Viper Wine (37 page)

Lady Howard wiped the winedrops from her smiling, bloodied chin.

Van Dyck’s studio boy lit a lamp, killing the daylight, and the fabric painter surrendered his brushes.

The palace of Whitehall, that august labyrinth of two thousand rooms, resembled a great hive or nest, built with blind diligence and no design. Each generation added their own improvements, so brick-built chambers extruded off the old stone halls like Gothic red growths, fashionable red telescopic chimneypots sprang out of old eaves, fingering the sky, and all was supported by half-timbered council chambers put up temporarily two hundred years ago.

The Queen’s Garderobe was formerly a Council Chamber, where feudal lords once carved up the kingdom, and sleepy ministers scratched through endless dispatches, but its pews were now given over to the spectacle of the Queen’s habiliments, where she was dressed in ceremonies of long and stifling intimacy.

It was important for every lady-in-waiting to attend, as no one wanted to give the impression they had been uninvited, and the Queen liked to have massed ranks of assumed friends around her. She spent a good deal of time changing in a withdrawing room, however, and there was no denying that the event would have been extremely boring for those ladies sitting in the upper tier of the chamber, had they not a million matters to talk of: friendship, and the hidden causes of things; the nature of their dreams, the habits of their servants, and the sayings of their children; of great occasions past and forthcoming, and, most of all, of who had said what, to whom, and what they really meant by it. The tone of their conversation was quick, informative and frank – at least, on most matters.

When the Queen emerged from her private room, many of the ladies held prospective glasses up to their straining eyes, the better to see her fashions, the pattern of florets and lozenges stamped in hot indentations across the cloth, or the pinking about the cuffs. But as the session wore on, her ladies turned these prospective glasses to other uses.

‘I fancy Dame Digby has a brand-new face,’ said little Anne Ogilvy, slowly, glued to the sight of her.

‘Cosmetic improvements are of no interest to me,’ said Belinda, Lady Finch, trying to take her glasses back from Anne.

‘She does not exercise her face as much as she used to. It seems almost . . . immobile,’ said Anne, holding her ground, and focusing the glasses with her thumb.

‘Smiling is plebeian,’ said Lady Finch, ‘and frouncing the brows together gives a woman a mannish look. I have long perfected the art of an immobile countenance. Give me back my glasses, dear.’

‘And yet there is something new-born about her, which I cannot place . . .’ continued Anne.

Straining with barely contained impatience, Lady Finch’s face was far from immobile.

At that moment, the Queen walked out in a stiff silk of butter-yellow, and the ladies clapped. The Queen appeared not to hear them, as she was caught up in an enquiry over the dress’s hem length. Conversations around the chamber continued at a peaceable hush.

Venetia turned away from general view, inclining like a heavy-headed lily towards some confidence from her companion, Lucy Hay.

‘And now she’s occluded, and I shall see nothing of her,’ fumed Lady Finch. ‘It is all to the good, for I take no interest in the complexions of Catholics, be they never so fair.’

She remembered that the Queen was Catholic, and said quickly, ‘I jest, of course.
Une blague
, ha ha.’

‘It is a shame and a pity when good women use medicines to make themselves new faces,’ said Mistress Daubigny, joining their conversation. This put Olive Porter in the middle of them, and without the least hesitation, she agreed with Mistress Daubigny.

‘Oh, the abuse of cosmetics is a terrible shame.’

All the ladies turned to look at Olive, and her tightly tweaked cheeks, and her dilated pupils, and her unnaturally smooth skin – and none of them said a word.

‘I don’t know anyone who does it,’ continued Olive, to fill the silence. ‘I would not myself, certainly.’

They were kind ladies, and they all ignored her.

‘It is indeed a great pity to meddle with one’s face,’ said Lady Finch, squinting through her spyglass as hard as she could.

‘It is terribly sad,’ said Mistress Daubigny, leaning dangerously far over the balcony, the better to see how sad it was.

‘I think her neck is lovelier than ever,’ said Anne, unguardedly.

Indignantly, the ladies in possession of glasses scrutinised Venetia’s neck. Intuitively aware of the attention, Venetia turned her face to the gallery, to indulge those who watched her, and display her most serene countenance. She fanned herself, looking upwards with a contemplative expression she copied from a carved Madonna.

‘Oh,’ sighed Lady Finch.

‘Ah,’ sighed Mistress Daubigny.

‘Ha!’ said Anne, with youthful excitement. ‘I told you!’

‘I see what you mean,’ murmured Mistress Daubigny.

There was silence while all absorbed as much detail of Venetia’s physiognomy as they could.

‘There is not so much gold in the world that would persuade me to take whatever cure she has taken,’ said Lady Finch.

‘There is no cure can do that. She is younger and more beautiful than I remembered, that is all,’ said Mistress Daubigny.

‘Pah!’ said Aletheia Howard, coming back from what she called ‘taking the air’ outside (by which everyone knew she had been smoking her pipe). ‘Lady Digby has been at her husband’s cabinet of medicine, I wouldn’t doubt. She’s married to an alchemist who supplies her with the
ultimo
, the finest treatment.’

‘What treatment would that be?’

‘How so, what treatment?’

‘Do tell.’

‘Indeed,’ said Aletheia, savouring this moment, ‘the one they say “Ripens Wives”.’ She smiled mischievously, and stroked the spot on her chin where the wine had dribbled.

‘Ripens Wives?’

‘Oh, there are plenty of them about. The ripening wives. They are everywhere!’ She tried to catch Olive’s eye, to wink at her, but Olive had busied herself with reading her prayerbook. Aletheia continued: ‘No, come, come – Ripens Wives is an anagram for Viper’s Wine, which is her new beauty cure.’

