Viper Wine

by Hermione Eyre

  FUGUE OF DESTRUCTION

  ‘It is strange to note how we have slid insensible into the beginnings of a Civil War by one expected accident after another.’

  Letter from Parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke to his wife, 1642

  IT STARTS WITH flecks of torn-up paper, carried on the wind: the demand for Ship Tax, 1637, shredded with the fingertips and blown to all hell.

  It builds with the dipping of white handkerchiefs in the blood shed by William Prynne’s ears, their tips cut off at Smithfield for his seditious libel against the masques of the Queen and her ladies.

  The rose window of the cathedral shatters with the iconoclast’s cry, and so it has begun. A horse is led in to feed from the altar, and the font’s naive traceries of Matthew and Mark are hacked away.

  Parliamentarian troops, billeted at Gayhurst, carve their names on the masonry.

  The Medieval frescoes in Gayhurst chapel are painted over. Adam and Eve, pink and ineptly drawn and vulnerable – whitewashed and gone.

  Venetia’s family’s estate, Tonge Castle, is burned rather than ceded to Parliamentarians.

  The Madonna at Snittlefield that Mary Tree once venerated: smashed.

  The farmer turned iconoclast, William Dowsing, prays before he wrecks the icons of 150 churches in Suffolk. He works with a hammer, alone.

  Six hundred deer are slaughtered wantonly and left to rot in Corse Lawn, Gloucestershire, by men and women desirous of noble blood.

  The King and court having removed to Oxford, the royal gardens are picked over by the populace; the Queen’s great avenue of Limes is axed for firewood. The monkey Pug’s cage is left behind, forgotten, and kicked between townsfolk.

  The Great Cross on Cheapside, erected in 1291, dark with soot and soiled by birds, is identified as ungodly and pagan, and destroyed overnight on 2 May 1642 by the Puritan Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry. Its stones are cracked and flung in the ditch, its icons melted down to be made into bullets.

  Those bullets, aimed at the high windows of Westminster Abbey, make starbursts of rubies and sky-flying sapphires. The broken shards are replaced with clear white glass by a Godly glazier.

  Penelope Knollys fires a musket in the face of a drummer boy attacking her estate, which she defends for Parliament in her husband’s absence for a seven-week siege, until the Royalist troops are called to worthier battles.

  Archbishop Laud, aged seventy-five, is condemned to death and executed on a trumped-up bill of attainder.

  The maypole on the Strand, and the maypole at St Andrews, and all other maypole shafts, are lopped down as sinful recreations.

  Young Kenelm, now twenty-two, is shot above the heart and killed, riding for the King’s men at St Neots, Huntingdonshire, and his body fished out of the Ouse, river of his childhood games. The skirmish is remembered in dispatches ‘only for the death of the young and gallant Lord Francis Villiers, brother of the Duke of Buckingham’. The whip-sting of this assertion; the pain of it.

  Inigo Jones, beard as grey as Time, is captured by Parliament at the siege of Basing House. His life is spared, but his clothes taken for plunder, his trembling form carried out naked, wrapped in a blanket.

  The King’s last words, asked hurriedly of his executioner: ‘Stay for the sign?’ His death, intended to give the country peace, proves no better than putting a stopper on a broken bottle.

  The Rubens altarpiece in Henrietta-Maria’s chapel, with its pale Christ ascending and the stricken Mary kneeling beside a peacock, is hacked apart by the Irish iconoclast John Clotworthy, who stands on the altar, pricking the painting with his dagger. He asks his men for a halberd and thrusts it through the canvas at Christ’s feet, ripping upwards, splitting His holy body, left, and Her suffering face, right, till the painting is in pieces. Those scraps of canvas, cast into the Thames, sink and turn on the tide.

  BLETCHLEY PARK TO OUTSTATION GAYHURST

  INTO THIS NEW world, Sir Kenelm went wandering.

  He was free from the accusation of murder, and from the riddles of guilt that had for so long oppressed him, although by the time he left Gresham College, Kenelm’s mind was as clear as hartshorn jelly, and he was weakly in his legs. But Parliament believed he was still a dangerous man, and issued a warrant for his death. He removed himself to Paris, and from his small laboratory in Saint Germain, he practised alchemy to hasten peace. For his pains, the Protectorate was established, and the King’s cause defeated.

