Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  Sir Kenelm clutched the counterpane, imagining he could feel Venetia’s breath upon his cheek. He hovered closer, searching for the phantom of her sleep-sigh, her departing pneuma. He wished he could have caught and captured it. A glass bulb would have sufficed to catch her spirit in, the filament crackling with her presence.

  Kenelm – whose mind was then unmoored and skittering through time – remembered that when Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was captured in a test tube by his son Charles, kneeling at his bedside. Edison’s great admirer, Henry Ford, the alchemist of speed and metal, displayed that empty test tube at the Ford Museum, outside Detroit, where on a small plinth the glass performed the high service of making the invisible visible. The inventor of the light bulb’s breath was a worthy catch, but how much sweeter, how much more useful for his Great Work, would his own wife’s breath have been?

  But though he dragged a net through the heavens, he would never find any of her vitality. He shuddered as he felt the flames that would, in 1666, consume their double tomb, raging around their grave like a furnace, blowing the windows of Christ Church Newgate, blackening her gilt memorial, and turning their ashes loose across the smoking rubble so they mixed together in the wind.

  The calcium of bones, the keratin of eyelashes, the exhalations of our bodies – all these are reconstituted as carbon atoms, used to make the world anew: the earth, the lilies of the field, the ink of this book. What is can never cease to be. Kenelm found comfort in these alchemists’ precepts, touching them again and again like rosary beads. We are all stars, and to the stars we return.

  Tin, lead-white, bismuth. Van Dyck’s brush moved with gentle care. His portrait listened so closely to Venetia; all the closer, because she would never now have anything more to say. In life, a portrait of this intimacy, with the sitter in her nightgown, framed by bed-drapes, would have been outrageous. But she was safe, now, from any ill remark, scandal or unwonted action. She had become a monument. She had always sought to preserve herself so that on future occasions she would not be found wanting, but now, at last, she was ready.

  The woman is perfected

  Her dead

  Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

  The illusion of a Greek necessity

  Flows in the scrolls of her toga

  Her bare

  Feet seem to be saying:

  We have come so far, it is over.

  Sylvia Plath,

  from ‘Edge’, 1963

  Van Dyck finished this painting himself, without delegation. He applied the final white gleam to her pearls, her one, half-open eye. One eye symbolised occult knowledge: there was no accident in Van Dyck’s art. He worked softly, stealthily, so that nothing might jar the peacefulness of his creation, and all the murmurs that he had ever heard resonated through his brush. He saw her with the artist’s double vision. And if, onto the dark expanse of her counterpane, he threw a snake, twisting first into the form of a blanket’s gold-enamelled hem, and then into the guise of a viper’s scaly back, it was only because artists cannot help themselves.

  LET ME SPEAKE!

  GRIEF MADE KENELM’S mind turn over, like a boat, and—

  Let me speake!

  Those who would protect him told him he ought to put his mind upon a different subject. He could not sleep, or eat, but existed in a heightened state of consciousness—

  Oh, is’t so indeed?

  His beard grew untended, his hair unshorn—

  Enough from you, who hath spoke so long! Let me have the reins awhile.

  Note – The following is taken from Sir Kenelm Digby’s correspondence, including a long letter to his sons, written in the weeks after his wife’s death, 1633:

  I can have no intermission, but continually my fever rageth. Even whiles I am writing this to you, the minute is fled, is flown away, never to be caught again.

  I have a corrosive masse of sorrow lying att my hart which will not be worn away until it have worne me out.

  Not only while I felt the first violence and heate of a passionate and extreme love; but even to her dying day, when I had time enough to observe her and to know her thoroughly, and that almost ten years had converted that which might be thought desire and passion into a solide vigorous and peacefull friendship which (believe me, my children) is the happiest condition and the greatest blessing of this life.

  In a word shee was my dearest and excellent wife that loved me incomparably.

  Many times she received very hard measure from others, as is often the fortune of those women who exceed others in beauty and goodness.

