Viper Wine (22 page)

‘Well, sir,’ she said, ‘does you like my new look?’

Poor Chater stammered tactfully, and his confusion was so entertaining to her that her face-mask cracked into a thousand tiny lines.

Finally she rang for Elizabeth to help her get dressed. Her costume must be put on each and every day. She sat at her dressing table, painting.
God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another
, she heard Hamlet’s angry words in her head, and she thought what a tiresome person he was, licking the tip of her sable brush and dipping it in carmine. Poor Hamlet was ever a booby. The poison-pen letter she had received had gone into some detail about her painted lips, ‘her rubious o, her bright fornicator’s mouth’. She wondered if the writer of the letter had formerly been one of the boys who chased after her carriage shouting hallelujahs.

As she went about town that afternoon, helping Chater distribute her pamphlet of domestic wisdom,
A Mirrour for a Modest Wife
, she was both pleased and displeased by her unaccustomed cleanliness. It made her feel brand new but invisible, as if she had no shadow, no presence. The comforting musty aroma of self was gone. It would take weeks to recover it.

That evening, Kenelm called her his strange new wife, and kissed her curiously. Usually Mistress Elizabeth unlaced her but tonight he did it himself, pulling at every string and bow he could see, even the decorative ones, and doing it badly, like a boy, unlacing everything in the wrong order, and tearing a few stitches in his hurry to see how clean she was.

A few months ago, she would have doubted him, wondering why he was so excited, tormenting herself with suspicions and asking if his male psyche was pretending she was another woman, some cheap young doll or katy.

But now her power had returned, and none of these cruel thoughts bothered her. When she was naked, she slowed him down, staying his hand and keeping him back, until he was the kind and gentle lover that she had taught him to be in their early years together. And finally, well pleased with one another, they fell asleep under her new coverlet, with their legs entwined the whole night through, waking only sometimes to kiss one another, as they had done at the very beginning.

A cart had drawn up in Charterhouse Precinct, and men were fetching piles of books into the house. Sir Kenelm was amongst them, coming and going, his voice commanding where the next consignment should go, his arms filled with books, his face wet with tears that he did not seem to notice, as he continued to lift and stack the books into pillars, piles and tottering columns.

There were vast folded maps, as tall as young Kenelm; flapping incunabula and sheaves of illuminated manuscript, not bound but tied with string, like parcels; doll-sized prayer books and gospels; Indian mandalas and Islamic calligraphy and books of Aztec illustrations marked ‘Ægyptian’. The sole extant copies of Anglo-Saxon poems were mixed in with tattered sheaves of church accounts and Medieval tithe books, alongside dozens of annotated books of geometry, bound in black with no markings, in order to disguise their dangerous content. It was the entire library of Thomas Allen, who had finally been released of this life in his rooms at Oxford, where he had been found dead in his chair, as if asleep. He had got up to put on his best clothes before he died – his Magus’s cloak of blue and threaded with silver stars.

‘It is as if,’ Kenelm said, pausing to wipe his face, ‘as if we carry his heart, his lungs, his spleen, and every part of his body into our house.’

Venetia, who had come down from her bedroom to discover this excess of books, and her husband in tears, took in the situation immediately. ‘He speaks figuratively,’ she explained to the men. ‘He is only sad for the loss of his old tutor and friend. Whiles you are with us,’ she smiled airily, flashing her old power, ‘could you do us the great good action of moving this big old chest here, so, and heaving this cabinet here into the upstairs chamber . . .’ And thus Venetia had the men running about rearranging the house as well as filling it with books.

‘Like a number of mathematicians, Thomas Allen was popularly supposed to be a necromancer . . . As early as 1563 he began acquiring manuscripts and gradually built up one of the largest private collections in Oxford . . . which he bequeathed to Sir Kenelm Digby in 1632.’

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
2012

The books were in Digby’s mercy now, bequeathed to him as a child to a godparent: a blessing but a burden of care. They had come to him because he loved books; so our passions gather their own speed. Over the next weeks, he would furiously reprimand the servants of his house for using the books to hold doors open. It was the way people treated manuscripts, since the monks were driven out. He found a beer pot placed upon an Illumination. ‘I will not have these papers abused,’ he insisted. ‘Who harms my books harms my very person.’

The air that night was sulphurous and syncopated with burst-bladder pops and bangs. A loud one, catching everyone by surprise, made the carthorse stamp, and the windows rattle. It was the fifth of November, and the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot was enforced by law, though the Digbys always spent the night holding vigil at home, even though one of them was now a Protestant. Kenelm was of the opinion that Venetia should retire and draw their bed-curtains against the noise, in case she was with child again, and the explosions marked their baby – he knew that by looking at an execution once, a mother had given birth to a headless child. He found he was crying again, for the woes of the world.

Digby paused beside a stack of books in Italian, noticing a little volume wedged underneath, as big as the palm of his hand, in stiff goatskin the colour of dried blood, tooled with naïve, off-centre round Celtic designs. He held it gently, became caught up in its first pages, and fell to reading.

The men moved back and forth past him, shifting and shouting, and one of the men put out his back through heavy lifting, and made a cry about it, and Venetia ran to get him a pretty medal of St Christopher from her own closet, only a little mouldy, and his to keep, she insisted. It was not worth a penny, less than the worth of the work of furniture shifting they had done, and yet the man went away well pleased, and sweet on Venetia.

