She wiped away a snot-smear.
‘Does the letter speak of a dog called Asparagus?’ asked Mary.
‘I think no, but I will have another look betimes. We shall find you a place here tonight so you can rest a-while and take some sustenance,’ said Kenelm. ‘There are many rooms here in this college, wherein all my world is now. It is a Sympatheticall place. There are sizars and servants here, though there are not many who are as yourself, which is to say, women – but you will find that Goodwife Faldo who runs the household will look after you.’
He saw that this cheered Mary Tree, and he smiled at her with his new, uncanny, counterfeit smile, and whispered, less to her than to the cold and darkling night itself: ‘I have many pertinent designs for the Divine Regeneration of Beings.’
The college quad caught and magnified the whisper, so that it reverberated as clearly as if he had spoken the words in the great amphitheatre at Ephesus.
After achieving sleep for a few hours, Kenelm woke and bid good morrow to his wife. He fancied she was as pale as ever, although, in keeping with his new habit, he moved the painting into the daylight with him when he rose out of bed, holding it to the window to check she had not developed overnight a blue pall, nor any other distemper of the grave.
As she was making up Sir Kenelm’s fire, Mary Tree made a resolution that when Asparagus was conveyed to London, he would be Sir Kenelm’s constant companion. The morning needs of a wolfhound, however base, would be preferable to this daily practice of picture-gazing, which she could not help but consider morbid. In his empty rooms there was precious little else to look on. He would be so much the better when he had that grey-whiskered muzzle to gaze upon every morning.
Kenelm’s bookshelves were bare, and in need of dusting. Mary was surprised that so great a scholar as Sir Kenelm possessed no books. She, Mary Tree, loved to hold the three books she owned, and when he found her looking at her small volume of flower remedies, he took it from her, and then returned it to her instantly, as if it burned his hand.
At the sunlit breakfast table of Gresham College’s great hall, Sir Kenelm instigated a conversation about the custom of the farmers of Saxony, where families who are struggling to feed themselves through a hard winter first toast their grandparents with Meth or Hydromel, then inter them into coffins laid in the ice, where the old people remain frozen until the arrival of more abundant food in spring, when they are disinterred and revived again with more strong drink. The Professor of Astronomy, who was morose after a long night waiting for clouds to part, thought this sounded like an errant foolery. The Professor of Divinity chewed his bacon collops, and did not speak; but when Kenelm used the word ‘resurrection’, he stopped chewing momentarily, showing a face that was highly discouraging.
None of the other professors would sit by Sir Kenelm, as they had developed a prejudice against him for the pungent smell about the east side of the college, caused by his experiments with crayfish. This was the first reason that they kept their distance. The second reason was the common belief that he had murdered his wife. These two offences combined extremely effectively, even in the mind of the Professor of Logic.
Most mornings, Sir Kenelm sat with Mary Tree, reading aloud from Discorides’ book of medicine, while Mary Tree followed another copy with her eyes. Since he had no books now, he had been obliged to borrow both of them from fellow Greshamites. He handled the book he read from carefully, as if it were the first he had ever seen, and he spoke slowly, taking care to see that she had the right place, so that with time she would be able to read for herself, he hoped.
Later, while the morning sun was still golden, Mary Tree went down to the banks of the Fleet where Sir Kenelm sent her looking for nettles, cuckoo-flower or sweet william. ‘They must be fresh and fair, for my purpose,’ he told her. ‘Both buds and flowers withal.’ She carried with her a basket and wore Sir Kenelm’s hawking gloves.
Kenelm sat cross-legged before the fire, meditating upon the meaning of ‘metempsychosis’.
At noon, Mary Tree spent an hour in conversation with Chater when he came to Gresham to get his washing done and collect his stipend. She perceived instantly, by his walk, by the sit of his hat, by the cast of his eyes, that he was a Catholic, though he wore no illicit garments. But she was not afraid to talk to him, nor he to her, it seemed. He was the type who found her Mark more fascinating than repellent, she supposed, and he hung about her as she performed her tasks, looking moody and uninterested but, as she perceived, taking solace from their conversation, which was necessary for his uneasy soul. Although Mary Tree was loath to show too much prurient interest in talking about Venetia . . .