  Although it be not the custom with us in England to have the husbands all the while present att their wives labours, yet she understanding that it was warranted by practise of most other countries – a mann’s strength as well as counsel being in these cases often times necessary – she would never permit me to be absent. She had so excellent and tender a love towards me that she thought my presence, or my holding her by the hand did abate a great part of her paines.

  What she won at play furnished her with a certain large revenue, which she gave for the poor. Before she died she disposed of £100 in one lump, to be prayed for.

  Whiles she did play, one could observe neither eagerness nor passion in her; no stander-by could have guessed by her countenance whether she won or lost.

  Her presence and comportment was beyond all that I ever saw; it would strike reverence and love in any man at the first sight. Her cheeks grew pink through exercise . . . Her blue veins shewed in her forehead . . . Her face could not be expressed upon a flatt board or cloth, where lights and shadows determine every part. Even a little motion in so exact and even a face gave her a new countenance, the life and spirits of which no art could imitate.

  [She lost some of her hair] with the birth of one of you boys. Nothing can be imagined subtiler than hers was [her hair]. I have often had a handful of it in my hand and have scarce perceived I touched anything. It was many degrees softer than the softest that I ever saw, which hath often brought to my consideration that [one] may judge the mildness and the gentleness of the disposition by the softness and fineness of one’s hair.

  Her hands were such a shape, colour and beauty as one would scarce believe they were natural, but made of wax and brought to pass with long and tedious corrections.

  Now towards her latter time she grew fatte, yet so that it disgraced nothing of her shape.

  When she had been dead almost two days I caused her face and hands to be moulded by an excellent Master, and cast in metal. Only wanness had defloured the sprightliness of her beauty but not sinking or smelling or contortion or falling of the lips appeared in her face to the very last. The last day, her bodie began somewhat to swell up . . . which ye chirugions said they wondered she did not more, and sooner, being so fatt as upon opening up she appeared to be, and lying in so warm a room.

  When she was opened—

  Are you sure this is suitable for your readers – your little sons?

  When she was opened, her heart was found perfect and sound, a fit seat for such a courage as she had when she lived. In her gall was found a great stone bigger than a pigeon’s egg. In her spleen, two cartiledges, quite extraordinary. There were severall of the most eminent doctors and surgeons of London at the opening of the body. There was but little brain left –

  An autopsy such as this was unusual, reserved for deaths which were suspicious or unexplained.

  – and this was thought to have caused her the most sudden and least painful death that ever happened.

  A cerebral haemorrhage. It is also said she drank a preparation known as Viper Wine.

  For to impute any cause of her death to Viper Wine is without any grounde at all . . . Of late she looked better and fresher than she had done in seven years before.

  How old was she?

  She was born on St Venetia’s day, 19th December 1600. She was designed for my salvation. And if here she was so faire, what will she be hereafter?
<
br />   Come, sir. Crying will not help her now. Would it comfort you to speak a little more of times you passed together at Gayhurst? Have you returned there yet?

  As I rode along, at every step some new object appeared to whett and sharpen my sorrow for they called into my memory a multitude of severall circumstances that had bin between my wife and me in that time which I may truly say was the happiest I ever enjoyed. A tree we sheltered under against a shower of rain. When we were hawking, retrieving of a partridge, I remembered how with admirable agility and without the help of any body she leaped from her horse to save the hawk from a dogg that else had killed her as she sat pluming the quarry in her foote. By heaven, I never saw anything so lovely as she looked then.

  For of all the women that ere I knew (and I will except few men) she was most capable of true friendship. Now my mother, who was ever most averse to her in life, can say as much. If my wife had lived, they two had bin upon good terms by this time, for my mother was overcome by my wife’s goodness and had resolved att her next coming to London to have expressed it.

  And her funeral?

  The funeral was held by night, to enhance sorrow.

