Viper Wine (24 page)

One Small Step for Ma

But he had been interrupted, so that the charcoal cartoon of the lettering only went so far, and the rest was whitewash.

‘
Man
,’ said Sir Kenelm. ‘
For Man.
And where is the rest?’

Clack put his chalk in his mouth while he rubbed his hands, shrugging.

‘. . . 
One Giant Leap for Mankind,
’ said Kenelm. It was depressing to see this noble phrase incomplete.

‘Yep,’ said Thomas Clack. ‘He’s only gone for his dinner.’

‘The calligrapher went for his dinner last week and has not come back.’

‘He’s a good lad, he’ll be with you later today or tomorrow, sir.’ Thomas Clack was not himself a craftsman, but he was an able general manager, and he knew how to pacify his clients.

‘And your cloud-painter, is he come yet?’ said Kenelm, pointing to the ceiling, where Zephyrs should be disporting through heavenly Afflatus.

‘Now, Bill the Cloud is high up in the Worshipful Company, and he’s much in demand. First there is Master Suckling’s Love Temple, which needs many, many more clouds if the flying maidens are to have any modesty at all, and then he is painting Lord Arundel’s heavens, which was meant to be a quick job but are now required to the degree of storminess that they will put forth lightning. Then he must finish the Passion for Mary Abchurch, or there will be no Christmas altarpiece, and the people must look at our Saviour suffering upon an empty sky of plain red clay – do you wish that to come to pass because you have such need of your own library?’

‘No,’ said Kenelm wearily. ‘No, he will come when he is ready. I had not realised London was so much in want of clouds.’

Kenelm had at first had the idea that the library ought to be constructed in the Vitruvian fashion, after Michelangelo’s library in Florence, with all its proportions following the golden archetype of Man’s Corporeal Body, with a cranium in the middle which was a cupola inset in the rafters, with the light of consciousness let in from the sky, but over time Kenelm contented himself with this more prosaic library, yet his cherished plan was that the shelves should cohere to the Continents of the World (as, Roman, New World, English, and the like) and just as there was
terra incognita
, so there would be dark, empty shelving held for works as yet unacquired and unwritten: biographies of men or even women unborn, Atlases of countries undiscovered. Only a complacent and heretical library could present a closed frontage. No library should ever be full.

Thomas Clack was waiting to speak. ‘Sir, your
other parts
’, he said significantly, ‘are being worked upon.’

Kenelm had asked Clack, who was often employed by Catholics, to build him a mirror-frontage concealing private shelving. Clack took the commission with high seriousness, presuming the secret books to be seditious tracts from Rome, manuals of equivocation and Counter-Reformation. In fact, the most precious books in Kenelm’s collection were on the Pope’s Index of Prohibited Books. Contradiction and countermand were intrinsic to his soul. Clack frequently reassured Kenelm, under his breath, that his designs had been noted, and were being put into practice. Clack even winked at him in reference to the pornography he presumed would also lodge there, but Kenelm missed this profanity, assuming he had dust in his eye.

As part of his duty of care for Thomas Allen’s books, Digby was having them re-bound in leather and gilt. When he first became custodian of them, he thought he could never wish for any more books – until he went to visit the bookbinder at the Blue Bible, who showed him other rare volumes, which must have come from a great philosopher’s library:
The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon
, Aristotle’s
Secretum Secretorum
, a pharmacopœia, and Rolle’s
Pricke of Conscience
, tooled in gold and red calf, as well as volumes in esoteric languages unknown to Kenelm, who looked them over with a grim kind of pleasure, since these must also be added to his library, even though some were duplicates of books he already owned, and yet he must have them.

The windows, being the eyes of the building, must not let too much brightness into this place of contemplation, nor must they keep it unduly dark. It was ideally to be somewhat like a gentle forest dell, wherein new thoughts might grow and weedy distractions wither . . . The windows were to be painted with scenes that appeared Emblematicall, though they were sweetly personal to him and Venetia, depicting moments from their courtship. Two fat cherubim, playing together; the lion with the thorn in its paw, in remembrance of how he once took a thistle out of the heel of Venetia’s hand; the Laurel of constancy, the Mulberry of patience, the Cherry of Virtue, the Maple of her suitors’ rotten hearts. In the final window, there appeared the Fig-Tree of deliciousness.

His library would be never-ending, thanks to
trompe-l’œil
: at the far end, he hung his Dutch perspective painting of the great library at Leiden, which played with the eye from a distance, and the great grey architraves of the library looked so permanent, and its books so material, that if he hung it half behind an Arras curtain, anyone might think that it was a portal to another library, and hence from Leiden, one might wander into another library, and beyond that ever forwards.

When he peered into the painting, Kenelm fancied he saw amongst the lean, dark-hatted scholars the figure of Thomas Browne, working for his doctor’s gown in Leiden. They knew one another from Oxford days, when they were acquainted only by reputation. The queer thing was this: Browne moved. Sometimes when Kenelm looked at the painting, Browne was pacing about. The next time Kenelm looked, he was daydreaming in the scriptorium. Sometimes Kenelm peering very close into the painting fancied he stood at Browne’s shoulder and he could see, as his nib moved across the page, that he was writing his Bibliotheca Abscondita: his list of books that either were lost or had never existed:

The song of the sirens

The paradoxes Berkeley invented about time but never published

The lost language of the Saharan Garamantes

The proof of Pierre Fermat’s last theorem

The unwritten chapters of
Edwin Drood

Aeschylus’s
The Egyptians

Homer’s comedy
Margites

The secret and true name of Rome

The Gnostic Gospel of Basilides

Works of David Foster Wallace’s dotage

The perfect translation of
Eugene Onegin
into English

Over the page, his notes continued:

The book of Lilith

The ending of Mrs Gaskell’s
Wives and Daughters

Queen Nefertiti’s edicts

Jane Austen’s
Sanditon

Sylvia Plath’s destroyed journals

The works of Ada Lovelace on the Analytical Engine

Letters of empresses, queens, noblewomen and ordinary women

Diaries of the same

Masterworks of the same

The letters and papers of Venetia Stanley

Leaving Browne at work, Kenelm began to explore the library at Leiden, pacing as in a dream through the cold, stony labyrinths, looking at all the unreachable volumes, until he came to the back wall, where there was a curtain, which Kenelm drew back, to find another large painting of a library, so well done it might have been a window, and by gazing, Kenelm moved into it, propelling his mind forward with the same effort one might use to lift a weight, or pull a rope.

This was a very magnificent library, in a new classical mode, on a circular model, so one might turn about, looking down the walls of books like spokes in a wheel. Rotating with some mental effort, as if he were trying to write with his left hand, Sir Kenelm began to feel giddy, and clung to a wall, where a sketch hung, an architect’s plan for the best library in the New World.

Gazing into this design, he saw on the shelves some of his own books.

‘In 1655 Digby sent a gift of about forty books to Harvard University’

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, 2012

From there he was drawn onwards, through another window, into a drab, clean library, in which there were no books at all, only a humming emptiness. The users of this library were not present, but Kenelm could hear them working, making thousands of tiny clicks.

‘Every book ever written is inside me,’ he heard a slim shape on the table say, as its mouth lit up.

‘You can take me anywhere and turn my pages with your eyes.’ The machine fluttered as if a dove were trapped inside it.

‘Most people have access to all the books in the world. They carry their libraries about in their pockets.’

Kenelm smiled with relief – Utopia was come to pass.

‘No one
reads
them – are you crazy?’

Thomas Clack coughed, to bring this hare-brained one back to reality. Of all his dreamy clients, the Catholics were the worst.

Kenelm swallowed and ran his hand through his golden hair.

‘And above the door, here, dominating the room, I plan to hang Master Van Dyck’s portrait of our family grouping, which is soon to be completed,’ said Kenelm.

‘It will be a fine enough place,’ said Thomas Clack, ‘in spite of all the books.’

‘Spare no cost, sir, and make it the finest,’ said Kenelm.

T
HE
A
POLLO
R
OOM AT THE
D
EVIL
T
AVERN

‘
CUP US TILL
the world go round, the world go round,’ sang Suckling and Davenant, arm in arm, doing a little dance down the steps of the Devil Tavern.

‘Our careless heads with roses bound, roses bound . . .’

Gatherings of the Tribe of Ben usually ended in chorus numbers. They had been feasting in the Apollo Room upstairs all day, producing sonnets extempore in the first flight of wine at noon, exchanging couplets over beef, speechifying, toasting and boasting, and finally, succumbing to hiccoughs and singing.

Jonson left early, so they bowed to his bust, and set a napkin over its head when Carew’s verse was bad. ‘I trod a tough hen on Monday last,’ sang Shackerley Marmion, ‘of thirty years of age . . .’ And Kenelm silenced him with a raised hand. They were not coarse braggarts; they were gifted adepts of the Quell and Stile. Ahem. The Quill and Steel. They would defend their honour, leaping from balcony into walled garden, displaying terrifying swordsmanship, and write it up with embellishments before morning in Apollonian hexameters. Thus they were – Kenelm said the word with an Italian flourish –
Rhodomontades.
Young Thomas Killigrew was joining them for the first time, and the Apollo Room standards should be maintained. And William Davenant was there too. He was unexceptional in his versifying, but there was immortal blood in him. He was Shakespeare’s bastard, after all.

‘But the world has gone dark – has Phoebus fallen out the sky?’ Young Killigrew ran out into the street, shouting and wheeling faster and faster, a loosed piglet, until he fell over into the mud, shouting: ‘And now the earth has tilted on his axis, and thrown me off!’

Kenelm saw he was, at least, more sober than Killigrew. He found the cold air of Fleet Street refreshing to his face. He was conversing with William Cavendish, and he knew their discourse was of mighty import, only his understanding of it would not keep still, but came and went like the sea’s surf.

‘Everything depends upon the circle and the straight line,’ said Cavendish. This was not an original thought, but one of the tenets of Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica.

‘Everything,’ said Kenelm, suppressing a belch. ‘Observe the molecular structure of water.’

Cavendish did not notice this anachronism. ‘Indeed,’ he said intently, playing for time while he swayed a little. ‘And now, if we were to hit upon the right symbol.’

‘The symbol of essential wholeness,’ said Kenelm.

‘According to the Fourth Letter . . .’ said Cavendish (this was their code for D – John Dee).

‘The symbol would, if perfectly engraved, enable us to achieve just that,’ said Kenelm heavily.

‘Achieve what?’ said Cavendish.

‘Gnosis,’ said Kenelm, swallowing the ‘g’.

‘Whazzat?’ asked Cavendish.

‘Divine Regeneration!’ whispered Kenelm, suddenly thinking he might be sick.