Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  How she missed Kenelm, now he was away at sea again. She longed for him, fearing for his safety, and yet she had taken full advantage of his absence. She went to Choice directly Kenelm sent word he was at Dover. She must be cut open quickly, so she had time to heal before he was back. She tensed every time she heard the Mercury letter-boy’s bell, in case it was a note from him saying he was come home early, although she knew by experience that Kenelm never came home early. He was too enraptured with the world for that. He was gone to sail across the Bosphorus on the wings of a mechanical eagle – or if not, then he was witnessing a new city built upon marshes and artificial islands. No, wait; he was gone to see a clock that kept its time by the sun-magnetised seed of a sunflower, owned by a Jesuit from Westphalia. He had talked of all these ventures, and the desire to travel had overtaken him, as it did periodically, so that his will to be gone was stronger than his motivation for going. When he wanted to leave he was caged and fretful until he went. His library building had overspent him for a year, and she gave him some of her private monies – her gambling fund – to send him on his way.

  She had rehearsed the Procedure in her head so many times, but when it came to it, she put forth no more than a track of ruby tears across her forehead and down each cheek; afterwards, she produced only small degrees of pus. She barely noticed the pain. The elation of her new endeavour carried her onwards. It was the most advanced treatment possible, practised by her trusted Physician. The tiny quantity of Viperish serum he introduced into her wounds was enough to sweetly paralyse, but not to harm. She knew it was poison, but everything worth having is a poison.

  Since the Queen’s Twelfth Night Masque, she had never been at a loss for direction; she had not felt alone, but always accompanied by her mania. Whether she was playing with baby John or directing the household, the mania expressed itself in one word, which like an incantation she heard repeated in her head: ‘younger’. It was an imperative, to herself, to Choice, and it summed up her new purpose. She said it through tight lips, like a curse, a profanity, or she smiled it with the impatient glee of a girl. ‘Younger, younger.’ It had no answer, no context. One simply repeated the command.

  She could hear the boys running about the corridor, trying to get her attention. Her little loves! She visited young Kenelm at his military practice in Bunhill Fields the other week, turning up in her white veil, interrupting the marching song, and telling the lieutenant soldier she was taking him home. She wanted to spoil him for his saint’s day, so they could be alone together again for the afternoon, as they always had been, playing Rise Pig and Go, or Fox i’the Hole. But when they were home, and he would not drink his beaker of ale, she realised he was not happy, and he told her in a stiff little voice that she was the only mother to come to the artillery field, and that she should not do it again.

  With Kenelm away, she wore soft clothes about the house, and took porridge for supper, and relaxed all her habits. It was a comfortable, drab life, enlivened by the riveting project of her Improvement.

  Her morning face-palpations took about an hour. It was necessary work; one treatment led to another, as calf to kine. She heard the clatter of the cattle going willingly to the market down Cowcross Street to Smithfield, and she looked at herself in the mirror with the wide eyes of a milk-calf. She laughed, and a scab in her cheek lifted, stinging her back to piety.

  She blotted, fanned, pressed her face with cold linseed water, painted with ceruse so the redness and the serrations were covered, and she was ready to begin her exercises. Chater came up to help with these; he was such a kind friend to her these days. He understood everything, without needing to be told. Ever since she started her course of Viperish Infusions, he had taken such care of her, never reproaching her and bringing broth to her on the days she was bleeding or bruised and needed to stay closeted from the household. He was her confidante again, although they never spoke of her Improvements – he only responded tacitly to her needs, with an officious air that she found comforting.

  First they prayed together, and then he got up and took off his wide black hat and cracked his knuckles in preparation, forgetting that Venetia had forbidden him to do so. He took the daily practice of her Exercises with high ceremony. Rubbing her back with his fists, Chater could feel her vertebrae, perhaps because of how much thinner she was grown, or because something in the Viper Wine leached the goodness out of her. He held her arms behind her while she leaned forwards; he helped rotate her arms in their sockets, as a means to suppleness. They both bent their heads to one side; then the other, fifteen times. Their movements were based on the fencing exercises of Jacob de Gheyn, which so many men followed as a morning drill. Venetia had seen the book. Except her aim was not to thrust and kill, only to move more smoothly, and carry herself with her old, sweet, flowing locomotion.

