Viper Wine (34 page)

‘But I love Kenelm more and ever more, and his oddities, his failings, even, are the very things I love the best. It touches me near tears sometimes to think of him fussing in his study over his Secret Work, and sending for bat droppings or some other strange recipe, excited and full of high seriousness, and yet nothing seems to come of it, year in, year out.’

Olive shook her head. She counted this little speech of Venetia’s heresy against husbands. ‘Endymion is far wiser than I, and he knows more than I will ever know. This is how marriage is, Venetia, and how it should be.’

Venetia was silent for a moment, and this pleased Olive, who was not to know that Venetia was thinking of Endymion’s ruddy face and curt manner, and wondering if he had become a kinder lover, or if he still brought to their marriage bed the tricks of the stews, as Olive had confided. Venetia said in an inwards voice: ‘A husband’s heart is a little glass bauble, coloured like the rainbow, and we must be careful to preserve it from our deep or wounding thoughts, and keep it from cracking with the heats of our disappointments, and guard it safely. This is an act of care, Olive, not of innocence.’

Olive thought how Venetia always seemed wiser than her, even though she was a year or two younger.

‘Does he still hurt you?’ asked Venetia.

‘Oh, always. Whenever we couple. I am learning to like it. He never gives me real pain. It is only close to pain – a game, really.’

Venetia thought of the canvases Endymion bought, of Europa ravished and the Sabine women and the Innocents being massacred, and all those naked, flaunted, terrified women, and she wondered if art sometimes fed the appetite, rather than the soul.

They went on together towards the apothecaries’ stalls, where Olive asked after Master Choice – Venetia could not prevent her – and when they were told he never came to the Exchange, they browsed the pots of paint and fucus, the horse hair-pieces and the patches for pock-marked women to wear upon their cheeks. There were black spots and stars and moons and musical notes and fleurs-de-lis and even, look, they pointed out to one another with appalled laughter, a tiny coach and horses! They asked one another a question with their eyes, and then burst into laughter again.

‘Not for Penelope,’ said Olive.

‘Oh dear, no, not the coach and horses.’

‘She will need a great many of the plainer sort though, like as not,’ snorted Olive, with ill-disguised excitement.

Venetia looked at her reprovingly. ‘Penelope recovers apace,’ she said, setting a more sober tone for the conversation. ‘Or so I gather.’

Venetia did not think Olive needed to know about the letters she had burned.

Chater caught up with them carrying their
pain-perdu
, which they retired to eat in the counting house, where they sat and restored their senses so they were ready for the next round of commerce. Whenever Chater left them for a moment, Olive tried to talk to Venetia about Choice, or his Wine, such as: ‘Do you fancy it makes your water smell horse-ish? Like a breed mare?’

‘No,’ said Venetia firmly, to quieten her, although the suggestion stayed with her, and she came to the discomfiting realisation that the strong, healthy smell she had noticed on her skin and in her breath did carry something of the stable.

The New Exchange being a better sort of place, its stewards tried to keep the criers and ranters out, and yet still they came, and people liked their spectacle, and it made the whole place agreeably like a theatre, so they were kept to the open-air courtyard in the middle, shouting themselves hoarse and distributing handbills. There was an apothecary called Dr Dafft, offering small samples of brown liquor, which Kenelm had told her was no more than angel water with sugar in it: ‘Cure of life, ladies, precious tincture, drink ye down and rise again.’

There was the tall, white-clad figure of Lady Eleanor Davies, the baronet’s daughter who claimed to be the Meek Virgin of the Apocalypse. She pronounced to the Bourse that ‘Popish Priest’ was an anagram of ‘He Piss Pot’. The pamphlets she printed illicitly in Amsterdam were arranged for sale in front of her on a little rack, although she was not here for commerce, but to answer her Calling. Since the execution of her brother Mervyn Lord Touchet for crimes too terrible to mention – even in anagram – her will to prophecy had redoubled, and she did it compulsively, in public, pronouncing to whomsoever would listen. ‘The letters cannot lie!’ Randomly consulting her Bible, she spoke in short bursts: ‘The Beast’s days not more numerous. The people, rapt. The saviour, come. Blood in the river!’

Venetia stood alone in front of her listening, absorbed. She was attracted to millenarian intensities, and this woman’s abstracted words struck her with a kind of rough poetry. Venetia felt her face framed by her hood as she stood there dreaming and as a snow-crystal settled on her cheek, she became lightly conscious that she was making a lovely picture, and so she stayed there for a second or two more, holding the pose, thinking that a very good painting of herself in this attitude could be taken, and that its title might be
A Lady Considers the Fate of Nations.

Repelled by the sight of a well-born woman speaking in public, most people passed by Lady Eleanor Davies quickly, but there was a crowd around an upmarket mouse-catcher and his prize cat. ‘Mices, rats, cockerchaffes – she wants ’em. She’s the fastest cat in the country, ladies. She’s caught three dozen rats in a minute, by the bell. Your bed shall be your own again, ladies.’

The thickest gathering made its object hard to see, but Venetia, taller than most of the crowd, glimpsed a small baby-haired woman with a round head like a moon-calf, standing on a box and declaiming in a high-pitched voice that was hard to hear. Venetia was about to move on to another entertainment when a handbill was passed to her:

* A Mistress of Natural Physick *

IS ARRIVED in LONDON bringing her Country Cure and Kind Ways to restore the stale and tired women of the Town as she finds are very much in need of her consultations and advisings. Ably assisted by her clever little friends she can read water, remedy sores and dispense to ladies for heartache and distemper, with jallops and fever-few.

Shee is an auctoritee in the matter of BEAUTY Having lately cured a very Noble woman (whom out of sweet deference we shall term only Lady V.D. née. S.) of middling years of her Sadness, and Having restored her to Her Husband. Which was no small matter, Hee having been long away at sea fighting battles and Shee having gathered much dust during that time.

Yet after consultations the Noblewoman has Lately been seen in Publick with her Adoring Husband and Shee restored to all her former glory. What cure has this Lady taken? Natural Physick onely and dispensed by your own MOTHER NATURE, who shall be found at the sign of the Thistle, beside St Mary Axe, and who goes by the name of Mistress BEGG GURLEY. She shall not stay long in London, so seek her out without delay.

Printed at Powles by the Saracen for Master Thomas Leake

As Venetia read the handbill, she realised the small woman talking to the crowd was ‘Lady’ Lily Trickle, and she made ready to sweep her up with furious anger and carry her kicking by the braid on her little mochado jacket and bring the Lord Chancellor down upon her – except as she elbowed through the crowd she saw that Lily Trickle, her supporting gentleman with his handbills and, yea, even the box she stood upon had vanished, leaving her spectators dumbfounded.

‘She’s with Queen Mab,’ said one woman.

‘She’s scuddled,’ said another. ‘Creditors maybe.’

‘Poor little mite,’ said a third, looking at the handbill. ‘Do you warrant she restored the great Lady to her husband, or no?’

Olive appeared, slipping her arm around Venetia’s waist, and Venetia quickly folded the atrocious handbill away, and put it in her pocket. There was no need to magnify this problem by sharing it.

Venetia said she was bored now, and Olive loyally agreed she too was bored.

The only sign that anything was amiss was a tiny muscular movement across Venetia’s brow, which repeated of its own accord, like a tick or spasm. Venetia was angry, and yet the subtle potion she drank disallowed anger, repelling it from her face, blocking its pathways and its impulses, so that it took a deeper route, making a vein in her forehead stand out like a river on a map, and giving her eyes a frozen glitter.

Determined to leave this place, she fought against the crowd, Olive following behind her as she elbowed past all the happy, animated faces that looked blindly through her, thinking of this pretty China-bowl or that Pipe-stand which they must have, even as they stepped aside and bowed to her as a lady of quality whom they half-recognised. But a few ladies nudged one other, hiding their smiles behind handkerchiefs as Venetia came by. They had read the handbill of Begg Gurley, and looked at her sideways, with awed and credulous fascination. Venetia smiled haughtily and ignored them, furious with Begg Gurley for her cheek, and the indignity it brought upon her. Yet as the whispers spread, and more people glanced up at her, and as the crowd parted before her, deep in her heart, Venetia loved the bitter-sweet attention, and recognised the tinder spark of infamy from her past, when she was called courtesan one day and sweet virgin the next, and halberdiers used to hold back the crowds so she could pass.

She wanted to send Begg Gurley and Lily Trickle to the stocks, to the ducking stool, if they could find a chair big enough for Begg, and one small enough for Lily. She wanted to see mouldy veg pounding upon their faces and their heads covered in egg yolk, and leprechaun familiars laughing at them and pinching them. And yet she knew it would never do to prosecute Begg Gurley; that would only bring the whole debacle out into the open, so that Kenelm and all his friends knew of it. This was what Francis Bacon meant when he wrote of the Marprelate tracts – ‘He that replieth, multiplieth.’ Complaining would only ensure everyone heard Begg’s slander, and found out about her other Viperish secrets besides. Instead, she would give Begg Gurley and Lily Trickle a scare; without a doubt, she would. Perhaps she would send one of Dr Choice’s worms to their lodgings at the sign of the Thistle. She would slip the live worm into a velvet purse, with a sickly sweet letter tagged to it, so they thought they had a rich jewel for a present, until they put their hand inside and touched a livid, hissing coil.

But for the moment, Venetia would live up to the attention, the gossip, the prurient looks, the half-sniggers. The handbill was out, escaped to the four corners of the Bourse, and she must assume that everyone would read it. Even Aletheia Howard, whom she noticed over in the eastern alcove, involved in tough negotiations over a set of Porcelain.

She looked across at Venetia and squinted at her, trying to work out what had changed about her. Aletheia had the eye; she could distinguish Titian’s own work from that of his studio assistants. She could discern hair-cracks in walnut wood boxes, and she knew how Greek ikons were faked. Today, she thought Venetia was executed not by the Master’s hand, but a close acolyte’s. She was well done, indeed; but a little
too
well done.

Venetia consoled herself: this outrageous handbill had come about because she was herself again. Begg’s chestnut-munching mouth must have hung wide open when she heard the talk of Venetia’s restored beauty – and the old hag believed, no doubt, that she had managed to cure her with the power of pattering fairy feet and rose-petal rain. Ha!

Venetia threw back her head and walked about the market as if she were on the stage of a masque. Her face assumed that expression of utter thoughtlessness that had served her so well. She sucked her cheeks and tossed her head. She would show neither pleasure nor displeasure, so she would, in time, come to resemble a China-cup, or a Sandal-wood box, and she would be traded, her name called up and down the market, people clamouring for more of her, and handbills flying with her name on them, and yet she would keep consignments of herself just scarce enough, delaying them by means of continental blockades and wars, so when she came to market, she was much in demand. And she would walk back and forth, advertising herself, and there would be no end to her and no beginning, and she would be stacked as high as the hollow China Dogges on this very table in front of her.

‘Madam, shall you buy this Dogge – on his neck a bell which rings?’

She was a very good China Dogge, because she was shiny, and she had glossy hair, and a sweet nose, and people wanted her, and because they wanted her she had a price. Otherwise she was useless. Was she not? But she could inspire people to part with their money, and therefore she was not useless. She shook her rattling head. Certainly she was not useless to Begg Gurley and Lily Trickle and – she checked the poxy handbill again – Thomas Leake, whomsoever he may be, the pouch-penny swine.

Venetia smiled at a pretty young woman, imagining that she knew her. She was her friend Anne Somerset from the court of James. But no, Anne was now mother of six boys, and living in the country. And then she spied a poor little gentlewoman with a rolling gait – Penelope. Was it? Yes. Venetia felt herself coming back to life, brimming with happiness to see her good old Pen, and she swept through the crowd towards her.

As she came close, she saw that Penelope was thinner, with a tougher expression in her eyes. She was wearing a mob cap as usual but it did not sit right, and Venetia suspected that her hair had suffered. She was pale but she was not pocked – it must have been a mild attack of the sickness. The King had also been spared, two years ago, when he sustained barely a mark. Sometimes the scourging angel’s wings brushed gently. Standing with Penelope was Lettice, and when they saw Venetia coming, the pair of them stiffened in unison, and Venetia could see that they had become close.

‘Pen, my dear,’ called Venetia, who reached out towards her delightedly, but stopped short of wanting to kiss her.

Penelope smiled weakly, and Lettice gathered her arm around her, like a swan protecting a cygnet.

‘Thank God for your recovery,’ said Venetia, crossing herself.