tiny round metal discs, which we call “Oos”, reflect the light—’
‘Too much detail,’ said Inigo’s mother. ‘Tell me something interesting.’
He could not speak at all being, for a moment, too hurt.
‘Each costume costs about thirty pounds,’ he said.
Having descended almost to earth, Aurora was now entertained in mid-air by a cloud of zephyrs, which ascended from the stage in the chariot that used to belong to Night.
‘Hup two,’ said Lubber.
‘Hup three,’ said Vogg.
‘Oh, these zephyrs.’
‘Keep them cranking.’
‘Are they made o’ lead?’
‘Think of the tankard.’
‘Aye, think of the ale.’
‘Turn this thrice and we’ll be done.’
‘Twice and we will o’ercome.’
The last turn of the wheel was always the hardest.
‘But look, there she sits amongst the clouds!’ said Lubber, peeping through the scenery at the Queen on stage, his whole aching body covered in goosebumps of awe.
‘Is she not a flying thing of wonder!’ marvelled Vogg.
Venetia was chiefest amongst the zephyrs, and she sat highest upon their chariot, reclining in luxuriant pose, her head inclined backwards and her white neck and shoulders exposed by a gown that threatened to slip from her shoulders at any moment, while the two younger zephyrs waved large silk fans and pretended to play their paper harps, plucking, as the musicians below them made their real harps vibrate with fine appeasing melodies and glissandos.
Venetia’s chariot paused mid-air, and realising she was half in shadow, she found her light by leaning forward. With a whip in her hand like Boudicca, she fixed the audience with her arch and glistering eye, as super-celestially camp as any priestess or diva, before or since. She spoke:
‘Thy journeys never can be past
But must forever last
Tis not limited how far
Because it still is circular – the audience rippled with laughter, as was her design –
Thy universal beams cannot grow cold
Nor mortally wax old
Nor will they ever tire
Fed with immaterial fire.’
Applause powered her silver-gleaming chariot higher, so she seemed to levitate upon the goodwill of the audience, their admiration plumping her skin, till she shone like a creature of phantasy. She felt herself gathering, rising, filled full of honey fame, which overflowed into her cracks and privities, as she flew upwards like no earthly dame, her eyes ecstatic, her hair curling with pleasure.
Sir Kenelm forgot to be nervous for her. She was here, his water nymph from Enstone House –
The King jabbed his staff of state at her –
Pause.
Not a cell divided, not a hair greyed, not a mole darkened, not a line deepened, and the plaster spaniels no longer chased the mallard round the fountain of Whitehall Palace.
In 1584 a government decision was made that Queen Elizabeth’s beauty was to be maintained in portraiture, and she did not age from that time forward.
The zephyrs’ light fabrics were caught in mid-air, their cheeks mid-smile.
Venetia ran outside into the night air, to cool her skin, which flamed with happiness. She was cured of her own mortality, and like someone freed from long confinement she ran into the darkness, and panting at the edge of the muscled, tossing Thames, and she gasped as she saw that even the river had paused.
It was stiff as beaten egg-white.
She would never age, but always be beautiful.
The pause had killed the river’s flow, and reduced it to a representation of a river; the pause had killed the soft redoubled light that played around the Banqueting Hall, and the smell of the candles, and the slight wobble of the chariot. The pause had killed the moment, and the moment lay there dead and ready for the taking, glossy and permanent.
The King hummed, scratched his royal head. He picked the moment up, and put it in his pocket, intending to look at it again later.
He revolved his staff of state.
Rewind.
He wanted to make the candles in the hall burn backwards, and the zephyrs’ fans suck up the air they had dispersed, and their fingers to unpluck their harps, and Venetia to retract her smile. But he could not make it happen.
Queen Elizabeth never looked in the mirror after 1584, and her courtiers were so certain of this that the ladies of her bedchamber once daubed her nose with cochineal, or so Ben Jonson said.
Venetia realised the
River Thames had not paused, only frozen.
It was the cold, making her confused, and the vipers in her blood were tricking her imagination, so in her vanity she believed she had arrested time. For the last few days the river had been viscous and becalmed, and now it was a massy solid, and presently there would be skating on it, and bowls. She heard the hubbub of voices inside the masque and she knew she must go inside.
The King rotated his staff impatiently.
Rewind was stuck. He could make a singer repeat her line as many times as he liked, but he could not make the candles unburn, nor could he make the Thames flow backwards, nor could he put a grown smile into bud again.
Even he, the King, divinely entitled to rule as God’s representative on earth, could not achieve this simple thing.
