Viper Wine (42 page)

By the heavy sigh of fabric and the sound of relaxation in the audience, Inigo’s mother knew the curtain had fallen. A night-watchman’s bell rang from the back of the hall.

‘Here is the anti-masque, mother – nothing but foolish knavery. I must to the Queen.’

Inigo slipped out between the rows, while two thieves ran through the hall, carrying clanking bags of plate and alarming the audience for a moment, until it became clear it was a mock-disturbance staged by actors, and the thieves were pursued by two night-watchmen, wearing false bellies and crying fury.

Next came Groucho Marx, dressed as a cook, with a tray of popcorn cornets.

‘This is my room and region, the Banqueting House. Nothing is to be presented here without my acquaintance and allowance to it.’ He handed out popcorn to the audience, giving it to those who did not want it, telling others that they did not deserve it, and extemporising as only he could. He called out for his fellow cook, who thickened sauces with sulphur and made custards of Mercury. ‘Have you got a Philosopher’s Egg – I want to make an omelette . . .’

Kenelm laughed loudest of all, because he knew the words were directed at him. His hair tumbled down his collar lank and golden. He was worried Venetia had not yet appeared.

‘Now,’ shouted Groucho, ‘who is for the pot?’

An apprentice cook came pulling into the hall two dwarves, Jeffrey Hudson, the Queen’s Lord Minimus, and Archibald Armstrong, the King’s dwarf, strung together with ropes around their necks like partridges.

‘A brace of dwarves, Master cook!’ shouted the apprentice. ‘Delicate birds.’

‘Very good, so in we go,’ said the dwarves climbing up a ladder, bowing to the audience, and jumping into the pot.

‘It looks warm in there,’ said Groucho Marx, puffing on his cigar. One of the dwarves escaped out of the false bottom of the pot, and Groucho chased after him.

‘The ingredients are escaping – that’s a recipe for disaster.’

In the wings, the Queen and her ladies were peeping through the curtain, and laughing and shaking with delight at the spectacle.

After the waggish anti-masque, a new mood of serenity prevailed, as the curtain rose.

‘Another setting, Mother – the City of Sleep. Gold towers, windmills, and other extravagant edifices.’

‘Scenery, all?’

‘Aye, but so well-made, Mother. Out of the Palace of Morpheus come five nobles, dressed in white and wearing garlands of grapes.’

The King stood, and raised his staff of state . . .

Fast Forward!

The nobles moved with exaggerated, knee-gnashing speed, Thomas Howard the Earl of Arundel, Master Denny, Master Hay, the Lords Lennox and Devereux, processed out of the Palace and marched at the double around the cloud-capp’d tower and down to the front of the stage, as fast as toy soldiers, while the music played at triple speed.

‘And now here come five other nobles, sentinels of the Ivory Gate, whence come only truthful dreams,’ said Inigo, speaking very fast. ‘Lies-and-false-imaginings-come-through-the-Horned-Gate,’ he said, double-quick.

‘Andnowtheybow,’ he added, high and squeaky.

Their little troupe raced to the front of the stage, where they became stuck in the middle of a bow, as the King revolved his staff of state backwards and kept them on slow speed, so that their obeisance took a satisfyingly long time, and their eyelids drooped and their arms made stuttering tracks through the air, so they appeared to have fifteen hands apiece, until he put them onto double speed again.

In the audience, sitting beside the King, the Earl of Strafford clapped powerfully, although his low forehead was contorted into a deep frown. He privately wished the King would not exercise his divine authority thus. It was not politic to play with his nobles, now there was no parliament.

The whole masque remained on Fast Forward as the Sons of Night appeared out of a cave: Endymion Porter, wearing a white sheet and laurel wreath, representing Phantaste, the Spirit of Anything that Can Be Imagined. Endymion played the part with relish, although he could not act, and never would be able to.

Faster!

Then the dawn began to rise, as a hundred little flames, and then another hundred, were lit on cue, their pink glass candleshields turning to create the effect of rosy light.

The King knew the Queen was about to enter, and so he pointed his staff of state respectfully at the scene on stage.

Play.

‘The heavens begin to be enlightened,’ whispered Inigo to his mother. ‘It is a delicious prospect. The scenery turns on its axis – it is made of many triangular posts, which revolve in unison, revealing different scenes.’

‘Your clever notions!’ said Mrs Jones.

