Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  ‘Come, come,’ he coaxed her, trying to pull it out of her hands, though they would not give. ‘Of what does this cloud foretell, darling? What does it signify? Every portent has its meaning.’

  Venetia lay pale and inert.

  He knew the cloud was warning him of something, but he did not know what, and his ever-postulating mind went straight to the political, foretelling the revolt of Parliament, or the failure of the Exchequer, or a sickness in the body politic. Perhaps they would be drawn into the war on the Continent. Or perhaps the Godly ones would have no more of Papistry, and rise to drive them out. Tomorrow was the first of May; perhaps the cloud was a May Day token, come to wake him to bring in the spring.

  The aurora borealis, which men called streamers, petty dancers, or goat-dancers, had burned so brightly red under Tiberius that people believed it presaged fire.

  Tycho Brahe believed the streamers brought on infectious diseases.

  Elizabeth I saw the firedog playing with fire, and called John Dee to explain its portent.

  He gazed at the cloud, as Venetia’s calm body lay beside him, and he tuned into twenty-first-century voices arguing in his head about ‘the recent phenomena only just observed in the sky, which scientists have agreed to call “acid clouds”. They are made up of tiny reflective acid crystals, so they shine like mother-of-pearl, but their source and their significance is still a mystery. Some say they are a sign of global warming.’ They were a tenuous phenomenon, vaguely understood, but thought to be symptoms of – the voice grew ominous – ‘climate change’. The voice brightened. ‘Now for the shipping forecast,’ and the signal faded out, as the cloud drifted gently over the horizon, and the first light of day showed in the sky.

  He tiptoed out of the bedroom, and in the grey dawn he consulted his books on shadows and eclipses, and his tracts on heavenly bodies, hoping that he would find amongst them some recognition or explanation, until, still turning the pages in his mind, he fell asleep in his hammock.

  ‘When the shrill and baleful voice expressing her heavy plight strook my eares . . . in an instant my fansie ranne over more space than is between heaven and earth. I presently grew as senseless almost as the body that I had in my armes. Amazement, upon such occasions, for a while supplieth the room of sorrow.’

  Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to his brother John, 1633

  May Day morning, 1633, and the city was up early, excited, noisy. The great Maypole on the Strand was already strung with ribbons and in imitation every city green was raising its own with shouts and heave-hoes. At Charterhouse crowds had gathered to see the boy singers of Sutton’s Hospital performing from the church tower like so many skylarks and warblers, their little mouths wide with song. A soloist was chosen, though he was one of the youngest, and in his nerves he reached an even higher peak of clarity, and his song carried through the green town square and beyond, mingling with the shouts of the men setting up archery butts, and rolling beer kegs, and building bonfires, so that the pious men and women who had come to hear the choir’s singing threw stalks and leaves at them and shouted down the noise-makers in an angry chorus.

  Kenelm was roused from his hammock by a frantic pounding at his study door. The birds in the green garden outside his window did not cease their singing as he ran upstairs, following the screaming of Mistress Elizabeth, who was on the threshold of Venetia’s chamber. The sun smiled through the bed-drapes, and on the serene image of Venetia, lying in her bed, elegantly pale, at rest, and yet more profoundly at rest than she should be, so that her body lay too immobile upon the pillows, and her dark head hung backwards, like a heavy flower on a broken stalk, as he grabbed her to his chest.

  Cries of joy echoed up from the street across the Digbys’ garden as the maidens came a-maying, to take their places on the green, and the ladies in the crowd waved their ribbons and flowers, and boys hawking posies shouted ‘Meadowsweet and sage! Hyssop and clary-wort!’ as Sir Kenelm uncurled Venetia’s cold white fingertips, gracefully curved, and stiffening with every moment. The May maidens called to one another and waved their ribbons. Sir Kenelm shook her, and like a lovely dancer, she moved willingly in his arms. He wailed to heaven, as in the street outside a hurdy-gurdy struck up a May Day jig.

