Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  Venetia paced around her chamber like Sackerson, the tethered bear at Southwark. She expected that the lack of Wine would leave her enervated and supine, but no, she could not pass a moment’s stillness. As soon as she stood up, she wished to stand no more; as soon as she reclined, she wished to stand. She was like an ant on a fire-griddle. Her legs carried her back and forth, but her will, her whole soul, was contrary and dissatisfied with every proposition. She tried to read her Bible while she walked about, and this helped for a time, as she leafed through the pages, although her mind was soon too restless to finish any sentence, any thought. She itched all over her body, a phantom prickle that moved onwards as soon as she pursued it. It was only after some time that she realised she ought not to be using the heavy, rough edge of her Bible to scratch herself. She kissed the Bible and put it away with a trembling hand. What was the point of this torment, if not to become Good?

  A vast belch of smoke and gas from the top of the mountain threw Sir Kenelm backwards. As he righted himself he saw melted ore dribble down the side of the steaming mountain as if from a smithy’s pot. It poured with a sensuous power, setting into furrows and dollops that blackened as he watched. This orange quickening, this incandescent flow, held him fascinated as he sat on a rock, covered in pumice dust, sweat, and shirtless, from the heat. So vulcan’s mountains did exist, and more than that, the mountain he had three-quarters climbed was one of them: a volcano.

  It had erupted before, he knew, and it would again, and it was humanity’s curse to be continually surprised by it. Communal memory had forgotten the Roman towns below the sod, as it would remember and forget them again. His skin was cracking because he had removed his clanking armour, his bio-suit, his gas-mask. He smelled the bitumen that sealed up Herculaneum, and he choked on the dust that re-covered its charred treasures a thousand years later, silting up the runways, the resorts, the roundabouts. He felt the feather-light stones of many eruptions simultaneously.

  Akathisia – (from the Greek ‘inability to sit still’) a profoundly uncomfortable feeling of inner restlessness. A symptom of opioid withdrawal.

  Venetia could contain herself no longer. She left her chamber and headed for Sir Kenelm’s study. As soon as she began walking downstairs, her body ached to be at rest, and as soon as she paused, she wished to walk again. She flung Chater out of the way with a look when he tried to stop her going into the study. He watched grimly, afraid she was going to do something desperate. He believed she was missing some drug that Kenelm usually gave her and he worried that she might eat antimony, or swallow one of his telluric compounds.

  She bent to unlock the door and caught a glimpse of herself, puff-faced and desperate, distorted by the brass doorhandle. She pushed aside Kenelm’s stacks of books, and stumbled towards his laboratory table. As she stepped nearer she swerved towards her goal. From the back of his chair she seized the sheepskin he wore on his cold nights’ work, and buried her face in it, catching the scent of him, and shuddering into it for comfort.

  Lo, the walkers approach the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and yet they withstand the heat . . .

  A wet mirage danced ahead of him, watermarking the sky, and Sir Kenelm trod towards it, his hair crisped by the heat, his mouth parched, his curiosity infinite.

  He longed to look inside the Crater, thinking he would see visions from Dante’s Inferno: alchemists degraded in the tenth chasm of hell, or the dreadful procession of sinners with their heads on backwards, their tears falling down their buttocks. Every step took him closer to his father, whom he would surely find in the circle reserved for plotters, holding his own heart aloft and calling, ‘Thou liest!’

  He could not tell if he was crying because he approached a great theological mystery, or if the hot sulphur in the air was making his eyes run rheum.

  ‘I thought I beheld the habitation of Hell, wherein nothing seemed to be much wanting besides the horrid phantasms and apparitions of Devils . . .’

  Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath, on climbing Vesuvius to look in the crater in 1638

  She was twice a mother, monthly cursed, inured to routine aches and torments, which she knew so intimately, they became part of herself. Pain was nothing to her. It was constant, a tame companion. What she was suffering now was different – it seemed to have no source, but traversed her whole person and her mind. She vomited and perspired and shook. She scrabbled to look in her scrying glass, expecting to see that without the Wine, she had aged a lifetime already. All she could see in the glass was her young self, tempting and taunting her.