  As the exercises sent her blood pounding, through her formerly feeling heart, it gifted one word to every vein and corpuscle: younger. Younger.

  When the physicians had no more bodies, they anatomised living creatures, rats or dogs, which demonstrated briefly the final workings of their flapping hearts. Life was the secret that could not stand to be known, and concealed itself at the very moment of its uncovering. Kenelm’s friend, a Kentish man called William Harvey, was the chief anatomist. When they were crossing the Thames together a waterman stopped Harvey and gave him a transparent shrimp, for which Kenelm was surprised to see Harvey pay a crown. He showed Kenelm the repetitive pulsing movement of the organs visible beneath the shell. Younger, younger.

  ‘Vindica te tibi,’ she muttered to herself. It was their motto, and she followed it every day, through the thrilling agency of her own progress. ‘You must change your life!’

  She tried a smile, with some success, barely even wincing, although the blister on the curve of her smile put forth a little water as she moved her cheek. She dabbed it, and repainted. She looked in the glass, sideways, the better to see her newly smooth outline. She was so lucky, she considered, to live in this Age, at this rolling edge and frontier of time, where there was such advanced Understanding, and such cosmetic treatments were possible.

  The sound of urgent blades cutting the air brought the Queen and her ladies-in-waiting out of their rooms. Squinting at the sky and shielding their faces, they held their skirts against the unnatural wind. The Thames was marked with concentric ripples, and a huge circle of grass in the Palace’s east lawn was flattened by the breath of this great, whirring gnat as it prepared to land.

  Behind its eyes sat Kenelm and Endymion, wearing earphones. They had been charged with delivering the precious cargo to the Queen quickly and so here it was, because she could not wait another week. Too many of her treasures arrived spoiled, or were confiscated on the way – the Christ she commissioned from Guido Reni never left Rome, censored by a Cardinal. She had implored Endymion, twisting his name with her tongue (‘Hen-day-may-on’) to fetch her painted altarpiece safely. Rubens had never made her anything of her own before.

  The machine shut down and before the blades slowed to a still, the hatch was already open and the parcel conveyed across the lawn, wrapped in brown sisal and bulky yet invested with so much glamour it was as if it had come vaulting out of the sky.

  In the long gallery the altarpiece was shrouded and propped against a wall, so that the Queen might enjoy the drama of its unveiling; her singers were gathered to raise a jubilate. As she and her ladies knelt, the soft volumes of their dresses gradually sinking around them, a shaft of bright light on the other side of the room gave the scene a reflected glow. Endymion perceived this would glare upon the painting, and he pulled the window-covering half across, making a softer gloom. Endymion asked George Gage to remove the wrapping, who asked the Groom of the Gallery, who told his boy to do it. Endymion had already checked the painting for flaws.

  The winding sheet would not come off the highest corner, and a stick was procured to fetch it down. When it fell, the canticle reached a height, the singers raising their voi
ces in a sweet discord, and the Queen looked up.

  Christ’s beloved body was raised above her, so towering and foreshortened, she felt she knelt at the foot of the cross. His body was waxen-white, yet still living, and His muscles rippling, as if He were lifting a great weight to the sky, not suffering to death on the cross, but raising the roof of the world. About him, two soldiers carved the air with lash-whips, their bodies so muscular they were almost deformed. Poor Simon of Cyrene was nearly crushed beneath the cross, while in the midst of them, bone-white in the gloom, Christ shone so He made Henrietta-Maria’s eyes burn. Another soldier tried His flesh with a pike, and the blood and water fell thickly – the sacrifice that must be made to renew the world. Christ’s little beard was pointed and his eyes were so familiar they pulled Henrietta-Maria’s soul out of her skin. His body moved her as if it were her own husband’s body, prophetically sacrificed before her eyes. He was the son of a King, how could they kill him?