‘Ommmm . . .’ said Kenelm, meditating. ‘Pherecydes of Syros taught Pythagoras who taught Plato that souls migrate, by metempsychosis, into other bodies. Orpheus turned into a swan; Thamyrias a nightingale; tame beasts were reborn as wild creatures, and musical birds in the bodies of men . . .’
. . . Chater wished to talk of nothing else: Venetia’s illness, how he had tended her, and his fears for her, which were rebuffed by her constant affirmation that she was perfectly well. Mary Tree expected him to talk of how dignified and gentle she was, and how she gave to charity, but none of these topics seemed to move Chater; he did not expound on her sweet nature.
‘Oh, to make her wait was foolish, such impatience she had!’ he said. ‘Sometimes she was taken by choleric moods, when she would suffer to have no one with her but her Chater.’ His lower lip was beginning to quaver with fond remembrance. ‘In those moods she could put lightning up me just by looking.’ Tears were welling in the undersills of his eye. ‘I would jump to serve her, and she would tolerate me only, letting me know of my foolishness with the tilt of an eyebrow.’
‘She was so unkind?’ asked Mary Tree.
‘She was so magnificent,’ said Chater. ‘Such a one as her leaves this life’s little stage empty. She had a mirror placed high in the alcove of her withdrawing salon,’ he said almost to himself, smiling.
‘So she could regard herself secretly?’ said Mary Tree, who thought she was beginning to understand Venetia’s character.
‘Ha! No, not for such seeming shallowness. She was not vain, you understand. She merely had splendour to maintain. No, she fixed the mirror there because she used it to secretly view the cards her friends held, I fancy. Winning was everything to her. To take money from other gamblers – this was her best delight.’
Mary pondered this. ‘Even from her friends?’
‘Oh, more from her friends than anyone.’
That these words came from a priest made them even more confounding.
‘She loved Sir Kenelm?’
‘Oh, unto death. She thought he was growing maggot-brained, and she used to say she despaired of him, and she thought no one else would have him, except her. When he went away she declined like a plant without the light. She would rather go hungry than appear before Sir Kenelm without her face painted and her eyes coloured, except when she was in the mood for candour, when they would spend all day at home together in their bedchamber . . . I brought them sweet sack and figs and books. I was their trusted one.’
When he spoke of her illness, Chater referred darkly to ‘the drink incarnadine’ or ‘the ruby wine’. He never said that this drink was to blame for her death, and yet he came always to the brink of saying this, and would then go no further, switching instead to the theme of his loyalty to Sir Kenelm, and asking moon-eyed questions about Sir Kenelm’s health and vigour, and once even enquiring if the shape of his calf held up, which was a question Mary could not answer.
‘Ommmm . . . We must all be reborn, says Plato, because there are a fixed number of souls, and many bodies constantly being born, so each soul must play its part again, and again . . .’
It seemed to Mary Tree, as she banked Sir Kenelm’s fire, while he sat muttering in front of it, that no one would have any peace until they had a better understanding of why Venetia had died, but then Mary had to go and put
the ashes out by the kitchen garden, and service the water butt, and clean the swilling-house floor, before it was time to turn the maslin bread, and at last, to sit silently at the servants’ table. Here, she discerned that the others, in imitation of their professors, held away from her, putting up a discreet barrier of indifference, as if she, too, smelled of crayfishes and slander.
When she made Kenelm’s bed, Mary was frightened by a cold hand which she clasped under the pillow. It was so heavy it felt as if it were drawing her down, and made her start, but she quickly realised that it was a bronze made from a cast taken of Venetia’s hand, and Mary understood why Kenelm would wish to hold it close to him. She propped it up on the counterpane, but it looked amiss, almost as if it were waving, so she tucked it under his pillow again.
‘Ommm . . .’ His concentration slipped, and . . . Ping! Celestial spam arrived in the brain of Sir Kenelm.
‘Private cord blood storage facility – insure the future health of your loved ones by preserving their precious stem cells.’
Sir Kenelm accepted this enticing premise. ‘Umbilical cord blood and tissue is one of the richest sources of stem cells in the body with even better regenerative potential than bone marrow . . . We use cryo-preservatives, which are easy to remove post-thawing. Storage facilities are monitored with twenty-four-hour security. From £2,000 with additional phlebotomy costs.’
