Viper Wine (32 page)

Spiky and shock-headed, comically proud to be alive, were a whole guard of daffodils, in December. And vegetables, too, peasquash, beans and marrows, putting forth bright yellow flags as if it were August. Parkinson’s greatest patron was the Queen – it seemed he furnished her with fruit and flowers all year round.

‘Are these goodly fruits and flowers,’ she asked the Gardener passionately, ‘fit to eat? Not hollow, or blighted, or corrupted by unseasonal flowering?’

The Gardener laughed and shook his head.

‘They are real, in other words, and worthy of love,’ she murmured.

One plant was squat like a marrow but spined like a porcupine. It bit Venetia’s finger when she touched it, and the buzzing of a blow-fly sounded very loud and large in her ear. As she walked unsteadily about, another bush reached out to pluck at her gown, and she turned about in time to see it recoil, its fronds whispering and shuddering.

‘The best plant to eat in here’, said the Gardener, ‘is the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary,’ pointing to a little plinth where sat a mass of wool and fern, somewhat like an old mop crossed with a dog.

‘He is the reason we keep this nursery pen so warm, because he’s a precious beast indeed. He’s come from beyond the Alps, beyond the Tartar Sea, from a place called the Ural, and he’s thought to be about to issue forth live lambs, which will graze around him, joined to this plant by an umbilical stalk. We’ve feed for the lambs in case they come early,’ he said, kicking his foot towards a sack propped against the wall, ‘but there’s been no bleating from this corner yet.’

‘Is he plant or animal, then?’

‘A mickle of one and a muckle of the other, my lady,’ said the Gardener, inserting himself between Venetia and the Vegetable Lamb, so that she would not harm him through carelessness.

‘Sometimes I make a melody, to bring him on a bit.’

The Gardener turned and started sweeping, heaving his broom and singing:

‘Only the dove and the lamb live here

Lions nor vultures nay breathe the air

Sweet music and nay narry distress

In the
sole paradisus terrestris.
’

He carried on sweeping and singing, and he had such tenderness in his voice, she felt the Vegetable Lamb must surely grow with the nourishment of his tunefulness.

‘Master Parkinson is fixed on bringing about the production of lambs from this plant,’ said the gardener. ‘Namely, the production of meat from seed. He says none will go hungry if we can do it, and the taste of this lamb is said to be uncommonly good. Every time I sleep for more than a few hours, or our fire goes out, then he berates me, saying the Lamb is the Joy of Man’s Vegetable Desiring, and I jump to my work again, because it seems likely that after the earth has discovered potatoes, meat should be picked from a tree.’

Some visitors to the Park-in-Sun denied the Vegetable Lamb, and said it was no better than a bush wearing a wig, and called it a hoax and a nothing, and the Gardner heard them, and yet he kept his faith in the Vegetable Lamb.

As Venetia stood in front of it she was convinced she heard it gurgle. The Vegetable Lamb’s tails hung from its stunted boughs, and as she looked at them, wondering what Kenelm would make of them, they began to shake and wriggle with the foolish happiness of cloned lambs, gambolling about transgenic laboratories where they were tended by a thousand white-coated shepherds. She blinked, looked again, and saw that the Vegetable Lamb’s tails merely trembled where she breathed upon them, though Dolly the Sheep’s great granddam (to the power of a thousand) already grazed on the Derbyshire vale. Moved by the strangeness of the Spirit, she performed a quick cross and genuflection, in front of the Lamb, and the gardener followed suit.

‘We always strive to build Utopia in our garden. For if we bring plants here from Every-where across the world, then here becomes No-where, a place that is only full of the best. And Utopia is a good place, and yet no-place, and so we have it here, where there are no seasons. My master always replies so: “God would be much honoured if we could do it.” And so I say also, God would be much honoured if we could devise a true understanding of the parentage of grasses and reeds . . .’

Venetia wandered away, drawn to a peaky-looking lily that perched on the edge of a trestle of blooms. It was of an achingly sad, voluptuous disposition, its heavy head on an angle. She touched her cheek against its cantilevered petals. It smelled of summer, of Gayhurst, of Floralia, of her son’s bare suntanned legs. The skin was fibrous with a waxy touch upon it. It had flourished by special pleading, and careful maintenance, and yet it was as beautiful as any woodland or hedgerow flower – more so, because in its plenitude and hot-house refinement, there was something overly sensual and rare. It had been kept constantly warm here, taken outside into sunlight and shielded from frost, cosseted and fed and watered, nurtured against nature into a constant bloom. It was a lily that had drunk of Viper Wine. She looked at its pert stamen, and wondered if it was barren.

The lily, looking back at her, creaked fibrously into bloom, exhaling a breath of musk and cream and incense, inviting Venetia closer until she could smell its glandular undertow. As she closed her eyes, its rusted stamen stained her neck with two brown imprints, fang marks that smudged into love-bites.

Tansy, or Mugwort, or Gold Buttons – by any name it was as helpful to a woman with the smallpox – was sprouting in the medicinal section of the nursery, and the gardener cut her a good quantity. It cost, but of course it cost. They stoked the fires here constantly, and watered as frequently too: there was foetid greenness growing on the window casements, becoming thicker all the time, blotting out the light more now than when she had stepped inside, as if the pace of life in here were unstoppably quick, and oppressed by the close atmosphere, she darted outside into the wholesome cold.

