Viper Wine (38 page)

‘Me, the tardie, cold

unprofitable chattel, fat and old

who hardly doth approach

but to break chairs or crack a coach . . .’

He spoke almost entirely in his own verses now. Since his recent palsy-the-wits, conversation had become impossible. He talked in old bricks, laid together end to end. His brain was become the maggoty, abbreviated book of his own quotations.

He kissed his hand to Venetia, a gesture he fancied was more winning than it was, and turned to the wings, keen to give the impression he was busy. Venetia followed after him, whispering urgently so that Lucy Bright might not hear her.

‘Let me have a pretty part, dear Ben, and not be made to represent Night, or a hag, or a spider?’ She cultivated, as ever, a charming tone of speech, but the smile in her voice was as unnatural as the painted wooden oranges on the scenery behind her.

‘Night?’ asked Ben, jowls swinging with confusion. With one eye bulging, he peered into the shadows of the wings, looking for his help. ‘Where’s William?’

A young man was sitting on the prompt stool, and Venetia guessed this was William Davenant, who was assisting Ben with his writing these days. He was wearing a collar in the style of his supposed illustrious father, and his hair parted in the middle, too, like the portrait in the First Folio, which struck Venetia as a pretty trick.

Instinctively positioning herself so that her hair caught the light that spilled from the stage, while her face was held in the soft shadows of the wings, she breathed deeply, and Davenant looked up at her. She let him have one of her most candid smiles.

‘Is this him, at last? The young pretender. I have heard much talk of this Davenant who is to be crowned with a wreath of swan-feathers.’

He was holding a quill pen, which she tapped with her finger. Davenant leaped up, guessing who she was.

‘He has the inky mark upon him,’ she said, looking at his fingers’ ends, which were bestained with black. ‘’Tis a pox can only be cured with candles and much parchment. I’ll warrant he was born with an inkwell in place of a navel. If only we had use of this Davenant in days gone by, when we were playing festivals outdoors, all summer long, and especially when we made the Tethys Festival. It greatly wanted wit, Master Jonson being out of favour at the time – or was he in Scotland? No matter; they are the same. So the writing fell to Master Daniel, and he struggled and he strained and in the end we had few lines, but much music . . .’

She indulged Davenant with gossip about legendary masques and their writers, and he lapped it up, impressed by her experience, cajoled by her warmth and familiarity, and yet how grand she was, how grand! She made him feel he was nothing and something all at once.

When Lucy Bright called out for her, Venetia’s work in the wings was already done.

‘Write me some lovely lines, dearheart,’ she cried as she left the writers. Both thought she was talking to themselves alone.

‘Dear hart of the forest . . .’ Jonson began; Davenant gave her a comprehending look and a deep bow.

‘Make them good lines, won’t you?’

‘Lines? Lines are of no account,’ interrupted a loud, disembodied voice that was Inigo Jones in the gantry, using a megaphone. ‘These shows are nothing else but pictures with light and motion.’

He started the special effects with a signal. Hot white dots danced across the backdrop, then focused into concentric circles, as a mechanician in the pit played with candles and a mirror. ‘Spectacle and motion pictures – this is what they want,’ said Inigo, sitting in his director’s chair.

Using a paper cut-out, the mechanician made Inigo’s moon wax gradually into a round, bright Harvest moon.

‘Light and motion,’ he said.

A diffuse glow spread across the stage, then turned pink.

‘Motion and light,’ said Inigo. ‘And – action.’

Outside, the sun had risen in the sky, and as the clouds shifted, an errant sunbeam thrust its way through the Banqueting Hall’s black-out windows, piercingly bright. It cut through the hall’s darkness to the stage, illuminating dust dancing in its beam, picking out Venetia’s form and face in a spotlight.

‘And there we have it,’ muttered Inigo, crossing himself. ‘All my invention is eclipsed by God.’

‘Women goe up and downe with white paintings laid one upon another soe thick that a man might easily cut off a curd of cheese-cake from either of their cheeks.’

