Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  His vainglorious library, with its ceiling of clouds, its lovers’ motifs, its sententious aphorisms engraved across the walls: its whole conception and ethos was lost to him. He could not comprehend the babyish happiness he must have enjoyed in order to commission such a den.

  There was but one remaining fixture of the library: his armillary sphere, sitting on the edge of his desk, brassy emblem of his former certainty, his mechanical universe. He ran his finger over it so its spheres spun around his little earth, cosseted at the centre of the sky. This model of the universe he now rejected. Galileo the Starry Messenger had sought to destroy his faith in it with reasoning; now life had done that job instead. He lifted the delicate mechanism above his head and slammed it onto the library floor, where one of the soldered brass hoops split resonantly. He scooped up this cracked ribcage of the heavens, to keep as his only trophy, emblem of his broken state.

  He shut the door with easy finality, knowing he could always return in his mind.

  ‘Sir Kenelm donated fifteen trunks of books, comprising 233 codices, five rolls and a catalogue, to the library of Sir Thomas Bodley . . . He also gave “fifty good oaks” from Gayhurst. [for the provision of shelving].

  The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist, 2007

  Although the journey across the city seemed an impossible undertaking, with his groom’s help Sir Kenelm went down by carriage from Charterhouse to Van Dyck’s studio in Blackfriars. Kenelm’s groom turned the coach round while his servitor left him on the doorstep of the studio, with his potted sunflower and his smashed armillary sphere boxed up beside him. When the studio boy opened the door to the unkempt man in black waiting on the doorstep, he took him for a beggar.

  ‘If a man can poison his wife with impunity . . .’

  Van Dyck ran through all the possible backdrops: distant mountains, broken columns, rich curtains, garden views, imperial arches . . . Sir Kenelm motioned to his preference, which was a putty-brown drape of cheap material.

  ‘If a born Catholic can use his improper knowledge of plants and herbs to plot the downfall of his own wife, what harm might he do our country and our King?’

  Sir Kenelm barely spoke during their session. Van Dyck imagined him as Harpocrates, except instead of depicting him with the index finger of silence held to his lips, Van Dyck showed how the tendrils of his beard grew almost over his lips, like ivy sealing up a gate.

  ‘As a wife she was hardly spotless – you can imagine he might do it in a jealous rage. Naming no names ;)’

  Kenelm lay his right hand upon his heart, spontaneously, and Van Dyck saw he rested easily in this position of defensive sincerity, and asked him to remain thus.

  ‘They put poison in their bejewelled rings, see. And then they unclasp, flip and tip it into the wine-cup of anyone they wish to do away with.’

  One finger on Kenelm’s right hand was trapped inside his black garb – his little finger. It was a natural detail, infinitely casual, and yet to anyone schooled in Hermetic wisdom, it showed that Kenelm’s powers were in abeyance, his riches lost, and his strength in decline. The little finger was the finger of Mercury.

  ‘I gave prophecy this marriage would come to no good ends, Lascivious Shee and Whoreson Hee, spawn of a plotter’s loin!’

  Van Dyck talked as he painted. ‘So you know about the Sidereus Nuncius?’

  Kenelm regarded him balefully.

  ‘Sentenced by the Papal Inquisition. He is under house arrest. He abjures, curses and detests his theories. In order to live, he has recanted heliocentrism.’

  There was silence, except for the gluey sound of Van Dyck’s brush moving, its heavy swirl in the oil pot, and the bright tap of its shaft on glass.

  ‘She must have suffered the whole night through – just at the very going out of April and the coming in of May . . .’

  The all-seeing sunflower knew that both the men were in the Catholic faith. Since his wife’s death, Kenelm had taken the sacrament from Chater, relapsing to the automatic faith of his childhood, the comforting folds of the Marian blue cloth, the heart’s-ease of the Miserere Psalm. Only the Catholic liturgy made sense to him. He would, in time, publicly confess his relapse, his homecoming. Not yet.

  In the painting, Van Dyck made Kenelm’s face composed and sanguine, as decency demanded, but he let the sunflower next to him howl and weep, its petals shrivelled by an unseen blight.

  Ovid wrote of Clytie, abandoned by her lover the sun-god Apollo, sitting naked and unkempt upon the ground, turning her face to watch the sun as it passed by. In time her legs became roots, her arms tendrils, her yellow hair was torn into petals, and she was transformed into a bloodless plant, a sunflower.

  ‘He’s said to be a broken man, but where is he? Has he been seen abroad in mourning clothes? Has he given out alms in her name, or set up any town monuments in her honour, or done penance beside her grave?’

  Sir Kenelm’s mourning portrait was finished, copied, passed around. Its profundity and novelty were noted. It was not a memento mori; it contained no traditional mourning emblems. It was a problem painting. What shall he do now? What should be done with him?

  Sir Kenelm Digby, by Anthony Van Dyck, 1633

  ‘We shall see many more cases like, unless this is brought to trial. And yet the Lord Chamberlain, the Master of the Rolls, the Archbishop himself, none do lift a finger against their friend Digby . . .’

  It was high summer, and long days of thirsty drinking gave way to pale blue evenings, by which to wreak rough justice. The whisperings about Venetia’s death had built into a consensus, and the mob found itself with a righteous purpose. Where justice was perceived to have failed, savagery crept in. The mob smashed John Dee’s custom-made laboratory instruments in Mortlake in 1583, and drowned his devil books in the well. The mob hunted the astrologer John Lambe in 1628, hurling pebbles till he was blinded, and when he hid, cornered, it waited outside the door to complete its work when he crept out at dawn.

  When angry men came to Sir Kenelm’s home, they stood on Charterhouse green bearing torches, stones and whips, chanting for justice to be done, for his Catholic books to be burned, and for his life-taking conjurations to cease. A local woman who did the Digbys’ washing shouted at them, as she hurried by, that they should feel compassion, but to the mob, Sir Kenelm’s misfortune was a stain, a sign of guilt.

  When nightfall brought anonymity, the mob became stronger and more brutal than any of its members. It rammed down the back door with picks and shoulders, and ran into his courtyard, shouting to frighten off the bad spirits working in the service of Sir Kenelm, fearful that he – a murderer already – might wield a musket at them in the dark, or worse, operate his unseen instruments of sorcery. But they had no sport there, for the Digby library was already packed up, the household dispersed, all contents sold, all wishes spent and dreams departed, and Sir Kenelm gone.

  ‘Gresham College is an institution of higher learning founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham and today it hosts over 140 free public lectures every year within the City of London. Its original site in Bishopsgate is now occupied by Tower 42.’

  Gresham College website, 2013

  Gresham College

  At Gresham College, that exalted seat of learning, the porters maintained a jovially paternal attitude to their charges, the professors. The college was founded in Elizabeth’s reign with provision for seven professors, a pleiades of experts in Rhetoric, Divinity, Music, Astronomy, Geometry, Medicine and Law, all supported by stipends and sheltered from the world that they might perfect it. Witnesses to the unseen Microcosmographies of life these gentlemen were, and masters of the circle and the square, with often two degrees from the Universities apiece – and yet between them they gave rise to so many crises, by forgetting to take their meals, losing their keys, exploding their laboratory furnaces, accruing debts mistakenly or falling a-prey to Abraham men and the like, that the only way for a porter to handle a professor was with firm and amused patience.


  It was a rich foundation, newly built and endowed, and its gables shone very clean, painted against the ubiquitous coal dust, so it was white, whiter than any other building in the City. For all its eccentricities, it hummed with prestige. Gresham College was established in order to advance commercial interests, and it was far and away from the rowdy Universities. It was a rarefied laboratory of the future. Here, the acuity of human vision redoubled every two years – reaching outwards to the heavens and inward to the dust. The stars were becoming places, not five-cornered specks, and fleas were about to be revealed by Hooke as armour-plated, bristling monsters. The sound of the grinding of lenses, simple and compound, which echoed around the quad on Tuesdays, was the sound of the perimeters of the world extending, coming into focus.

  What went on behind the closely guarded stone facade of Gresham College was, to the busy city street of Bishopsgate, uncertain, but occasionally signs of arcane experiments were visible. Small and large transparent spheres of wobbling soap came rising with serene iridescence over the gables of the college, before expiring into a single teardrop on the breeze. Sometimes the chimneys belched yellow smoke, or clouds of turpentine blue, or stank of sulphur. For half a term, the sound of cats wailing in concert emanated from the rooms of the Professor of Music; for years, the clanking of a heavy metal chain could be heard around the college, day and night, while Professor Gunter perfected his Instrument of Dimensurement. This was a favourite with the porters, who loved to recall how this massy great chain had been set up like a hazardous trap-fall all around college, which no one was permitted to move, only step across – and how, after long attempts at its perfection it had made the gentleman’s fortune many times over, being the best tool for surveying distance and calculating land-mass ever yet invented, as well as a sure-fire way to break your neck on a stairway.

  Into the college, under the stone-carved grasshopper, which was the founder Thomas Gresham’s insignia, were conveyed many pieces of equipment: empty barrels, used to prove the spontaneous generation of mice out of the air; complicated pieces of blown glasswork, made to order, so that a glass beehive might be constructed, a furtive bee-peeper’s dream (unrealised until Christopher Wren’s residency, twenty-four years later); ores and heavy metals, to be used as medicines.

  A file of inkhorns, intellectualists, tech nerds and business speculators waited by the back gate to attend the public lectures once a month. Otherwise, the college was private, hermetic. Professors who passed under the stone grasshopper into the college might spend a dozen years safely inside, shifting the heaviest presumptions with their minds, or blowing thought-bubbles.

  In their well-swept rooms beside the green quadrangle they tasted caput mortuum and sniffed mercurial fumes until their skin turned grey. They spun quantities of numbers into logarithms and trigonometry, and cooked up new hypotheses on their retorts and alembics. At night in their cots they dreamed of binary code, and genetic therapies, bandages that glowed when they harboured poison, and magnetic devices that told where bullets lodged in breasts. They sleeptalked across the quad to one another of Voyagers 1 and 2, already bound for other planets, and babies generated out of dishes. With their half-awakened minds, in the grey dawn, they saw their quadrangle and their dining hall on Bishopsgate become, in time, the footprint of one of the soaring towers of the City, built of calculus, and topped with a constantly flashing light, to warn off angels.

  One Sunday afternoon, when the daylight was so flat and uniform it seemed as if there was no source of light behind the clouds at all, the college’s peace was broken by a determined knocking. The duty porter rammed open the wooden window in the lodge’s great door, to discover there was nothing there except the top of the head of a girl.

  ‘Washermaid?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir, I am Mary Tree,’ she said, stepping backwards so she might look the porter in the face. Conscious of her Mark, as usual, she was relieved when the porter managed to find it in his heart not to look at her too strangely.

  The porter looked down and saw a fresh-faced maid without much to distinguish her from any other.

  Mary swallowed. This was the last time, perhaps, that she would need to announce herself and her odd quest to a stranger. She began: ‘I have some business with Sir Kellem Digbaine—’

  She broke off and tried again, more slowly. ‘I mean, Sir Kenelm Digby. Is he known to you here?’

  ‘Well,’ said the porter, with savour that presaged a long and equivocatory discourse. ‘If you mean the gentleman whose hair is long as an hermit’s, who never removes his black mantle, and rarely speaks a word, except to friends, and moreover, demands large quantities of crayfishes for calcification, then perhaps we have an understanding. But as you probably mean only to be meddling with his business of grief, then stay away.’

  When you have been travelling for many months with one object in mind, and you come near to that object, almost within touching distance, small frustrations can be unduly discouraging. Mary Tree heard that tightening hum inside her head that told her she was close to crying.

  Mary had already been forced to mourn her long-cherished idea of Venetia, and given up for ever her private fantasy of becoming her lady’s maid. Now her whole quest, her long ordeal, was being disparaged by this St Peter, this gatekeeper.

  ‘Is he here or not?’ she said in a voice that was more high-pitched than she wished it to be.