  At midnight, the bell of Christ Church Newgate tolled the arrival of her bier, dressed with violets. Her black marble tomb was inscribed with copper gilt and set with a bust of her head and shoulders, a good likeness taken from her deathbed, that her beauty might be kept eternally in the mind of the living. The path to the door of the church was lit by flaming torches. Inside, the church was candlelit.

  Many hundreds viewed and kissed her corpse. Never was a woman more lamented. Many observed they had never seen so much company. Most came of their owne free motion, for neither the shortness of the time nor the extremity of my passion admitted me to invite any. So many carriages came, Charterhouse was full. Guests included the Prince’s governess, secretaries of state, privy councillors, Aldermen and Sheriffs of London. She was given a Protestant burial.

  The only way to have her funeral made public was to make it Protestant, although it meant that Chater was not able to attend, but stayed crying in the churchyard throughout. Amongst the elevated throng in the church, were there many strangers? Those who never knew her, but whose habit was always to go to notable funerals, where they never failed to shed a tear. Those who had waited, years ago, to see her carriage pass, cheering and waving to catch sight of her; those who were convinced of her goodness and kindness to the poor, her virtue as the author of A Mirrour for a Modest Wife.

  And what of those who had done her harm? Was there, at the back of Christ Church, Newgate, behind a rotund Norman pillar, a familiar figure, soft and massive, one medicastra by the name of Begg Gurley? For she considered herself a rightful mourner. She was accompanied by her common-law spouse Thomas Leake, he as thin as she was plumpy, as if they had only a certain amount of flesh between them. Her shoulders were heaving as she cried for the loss of her Great Patron, and yet she was grateful that, during her life, she had at least been able to help her more than once.

  In the front pews, Olive, crying; Penelope, grim-faced, looking older than the week before; Aletheia, in her high mourning hat and cloak, with pale blue veins delicately painted in oil of Turpentine upon her forehead; Lucy Bright, veiled, her head bowed. The doctors’ account of the brain-spill, the blood-flux in Venetia’s mind which killed her, left some convinced, and others suspicious and uncertain. But all her friends were conscious of an inevitability, a just and fitting drama to her death. It had a certain flourish. To die so elegantly, leaving a husband distraught, a city talking; to die overnight, without blemish or ague; to sit to Van Dyck, after death: if anyone in their little set could pull this off, it would be Venetia. The women mourned and their cheeks were coursed with tears and all, except Penelope, were plumped and dark-eyed from that day’s Drink.

  The chief mourner was, by tradition, a woman judged to be of roughly the same age and distinction as the deceased. She walked behind Venetia’s coffin, decked in violets. Her eyes darted and she opened her mouth frequently, as she looked at the mourners around her, as if she was pleased to recognise them and wished to speak to them. One would almost have thought she was enjoying her role, were that not such a regrettable idea. But Venetia could not have wished for a younger or more elevated woman to follow her coffin, for this was Lettice, newly Countess of Dorset.

  Ben Jonson took up half a pew with his great bulk. He presented Kenelm with the manuscript of his new poem ‘In Praise of Venetia’, except the first part was not about Venetia, but swiped instead at Van Dyck, repeating that he, Jonson, was a worthier witness than any painter:

  Not that your arte I do refuse

  But here I may no colours use

  Beside your hand will never hitt

  To draw the thing that cannot sit—

  By this last line he meant ‘the mind’. He found his stride later in the poem:

  It were time that I dy’d too now shee is dead

  Who was my Muse and life of all I seyd

  The Spirit that I wrote with and conceived!

  All that was good or great in me shee wean’d

  And sett it forth! The rest were Copwebs fine

  Spun out in the name of some of the old Nine . . .

  So sweetly taken to the court of Blisse

  As spiritts had stolen her Spiritt in a kiss

  From off her pillow and deluded bed

  And left her lovely body unthought dead . . .

  For this so lofty form so straight

  So polish’t perfect, round and even

  As it slyd moulded off from heaven . . .