Thomas Tuke,
A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing
, 1616

ON FRIDAY, NO
delivery came from Dr Choice.

Venetia shrugged it off, being busy with the household, but found herself out-of-sorts and listless. It was particularly hard to get through the afternoon, when she had a habit of sipping her Wine continuously, as if it were a posset cup. She reached for the vial three times, forgetting it was empty. The day seemed wasted, and she did not even feel like playing cards. By evening she was in her closet, licking the old vials for any remnants of liquor, swilling them out with angel water and gulping it down. She took herself off to bed early, and slept lightly, stirring at every sound in case it was her delivery.

She woke from angry opium dreams feeling full of self-reproach. She heard her boys calling for Mistress Elizabeth and chastised herself as a bad mother, and a tough old hen, not fit to tread the Queen’s stage. How did she think she could compete? The more paint she applied, the more she would be a figure of fun, like the curd-cheek’d woman in the popular song.

Most people would tell you that vain women drank Viper Wine, and drinking made them vainer. But that only showed how little understanding most people had. The Wine had freed her from her riddling disquiet about her own appearance, so instead of squandering her time on looking in the bottomless glass, she could turn her powers outside herself, free to go into the world and do better deed, as far as she was able.

She reckoned that so much Wine was in her blood – that her veins were now made of Viper Wine – that she had the strength to be herself for the day, even without her dose.

She would put on her shield and vizor and go forward. It was vital to resemble oneself, even at home. From her private cabinet she took a pot of Spanish red, and a squirrel-hair brush, and drew herself a pair of rosebud lips.

Upstairs, Sir Kenelm was looking over his son’s shoulder at his wastebook, and saw he had been copying the sign of Mercury, doodling, deforming the shape. ‘No,’ he chided. ‘Symbols have power.’

She used a tiny trowel to mix up some ceruse, adding pearl dust and vinegar.

‘Symbols work upon men’s minds more directly than words,’ said Kenelm.

She used a sponge to pat white ceruse across her chest.

‘Words equivocate, and words are used in sophistry, and words turn back and forth and obscure the truth . . .’

She worked the ceruse up into her neck and jaw, and patted it into her pores so she was as smooth as an ivory chess piece.

‘But a symbol is worth a thousand words. Symbols, sigils, hieroglyphs – these are dangerous in and of themselves. They do not correspond to power. They are not analogous with power. They are not translations of power. They
are
power . . .’ Sir Kenelm realised he was talking more to himself than to his son.

She clipped a pearl into her right earlobe, and tied black ribbon in her left. Thus she was adroit,
pas gauche.

‘If you write out a holy acrostic, it can protect you.’

Now she spread a little blush into her cheek. She was coming into being.

‘And if you write a low symbol, it can summon injurious notions, spirits and malevolent will.’

Her finger slipped and she put a great dark shadow under her eye by mistake. She corrected this with honey water and a rag.

‘If we could engrave the perfect symbol, the world would be made anew.’

Young Kenelm sighed and scratched his leg.

‘Cattle die, birds eat their young, it rains flies and the sun is covered over by the clouds for months when this sign is shown abroad,’ said Sir Kenelm, reaching to show young Kenelm what he had drawn.

Venetia’s left eye was now blue-shaded and beguiling.

Kenelm showed his son a swastika.

Venetia put down her brush and smiled at what she had created: the representation of a beautiful woman. Not quite herself, but certainly, a beautiful woman. For when we dress, we symbolise ourselves.

Kenelm ripped out the swastika and threw it into the fire. He then addressed himself to the page and drew it again, curving its spurs in a different direction.

‘But this sign, its mirror opposite, means peace which surpasseth all understanding.’

In the afternoon, Venetia played with baby John, who looked at Venetia’s bright face wonderingly, and tried to pull off her nose. They babbled to one another, until he was taken away by his nurse. Venetia went to linger by the scullery door in the kitchen, watching the back path and listening out for a messenger’s tread, hoping her delivery was about to arrive.

