Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  With her nerves flaming she stood beneath his emblem, the sign of the star. The shop was shuttered for the night and the house was quiet as she waited on the doorstep. She wondered if this meant the household was already packed up, and the Choices fled, and she was about to leave, half disappointed, half relieved that she could slip away, her conscience discharged. But then Margaret Choice answered the door, shockingly dishevelled with her long grey hair, usually tucked away so neatly, swinging about her shoulders, and a mob cap on the back of her head. She was out of breath, and greeted her as Mistress Venetia, before correcting herself. Olive could see she was in a state of high alarm. Except for some braggarts shouting on Cheapside, the street was still. An owl hooted drunkenly from the churchyard of St Mary Axe.

  Olive’s ears were not attuned to the night, or else she might have heard a soft slithering of bodies, tipped out of the Choices’ back door into the communal servants’ yard, or over the side wall into the neighbours’ garden, or into the mouldy back alley. But for each viper that darted into the cool dark rat-scented night, there remained a Medusa’s head of vipers in the pits, guilty and convoluted.

  Seeing Margaret Choice’s disarray, Olive was about to excuse herself and leave, but Margaret seemed to think she should stay, and showed her into the downstairs parlour. As she waited she heard bumps and scrapings of furniture upstairs, and voices raised. Then Choice came to her, and in a scene straight out of her fond imaginings, he went down on bended knee before her, ardently kissing her hand, and resting his head in her lap.

  By the candlelight, she stroked his lustrous dark hair, which smelled of woody pomander, and wondered if this was truly a new beginning. When he raised his head he studied her with such affection, that she almost felt he was not looking at the creases on her neck at all, but contemplating her as a finished piece of art, one of his own finest creations. She shut her eyes, expecting him to kiss her, only he did not.

  ‘I know; I know,’ he said. ‘We are to leave or be apprehended. It is over. The death of Lady Digby is to be put upon us, unwarranted as this is. We are packing away our properties. But you came; you came to warn us. You are indeed the noblest She alive.’

  He played a little with the lace on her cuffs, looking fondly at them.

  ‘Would you be the kindest, sweetest dame that ever lived, and take for us two trunks of possessions? Your coach would be the perfect vehicle. Only our best plate and some of my new clothes, and books of mine. I doubt their safeness on the Continent, and you are the most trusted friend I have. The letters you speak of are safely stowed within the trunks; these are yours now. The other contents, I will come to claim from you in a matter of months. And until then, you shall keep for me also this, my heart’s kiss’ – he put his slightly wet lips upon her palm – ‘in your safe keeping.’

  With this he closed up her hand, and the way he spoke was so purposive, so full of warmth and carnal intent, that Olive felt as shocked with herself as if she had already committed adultery. The moment was broken only by an odious scratching sound upstairs, as if someone were trying to take up a floorboard. Olive could have lingered there all night, but the trunks were packed, and waiting in the ante-room, and Choice and Margaret hoist them onto Olive’s coach themselves. Margaret disappeared quickly upstairs, while Choice urgently embraced Olive, running his thumb over her cheek as he had done at their first appointment, bringing Olive close to delirium. He was about to kiss her, when a sound from the street seemed to startle him, and he saw her out with all haste, slamming the door behind her.

  Choice was arrested at his premises that night. He was detained on grounds that he had not paid his tax computations, pending a claim against him by the Crown for the improper practice of his trade. He was a lapsed member of the College of Physicians, and thus he retained no protection from their offices, and indeed, they pledged to assist with his prosecution.

  Choice’s confinement meant the freedom of others, namely the women who depended on his Wine. They woke up to its absence, and noticed daily with a deeper pang that it came no more, like the letters of a failing love affair. Next, they began to suffer cramps and deliriums. When they visited his shop, sweating, their nostrils wide as horses’, some joined the creditors arguing over the flame drapes, hoarsely demanding their Wine. Other ladies sat in the street crying, while still others, who had not been so badly bitten by the Wine, crept away when they saw the over-sized gilt star from above the door, Choice’s proud emblem, which once blazed so high, resting upended in the street-mud.