‘No, it is only copied from the Greeks. They are called periaktoi. This way they turn, and turn, giving a painted vision of rows of trees, fountains, statues, arbours, grottoes, walks and all such things as might express the garden of Brittannides.’

Happy King, to rule over such a country! Such a pleasant land of grotts and groves, where every subject might walk about his arbours and fountains, without worrying that the land was falling into two factions, whose disagreement would rend the nation’s heart with steel.

The chorus sang: ‘The bright perpetual traveller / Doth now too long the day defer’, which was the cue for the Queen, hiding in the wings, to make herself ready to mount her golden chariot without any back, and she and her ladies prepared for their entrance.

But first, Phosphorus the Morning Star came to light her way.

‘Out of the pale sky, Mother, descends a fiery white bark, sailing across the clouds, bearing the brightest mirror-lamp I could design.’

The audience sighed with rapture at the tiny white boat. Sitting in the prow of the boat were two figures: Lord Mountfitchet, dressed in white silk, paired with Lettice, who was wearing a gown that shone like a sapphire, or kingfisher’s wing. The spitting phosphorus lantern disclosed their smiling childish faces as they played a game of handy-dandy, their palms raised to one another in idle slaps.

Fond applause sounded like summer rain in the hall.

‘The twins of Phosphorus have been chosen to represent the loving unison of the King and Queen,’ said Inigo to his mother, as Lady Darnley stood in the centre of the stage and spoke her lines, clearly and with a sense of irony, even though she was a woman:

‘Their minds within / And bodies make but Hymen’s twin—’

‘A woman?’ asked Inigo’s mother. ‘Speaking?’

‘Aye, Mother,’ said Inigo, squeezing her hand, to indicate she should shew no alarm.

Backstage in the semi-darkness, two sweaty stagehands, Lubber and Vogg, turned the crank that made the Morning Star descend.

‘Ten more?’

‘Ten more and then we move to bring the dawn.’

‘Heave six.’

‘Heave seven.’

‘Think of the King.’

‘Heave nine.’

‘Ten for a job well done.’

‘There she goes,’ said Lubber, nodding his head to the Queen’s satin slippers, which he saw at eye-level through a chink in the wooden stage structure as she traversed the upper gallery. They were white and sewn with pearls, and Vogg raised his cap to the slippers, although their wearer would never see this act of veneration.

‘I feel towards her as if she’s my own daughter, but then my wife says that’s because I’m so often carpenter for her wooden boards and foot-rests, so it stands to reason.’

The music swelled. The architect did not know it, but the velvet black eye mask that his mother wore to hide her cataracts was damp with tears. In her mind’s eye the spectacle was unbearably rich. ‘And now the Queen enters,’ he whispered, getting to his feet, and taking his mother’s arm to help her up, as the royal trumpeters sounded her entrance.

‘She descends from the upper part, in a chariot heightened by gold. Reflectors set all about the hall redouble every candle’s light, which in turn reflexes onto the masquers, their silvery habits. The Queen’s majesty is highest, and several of her ladies are with her, seated somewhat lower. She wears a heavenly crown, ha. She cannot wear the crown of England, because of her religion, so the costume is chosen to make a point. About the Queen’s person are rays of sunlight, somewhat like the Madonna at St Sulpice. She smiles. The sky grows lighter, and more pink. This rare effect is created by reflectors being turned inwards, towards diaphanall glasses, filled with water that shews like the ruby stone of the orient. The habit of the masquers is close bodices, and their colour is Aurora, embroidered with silver. Diadems of jewels lie atop each head, and falls of white feathers, and tiny round metal discs, which we call “Oos”, reflect the light—’

‘Too much detail,’ said Inigo’s mother. ‘Tell me something interesting.’

He could not speak at all being, for a moment, too hurt.

‘Each costume costs about thirty pounds,’ he said.

Having descended almost to earth, Aurora was now entertained in mid-air by a cloud of zephyrs, which ascended from the stage in the chariot that used to belong to Night.

‘Hup two,’ said Lubber.

‘Hup three,’ said Vogg.

‘Oh, these zephyrs.’

‘Keep them cranking.’

‘Are they made o’ lead?’

‘Think of the tankard.’

‘Aye, think of the ale.’

‘Turn this thrice and we’ll be done.’

‘Twice and we will o’ercome.’