  The Queen was easily revived with swooning-water. Lucy Hay carried sal volatile always with her, as Henrietta-Maria had frequent need of it lately. Everyone at court presumed she was with child again. The musicians broke off in sympathy, and when it was ascertained she had only fainted, resumed at a tactfully soft pitch. As she came round, the Queen babbled half in French, half English about her attempts to convert the King. ‘He comes to Rome, chaque jour, he falls . . .’ The ladies pretended not to hear.

  Endymion was also moved by this painting. It depicted the actual moment of Christ’s death, in full colour – pious and spectacular. To look upon this Rubens was to develop a second sight, to enter a moving world. Actions and their consequences were both contained in the same painting: the spear piercing and the blood spurting, the eyes of Christ illuminated by the thunderbolt, the changing darkness of the sky, the momentary eclipse of the sun, the hysterical feathers of the frightened birds . . . Everything was in motion, and yet painting was a static art – this was the fascination of the thing. It was the paradox that made the painting rise to meet the Miracle. The peacock at the foot of the cross, symbol of early Christians – that was very Rubens. He must have had that mouldy peacock hanging around his studio, left over from The Judgement of Paris. I give you Christ’s Passion, with a peacock at no extra charge . . .

  Henrietta-Maria and her ladies left the gallery to take some air. She walked away light-headed, supported by her ladies, but pleased beyond measure with the proof she had given herself – and everyone present – of her spiritual and artistic capacity to be moved. The painting’s value could not now be doubted. Endymion fancied that the Italian ambassador would already be noting this incident down in his dispatches.

  On the sunlit side of Whitehall, William Laud, dean of the chapel royal, and de facto Archbishop, was giving communion to the King and his men. ‘The Lord bless you and keep you.’ The King and his gentlemen knelt at the top of three steps, before an altar guarded by a rail: this was how Laud believed communion should be taken, and this was how it would soon be administered, across the whole country. High and low would have to respect this. Laud was moving along the line of men, giving the Protestant sacrament to Kenelm with particular joy, when a Groom of the Bedchamber discreetly approached the altar and whispered in the King’s ear.

  Laud heard something about the Queen and guessed it was to do with her health. He turned back to the high cross, and focused his mind on communion. Laud closed his mind to the Popery the Queen practised in her chapel. It was one of the inevitabilities of serving royalty: the King had to have a dynastic marriage, and it was only unfortunate that his bride would not come over to the established Church. Laud hoped she would, for the sake of her soul and his ministry. Last week, he dreamed that the Queen had made a gargoyle face at him, before slamming a door. He wished his dreams would not make such affairs of state personal, but this was ever his burden. He had nine older brothers and sisters, and his mother always said: as the tenth, he was paid to the Church.

  The King crossed himself and rose to go to the Queen while Laud continued to dispense communion. He suspected the King had gone to see the new painting. Laud longed to see it too. It was his will to reconcile the established Church to beauty. Paintings and altarpieces; holy chalices and vestments for priests. Altars set away from the congregation, pulpits for the authority of the priest. No more Puritan altars in the middle of the church, mimicking the Last Supper. No more gadding to hear Puritan sermons in other parishes, no iconoclasm, no hairshirt whitewashing of church frescoes. Carved pews, decorated ceilings, even sculptures of fatted cherubim and paintings of Christ – these were more than permissible, these were to the greater good of God. All must beautify and glorify His name. To glorify we beautify. Amen.

  MARY TREE: 252 MILES TRAVELLED

  THE GODLY MEN and women of Childe Biddeford made me so welcome, that although I only intended to pass one night here, on my way from Gayhurst to London, I have now stayed two months almost, and yesterday I clean forgot my own name. The reason being that everyone here calls each other by Virtues, that they might be minded to follow the Lord more closely every time they call and reply. I cannot tell you what my new name is, just for the moment, because it may bring me to laughter, and laughter is one of the cracks wherein depravity enters, so I will talk no more of my name, and continue plaiting these rush mats, as Mistress Be-Busy bid me.