‘It sounds like a most dangerous tonic, and I should have none of it,’ said Mistress Daubigny, her glasses still focused upon Venetia.

‘Nor I, never, no, not a drop,’ said Lady Finch, also looking intently at Venetia, like a feline at prey.

Then one by one, they all said to Lady Howard, urgently, as if they were very keen to protect themselves from this dangerous cure, ‘Tell me again. What is it called?’

It was the last Levee before Christmas, and the Queen’s costumes were grander than usual, and she now emerged wearing a dress of silver and gold, with a rebato collar, and yet the spyglasses of all the ladies were focused not on the Queen’s high collar, but in the wrong direction entirely.

‘It must be a most choice decoction.’

‘It’s the drink of choice, my dear.’

‘Indeed – Choice on Fenchurch Street.’

‘Choice would be a fine thing.’

Choice, Choose, Chosen. A bird, a turtle dove loosed or lost from the royal cages, flapped around the hall, struggling to get out. Its beating wings against the high ceiling created such an atmosphere of distraction in the Chamber, that much delay and chatter followed, and the whispers of ‘Vein Wiper’ and ‘View Repines’ and ‘Ripen Wives’ chased one another across the benches, as the letters were rearranged in the slipstream of its wings, and word continued to spread until the only male present in the room, the young Prince Royal, burst into loud tears, and the Queen’s Levee was adjourned.

I
NIGO
J
ONES’S
M
OTION
P
ICTURES

‘These shows are nothing else but pictures with light and motion.’

Inigo Jones on the court masques, 1632

CHRISTMAS WAS COMING
apace, and Lucy Bright wrote to Venetia asking her to attend a rehearsal for the Queen’s Twelfth Night Masque. Venetia went unmasked, wearing her silver slippers and her gladdest attitude. The court had removed to Somerset House for the holidays, and the north courtyard at Whitehall was like a builders’ yard, all sawdust and commotion, with stage flats and props stacked against the fountains. Lucy Bright was in the courtyard, watching carters unloading a vast tree made of wire and silk. She came to greet Venetia as soon as she saw her carriage, and took her on a promenade of the set.

The palace, seat of power in England, was urgently busy: a joiner was making a chariot without any back, and two set-makers painting wooden trumpets. A queue of apprentice stagehands were watching a demonstration on the art of gently agitating false trees, so their silk leaves rustled as if in a breeze. From a wagon came bales of flocked azure sea.

Stepping inside the Banqueting Hall, the ladies found it semi-dark, the windows blacked out. A stage had been erected at one end, with rigging, ropes and a ladder 40 foot high. A huge consignment of boxes stood in the middle of the hall. ‘These are full of pink-coloured glass,’ said Lucy, opening one and holding up a rose-tinted glass candle-shield. ‘They will create the stage-effect of dawn. The effect will last perhaps three minutes, but the cost is almost a thousand pounds.’

They exchanged looks. The cost sickened them both. It was wasteful, and wrong, and Venetia loved it.

‘Worth every penny,’ she said.

Venetia opened a box containing mirrored candle-shields. ‘These are very like the ones we used for the Masque of Blackness,’ she said. ‘They caused a sudden
éclaircissement
when the deity appeared – Queen Anna was quite blinded by her own entrance.’

‘The mirror shields are another essential expense,’ sighed Lucy. ‘Though why they must buy new ones for each masque, I do not know. People hear the words “for the Queen”, and pull a price out of the air.’

‘The Queen says the Medici have masques six times a year,’ said Venetia.

‘And Valois, and Lorraine,’ said Lucy. The names were current and powerful, and simply saying them conferred sagacity.

‘Ah yes, I have brought my gown,’ said Venetia, holding up a basket with a blaze of Ultramarine folded in it, her old treasure, her famous gown, now quite shabby, but highly coloured as a kingfisher. Lucy Bright had asked her to bring it for the Queen, who was considering a bright blue dress for the masque.

‘Of course,’ said Lucy, taking the basket from her in a demonstration of her superior authority at court. Dressing the Queen’s body was a matter of such reverential importance, governed by vast and elaborate protocol, that Lucy did not thank Venetia for bringing her dress, but Venetia thanked Lucy for allowing her to bring it.

Sweeping up the shallow stairs in their skirts, they climbed onto the stage. Even in the half-light, the Banqueting Hall was wonderful from this perspective, a model of Palladian style, representing a kingdom of order, proportion and symmetry, where everyone had their fixed place. To Venetia’s eyes, its elegance connoted virtue. She felt safe and at home here; ready to shine.

‘Master Jones, come down! I have Lady Digby,’ called Lucy.

Inigo Jones was atop the stage-ladder, hanging a smooth wood-slatted circular object from the gantry. He waved decorously. ‘Ladies, excuse me, I am raising a Harvest moon. If I desist now I will be eclipsed.’

‘You were eclipsed long ago,’ boomed Ben Jonson, lumbering out from behind a plaster urn, his big black smock pulled down over his tummy, his hands full of handwritten scribbled papers.

When he saw Venetia he began, as ever, to extemporise a new panegyric for her:

‘Half the world in thy retinue would be too few

And leave the odd in war against the even

Competing to be the first to see thy face each morn . . .’

Venetia knew this one. He was re-using the same rhymes from long ago.

‘As it slid gently off from heaven?’

‘Yes, yes, that’ll do,’ said Ben, closing his eyes for a time as if in pain or dull remembrance. ‘Now I must off and finish this play, Venetia,’ he said, shuffling towards the wings. ‘I’ve a play to put out, you know. Yes, me—’ He broke off into one of his lyrics: