Viper Wine (19 page)

A maid carrying a tray of white sack went into the room, and Venetia caught a glimpse of Olive, being fed a sweetmeat by a girl she did not recognise. Venetia threw open the door and sailed inside.

‘Ladies, I come from the Queen,’ she said, off the top of her head. ‘She has news for you.’

Lucy Bright sat up. ‘What?’

‘She says to tell you that you are her angels of Platonic love,’ said Venetia.

Lucy lay down again and carried on singing.

‘Philomel with melody / Sing in our sweet lullabye . . .’ With these words the ladies on the floor rolled over, singing, ‘Lulla, lulla, lullabye, Lulla lulla lullabye . . . So, goodnight, so goodnight with lullabye.’

‘What sport, girls, is this?’

But no one answered her, in the giggling and commotion.

‘Oh no, my fairy wings are crushed.’

‘Sweet pea, you are sitting on my foot.’

She noticed that young Lettice was there, in the middle of them, still wearing that unbecoming red dress but quite happy tickling Lady Mary Somerset’s face with a sprig of blossom. How pleased she ought to feel to see Lettice so at home.

‘Venetia, we are to be fairies at the Queen’s new masque,’ said Lucy Bright, while the other fairies continued tumbling in soft heaps. They were meant to be rehearsing for the masque by arranging themselves into the initials HM, for Henrietta-Maria, but they were too giddy for that.

‘We would very much like you to help us,’ said Lucy. ‘You are such a brilliant actress. We know you can do it.’ She said the shocking word ‘actress’ casually, because the game was always to refer to the court masques as if they were the theatre. ‘Will you, will you help us?’

Pleased – and yet a little doubtful – Venetia sat on the floor, beside her, and said she would.

‘Oh wonder. Here’s the thing, darling. We are to represent a chorus of fairies, but we need someone to take on a bigger role. Someone with Experience. You see, it is really quite a demanding part. We need someone to play the Spider Ariadne.’

Lily, Lady Hutchinson, snort-sniggered at these words, but in a bid to pretend she was laughing at something else, rolled over onto little Marion Cavendish, tickling her fiercely. Their combined years did not make Venetia’s.

The high tide, the rushing ebb, and then the low, low sand. Later, Venetia could not remember how she managed to hold herself together. When she was a child she had always made people laugh, playing the pretty noodle. When she was beautiful she was famous for her irony. It was the grain of salt that made her beauty taste. She was still ironical, but people seemed not to notice; no one listened hard enough. And so the time for clowning was come again. It was no longer the time to be Helen of Troy. Now she was Thersites. She must play with these girls as she played with her sons, making them laugh by snapping her teeth and blowing out her cheeks. It was time to make her body serve a new purpose. She looked Lucy deep in the eyes, as if to say, I will not forget this – and then she laughed, shrill, gurgling, chesty, hoo hoo hews, haa haa haas, and she made a show of trying to stop herself laughing, and then finally she collected herself. ‘But who will play my flies?’ And she opened and closed her lips in smacking parps of pantomime menace. Lucy loved her from then on.

‘Nothing could give me greater pleasure than to spin a little web for you,’ said Venetia, though what she was really thinking was, I must drink that Viper Wine, as soon as I can, so help me God. But she continued: ‘Am I to play in the masque or anti-masque?’ Meaning: Am I alive or dead to society? The anti-masque was disgraceful. Lords and ladies appeared in the masque; only hired actors, mummers and professional grotesques performed in the anti-masque, playing parts like ‘a runaway chicken drumstick’. For Venetia to be in the anti-masque was impossible, and they both knew it. An idea struck Venetia before Lucy had time to reply. ‘Perhaps I should play the harp? A very spider-like instrument, I have always thought.’