  I forgot, I should call her ‘Be-Busy’ only, as she holds not with titles.

  As soon as I showed my face here, walking into this valley one spring-like day, the men and women made out they recognised me, waving and telling me ‘welcome home’. It was odd, but I gave myself over to this false homecoming. I suppose it was a dream I have long held of belonging. I told them I must be about my master’s business, meaning Richard Pickett, but they said I must be about my Father’s business, meaning Our Lord. I found it difficult to answer that one. I have almost enjoyed my time here, eating only beans and plain foods, and seeing all the preachers as they pass by. Last week we had a calm and quiet minister who talked of Providence, and the universal purpose of portents, which made me wonder what purpose my Mark portended. Then this week a full-passionate preacher spoke out against the King’s Archbishop, and his idolatry, and men wearing what they call ‘lovelocks’, and his condemnation was so stirring that it made everyone rise to their feet, glad almost to tears.

  The people here perceived I was lost and they wished to claim me as their own, and yet belonging is not such an easy matter as that. Being tucked under a shepherd’s arm is not enough to bring us to a flock. Zealous Goodenough is the father to this congregation, and kind as he is, I do not feel he is my father. I do not wake every morning praising the Lord – some of the women here say psalms in their sleep, I swear – and fasting does not agree with me. I do not wish to wear a bonnet always, as I think there is nothing sinful about my hair. But on these matters there is such agreement here, it is as if they are an army waiting to do battle, valiant and full of righteous hope. Often they speak of raising banners, marching, and making ready their weapons of faith. I was relieved to hear that by ‘weapons of faith’ they usually mean their tongues, to talk Scripture.

  Which brings me to my name – oh my name! It is Crush-Evil-’Neath-Your-Toe. I am glad Annie Braxton is not here for she would laugh until she shook. I was given the name at prayer circle the evening I was received into Communion. I support the crushing of evil, only it is not pleasing to find oneself replying to the name of ‘Toe’.

  At prayer meeting yesterday Zealous Goodenough declared that godly men and women shunned beauty, as a false witness, a lure, a trap and a trick to send us mad, and then as he was talking he came over and smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder, as if to say: Look at this unbeautiful one we welcomed in. Then he asked around the room in turn, Do ye shun beauty, do ye shun beauty? But they never asked me, because it would be like asking a cripple if they shun walking. Perhaps it was as well they did not ask me, because I do not shun beauty. I long to catch a glimpse of b
eauty, to grasp its trace in every living thing. I see it in the hedgerow and the brook. I see it in the clouds. I thirst for beauty as much as any other girl who never owned a pretty kerchief nor a gay garter.

  My name is not ‘Only By Marriage’, nor ‘Crush-Evil-’Neath-Your-Toe’, I said to myself, as I tiptoed out of the lodge last night with my pack at my back. My name is Mary Tree. The white owl beckoned me with her call, and I feared it was Sir Richard’s spirit. At least I have weathered out the worst of the winter here, although it was not so warm yet that I was minded to rest, but I kept marching all night, till I walked into dawn, with Richard’s shard always at my back.

  As it began to be sunny, I came upon some milkmaids with their pails full for skimming, and it pleased me so much to learn none of them were called Here-Be-Zion nor Have-Faith-In-Him, but only Jane and Susan. I thought I must have been brain-sick to linger so long with those Puritans, and yet I met many more Brothers and Sisters along the way as I trod the green paths onwards.

  ADULTERATED CANDIES

  AT THE SILVER Thistle, a dirty apothecary’s on Shining Lane, the stock was being despoiled, the Cures and Healing Tinctures shaken out of their stock-jars so they collected on the floor in great powdery pyramids, sherbet-coloured ground coral mingling with verdigris and sparkling talc. Clouds of marbled dust swirled in patterns unknowable in the light from the little round window. The proprietor of the shop had buried her face, refusing to witness the waste of her goods, and crying silently into a huge grey napkin. The doors to the premises were locked; one boy was searching the back room, while another climbed the ladder, upending the jars one by one. The College of Physicians was making a raid.