It was hard being King.
Play, play, play, play – let us dance and sing, for tomorrow we die. Handy-dandy, whirlabout. The performance was over, and a new game had begun, the courante starting up, calling the dancers to the floor. The masquers quitting their chariots and clouds, stumbled in their haste to join the dance, still wearing their diadems and falls of feathers, so that the masque continued, in the form of dancing. The masquers and their audience joined and mingled, hot atoms seething amongst the cold, turning formally between each other, hands raised in a courtly contretemps, heads bowing in obeisance, heels tapping out a demi-chasse.
And as the dance brought faces closer and then carried them away, like tides in a stately sea, Kenelm looked for his wife, overfilled with pride and anxious to praise her with kisses, but he could not see her. Perhaps it was the rapture of the dance, and the enravishment of the masque, or the work of a nimble apothecary, but he could not find his wife.
Confused, entranced, he saw echoes of her in other women. Aletheia Howard had the set of her eye; Mistress Whisk the pallor of her brow. Belinda, Lady Finch, had something of Venetia’s new glowing serenity; none of them frowned, or seemed capable of displeasure. Even Lady Vavasour was dancing, as if she wished to make a show of herself, though she had not disported at court for ten years or more. What epidemic of beauty was this? Was Venetia’s beauty catching, like a virtuous plague? All the ladies had lost their cracks and wrinkles, their scorched lead faces. There was a proud communal bloom to them, like a richly cultivated bed of roses.
He thought he caught a glimpse of her, but a mole on the upper lip told him it was Olive, Lady Porter.
Guide me, spot of beauty, to my Venice, like the morning star, muttered Kenelm, reaching out, blind, somnambulant.
Then he saw Lady Porter’s double, but he realised it was Anne Ogilvy.
No, here was Venetia, flashing azure in her famous dress. He had found her. Kenelm reached to twirl her, but then he recoiled, repulsed because it was not Venetia, only Lettice, blazing in Ultramarine: Lettice as her living likeness from their courtship, years ago.
He let the dance carry him onwards, into the figure of four the dancing master called ‘shining star’.
They all raised their left hands, and he saw the far point of the star was Venetia, but then he turned and found another Venetia at his left, and still another at his right.
‘Did you see me?’ shouted Endymion. ‘I was the Spirit of Everything that Can Be Imagined!’
Edward Sackville was showing off also, turning his ankles for the ladies. He was incorrigible. Whenever Kenelm wanted to hurt himself, like holding his finger over a candle, he considered how Sackville had sought to sleep within Venetia’s encircling arms.
Uplifted by the dance and cuffed about the head by wine, Kenelm looked wildly about for Venetia, but he could not see her. He had lost the art to know his true Una from the many false Duessas, his original from the multiplying counterfeits.
Kenelm turned round and about, thinking of those early days, when so many faked copies of Venetia’s portrait came, unlicensed, from the limners, and each copy’s copy degraded a degree, a minim too heavy in the chin, a jot too wide about the eyes, until the only thing about the portrait that was hers was the name engraved below.
His head wheeled, but his legs were carried onwards by the dance. Sweat made his blond quiff stand up like a staff.
There was a great cry and the crack and clatter of silver and glass, and Kenelm guessed the banqueting table had been turned over at the far side of the hall. It must be midnight already.
He saw a foreign ambassador run out to try to put right the damage to the banquet, and laughed at him for not knowing the midnight tradition of turning over the table. The feast was always overturned, for sport’s sake. At the crack of the table a new galliard struck up, faster and louder than before, and the crowd leaped to the music.
Venetia was revealed, strobe-lit, in the midst of it all, moving, yet not out of breath, smiling like the goddess of the dance. Behind the serene mask, her thoughts were tumbling: the child Lettice wears my dress, my Ultramarine that Edward Sackville called the colour of Jerusalem’s sky. I never gave it to her. I brought it for the Queen, not for her. Now she dances with my husband, and leads the masque as the Morning Star. She usurps and supersedes me. If this is the natural order of things, henceforth nothing in me is natural. Bring me to drink the gaudy immortal. Let me become super-natural.
The drums beat out a new tune: ‘Love Will Tear us Apart.’
Venetia was thrown opposite a young blood called Wharton, who was dressed as a shepherd, in a rich silken cape, ringlets and Arcadian sandals. His hair was bright blue. ‘Madam,’ he bowed deeply. ‘I adore your daughter Lettice.’