The Gardener saw her scratching herself surreptitiously under her shawl, and he moved in front of her, blocking her path, looking intently into her eyes, scanning them with his own. Even in the garden light, her pupils were too wide.

‘
Papaver somniferum
,’ he said, more to himself than to her. ‘I wish you joy of your dreams, my lady.’ With a small bow, he pointed her towards the tiny door in the wall. ‘Take care to waken from them.’

Penelope had her tansy by nightfall, but the lily pollen stains clung to Venetia’s skin until evening when Kenelm, searching her body and breathing her incense-scent, found the yellow smudge of them on her neck, and removing them with his thumb and his hot tongue, covered that spot with loving kisses, which suck’d the vessels under her skin so gently she could barely feel them breaking, and pleasured in the feeling, until she realised what he was doing and told him to stop, in the name of her honour.

Now Venetia was herself again, Kenelm’s life was full of luxury. He was like a greedy bumblebee rolling in pollen. At their table they took baked venison, from Gayhurst, cooked as Kenelm directed, so it could be eaten with a spoon. Gellied bones, and whipped-cream syllabub; veal with sweetbreads, champignons and truffles: what a banquet of the senses they enjoyed! He felt the fitness of his tongue through much licking.

He had the bare plaster wall in their chamber covered with leather, tooled into fleur-de-lis patterns, and its richness went in at the eye, yet pleased the fingers, without touching.

Godly men and women, Puritans so-called, preferred plain things, of lasting quality. But Kenelm was in love with decoration, opulent colourings and fretwork. To his mind there was nothing that could not be improved with a few swirls and spandrels.

He bought young Kenelm a pistol, inlaid with pearl and chased with silver. It had the enchantment of all miniature things, and its cartridges were pluggits of cork.

The sound of Venetia approaching made him weak: the sigh of her skirts, the lush heaviness of them. He pinched the lawns and tiffanies she wore between his fingers, feeling their fine grain, marvelling at the abilities of worms.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes

Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows,

That liquefaction of her clothes . . .

Venetia’s silks were a fetish for her admirers, who used to crouch at keyholes to watch the rhythm, the pattern of her walking, and the flare of her gown as she stooped or stepped. It gave young men a frisson to think that the silk moved because she had a pair of legs, independently articulated like a perfect doll, which (yes, no word of a lie) divided at the top . . . For Kenelm the doll was gone, replaced by the woman he loved, but an echo of the fetish remained, in the rustle of her silk, and the flow of her sateen, its indecent slipperiness.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see

That brave vibration each way free;

O how that glittering taketh me!

Venetia’s hair was curled with the expensive new pomander he bought her, which was spiced with bergamot and ambergris from the belly of the whale, a scent that came to define that time of their lives even as they were living it, so that whenever Kenelm caught it he sighed for last week, last month, last year.

He wondered: was his wife his greatest luxury of all? It was the other way round. There was no luxury without Venetia.

When Kenelm sat at his desk he closed his eyes and ran his fingertips over the tooled letters of his newly bound books, reading in the ridges and grooves the deep and light luxuries of his life, and imagining he was touching Venetia. He almost went to her, so they might roll all their sweetness up – but he stopped himself, and opened his book instead. They had time enough for that to come: tonight, after dinner; tomorrow; a lifetime, indeed. Was this not the blessing of marriage?

‘It was [my] fortune to fall into the company of a Brachman [Brahmin] of India . . . which man was one of those that the Indians held in great veneration for their professed sanctity and deep knowledge of the most hidden mysteries of theology and nature. [The Brahmin enlightened Sir Kenelm so that] . . . after much patience, and by abstracting my thoughts from sensual objects, and raising my spirit up to that height that I could make right use of these powerful names which this art teacheth, I got a real and obedient apparition as I desired.’

The Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1631

‘A button of gold could stretch, as thin as a hair, from Montpelier to Paris.’

Sir Kenelm Digby,
On Bodies and the Immortality of Souls
, 1659

‘OMMMMMMM.’

Sir Kenelm was meditating. His pantalooned legs were crossed beneath him, his lacy cuffs rested upon his knees, his dark gold hair lay upon his collar, and his thumbs and first fingers pinched together into a point, like Bodhisattva’s teardrop. His pale eyelashes were closed.

Thoughts of worldly advancement – Sir Francis Windebank said more monopolies were being offered by the Crown, for loans – entered his mind, and he cast them away. He breathed in light, and breathed out darkness.

Thoughts of the tightness of his garters entered his mind, and he cast them away. He breathed in darkness, and turned it into light – for was the meditating subject not using his body as a jordan? As a flask or alembic, for the transmutation of base matter into higher thoughts?

‘Ommmmmmm . . .’

Sir Kenelm had come across his old chest of relics from his teenage travels, rare trinkets he had collected on his journey through Alexandria and Anatolia – tiny jangling bells from a temple; a representation of the evil eye; his Persian cloth, decorated with a design of palms that would in a few decades be called Paisley; some scented sticks that were even now giving off a thoughtful odour; and some rolls of parchment painted with Buddhist mandalas, which had greatly interested him, since they were so similar to English astrologer’s wheels.

‘Ommmmmmm . . .’

There was also a small holy statue which he had bought at great cost, having been assured it was an ancient relic, even though after purchasing it he discovered underneath it a small stamp saying ‘Made In China’.