Mistress Elizabeth and the under-maid became very self-conscious, fearing she was checking up on them. Venetia started looking through the larder, out of boredom, and telling the servants it was organised all wrong, when a rap came at the scullery door, and Venetia looked up with a glad smile, and rose to answer the door herself. Mistress Elizabeth was brought to doubt her whole understanding of Venetia. Was she cuckolding Sir Kenelm?

Lancelot Choice was at the door, breathless and hatless, but with one hand on his hip, in affectation of a careless pose. He handed her a crate marked TURNEPS, which she took quickly out of his hand.

‘At last,’ she said. ‘My turnips. I have been waiting for my turnips.’

‘I am sorry, my lady,’ panted the physician. ‘No staff, and Margaret indisposed, and—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Venetia, ripping off the lid of the crate. Only her deeply engrained femininity prevented her from taking one and drinking it down in front of him. ‘They’re here now.’

‘’Tis freshly culled, though not without risk. Our crop of living worms is not easily harvested. Margaret is bitten.’

‘Three vials only – you might have brought me a full complement.’

‘Indeed,’ he said stiffly. ‘And she shall surely recover.’ Venetia realised she had been talking without listening properly, or understanding his meaning, and she impulsively reached out and seized Master Choice’s arm.

‘Oh no,’ she said. The marriage between her handsome apothecary and his maternal, grey-haired wife intrigued and touched her. ‘Poor Margaret.’

He nodded. ‘One escaped brute. Biding its time, brooding in the corner of the pits. Margaret, barefoot in her nightclothes, checking the furnace. In the dark she happened upon him, underfoot, but she swears the viper was laying in wait for her, and as he pounced, the other vipers in their pens were roused and joined in a chorus of hissing rebellion. I say she raves in her mind, but she swears it true. I made good work of him with a shovel, after he bit my Margaret.’

‘You lodge above the viper pits?’ She had believed, for some reason, that the vipers lived in the countryside.

‘Oh no, madam, they are farmed a good distance hence,’ he said, scratching the back of his neck. ‘We were with them not they with us. Forgive me, I am confusing you with my worry. I have dressed the wound with a good quantity of millipedes, washed in white wine and reduced to a powder. She will be perfectly cured withal. Her ankle is in a state of paralysis, though, my lady, so I must—’

He turned away, making for the road.

‘Go quickly then, and . . .’ She was going to say that she would ask Kenelm for his advice on snakebites and their antidotes, but she remembered she could not, for reasons of her own vain secrecy. ‘And thank you, sir.’

She saw him walk off down the low brick path, by the South Ditch, which ran like an open sewer along the backs of the houses, a busy crossing for men and women who lived in the new tenements now built over the land between Smithfield and Etheldreda’s at Ely Place, where Chater sometimes went to minister to the secret Catholic congregation.

She shut the door on him, and there, hidden in the dark privacy between the curtain and the scullery back door, Venetia, Lady Digby, scion of the Northumberland Percys, and the Shropshire Stanleys, Earls of Derby, set her lips around the cold neck of one of her draughts, her throat pulsating as she drank it down. Afterwards, she breathed a deep sweet breath, and her body felt at ease once more. As her strength returned, she ran to tell Master Choice that Sir William Paddy had once cured Prince Henry of a viper rash, her feet carrying her lightly across the road.

‘Master Choice—’

Lancelot Choice had untied his horse, which was in a dancing mood. As he pulled its bridle towards Venetia, a sharp movement in the riverside bushes, a rat or a weasel, startled the horse so it bolted across the sewer-bridge. It was almost an open bridge, wide enough but built with scanty railings, and at that moment a young girl was crossing the bridge in the other direction. For fear of being trampled by the bolting horse, the girl, little more than a child, sprawled off the bridge and was sucked into the grey tide of the South Ditch.