  He returned to London as soon as his pardon was in place. His estates were mortgaged to pay for the Royal cause, and his blond curls reduced to thin dark strands. As he came up the Thames for the first time, he saw swallows dancing across the water, happy, no doubt, to be free from the mud holes where he – and all other observant Naturalists – believed they had wintered, under the river’s bank. He had travelled so much further than they.

  To Gayhurst he must go, travelling there by public coach, stopping at Bedford to catch a carriage. From Newport Pagnall he walked the final distance home. As in a dream the long drive curved before him, so familiar he could shut his eyes as he walked and see it still. As he came past the trees to the first proper view of the house, he saw that the window of Venetia’s former bedroom had been crudely battened over. He peeped through a window on the lower lawn, like a common Tom, and saw by the dozens of greatcoats hung up inside the hall, and the cigarette butts on the grass, and the noise of techno from an upper window, that the enemy still had possession of his house.

  The door was locked, and he had no key. His radio mast was missing, his chapel desecrated, his gardens running green and wild.

  He came stealthily back from the local tavern under cover of night, and in the silent moonlight on the lawn in front of Gayhurst, he stood where his obelisk once rose, with his arms stretched out, and he felt an alternating current bleeping through him, like a cardiogram.

  The signal was still live.

  ‘During the Second World War a Bombe Outstation to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (Monument HOB 12222785) was based at Gayhurst House.’

  English Heritage ‘PastScape’, 2013

  As Kenelm stood on the lawn he could hear the signal gently syncopating:

  . . . Repeated changes of the electrical pathway from the keyboard to the lampboard implemented a polyalphabetic substitution cypher . . .

  The lovely word torrents passed through his ears.

  Codename OSG, codename OSG?

  Sir Kenelm could not know, as he stood there, that in 1942 Gayhurst would become Outstation Gayhurst, housing five of Alan Turing’s vast Bombes, rotor drums, plugboards, brass plates connected by infinite umbilical curls: the world’s first electronic, programmable computers. Instruments of peace.

  This is B.P. to O.S.G., do you have Ultra for us?

  Rommel’s orders were deciphered on the day he sent them, faster than Rupert of the Rhine decoded Cromwell’s cyphers, by Bombes at Gayhurst, operated by WREN officers.

  Joan and Cynthia; Grace and Marigold. They slept four Wrens to a stable, and dressed in starchy blue. They worked eight-hour shifts, tending the Bombes with cold and diligent fingers, the machinery clacking over, sieving seas of letters on the spot where Kenelm once performed the Great Work.

  The messages were decrypted, translated and teleprinted back to Bletchley; memorised by a liaison officer, and then destroyed. The air was thick with thoughts and signals.

  Sir Kenelm could not know this. And yet he knew, as he knew that arrow-showers of neutrinos were racing through the blue moonlit lawn, that the Bombes at Gayhurst were whirring things of beauty.

  Group Captain Winterbotham calls them Bronze Goddesses.

  The divination of the Bronze Goddess thrummed as fast as her handmaids could work.

  In the night watch nothing rested, but the air was full of meaning.

  At midnight, the expectant pause when the Enigma changed again.

  In the silence, Sir Kenelm could hear the Wre
ns laughing as they sunbathed in the moonlight on the roof of Gayhurst, wondering if the British airmen in the planes passing overhead could see their bodies.

  Sir Kenelm was like a string that vibrated with strange frequencies, but now he had no one to tell his dreams to, he let them go. He was like a viol da gamba played in a shut-up house, unheard.

  PEACE THROUGH WAR

  IN THOSE DARK days of the Commonwealth, a light: Samuel Hartlib had established a new and extensive library. Sir Kenelm was cheered by this – but then he learned that, in keeping with this new era, it was not to be called a ‘library’ but a ‘public information service’ or ‘Office of Address’.

  Hartlib was a Polack working for the Protectorate, and yet Kenelm considered him a worthy correspondent. He had written to Sir Kenelm asking for information about the Cure of Sympathy, the weather in Aleppo, the best means to caulk a ship, and the cultivation of crayfish, all in the name of his attempt at Pansophy: the recovery of our happy, original state of complete knowledge and its expression in the pages of an encyclopaedia. Sir Kenelm applauded this project, believing that the dissemination of knowledge was a duty of man, although the idea that all should have access to a library struck him as novel, bold, foolhardy.

  ‘Hartlib . . . was responsible for patents, spreading information and fostering learning. He circulated designs for calculators, double-writing instruments, seed machines and siege engines . . . His work has been compared to modern internet search engines.’

  Wikipedia.org/wiki/samuel_hartlib

  Kenelm went from Chelsea to the City by public ferryboat, then walked slowly through the rain, into the new kingdom of the Protectorate. The ghost of Asparagus pulled back to ask if this was strictly necessary. Kenelm was not certain when they had arrived, for at the far end of Threadneedle Street a mortar had gone off in the recent fight, and there were no proper buildings, so far as he could discern, only a long, lowly type of barn, with a sign saying ‘God with Us’ in plain, poorly painted letters, and beneath it, smaller, ‘Pax quaeritur bello’, a Cromwellian casuistry at which Kenelm scoffed. It was the motto of the Protectorate, frequently printed on placards and scrolls. Kenelm believed in the divine power of opposites, which should be put to the service of the Great Work. Not to political ends. This was sophistry, to make untruths true, by their repetition. ‘Peace through war’, indeed.

  At the doorway men dressed in the plain starched garb of the Commonwealth were coming and going so that Sir Kenelm recognised this must be the Office of Address.

  Inside, the walls were bare apart from one or two crude diagrams (one of a monstrous fruit tree, another a bumblebee as large as a kestrel) and a sign declaring that this building was ‘A Publick Register of Information on Religion, Learning and Ingenuities, and a Centre and Meeting Place of Advices, Proposalls, Treatise and all manner of Intellectual Rarities’. There were few books, as far as Sir Kenelm could see, but plenty of boxes, in which papers were stored. There were plain chairs and tables, at which people in drab uniforms were sitting, some reading their papers, some talking. Not only men, but also women.

  By talking to a few of them, he discovered that he must address himself to the Great Intelligencer, whom everyone here spoke of as the Paragon of Wisdom.

  ‘He holds every detail you might wish to know, from what time the bells at Powles ring to how to catch a cony,’ said one.

  ‘But ask wisely, for one question costs six pennies,’ said another. Kenelm made a joke about the oracle being cheap at the price, but then he remembered, as he now must needs remember frequently, that he was no longer rich.

  The country was degraded by war; some quick jack-a-knaves had profited by switching sides, and they now held power – or the illusion of it. The fleur-de-lis wilted on his escutcheon, the green fields between Chelsea and the City were built over, and silk and lace were replaced by rough calico. Cromwell sat to Sir Peter Lely and bid him paint him ‘warts and all’; the Royal Society rejected alchemy as charlatanism; the innocent heroism of the cavalier was gone, and no one would again say:

  I saw Eternity the other night,

  Like a great ring of pure and endless light.

  A queue had formed in front of a hatch and, out of curiosity, Kenelm joined it. He heard his fellow queuers asking for intelligence on the keeping of pigeons and the milling of spelt. He heard them asking how to find love, how to write in JavaScript code, and how to tie a noose. He could not decide what question he was going to ask of the Great Intelligencer when he got to the hatch. It seemed important he did not waste that special Being’s time. He would ask about the cure of wounds, perhaps, or the practice of Divine Gnosis. But when he came to the front of the queue, he recognised the man behind the hatch as none other than Thomas Clack, one-time foreman of his own building work at Charterhouse, now operating in the guise of Great Intelligencer.

  Kenelm felt the past open up under him like a great chasm, and wandered out of the building with a sense of wonder.

  EPILOGUE: MARY TREE

  I could not leave you without telling you of the final mystery of my Mark.

  Sir Kenelm having noticed my endeavours to find the Cause of Venetia’s Ill-health (and so clear his name) said he would do one thing to thank me. On the full moon he bade me lie with my eyes bandaged – which must have looked a strange matter to any witness – while he brushed a medicament across my stained cheek. He used a feather, I think, and a lily-water paste, which he said was often used for the hot gout. As we waited for the paste to dry, he told me that Venetia was ever like a lily to him.

  He bid me go to bed, and in the morning when I came in to lay his fire, he was waiting for me with a mirror ready. I was concerned he had painted my cheek with fucus, as a shallow disguise of my Mark, and I knew that my Respect for him would not endure if he had sought to practise that trick upon me. Unwillingly I took the mirror to my face, and to my sight I was almost entirely free from blemish – only a light smattering of pink, where the strawberry botch was once thickly ranged across my whole cheek. I cried out with fear and delight at what he had effected, and I looked at him like he was a Magus, or practitioner of Angelic arts, to have so changed my countenance overnight.

  He said he was of a great mind to let me think it was all his Art, but that Reason must trump wild imaginings. He explained I had been born with a strawberry wine mark which was called with good reason a ‘birthmark’ because it had faded a little every year since I was come to my majority, and he had only finished it off with a dab of lily-water. He said he saw with great clarity how constrained I was by my understanding of myself as Marked, that all these years I had been oppressed by an idea, no more.

  ‘We must all look in the mirror sometimes, Mary,’ he said. ‘So we can see ourselves directly and say, like Apollo, “You must change your life”.’

  FINIS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I saw Eternity the other night, see here – from the poem by Henry Vaughan

  Whenas in silks my Julia goes, see here – extracts from the poem by Robert Herrick

  Bourse Boy’s words taken from Ben Jonson’s, see here, Entertainment on the Opening of the New Exchange, 1609

  Tom Lubbock, writing in the Independent, see here, was the first to compare the painting Venetia, Lady Digby on her Deathbed with ‘Edge’ by Sylvia Plath

  Heartfelt thanks to:

  Dan Franklin and Beth Coates at Jonathan Cape, and Victoria Murray-Browne amd Julia Connelly at Vintage. To Laura Hassan, Charlie Campbell and Ed Victor, to Anna Webber and Georgina Gordon-Smith at United Agents, Dr Emma Smith of Hertford College, Oxford, Dr B. C. Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian library, Dr Andrew Gregory of UCL, David Cameron of the Institute of Physics, Sheila Knox, Sophie Melzack Robins, Carol Savage, Harry Mount, Theo and Flora Rycroft, Gavanndra Hodge, Ian Irvine, Hannah Mackay, Marianne Blamire, David Emmerson and Eddie, Lord Digby. My biggest thanks go to my parents Sir Reginald and Lady Anne Clements Eyre, and my husband Dr Alex Burghart for aiding, abetting and inspiring.


  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Aubrey, John, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick, Penguin, 1972

  Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend (Revised Edition), Echo Library, 2007

  Digby, Kenelm, Correspondence and papers, BL Add. MS 38175, 41846

  Chemical papers, Wellcome Library, Rare Books, MS 2124

  Loose Fantasies, ed. V. Gabrieli, 1968

  Journal of a Voyage to the Mediterranean, ed. J. Bruce.

  Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, Knt, Open’d, ed. A. McDonell, 1910

  Of Bodies and the Immortality of Reasonable Souls, Paris, 1644

  A New Digby Letter-Book, ‘In Praise of Venetia’, ed. V. Gabrieli, National Library of Wales Journal vol.9 no.2, 1955-6

  A Late Discourse Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathie, by Sir Kenelm Digby Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier, trans. R. White., British Library, Rare Books, 1664

  A Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants. Spoken by Sir Kenelm Digby, at Gresham College, on the 23 of January 1660, at a meeting of the Society for promoting philosophical knowledge by experiments, British Library, Rare Books, 1669

  Elegies on Venetia Digby’s death, British Library, Rare Books, Add. MS 30259

  Evelyn, John, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. W. Bray, JM Dent and Sons, 1973

  Gauden, John, Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty, or artificial handsomeness, in point of conscience between two ladies, 1656

  Jeamson, Thomas, Artificiall Embellishments, 1665

  Jonson, Ben, The Complete Poems ed. G. Parfitt, Penguin Classics, 1988

  Lucretius, The Nature of Things, translated and with notes by A.E. Stallings, Penguin Classics, 2007

  Parkinson, John, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris – A Garden of Pleasant Flowers, faithfully reprinted from the edition of 1629, Methuen, 1904