  ‘If you mean, is he present or absent, I can tell you that he’s not quite neither, since he’s so distracted by his loss, he’s liable not to hear you, or if he hears you, he may not see you, unless you be a crayfish, in which case he would have you calcified as soon as not.’ The porter looked at her sternly. ‘There are those who would prosecute him for his loss, and drag him through town for a business about which they know nothing, and if you’ve been put up to this by the Lord Chamberlain, and wish to get a false confession out of him, again I say, stay away.’

  Mary Tree summoned the last of her strength. She knew she presented a poor spectacle of a girl: weary, with clothes grown shabby from journeying. She was stained across her face, and she could not read or write, but although she had no family, she was friends with all the world. She said with dignity: ‘I find your words an insult, sir. I’m here because he is the Keeper of the Powder of Sympathy, which is the only remedy to heal my kinsman, Richard Pickett.’

  The porter’s hatch rammed closed in her face, and she thought her pride had ruined her whole enterprise, until the visitors’ door within the door clicked open, and the porter showed her in.

  ‘To avoid envy and scandal . . . he [Digby] retired into Gresham-colledge, where he diverted himself with his Chymistry and the Professors’ good conversation. He wore there a long mourning cloak, a high-crowned hat, his head unshorn . . . as signs of sorrow for his beloved wife.’

  John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 1669–96

  Mary Tree sat on a step within the quiet embrace of Gresham College, clasping the bound and blackened shard of glass.

  The college struck her as somewhere between an almshouse for the insane, and one of the old friaries. A man brushed past her, engrossed in a book that he held up to his face, reading as he walked, pigeon-toed, across the quadrangle. She held the cruel shard to her chest and considered its pathetic bandage, grown brown with dirt. This was the last of her many waits, and it was not a long wait, although it had a semblance of eternity as the light began to be lost from the quadrangle.

  Sir Kenelm came moving quickly across the flagstones, his black garments clinging to his body, now so much leaner that he seemed taller. He was carrying the Powder in one hand, and a basin slopping with water.

  He barely looked at the girl, but he registered that her eyes were sincere.

  ‘We shall perform the ceremony on the grass here, so that the healing Atomes may be carried through the air to your – your father, is it? What is his name?’

  ‘He is my kinsman – but only by marriage,’ said Mary, before clasping her mouth as people do
when they wish to take their words back. ‘I mean, he is as much my father as any man in this world. His name is Richard Pickett.’

  Sir Kenelm paused. He stopped his hand.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ he said. ‘I have received word of him last month. I knew of him a little for his learning of the Caesars. I had a letter which told me of your journey, and – would you like to see the letter?’

  Mary Tree nodded first, and then shook her head.

  ‘I cannot read, so you best tell me.’

  Sir Kenelm sat down with her quietly on the cloister wall. He noticed that she must once have had a mulberry stain upon her cheek, which was now as faint as the moon in the afternoon sky.

  ‘The letter that came, from Devon, I think, from one calling themself a neighbour of the household, makes me think we shall never send forth enough healing Atomes to help him now, for his mechanical physiognomy is beyond our reach.’

  ‘Has he gone to France?’ said Mary keenly, rising up.

  ‘No,’ said Kenelm. ‘No, it is further than that he has gone. The letter bid me tell you that he would never rise again, being sick of his wound unto death.’

  Mary Tree considered the grey pall that coloured the sky, and shivered.

  ‘He made a good end of it, passing quickly with a hot distemper upon his heart,’ said Kenelm, who had been moved by the letter.

  Mary Tree seemed to be muttering to herself.

  ‘I should have been faster on my journey,’ she said, more to herself than Kenelm; then, ‘I have let him down.’

  Sir Kenelm did not appear to have heard her, or if he had, he did not seem to know what to say. Mourning had clogged that quick facility he always had for talking. But with an effort of will it began to return.

  ‘If the wound was so penetrating as it sounds to have been, the Cure would not have helped him,’ he said. ‘It treats infection following on from wounds, not the injuries themselves. So your journey might have taken, oh, months, and he would have been no more saved.’