  A thunderclap and torrents of rain would have cooled Sir Kenelm, only the rain fell hot, almost scalding, and it carried streaks of ashes down his torso. He shielded his face with a bandage improvised from his garter. Looking up, he saw a rolling wave of red-hot molten lava cascading over the lip of a distant peak, spooling downwards, gloopy, implacable. He let the image burn upon his inner eye, so he could be sure of his own understanding when he told this tale again.

  Then he saw the red chargers foaming towards him, and he turned on his heels, and with the heat bellowing at his back, he ran.

  Would she do well to die here? A chill calm settled upon her, and morbid presentiments passed swiftly before her eyes, like black shadows under a boat, indistinctly glimpsed through blood-warm waters.

  He ran over the pumice, sliding with heavy speed downwards after so long ascending.

  Another rumble announced a great vomit from this beast’s belly – HERE IT COMES! He ducked, and as the words came to him, it arrived: the pyroclastic surge.

  Panting, he came to the site of his old camp, but there was nothing but the highest pennant of his pavilion sticking out of a great ash-slide. His notebooks, his books and baggage – gone. He felt this was a signal that he should continue downwards with all haste. He realised for the first time the recklessness of his endeavour. He thought of Virgil – ‘Facilis descensus Averno’ – It is easy to descend into Hell. The difficulty is coming back.

  Venetia fell at last into a lucid sleep, tossing and thrashing as the poison left her body. If it was true that snakes soaked up all the putrid qualities of the earth, no wonder she had been so deformed by their moral poisons. And yet she would do it all again, in a heartbeat. Il faut souffrir pour être belle.

  Kenelm longed to return directly to his love, his boys, his home. As he clambered over the lower crags of the summit, he felt the blessing of the sea-winds on his face, cooling and reassuring him. No one would believe his tale of climbing the vulcan’s mount. He would do better to regale the Tribe of Ben with stories of how he had been caught between Scylla and Charybdis, or how sirens had sung to his ship.

  In Naples, he had no hero’s greeting, for most of the townsfolk had gone to safer ground, and at his lodgings there was only an old dog lying in the shadows, who barely looked at him. He slept for a long time, disorientated by the quiet of the lodging house, waking only to drink with the thirst of a shipwrecked man. Finally one afternoon his body decided he was fit to rise, and when he was clean and steady enough to walk abroad, he lit fifty candles before the Virgin, and bought Venetia a set of pearls, earrings and necklace, at great price. The pearl trader should have been pleased to find a customer but when he saw Kenelm, he instantly perceived his love, his wealth and his homesickness, and Kenelm could do nothing about this, as he could not hide what he was. He felt the pearls glowing with their own luminescence, even in the dark drawstring purse next to his heart.

  Venetia slept heavily. Chater tiptoed about her room, drawing the curtains, opening the windows. The household was beginning to fear for her, and so was he. It was not even Lent any more, and yet she remained in her chamber day and night, taking only gruel and brandy posset. On the far side of the bed were two stale pots that Mary had missed. He studied Venetia’s slumped body, and he went, quickly, to fetch from his chest his priestly articles, his unguent, his Bible, his bell.

  ‘May the Lord make haste to save thee,’ he
whispered, panting, making a sign of absolution over her sleeping body and ringing the tinkling bell, getting his pot of salve ready to administer extreme unction.

  ‘Oh, Chater,’ she replied, in a thick, crabbed voice. ‘Leave me alone and let me be.’

  ‘I do not wear a rug. My hair is 100 per cent mine.’

  Donald Trump, 2004

  JING, JANGLE: THE new bright brass bell above Choice’s door sounded more strongly than usual. The customer upon the doorstep was a gentleman, well dressed, in late middle age, with a bluff countenance and broken veins across his nose. He sniffed deeply as he took off one tough leather glove, then another, and thwacked them upon his knee as he sat down opposite Choice. He was surely known to the court, from his dress, and there was a heaviness to all his motions, a roughness, which was somehow sensual. He seemed loath to say for what he had come, and he looked around the room a few times before beginning.

  ‘I hear your trade multiplieth.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. May I ask your name, for my book?’

  ‘Don’t put it in the book. Between ourselves, my name is Endymion Porter.’