As she heard more of the plans for the masque – Ben Jonson was to write the speeches, and an actor from the Globe would come and help some of the women to speak them aloud – it became clear to Venetia that even if she had to play a scuttling, spinning arachnid, she would at least be at the very centre of things. And everything was reversed in a good masque. Ladies played boys; kings played gardeners; pale dames blacked their faces, and Moors lost their colour; the moon danced and flowers sang. It could have been worse. She could have been asked to play Medusa, with a nest of real snakes in her hair. That was the headpiece that Queen Anne had insisted the least beautiful of her ladies-in-waiting wore when Venetia played the Grand Canal at Tethys Festival, the Masque of Rivers, twenty years ago.

That afternoon they sang roundels, and Venetia sat by Olive, the new, smooth-faced, baby-ish Olive – and Lettice sat loyally at Venetia’s feet, because Venetia would not move over so she could sit beside her on the bench, and as the singing master drew them into time together, Venetia’s voice secretly choked at the sound of the young unmarried ones’ high pure notes.

As they were singing, two persons slipped into the room: a little hooded couple holding hands, their faces obscured. Next came a scratching at the door, and a pair of spaniels bounded in, anxious to be with their master and mistress. Then Lord Arundel came discreetly into the room, and the game was up. The little couple pulled off their hoods revealing the smiling faces of their Majesties, and the ladies managed to carry on singing, although some faltered and laughed excitedly, as if they were children performing at a concert recognising their parents in the audience. After a minute or so a clanking sound echoed in the corridor, and the King’s guard of a dozen pikemen came into the room, trying to move quietly, although they were much encumbered by weaponry. ‘Oh,’ said the King, dejectedly. ‘They have all discovered us, Mary,’ he said to the Queen, pulling a faux-sad face.

After the madrigals were finished, the girls went up to their Majesties in little groups, curtseying. Venetia and Lucy Bright were both determined not to let one another take precedence in this, and Lucy actually linked arms with Venetia, so as to hold her back from reaching the King and Queen first. And so it happened that Lettice, Venetia and Lucy Bright all came before the King and Queen together.

‘Are you the mother of these two, then?’ the King gamely asked Venetia.

The Queen nudged him with her fan. She was no great speaker of English, but she had a ready understanding.

Venetia decided, with an effort of will, to take no offence. The King was famously tactless, and a king’s kick hurts less than a beggar’s. She could grieve for his comment later, when she was alone.

‘I am a riddle, if you will, sir – I am the state vanquished by mine own husband,’ said Venetia, because she knew the King loved a puzzle, especially one he could solve. Charles liked to be the clever one: his elder brother Prince Henry, who should have been king but died at eighteen, was bold and easy in himself and good at jousting, but little Charles was known as the scholar. Besides, she meant to remind him of Kenelm’s victory.

‘Every woman is vanquished by her own husband,’ he said, stroking his chin, enjoying the game. Lucy Bright was unable to summon any of her quick speeches, and she could barely take her eyes off Venetia.

‘My husband defeated me at Scanderoon,’ said Venetia.

‘Oh, ho ho,’ said the King. Now he knew who she was. She used to be the sweet bird Venetia Stanley. He recollected his elder brother, Prince Henry, talking about how he she made his mouth to melt, and how he had a will to stir her pudding, and various other drolleries, sincerely meant. Things had changed since then, to be sure, but she was still a sniff of heaven. The King was about to make a clever saw about the passing of time being cruel to us all, but his wife, sensing this, interrupted.

‘Venetia, whose husband has defeated the Venetians!’ cried Henrietta-Maria, and the King looked genuinely cross she had got there first.

‘We hold you and your husband in our heart,’ he said to her, stressing the ‘h’ in husband as if to remedy his wife’s French accent, and laying his hand briefly upon her head, to let her know her audience was over.

Leaving the palace, Venetia went straight home to Charterhouse, where she crawled into bed, although it was afternoon, and pulled its curtains close as a burrow.

‘If the ceiling was falling down in your living room, would you not go and have it repaired?’