  They were his old familiar rhymes, reheated for the purpose – and the one person who would have spotted the paucity of his invention, and teased him for it, was gone.

  Kenelm gave a brief, half-mad funeral address.

  Three weeks after her burial, my thoughts tumbled every corner of her grave where her face is covered over with slyme and wormes, or her hart has some presumptuous worme feeding upon it. I wake all bedewed with fears, womanish with weakness. I eat a miserable little pittance and scarcely gett an hour’s sleepe a night.

  And the rest of the household – tell us, how does Chater take the loss?

  As I sate this morning meditating deeply on my blessed wife’s death (which I do in particular manner every Wednesday) her old servant brought in her picture and sett it downe before me, going immediately out againe without speaking one word; which I perceived his teares that ran trickling downe his cheekes would not permit him to do.

  Van Dyck’s painting is in your arms even now?

  This is the onely constant companion I now have . . . It standeth all day over against my chaire and table, where I sit writing or reading or thinking, God knoweth, little to the purpose; and att night when I goe into my chamber I sett it close to my bed’s side and methinks I see her dead indeed; for that maketh painted colours look more pale and ghastly then they doe by daylight. I see her, and I talke to her, until I see it is but vain shadows.

  Your children are still with their grandmother?

  God knoweth it so fareth with me as I am not able to raise any in myself, much lesse to administer unto an other. As it fareth now, I am fitt not for society or relations of others to me.

  You are to move house, I hear.

  There is such desolation, loneliness and silence in the house where I have had so much company, so many entertainments, so much jollity.

  My mother advises me ‘to put a bridle’ on my grief, as we should ‘not sett our hearts over much upon a fading subject’. Many of my discreetest friends advise me rather to seek all meanes to divert my botelesse thoughts from this sad object that can never be recovered; and they chide me because I do otherwise. But for my part I am resolved I will never beguile sorrow if I cannot master it: I will look death, and it, in the face; and peradventure when we are growned better acquainted and more familiar, we shall be good frendes and dwell quietly together.

  I conclude from my p
remises that the golden chain of causes which by severall links reacheth from heaven to earth, beginning with God and passing through the Angels, the orbs of heaven and the planets, downe to the lowest elements, knitting together the intellectual, celestial and materiall worlds, and lapping in eternal providence and her two handmaids, chance and fortune, did bind together my wife’s and my handes, hartes and soules, which death cannot lose, but rather will ferry us over the tempestuous sea of this world to enjoy our friendship in tranquillity and aeternall security where the first knot of it was tied and where the first link of the chain was fastened.

  For the first few months my soule has been oppressed with strange agonies. But now I lye quietly, and it lyeth gently upon me.

  Sir Kenelm began the dissolution of his library by packing away the Americas.

  He turned the pages of his pharmacopoeias, his uroscopies, his prognostics, his Terrestrial Paradise of John Parkinson, and the pleasure he used to take in their engravings was like ashes in his mouth. The seascape murals above him were flat and tawdry, the busts of the Great Authors were plaster bodges looking down on him. There were no Atomes dancing in any sunbeams here. The spirit of Mercurius was no longer in this house.

  He packed away his Atlases and rolled his Mappes, although he barely had the strength to lift them.

  The treasures he brought back from Florence – no, Siena – when he was seventeen stirred nothing but weariness in him. The perfume of their vellum was too rich for his senses. Livy’s Punic Wars, Cicero, Seneca’s tragedies, Petrarch’s sonnets: without any sentiment, without even a fond glance over his juvenile annotations, he thrust these in the box. They were going to a better place.

  Through the painted glass he saw his Peruvian marigold, bent and blowsy, sorrowing in the garden. And yet the chattels in the house retained their freshness, pert and serviceable. He rebuked their callousness, their durability. Her possessions showed no Sympathy, her boots had kept their shape and her playing cards were impervious and bright, though she had been dead four weeks.