  Choice coughed. He knew that those love letters from Olive promised no good. He only hoped her husband was not here to demand a duel. He would not pull pistol for that doxy.

  ‘I’ll tell you straight. I’m used to passing time with Continental physicians, so I am well acquainted with their practices, their Methods and their Manners. Your trade holds no secrets for me, Choice.’

  Choice could not help observing that Endymion Porter carried an over-sized sword. He had the look of a man who was not afraid to knuckle-fight, either; a gentleman who was not always gentle. He spent his time buying art, Choice knew, and he supposed he drove hard bargains. Choice was reassured by the nearness of his lancet, in a drawer in his desk. He knew it was there; he could have it in his hand in two quick movements.

  ‘Now, I’m not a handsome man, but I have a certain look to me. I’m frequently about affairs of state abroad, and I find a swarthy, weather-worn complexion does follow after time spent in the sun. I’ve Spanish blood. It’s on my mother’s side. It’s from the mother that the dermis comes, they say. The fleshy parts are generally bequeathed by the softer sex. I read it once, in Fludd’s great book—’ He broke off. ‘You fellows do work upon a man, you do. With your silence! Ah, me. So let us to it . . .’

  Endymion slapped his glove across his thigh again. Choice was beginning to perceive gratefully that the former ambassador to Spain was not here to avenge his wife’s honour.

  But just as Endymion was about to tell Choice what it was he wanted, he got up and distractedly perused the monkey skull that Choice displayed in a small cabinet of wonders, a new acquisition that he kept above his desk, flanked by fashionable flame-drapes.

  ‘What the goodyear is this? It’s never a child’s, I hope . . .?’

  Choice was used to prevaricators. ‘What’s my duty for you, sir?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what it is. I’m a man of action. I travel for my employ. I’m often painted by great artists. I sit to them at great length. The paintings are passed around, from court to palace. I must play the man I am, d’you see? I must improve my aspect. At present, I am great. I do not resemble greatness.’

  ‘I think I see, sir,’ said Choice. ‘You would be pleased to benefit from my drink of beauty.’

  ‘That’s it!’

  ‘In order to improve your complexion.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ Endymion smote his fist upon the table. ‘It’s too much swagged and bagged; it’s too ruddy. It needs attention.’

  Choice stood up and stepped closer, looking across Endymion’s face. ‘Too coarse, too rubicund, too jowly,’ said Choice, peering at him. ‘Too scarred and stubbled . . .’

  ‘Well, steady, sir, let us not kill the cat with kindness.’ Endymion pretended to laugh, raising a hand defensively in the air. It was clear his pride was pricked by Choice’s words. Choice had not treated a man’s complexion before, and he saw he was going to have to exercise more tact.

  ‘Beside the pallor of the Stuart house, my face is like . . .’

  Choice declined to suggest ‘an old walnut shell’ or ‘a crack’d barque’s bottom’.

  ‘My face is like a man’s, sir, a man’s. Hearty and oaken. But I am the procurer of the King’s paintings, and it does not become me to resemble a man of war. Maecenas was no knocker, but he has the benefit of being rendered in marble. I cannot resemble Apollo, who is the god of sculpture, but I should look a little more like a lover to my good wife.’

  Tempting as it was to Choice to become the physician in a farce, and treat the amorous wife on one side of the door and her proud husband on the other, taking money and favours from both, while feeding them up on the same decoction – yet he was more prudent than that. He knew how farces ended: with a tradesman carted off to the stocks or worse.

  ‘Nothing would give me greater honour, sir, and I can offer you an infallible tonic for the gout, or the stone. I can give you a powder that will turn your hair white as chalk overnight. I can offer you a honey poultice for a sore thumb. I give ladies a drink that helps them through their moon-times. But for the delicate matter of which you speak, I have no Cures or Simples that are guaranteed . . .’

  With care, Choice wriggled, and span, and got himself out of the job. It hurt, to let such a customer go, and after the loss of Venetia too. But he preferred a customer who held no public office; who had no recourse to lawyers; who had no standing with the sheriffs, guildsmen or magisters; who could write a love-note but not a legal writ; and who was, above all, anxious to protect the precious egg of a virtuous reputation. In short, Choice preferred his customers to be female.