The Buckinghamshire radio mast was becoming less discriminating in the messages it sent to him. Previously it had blocked requests for money.
‘Cord blood can be used for treating: juvenile chronic leukaemia, Diamond-Blackfan anaemia, Neuroblastoma, Sudden Death Syndrome, autoimmune disorders including Omenn’s disease . . .’
Too late, too late, sighed Kenelm, and the message disappeared. He could feel himself becoming, for the first time in his life, self-involved, greedy in his thinking, when he should be disinterestedly intellectual. Grief seemed to have taken away all his strength. At least he was doing one pure, unmotivated thing, besides working on his project of palingenesis. He was teaching Mary Tree how to read.
Mistress Elizabeth came to Gresham College to deliver a basket of Kenelm’s bedding and sundries. After the dissolution of the Digby household she was expected to go and live with the boys and Mary Mulsho on the Gayhurst estate, but it emerged, to everyone’s surprise, that she had a husband in service with another recusant family in the city, and she was setting up house with him instead.
Mary Tree took the opportunity to question Mistress Elizabeth about Venetia’s possessions and the contents of her closet when she died. Elizabeth responded with guarded hostility, thinking this wench wanted a garter, or an under-garment, or a scrap of lace or tiffany for a talking point. And so she kept her counsel, and told Mary Tree nothing.
When Mistress Elizabeth had gone, Mary discovered, at the bottom of the basket, a pair of lady’s silver slippers, very finely made, with short heels and marks where chopines or pattens had once been attached. Mary sat a little straighter as she held them, as if they had rebuked her for her impropriety, and yet she also wanted to hold on to them, like treasure, as they gleamed. When Sir Kenelm came in he looked at them absently, and took them into his hands with ceremony, as if to say they were now in his safekeeping, and as Mary crept away, she thought she overheard him saying ‘in case she has need of them again’.
‘Palingenesis,’ said Kenelm, over a spoonful of potage, ‘from the Greek, palin, again, and genesis, birth, means the re-birth, revival, resuscitation or regeneration of living persons from their ashes or putrefying matter . . .’
‘’Tis more effective to make anew,’ muttered the Professor of Geometry, ‘which is why Talus the Iron Groom in Spenser’s book is germane to the purpose, being composed of an un-compostable ferrous material, which is to say, in a word—’
The Professor of Divinity broke in: ‘I thought “palingenesis” referred more usually to the conjuror’s impostorous practice of creating a miniature castle, flower or other such vain fancy out of ashes, for the amusement of a vulgar crowd. In my ignorance I was not aware that it had been practised upon persons living, or dead.’
Sir Kenelm did not notice the professor’s withering tone of voice. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, sir,’ he replied enthusiastically. ‘Not yet, not yet! It is not practised, but it exists in the minds of men already, as a word, an idea, an ideal and a dream, and as we know that truth and fiction are so intimately connected that Galileo calls his astronomy a fiction—’
‘Iron,’ continued Geometry. ‘Iron will, and no discernment, this is what makes an Iron Groom. He is in truth a weapon that walks about upright, composed of armour and clockwork. Armies of Iron Grooms would spare a nation in the wars . . .’
‘Then Spenser’s verses brings ideas to birth also,’ said Kenelm. ‘Make him, sir. Make the Iron Groom. Bring him to being. For as we dream, so we ought to do.’
‘Now I consider it, the phoenix rises from the ashes,’ said the Professor of Divinity. ‘It is no work of man to bring this about, though. It is heresy to attempt it.’
‘Try, try, try, and let them try me,’ said Kenelm. ‘La.’
The others ignored him, being busy looking into their own thoughts and pottingers.
Mary Tree having the duty of cleaning Sir Kenelm’s belongings, it was natural that she should find among them various relics of Venetia, including a box containing cosmetic pots and other feminine impedimenta, which she dared to suppose were the contents of Venetia’s closet. For the first week she respectfully refused to look inside it, and for the second week she left it in a prominent place in his rooms, hoping Sir Kenelm would do that instead of her. By the third week, she decided to take the matter in hand.