  Without the Wine, Lettice was oppressed with agonies of self-doubt and shyness and would not show her face in public for several weeks, until she began to see that without her potion she was still a countess. Sackville, noticing that his bride had lost her easy chatter, was forsaken, and learned to tolerate her quietness, until her spirits picked up and her old garrulousness returned, and even increased, and because of her new position, people were more inclined to listen to her, and to take her opinions seriously. And so she grew in confidence until her conversation was widely said to be her greatest attribute, though some secretly called her windbag.

  Aletheia was vexed and fractious when her darling Wine no longer arrived, until she heard the suggestion that Venetia had died from taking Choice’s decoction. She had always assumed Venetia’s supplier was Sir Kenelm, and the shock of Choice’s arraignment put her off all her complexion-enhancement, even her cheek-stuffers and chest lotions, and she threw away her metheglins and tonics, and took on a new project: the colonisation of Madagascar. The isle was hazardously remote at present, to be sure, but in a few years, once trade routes were established, it would prove a gentle pleasure garden. Its groves were chattering with tame monkeys, stripy-tailed and shiny-eyed, and the tree-leaves grew as big as serving platters, and cloves were as plentiful as corn. Aletheia instructed her lawyer to swiftly acquire the deeds to the island on her behalf.

  Her husband went along with her plan, as he felt there was no hope for England, where the King was not honouring his debts, and Parliament was addled, and the Puritans growing ever more incautious. Aletheia was delighted that, for once, the Earl had seen sense, and they began the enterprise with a joint purpose that united them for the first time in years. They were painted by Van Dyck in ceremonial dress, with a globe in front of them, Aletheia holding compasses trained on the Kingdom of Madagascar.

  ‘The Madagascar Portrait’ of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, by Anthony Van Dyck, circa 1639

  Dorothy Habington liked this development very ill, and took to her bed, and talked of jumping in the Thames. Aletheia, storming into her room when it was finally unlocked, cast her casements open, and briskly bid her throw herself out and snap her neck – rompi l’osso del collo – or make herself useful. Dorothy rose from her torpor and rallied further when Aletheia promised to make her Viscountess of Madagascar, and so the three of them planned their cultivation of the island, with zestful maps and drawings.

  Penelope became drawn into the business against the King, as her husband was one of the star chamber who resisted him. Her plainness and her lack of pride came to be a badge of calling, which defined her – such was the deformation that politics, in that unstable time, practised upon character.

  News of Lancelot Choice’s arrest was on every tongue, published in ballads (where his name half-rhymed usefully with ‘vice’) as well as handbills, corantoes and letters between friends carried by little Mercury boys, running. It spilled into every empty ear, and soon the tired and unkind story of the supposed guilt of Kenelm was exchanged for this new, spicy tale of corrupted commerce. Songs were made up about Choice’s trial, and prayers for him to be brought to justice were said in church. The story of the lethal apothecary carried on the flow of opinion and washed down the runnels of the communal mind.

  The visionary Lady Eleanor Davies, whom Venetia once watched declaiming in the Bourse, was seized by one of her vatic inspirations when rising from a too-hot bath and composed oracular verses, whi
ch she urgently declaimed to her publisher that night, waking him for the purpose:

  ‘Pathmos Isle

  Hieroglyphick Demonstrations

  Paganism rites celebrated.

  That fiction, ravished Europa

  True as the rape in maps and tapestries ordinary.

  Brace of spaniels, Her Grace’s swimming match—’

  ‘Er, what does it signify, my lady?’ interrupted her publisher. ‘It’s just that I’d rather not be put in Chancery for my pains, so no libel, I beg you.’

  ‘Its meaning? I have no inkling of its meaning. It comes to me. I am the channel only. The meaning is occluded, even to the author. But the significance is plain to all.’ She resumed:

  ‘A Knight Errand, no small Bull,

  Because the good spirit moved upon the water

  With his Venetian, with her Cup of Viper Wine, that never Awakened,

  Whether drunk or no, etc. The Flood’s days not equivalent.’

  From the prophetic writings of

  Lady Eleanor Davies, 1635

  The printer nodded. This was good. The benefit of Eleanor Davies’ prophecies was they were too vague to constitute libel. And anything about Lady Digby was selling, these days.

  The magistrate’s men arrived in the third watch of the night to find Lancelot and Margaret Choice still packing their many belongings, sewing gold into their hems and cramming silver and plate behind the wattle and daub.

  Once they were apprehended, a search of their premises revealed a vast quantity of vials, expensive medical compounds – none adulterated, according to the assayer – as well as a great deal of esoteric equipment thought to be used for the preparation of Viper Wine. A harsh smell led the magistrates to a large quantity of decocted horses’ stale, presumed to be pregnant mare’s urine. But those live, mute and unwilling chorus players in this drama were nowhere to be found. The sheriffs searched Choice’s premises with caution, expecting to find a horde of black flickering tongues and seamlessly uncurling bodies under any counter, or in any wash basket, a tangle of tender grey undersides and gold-green backs wriggling.

  The premises were turned over from top to bottom, and suspicion fell upon the cellar with its unusual furnace, and its reptilian stink, although there were no twisting scaly bodies to be found there, not even one dead worm behind an old flagon.

  Olive, full of blissful, forbidden emotions, shuddering every time her coach bumped and smelling the scent of Choice’s pomander on her hands, did not think to peep inside Choice’s baggage until she had repaired to her bedroom and the trunks been sent up after her. She looked at them for a while, wondering what male delicacies, what hose, combs and nightshirts might be inside. She did not consider herself the type to pick a lock, but she wanted to touch his things before bed, and she first tried her hair-pin, then her letter-knife, and then the heel of her chopine. And so like a too-tempted heroine, she cracked the lock, and, raising the sturdy lid, she also raised the household with her screams.

  NOCTAMBULATIONS IN THE FORM OF THE QUINCUNX

  AROUND MIDNIGHT KENELM woke, gasping, and began his nightly walk through the college gardens, pacing the back meadow back and forth, up and down, in the shape of the quincunx. The mystical sign of five: the arrangement of five dots on a playing card, the formation of the trees planted in the garden of Cyrus: the quincunciall lozenge. He walked slowly between each of its essential points, a solemn revenant, summoning her up.

  When he had read, in the ink of a common handbill, that Choice was to be prosecuted for supplying Venetia with deadly Viper Wine, he fell into a long and profound sleep, which lasted the entire day. Now midnight was become his noon, and he walked abroad while everyone else slept.

  The trees around him swayed, wind-tossed, and he heard each rustling leaf speaking for a different woman: one purged to death by a quack; another poisoned by pain-relief for botched surgery; a third killed by complications following liposuction.

  He called to Venetia gently, across the stock pond of Gresham College. He saw her ripple in reply, moving towards him over the pond’s milk-white surface. He wished to tell her only that he was sorry. He should have known she would find an apothecary to do her bidding after he denied her. She was ever blessed with a will. He thought he heard her laughing in the bulrushes around the stock pond. Then she was in the air above him, free as breath. It was fitting that he could not see her now, as he had failed to see her, though he looked at her every day, though he lay beside her, though they were as hand in glove. He had studied more closely his papers and his letters, his Chymical preparations; he had taken more interest in his work than his wife. But she should have been his Great Work.

  Geese woken by a fox clattered across the marshes, honking: ‘Real-life shocker: I had a nose job and my husband didn’t even notice.’

  He did not feel she had betrayed him with her secrecy. He understood that she had taken the Wine as an undertaking of pride, in privacy. She was trying to fill the crack in her nature, the needy flaw that was her secret deformity. He failed: he should have fixed her flaw with love, cherished her so she had no need of Wine. When he was young he thought they were Plato’s ideal lovers, that they were the same person, ripped apart at the Fall, and forever searching for one another, till they sealed each other up with congress, in this lifetime and the next. Now he was uncertain. Perhaps men and women could not make one another whole; perhaps love was not sufficient.

  He tried to hear her voice over gusting leaves, but the lamenting trees around him spoke like a tragic chorus, each leaf telling of another travesty: gums blackened by painting with lead; breasts operated on seventeen times for a non-existent problem; healthy bodies, cut apart by greedy physicians; women misled, traduced, deluded.

  Once, Kenelm felt it was his privilege to see how the world was ensouled, to perceive the anima behind every living thing, to see the sparkling atoms in coal dust dancing on the wind. Tonight, it was maddening to hear every leaf’s tale of woe.

  ‘I just wanted to fit my wedding dress better,’ wept the oak.

  ‘I needed to boost my confidence,’ whined the ash.

  ‘My husband was never meant to know,’ thrashed the elm.

  Each of the leaves was different, rotted to filigree stems, or curled into brittle cadavers. They rustled in drifts under the trees. He had not realised vanity had undone so many.

  Seized by inspiration, he tore off the collar of his gown and blindfolded himself, to represent his lack of insight in their marriage: and he held his arms open and trudged towards her, like a blind beggar, staggering in the direction of the stock pond.

  ‘The surgeon received two hours’ training . . .’

  ‘It was a surfeit of leeches, applied every hour . . .’

  ‘The implants contained industrial-grade silicone . . .’

  He marched towards reunion with her, ready to drown, longing for the cold seal of water over his head.

  The horrors of Hieronymus Bosch’s hell wiggled before his eyes, and he saw the special circle reserved for silver-tongued apothecaries, so-called surgeons and shysters of the knife and lancet. They were held down on operating tables, their lips injected by frog-headed beasts, or their skin peeled by giant pincer-fingers, or force-fed Wine in great purple draughts until their guts burst.

  He marched towards the black oblivion, until he stopped, because of his boys, who ought not to be orphans. Not at their tender years – two little ones the same ages as he and his brother when they were unfathered. He stood alive on the brink of the stock pond, listening to the electricity twitching along the crossrail track, feeling the nearness of death, the roar of the future far below him. He backed away, slowly, from the edge.

  ‘Understanding and love are the natural operation of a reasonable creature; and this last, being the only thing that is really in his power to bestow, it is the worthiest and noblest that can be given.’

  The Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1631

  Into the Fleet ditch Olive’s house-m
en tipped the scaly bodies, some dead, some dying, rearing up in anguish, floundering. By the light of a lantern they slipped into the coursing water, like a meadesman’s eel-catch reversed and running backwards, so the trunk was disgorged of tell-tale snakes. Some floated on the scum, others swam across the surface, propelling themselves in living ogees, moving with instinctive grace, rippling outwards to colonise the night.

  Worms turned up all over town in the months that followed, clogging drains and making nests under downstairs beds. They were found in toolboxes and coffins, cellars and sinkholes across London. One bit a woman as she waited at the Cripplegate pump, another killed a baby in Eastcheap.

  Soon after, the world turned upside down. The spirit of Mercurius abandoned the isle of Brittanides, which he had formerly loved so well, and left its groves to rot, as brother killed brother, and mothers turned against their sons. Does that sound too poetic? The facts alone, then.

  Lady Eleanor Davies took leave of her senses and stormed the private side of Lichfield cathedral, together with two females. She pronounced herself Metropolitan and Primate, and sat in the Bishop’s throne, flanked by her holy handmaids. Her next action was to pour tar over the (new) tapestries and altar-hangings.

  Sir Kenelm paid a vulgar necromancer, one John Evans, to summon a spirit for him. The conjurer disappeared in a sulphuric cloud, later claiming that he was propelled upwards out of his dwellings in the Minories in east London, carried bodily over London, and landed in a field in Battersea. Whether Sir Kenelm was satisfied by this display is not recorded.

  Van Dyck’s mistress, Margaret Lemon, mad for him, and jealous of his canvases, bit his thumb to stop him painting. With a splint and bandage, he painted still, although his cavaliers and courtiers were no longer coiffed and elegant, but wearing armour, and worried countenances, and holding instruments of war.