  Venetia had never visited St Bartholomew’s before, and now she knew why. Although she lived six minutes from its poxy portals, she could not stomach it. It was too much for any healthful person to bear; as she stood here, with the saintly Sister, she had to fight the impulse that told her, Get out, get out, and save yourself.

  The ear was offended first. The groans and occasional cries could be heard all along the cloister. Then, upon nearing the sick room, the stench, and the stickiness underfoot, which no amount of rushes could disguise. Venetia could hardly bear to look at the men, semi-clad, covered in pustules, or with swollen tongues lolling. She knew they must feel envy, or longing, as they saw her standing there, covering her little nose with her lavender kerchief, but they only stared into the distance with a sick, blank acceptance. Surely these were the worst cases, displayed to her by the Sister thus to play upon her feelings, like any Shiver-Jack begging in the street?

  ‘These are the Hopefuls, waiting to be seen,’ said the Sister. ‘We call them Hopefuls because we hope the physicians will find their cases of interest, and if they do not, we feed them, keep them warm, send them hither upwards or beyond.’

  A woman crouched in the corner looked blessedly whole, until she turned her head to one side revealing a goitre on her neck, blue-black and stiff as a fungus on an oak tree.

  She was here because she was become Good. She had made over £100 of her gaming monies to Bartholomew’s, which was the work of a very Good woman, not to say an excellent gambler. At their game of cards later that day, she would tell Penelope all she had seen, so she must not forget the details – the woman’s purple goitre. That man without limbs. With her presence here and her donation, she had atoned. For what crime, she could not exactly remember, but she knew Penelope was cross with her.

  Thank God in His Mercy she had brought a basket of bread and cake. The Sister was talking about bloodletting and stools and Venetia could not endure to hear any more.

  ‘Sister, please you take this present from the Digby household, and make a note that I, Lady Digby, was here to give my peaceful good wishes,’ she said, offering the basket to the Sister with a generous motion that allowed her to turn on her heel and, nodding at the patients right and left with due seemliness, which disguised her haste, she
sashayed out into the cloister, and the fresh, foul world beyond.

  IN WHICH SHE LOSES AT CARDS

  ‘IS LETTICE MARRIED yet?’ asked Venetia, adding, a little too graciously, ‘I do hope they will be happy.’

  She was wearing her new plain grey dress, twice as expensive as a gaudy one, and yet infinitely suitable, she thought, for someone who had gained wisdom through suffering.

  Olive threw a glance at Pen, who caught it.

  The cards made secret fans in their hands. Pen put down a ten and a Tib with a smack of the thumb.

  ‘They were married at midnight last Saturday. To preserve her estate since her father’s demise it was done withal speed,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I do rejoice!’ said Venetia. ‘I pray they will be happy despite everything.’

  ‘Despite everything . . .?’ queried Olive.

  ‘Oh, you understand me,’ said Venetia, and although she wanted very much to add more, she did not. She was Good now, was she not? She played a six, with an indifferent pout. ‘I wish them every earthly joy.’

  ‘I think your face is gaining its old sweetness,’ said Pen gently.

  ‘You are so much more whole,’ agreed Olive. ‘No little girls would now be affrighted by you; no, not at all.’

  The story of the incident in the Queen’s garden, when the Earl of Newcastle’s tot ran crying from Venetia, had clearly been doing the rounds.

  ‘I thought we’d have some China Oranges,’ said Pen, changing the subject. ‘To look at, of course, not to eat. They’re such bright worlds, I fancy they dress a table.’

  ‘Some silly girls do be dancing and fidgeting. It is the way of children,’ said Venetia. She was becoming used to her new attitude of forbearance. If she carried on like this, she would grow almost saintly. It was only a pity that the Wine would not leave her alone. She was free from it, and had not drunk it for a month and ten days, and yet it came into her mind unbidden, moving discreetly, like a scent, or a distant memory, or a tune she could not quite hear, so stealthily that it seemed to gain admittance without knocking, until there it was, beside her, pawing her shoulder, mewing for attention.