The last turn of the wheel was always the hardest.

‘But look, there she sits amongst the clouds!’ said Lubber, peeping through the scenery at the Queen on stage, his whole aching body covered in goosebumps of awe.

‘Is she not a flying thing of wonder!’ marvelled Vogg.

Venetia was chiefest amongst the zephyrs, and she sat highest upon their chariot, reclining in luxuriant pose, her head inclined backwards and her white neck and shoulders exposed by a gown that threatened to slip from her shoulders at any moment, while the two younger zephyrs waved large silk fans and pretended to play their paper harps, plucking, as the musicians below them made their real harps vibrate with fine appeasing melodies and glissandos.

Venetia’s chariot paused mid-air, and realising she was half in shadow, she found her light by leaning forward. With a whip in her hand like Boudicca, she fixed the audience with her arch and glistering eye, as super-celestially camp as any priestess or diva, before or since. She spoke:

‘Thy journeys never can be past

But must forever last

Tis not limited how far

Because it still is circular –
the audience rippled with laughter, as was her design –

Thy universal beams cannot grow cold

Nor mortally wax old

Nor will they ever tire

Fed with immaterial fire.’

Applause powered her silver-gleaming chariot higher, so she seemed to levitate upon the goodwill of the audience, their admiration plumping her skin, till she shone like a creature of phantasy. She felt herself gathering, rising, filled full of honey fame, which overflowed into her cracks and privities, as she flew upwards like no earthly dame, her eyes ecstatic, her hair curling with pleasure.

Sir Kenelm forgot to be nervous for her. She was here, his water nymph from Enstone House –

The King jabbed his staff of state at her –

Pause.

Not a cell divided, not a hair greyed, not a mole darkened, not a line deepened, and the plaster spaniels no longer chased the mallard round the fountain of Whitehall Palace.

In 1584 a government decision was made that Queen Elizabeth’s beauty was to be maintained in portraiture, and she did not age from that time forward.

The zephyrs’ light fabrics were caught in mid-air, their cheeks mid-smile.

Venetia ran outside into the night air, to cool her skin, which flamed with happiness. She was cured of her own mortality, and like someone freed from long confinement she ran into the darkness, and panting at the edge of the muscled, tossing Thames, and she gasped as she saw that even the river had paused.

It was stiff as beaten egg-white.

She would never age, but always be beautiful.

The pause had killed the river’s flow, and reduced it to a representation of a river; the pause had killed the soft redoubled light that played around the Banqueting Hall, and the smell of the candles, and the slight wobble of the chariot. The pause had killed the moment, and the moment lay there dead and ready for the taking, glossy and permanent.

The King hummed, scratched his royal head. He picked the moment up, and put it in his pocket, intending to look at it again later.

He revolved his staff of state.

Rewind.

He wanted to make the candles in the hall burn backwards, and the zephyrs’ fans suck up the air they had dispersed, and their fingers to unpluck their harps, and Venetia to retract her smile. But he could not make it happen.

Queen Elizabeth never looked in the mirror after 1584, and her courtiers were so certain of this that the ladies of her bedchamber once daubed her nose with cochineal, or so Ben Jonson said.

Venetia realised the River Thames had not paused, only frozen.

It was the cold, making her confused, and the vipers in her blood were tricking her imagination, so in her vanity she believed she had arrested time. For the last few days the river had been viscous and becalmed, and now it was a massy solid, and presently there would be skating on it, and bowls. She heard the hubbub of voices inside the masque and she knew she must go inside.

The King rotated his staff impatiently.

Rewind was stuck. He could make a singer repeat her line as many times as he liked, but he could not make the candles unburn, nor could he make the Thames flow backwards, nor could he put a grown smile into bud again.

Even he, the King, divinely entitled to rule as God’s representative on earth, could not achieve this simple thing.

It was hard being King.

Play, play, play, play – let us dance and sing, for tomorrow we die. Handy-dandy, whirlabout. The performance was over, and a new game had begun, the courante starting up, calling the dancers to the floor. The masquers quitting their chariots and clouds, stumbled in their haste to join the dance, still wearing their diadems and falls of feathers, so that the masque continued, in the form of dancing. The masquers and their audience joined and mingled, hot atoms seething amongst the cold, turning formally between each other, hands raised in a courtly contretemps, heads bowing in obeisance, heels tapping out a demi-chasse.