  He found her scrying mirror, slipped it from its velvet drawstring, and held its polished surface to her lips, her nose. The mirror stayed inert as steel, with no kind bloom upon it. Even its most sensitive wet-black screen could not find a trace of presence, a ghost of breath. He cursed the mirror for telling him the truth. The crowd outside cheered as a man already drunk and abusive was ear-yanked away by the aldermen’s men. A girl who was too young to be in the procession cried, and those who were glad were innocently so, without knowing their good fortune, and buds bloomed, and magpies cackled, while at the corner of the canvas, unnoticed by the ploughman pushing his oxen across his cliff-top field, Icarus fell out of the clouds like a sycamore seed, spinning, and plunged into the drown-deep sea. Only a farmhand gaped at the boy streaking through the sky.

  In catacombs, in mortuaries, in pits barely covered by seed-grass, the bodies of those who died of plague were quickly laid, too distempered to touch, too putrid to look upon. Death had undone them, so they were unrecognisable, yet Venetia was pallid-perfect so it seemed, like Juliet, she might wake at any moment. Kenelm, kneeling before her staring, tried to fix in his mind every line, every dear pigment.

  When Dr Donne prepared for death, he had charcoal fires lit in his room, and a carpenter come to build him a wooden urn and resting board, and he rose from his sickbed, wrapped himself in his winding sheet, and stood inside the urn, wherein there was room for his feet withal, and in this pose of eternity he had a sculptor take his living portrait, for his death’s monument. His shroud was knotted top and bottom, and peeping through was his lean and death-like face, eyes closed, and turned to the east, towards the Second Coming of our Saviour.

  Sir Kenelm gasped with inspiration. Van Dyck should come and paint Venetia. He reached for the telephone, but it was not there. He grasped for a text, a keyboard, pager, telegram. Pay-as-you-go. Hologram. Loudspeaker. He found a piece of paper and quill at her bedside, and scribbled words upon it, as fast and clear as he was able, through his distorting tears. When the letter reached Van Dyck at Blackfriars, where he was at his easel, he fell upon his knees and crossed himself, and it was only afterwards that he marvelled at how the letter had reached him, even though his name and lodgings were written in backwards mirror-writing.

  News of her death was spreading abroad, called out by the crier to the May Day revellers, above the din of ‘Ninny-heigh No’ and the thunk of arrows into the butts, and there was a compelling fitness to the salt of tragedy on that sweet May morning, so that talk formed on hasty lips between sips of ale.

  ‘Dead by a mystery no man can answer.’

  ‘Dead by her own good heart – she was tending the lazars at Bartholomew’s lately.’

  ‘Dead by an ague come up from the marshes.’

  ‘Brought to bed early of a babe, no doubt.’

  ‘The best do always fly the fastest off.’

  And tastiest of all, confidentially, between bites of crumble pie and sweet-pud:

  ‘Her husband was forever mixing potent drugs and pharmacies, which he did give her to drink, nightly.’

  When Mistress Elizabeth came into the room, Kenelm turned to look guiltily at her, as if she had surprised him in a covert act. He was leaning over the body, holding Venetia’s weighty head upon one side, as he fixed an earring to her still-perfect ear. It was a huge pearl, and he opened his hand so that he might show Mistress Elizabeth the other pearl, which he had yet to fasten. Mistress Elizabeth averted her gaze with her usual deference, but she wondered if he was losing his senses. His face was coursed with tears and snot, which he wiped upon the cuff of his shirt. ‘Oh, that’s fine, my darling!’ he said appreciatively, looking at how the pearls suited Venetia. ‘That’s fine indeed!’

  Mistress Elizabeth
bid the King’s physician, Sir Theodore de Mayerne, come into the bedroom – his boy was made to wait downstairs, with the weeping Chater, Olive and Pen. Sir Theodore had been summoned from a patron’s house, where he was about to eat a May Day marchpane pie, and under his cloak he still had his napkin tucked into his doublet, and a hungry look about him.

  ‘My darling,’ said Kenelm to his inobservant wife, ‘I should have given these to you before – presents which I brought for you from Naples.’ He spoke almost flirtatiously, tucking his blond hair behind his ears.

  Theodore de Mayerne recognised this behaviour. He had been in attendance in 1612 when Prince Henry, England’s golden hope, died aged eighteen of a fever. He had shaken King James to stop him babbling like a brook. He knew grief; oh yes.

  ‘Come, sir, step aside and let me see her,’ he said firmly.

  ‘LEAVE US BE,’ roared Kenelm, pushing Mayerne away. ‘You are dressed to go a-maying, I can see your gaudy doublet. And you have forgot your muckender, which is still tucked under your fat French chin.’

  Mayerne had heard it all before. Scurvied children tried to bite him and women cried shit and damnation on his head during their childbirths. He bore Kenelm no ill will; besides, he liked his own stately girth. ‘An evil soul rarely dwells in a fat body,’ was his habitual remark.

  Kenelm turned his back on Mayerne and tenderly fastened the rope of pearls around Venetia’s neck. ‘She shall have her present for a May morning. There, how lovely she is.’

  Kenelm remembered how he had spoken to his boys in their mother’s womb as they kicked and quickened; how he laid his hand upon them and felt their souls a-bud. Talking to Venetia now was similar. There was the trace of her, the shape of her, just beyond his reach. He could not think of the word purgatory. He would rather sing her an old song of their courtship, marking time upon her counterpane with his fingers: ‘Under the greenwood and round again.’

  Or perhaps – ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

  When Mayerne splashed cold water in his face, Kenelm came to his senses, and stood aside to let Mayerne make his examination. Kenelm could not bear to watch the indignity of it, and after telling Mayerne to leave her face and hands unmarked, he left her bedroom, and stepped into a new world of grief; the familiar hall, the dining room and library, all the same, yet changed beyond measure, so it felt like an empty simulacrum of the house in which he used to live.

  The boys were still in their nightshirts, much distressed, with cold little feet, which Kenelm rubbed as he spoke to them. They could not see their mother, no, but their granddam was a great good lady, and she would care for them while the house was all unresting, until their mother was well again—

  They peered at their father’s wretched head, as he turned away and sobbed violently, having told a lie that none of them believed. The boys rattled into the country with their nurses sitting at the rear of their coach and their bags of treasures badly packed and flung together. The godly would not let them pass through Highgate, as they were protecting the village, keeping it pure from May Day celebrations, and after a detour, their coach passed at last into open country, where they saw whole villages out a-maying, waving blossom boughs and singing and raising tankards at their coach, and calling them ‘cuckoo’, and being children, they called ‘cuckoo’ back, and waved, and laughed.

  In years to come the memory of this would grieve them, and they each kept it secret from the other, ashamed and questioning: why did no one help them to be better?

  At three, Kenelm tried to pull the bell out of their clock in the hall so that it might not ring any more, because time should not go on so blithely without her. He went into his study expecting it to be destroyed, and all his bottles broken and notebooks burned, but it was as neat and familiar as when he left it, only the blankets on his hammock were disarrayed, where he had left them when he first heard the terrible pounding on his door. He decreed they should never be folded but always left in that stricken attitude. He was comforted by this, and drank a little Rhenish wine which he was given, although he could not eat. When he went back into his study, the maid had already folded the blankets away.

  He felt betrayed by his clock, and the fountain in the town square, and the spigot in the stable-yard, because all of them flowed, and had not stopped at the moment of calamity. But when he drew the curtain to his study, he saw that the great sunflower’s head was newly drooped at an angle of despair, as if the world had gone to darkness, and there was no bright sun to turn its head to follow. This gave him comfort: this most Sympatheticall of plants.

  ‘Scientists have discovered that sunflowers can pull radioactive contaminants out of the soil. Researchers cleaning up the Fukushima site in Japan are putting the flowers to the test.’

  Japan Today, 2011

  ‘We plant sunflowers, field mustard, amaranthus and cockscomb, which are all believed to absorb radiation,’ said the monk Koyu Abe. ‘So far we have grown at least 200,000 and at least eight million sunflowers blooming in Fukushima originated from here.’

  Reuters, 2011

  And yet Sir Kenelm knew, with the heavy physical knowledge that accompanies heartbreak, that the sunflowers planted in Fukushima were proven not to be effective in dissipating radiation, reducing caesium in the topsoil by a negligible amount. Even their famous heliotropism was misconceived. Sunflower buds revolve with the sun. The mature flowers are only east-facing, like any others. Sir Kenelm looked at the grizzled plant, its tortured optimism, its petals rendered in a thick impasto. It had not saved Van Gogh either. Poor flower. It was condemned to brightness, though about itself, it was thoroughly disillusioned: that he recognised.

  THE DEATHBED PORTRAIT

  ‘It’s a kind of dance of death. But it’s her life force I was responding to. I hope to put a little bit of life into charcoal. Whether [the work] is of someone dead or alive is irrelevant.’

  Artist Maggi Hambling on drawing a series of deathbed sketches of her lover Henrietta Moraes, 2002

  ‘When we came in, we found her almost cold and stiffe; yet the blood was not so settled but that our rubbing of her face brought a little seeming colour into her pale cheeks, which Sir Anthony Van Dyck hath expressed excellently well in his picture . . . A rose lying upon the heme of the sheet, whose leaves being pulled from the stalk in the full beauty of it and seeming to wither apace even whiles you look upon it, is a fit emblem to expresse the state her body then was in.’

  Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby, 1633

  BY CANDLELIGHT, AND dawn, and daylight, as it filtered through the bed-drapes, Van Dyck worked constantly. The sorrow all around him, the sobbing in the hall where Chater held vigil, the distracted presence of Kenelm coming and going from her bedside, and the disorder in the household, did not seem to penetrate him; his lean moustaches were fixed in a placid expression of concentration, as he painted, so any common observer might think he was unmoved, when in fact all the sensitivities of his soul, and his precise brush, were working to transmute Grief into Comfort.

  Tin-lead yellow, Bismuth white, orpiment. By continuous circulation they may be sublimed and fixed together and lastly by coagulation, become immutable. Thus is the painter like the alchemist. This vision of cruelty and despair, this horrid, unwonted scene, this death’s head, about to putrefy, sighing as its cavities gave up their air – he would, by his Art, render this into a vision of serenity and calm; his most Intimate work, tender and careful. Her pale form, enclosed by dark blue drapes, like a pearl in a velvet setting. Her nightdress and cap, clean and shining white; her face, set in an attitude of sleepy contentment; her eyes, caught between opening and closing.

  Van Dyck almost smiled as he worked. It was a beautiful sight, if you but had the fortitude to see it so, and did not let the fear of your own demise cloud your vision. His art could transmute the awful question, the why that howled above her head, into a serene certainty: we all must come to this long sleep. Tin-lead, smalt blue, azurite. By his manipulation these base metals and tinctures woul
d become Higher. This brief interlude between death and decay would, by his painter’s alchemy, become lasting. Van Dyck always hesitated to use the word eternal, even in his private thoughts; he was not to know it would be carved upon his own tomb by his English admirers.

  ‘The pearls are not very lucid,’ said Sir Kenelm, standing at Van Dyck’s shoulder, looking at his work in progress.

  Van Dyck wanted to shout at Kenelm, but remained silent.

  The body in front of them let forth a noise, which sounded like a plaintive snore, and startled Kenelm, so he ran to her body, and clasped it in his arms, desperate to take the noise as a sign of life.

  Van Dyck was about to call out to Kenelm to bid him stop deranging his sitter – she would take some putting right – but he contained himself, breathed, and continued painting. There was not much time left.

  Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, by Anthony Van Dyck, 1633

  He had painted posthumous portraits before. In Antwerp, his tutor Rubens sent for him in the middle of the night, and Van Dyck found him kneeling over his wife Isabella in her open coffin. Now that was a task to paint. No sleep, all night; the children wailing, the bell tolling and the priest imploring them to go to church to bury her. And Rubens, weeping, and ordering him about at the same time – suggesting a better light, a more dramatic composition, and so forth. All he produced was a poor copy of Rubens’ style – a stiff tableau of death. But that was seven years ago, and since then he had gained so much in confidence, that he now worked within his own preoccupations. Every day, he painted portraits capturing his sitters’ steady, living breath, and this was very like, except this portrait caught the final whisper of breath that a body exhaled.

  That breath was deemed precious, because it contained the essence of the spirit departing the body. Vasari related that Francis I was present at the moment of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, clasping him in his arms as he died, sucking from his lips his last exhalation, to make it his own inspiration.