Eighty-one-year-old model Carmen Dell’Orefice, 2012

It was like a love-ache, an unbearable absence. Venetia lay in her curtained bed all the afternoon. Sleep was impossible and so was waking: she felt heart-sick, as if for the loss of someone dear to her. But who?

This new character she had was unacceptable. This plainness. It was not suitable to her. She was not like other women. She was famous for what was called her ‘fatal beauty’. Edward Sackville had lost a finger for her in a duel. He bought a spit of land for the purpose in the Low Countries, and the land was still known by the name of the man killed there – Lord Bruce. She had barely even spoken to Lord Bruce. The business was more between the men than anything to do with her, she knew now, and yet when she was sixteen, she took it very much to heart, sickened and enthralled by the news. A dead man, a severed finger and a ruptured lung – these were her tributes, laid across her dressing table with her favours and garlands.

She moaned into her pillow, missing her youth drink, though she had not yet drunk a drop of it. She hoped that when Kenelm came home he could not see the spider-ish look about her. She had to pretend to him she was still Helen, else how could he be Paris? How could she be anything less without disappointing him and the boys? She did not want to be a hag-mother, web-wound and scuttling. She felt the bitterness of it thinning her bones.

She managed to rise and repair some of the sadness that besmirched her face, and to leaden a little, and to paint a rosy lip, so that by the time Kenelm returned, she was ready to smile at him like he was the new sun rising. He went down on one knee before her, and buried his lion head in her lap and she suffered herself to put her arms around him like the unicorn of old, and she hugged him tightly against the spinning of the world.

He said he was likely to make naval comptroller to the King, as his exploits at Scanderoon were finally come to the King’s notice, and the King was interested in using
The Magus
as a possible model for a navy that ruled beneath the waves as well as above. ‘Ah, my nonesuch,’ she said, stroking his mane. ‘My none but one love.’

There was one obstacle.

‘My darling . . .’ said Kenelm, and she knew it was important, by the way he was holding her hands, as if testing their weight. ‘Please you take this in a good and loving spirit and be not afrit?’ She nodded; she knew this tone of voice. Although he seemed to be telling her something, he was asking, looking for approval.

‘I am of the wrong faith. I will be received into the Protestant communion on the feast of All Souls at Westminster.’

‘Moved by ambition, [Sir Kenelm Digby] has recently abandoned his Catholic faith and become Protestant.’

The Venetian Ambassador to London,
Calendar of State Papers
(Venice) 1629–32

Of course, Venetia had perceived two years previously that this might happen, and she had already managed Mary Mulsho’s will so that it would be harder for her to disinherit Kenelm. She had played a close hand with her Queen and the court ladies-in-waiting, never wholly renouncing or embracing either faith but keeping a subtle counsel with both, just as she collected hearts as well as spades when she played at Glecko. But then a presentiment like a chill settled upon her, a feeling of a long, cold separation from her Kenelm, who, as a Protestant, could not be buried beside her.

‘
We
are of the wrong faith,’ she contradicted him.

‘No, my love, you will keep the Old Faith and the Queen’s good counsel. I will take the new faith, and so support the King, and obtain promotion. I have to do it, Venice.’

He was thinking of the worldly benefits. ‘This will settle the question that hangs over me and my loyalty, once and for all. My father’s crime would be finally forgot . . .’ Venetia thought this unlikely, but said nothing. ‘And can you imagine, my darling, what we could also do if we were preferred at court? We could put up a new wing in this house, my Experiments would be preferred . . . It is,’ he kissed her hand, to comfort himself, ‘all to the best, I do believe. I nearly converted when I was in Laud’s care, but he said I should wait till my majority.’

Venetia wanted to ask Kenelm what the Synod ruled for couples who died in different faiths: would they be reunited hereafter?

But then the dogs barked, and a bell at the back gate jangled.

‘A late hour for deliveries,’ said Kenelm.

‘No, no,’ replied Venetia, leaping up. ‘Just a parcel from my Lettice, I think. Who will receive you into the new faith? Will it be Laud?’