Outside the war-like sounds continued, and the smell of a hundred good Protestant bonfires drifted across the city, but Sir Kenelm was still absorbed in the tiny ox-blood volume. He held the book to his riddling, turnover heart. He had an inclination to believe it was the gospel of St Cuthbert, buried nine centuries previously in the saint’s coffin, in the salty earth of the holy island Lindisfarne, and used in many Catholic miracles since it was disinterred in the claw-like grasp of the saint’s crystalline, salt-preserved body. With the smallest flick of his tongue Kenelm licked the top cover of the book. It was salty. He wondered if he might be struck dumb with tongue-rot, so he could say no more Protestant prayers.

He realised the men had gone and it was dark, and he looked up and saw he was in the dining room, trapped in the midst of his old tutor’s precious library, and had to shift two stacks of books to get out. He kept the Gospel tightly in his palm. This little volume had not yet achieved all its miracles. In a few hundred years it would raise buildings and save souls.

‘The Society of Jesus has sold the St Cuthbert Gospel to the British Library for £9 million . . . Proceeds of the sale will support Jesuit schools in London, Glasgow and Africa.’

The Tablet
newspaper, 2012

Kenelm climbed to the highest window in the house, where ashes from the city’s bonfires blew into his face like black snowflakes. Over the river a display of sparked-up military firepower spluttered, low, golden and bloody, like a demonstration of what the state could do to your guts, if it was so minded.

It was a potent celebration, this festival of fireworks – almost alchemical in its method. For it sought to convert a substance into its direct opposite. Powder had been a means to murder, now it was re-deployed as a means to delight. Screams of agony became screams of excitement. An act of terror became a celebration. A literal thinker would never have created this commemoration. Suitably for a Protestant occasion, everything hung on analogy.

As Kenelm’s private thoughts flared and sizzled, the display on the river seemed to grow out of control, fizzing ever higher into the sky, and just as he began to be afraid for the city’s safety, Kenelm thought he saw his father’s golden hair shining across the heavens, fading out of sight like a bounding Leo, for his father was born on the cusp of August. The bright form of the leaping lion was still there when he closed his eyes.

‘What is happening?’

It was young Kenelm in his nightclothes. ‘Well,’ said Kenelm, taking him onto his knee, ‘tonight is a festival in memory of your grandfather.’

It was almost true. There were some things that would need to be better explained to the boy, certainly, but he could start with the grand concepts. The detail – his grandfather’s treachery, trial, and so forth – could be filled in later.

The boy hid his face in Kenelm’s clothes.

‘The city is celebrating your grandfather with fireworks,’ he said. Less true, but never mind. ‘If you watch the sky you will see him glimmer and wave to us.’

A spluttering fusillade meant neither could speak or hear, then golden limbs streaked across the night.

‘He’s a Starman, waiting in the sky,’ cooed Sir Kenelm, as little fireworks whizzed round the sky like fiery maggots.

Over the music of crashes and rocket whines, he spoke urgently to young Kenelm. ‘I have told you that we Philosophers of Alchemy say that we are all Starmen, you know, and our bones are made of stars, and after we die we return to the stars.’

Young Kenelm nodded.

‘He’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds.’

Kenelm hummed the song to his son, a lullaby he must have heard in his own childhood, a Buckinghamshire air, perhaps. The boy’s limbs became heavy, and the sleeping Kenelm was carried to bed, while outside, tortured rockets whined across the sky.

M
ARY
T
REE: 22
M
ILES
T
RAVELLED

I TELL YOU,
the world is wider than you would ever think possible. The cruel shard I carry, which wounded Richard Pickett, is already tar-blackened, with no red on its bandage, and I have not even left the county of Devon. But I have learned so much. To begin with, I now know the proper name of the man I seek, the Keeper of the Powder of Sympathy: Sir Keyholme Digbin. A mighty pleasant name.

People in towns are very kind, I have discovered. I stayed in Totnes at an inn one night, where I paid the extra that was demanded so I might be in the warm company of many others, rather than in a drafty room of my own. I had expected the cost to be the other way about, but the inn’s hostess explained me my error. She seemed barely repelled by my Mark at all, but talked to me as any other. It was she who corrected me so I had Sir Keyholme Digbin’s name better. She said I should seek out one Sir Mungo Stump, who knows of all the great Men of the Age, and will blab about them moreover. And so I was sent onwards by cart to Dawlish, and as we ride I will tell something more of my strange business.

I saw to it that My Lady Pickett was funeralled and the bell tolled as she wished, even though Father Jonas was doubtful of such high ceremony. Being of a mind to pack me off to Virginia with the Puritans, he said he would come and see me that evening, and I said I feared I would be too busy and sorrowing, and he looked me deep in the eye and said it wasn’t a long business that he needed to do with me.

I went home and started to pack to leave at once, so I might evade him, and perhaps go into service at some house in Cornwall. I was considering whether or no I should take my three books with me, and I left without them, as they were not properly mine, and then went back to fetch them, when I heard a commotion at the gate and peeping from the window I saw a cart outside, with two horses, and a boy running after, and in the midst, a man, holding his feathered hat to his breast and gazing up at the house.