Kenelm stamped with the music, feeling the terrible, preordained joy of it, the heartbreak, tearing us apart.
‘Again.’
The song made him feel like a link in the endless chain of human longing, as he flicked the sweat off his blond quiff, he danced with every sinew of his body, the music animating him like a spirit-wound clockwork man.
Here she was. As he came close, he leaped and kissed Venetia once, which was all the steps would allow. The dance could not be interrupted by any one couple. The dance was bigger than the dancers. Everyone was intertwined, like a living weave. Moving back and forward, around and about, with steps their bodies knew so well their heads could forget them, and caught in the automatic bliss of repetition they turned to and fro, surging and stamping, dancing together in mutual regard and Kenelm rose, jumping, ecstatic, amongst a vast crowd of moshers, waltzers, pipers, ravers, tranceheads, and Pan himself was calling the tune.
LENTEN SCARS
THREE MONTHS LATER
‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’
Isaac Newton
VENETIA WAS SITTING at her dressing table in the grey morning light, peeling the night-bandages from her face. She heard her son Kenelm’s quick footfalls approach her door, and did not stir to let him in. He rattled the doorhandle, and she ignored it. Let him think she was still sleeping. She wanted nothing more than to let him crawl into her bed, to cuddle his hot little body, but she could not let him see her before she had applied her paint. He would judge her wounded, or in pain. He would cry out in alarm, perhaps, the first time he saw his mother’s scabs. So she must wait till she was made up for the day before she greeted him. His morning kisses, his closeness, was the very thing she must deny herself if she was to keep his love.
Over the months following the masque, Venetia had lost her taste for sleep. She went through the motions of sleeping, drawing her curtains, putting on her nightgown, larding and binding her face and resting for a few hours, when she slept more than she realised, but lightly. To her it seemed that most of the night she lay seething, waiting for the dawn.
She awoke before her fire was made, and she was at her dressing table when Mistress Elizabeth brought her morning posset. As soon as Mistress Elizabeth was gone, and sometimes a little before, she unlocked her cabinet and emptied a new vial into her drink, making a curdled pink bowlful, her first Viper brew of the day, which she sipped quickly, whispering
Lenten psalms. Then she performed her daily tractations. It required time and care to bring her scabs and stiffness off.
She sent for a bowl of scalding water, which she poured on pot-pourri and hooded herself over, and when the rising velvet vapours of hot rind and valerian root had softened her mood and steadied her breathing, she began to palpate her face, starting with her temples: fifteen circles of the left, fifteen circles of the right; and back again. Her fingertips were the best method, she found; she had no use for the little jet beads Choice had sold her for the purpose. Next she worked across her brow, first rubbing her fingers in myrrh-grease, the better to soften the crusts and serrations that formed overnight. Perhaps that was why she could no longer sleep: she could feel her skin thickening over, like water frosting or custard blistering. It was wonderful to sense how fast she reacted to the treatment; that prickling sensation of new scabs forming was the opposite of slippage, wastage and decay. Instead of slackening, she was tighter by the hour.
Because it was Lent, the pain was particularly appropriate; she considered her tractations almost an Observance. Not quite the Stations of the Cross, which Henrietta-Maria undertook with such piety. Venetia had attended such a pilgrimage around the gardens of the Queen’s villa in Greenwich, when they toured the seven improvised shrines barefoot, Venetia maintaining a displeased silence all the while. She preferred to purify her flesh at home. Venetia slapped her face a dozen times with a cold cloth, to feel the blood tingle in her cheeks.
When they sent a body up for anatomy, the doctor’s men held their torches near the dissection table, and lutes played: the same three chords, and an arpeggio. Kenelm had told her all about the anatomies at Amen Corner. They read aloud the history of the deceased; a sailor, hanged for theft; a woman of no virtue, nursed through her agonies at Bartholomew’s. Ever a different story, ever the same ending. Then the thorax, the parlour of the body, cut open with a razor; the heart, revealed to tell its story.
She had grown up believing that the heart was the font of all affection and kindness; that usurers and villains whose cadavers were opened were found to have no heart; that heartache was real, not a figure of speech; and that all one’s deeds were inscribed on the heart, so that when the body died, the heart was taken into the House of Judgement to be read, like a book, by God. Now she was told that her heart was a two-chambered pump, which pounded like a brewery or a city system of locks and canals, pressurised, efficient. Previously the blood was quickness and life, and the heart was hope and care and tenderness, but now the blood fetched and carried, and the heart was two pistons and a plunger. She was a mechanical being, then, so why not mend her?
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