Two gallypots of subliming calomel; a beaker of brandy; a few sticky vials stained red; private correspondence with a midwife; a large quantity of bloody face-bandages, hidden in a wash-bag; dried herbs that Mary Tree could not identify, though they made her sneeze; a wrapper bearing the wax seal of a fat viper, and a few words of commendation from an apothecary; an enamel box containing two milk teeth, thought to be young Kenelm’s; and a large quantity of millipedes in a jar, presumably waiting to be used in a beauty preparation.
Mary Tree did not know what to do with this intelligence, only that she must keep it in mind. As she fell asleep she ran over the letters and word-sounds Sir Kenelm was teaching her, and she recited this list over and over, laying the letters out in front of her eyes, which started to crawl before her as she fell asleep, and formed into snakes like the fat viper on the apothecary’s seal.
All around her, in their lamplit kingdoms, the Gresham professors followed their callings, the Astronomer using his mariner’s astrolabe to navigate stormy seas of cloud, and the Professor of Law poring by candlelight over his edicts and assizes. The Professor Without Portfolio, for his part, gazed for hours into the red glow of his furnace at the ashes of a mound of cow-parsley, willing them to revive.
When the night was at its darkest, and the ashes were cool, he put on his black overmantle and took, after the fashion of a Melancholy Man, solemn perambulations about the gardens of Gresham and beyond, walking in the figure of the circle and the square. He smelled the spirits of the earth, rising up as the ground exhaled its night vapours, and he wondered whether the world still turned or if it was all over now.
Moonlight picked out the veined cheeks of ivy leaves, and the willow tree’s hair fell finely as it turned its back to him. Sir Kenelm glided beyond the kitchen gardens, and he saw the stock pond wink at him, and the long white arms of the path rise to beckon him. He lay down on the wet grass and rested his face on the breast of the earth, and talked to the soil.
He did not convene with ghosts, but apparitions of men who had not yet been born. Pre-ghosts, proto-ghosts. Widowers with pink eyes and foreign clothes, heavy spectacles misted with tears. He could not understand their customs, or their style, or rank, but he recognised their suffering.
‘Have you found no cure for this,
three, four hundred years hence?’
‘No cure, no cure,’ sighed the wind.
‘Some ease for the mind,’ drawled the earth. ‘Talking, talking.’
‘Shock therapy,’ lashed the tree.
‘But no ease for the soul,’ sang the wind.
‘Pills to take away the pain. Sleeping draughts for wakeful hours,’ groaned the willow.
‘No cure for loss,’ spat the wind.
‘This is love’s price,’ announced the bell of the church of St Margaret. Four in the morning.
Sir Kenelm lifted himself upon one elbow, into the pose of Melancholy Thoughtfulness. A pattern of grass-blades was indented on his cheek and he was numbed by cold, as he desired. He resembled the statuary upon his own tomb. He realised why he felt no fear of the darkness, nor of the spirits he encountered. He had become a ghost himself.
But as the dawn came, when he paced lightly back to his rooms across the quadrangle, his feet left prints upon the wet grass.
A DISCOURSE CONCERNING THE VEGETATION OF PLANTS
SPOKEN BY SIR KENELM DIGBY, KNIGHT, AT GRESHAM COLLEGE
[Sir Kenelm’s words are in the following chapter taken verbatim from a transcript of his lecture made at Gresham College in 1665 to the embryonic Royal Society.]
THE LECTURE HALL at Gresham College was full of contained expectation, like a pot before the boil. This being the occasion of Kenelm’s first public address since the accident, it was the cause of much interest, some salacious, and a large and varied crowd assembled, each trying to wear a casual face. Alongside the usual Gresham lecture-goers, the earnest autodidacts and shrewd men of business, there were more dubious visitors, newsbook writers, and common tongue-wags, as well as idle moochers come in out of the cold. They sat mixed amongst Sir Kenelm’s coterie, his correspondents through the Invisible College, Sir John Scudamore, Samuel Hartlib and Endymion Porter, his hair flowing over his collar, and out of breath, coming in at the last. There was also a distinguished divine, sent to gather intelligence by Archbishop Laud, while at the back of the hall glowered a row of half a dozen Puritans with their high hats on and their arms folded.
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