Viper Wine (46 page)

‘Although, of course, like the painter, you will find your work is never finished. Titian used to sign his work
Titianus Pinxit
– Titian was painting this. You should use the continuous verb as well. You will always be needed by me, Choice. Continually! If I must to the country, you shall thence as well.’

She turned and beamed at him, and seeing her left cheek stretch taut as calfskin, he recoiled, stepping backwards, until he was up against the closet. He could see himself in the mirror now, trapped behind her, pale and surprised, his fake, customer-soothing smile still garnishing his face.

Choice had intended to create a dependency in his customer but now that ambition had so manifestly been achieved, he needed a few moments to understand his own startling success. Her attitude was surprising, and even senseless, given the condition of her appearance, and he blinked as he tried to believe she was truthfully happy, not firing some ironical barb, nor prating distractedly. But she was genuinely satisfied. And she was no mad lady. It was a sideways slip-slide of her brain, he supposed. About the nature of our own bodies, we can be mightily self-deceived. He remembered the Abbot at Westchester who ate himself to death. Oh lucky Choice, to have such another as his customer! This goldmine could run deep.

Her reason was strong, but her appetites were stronger – for love, for cards, for Wine, and eventually, for beauty. Choice perceived this, and played upon it. In that dark January when Choice persuaded Lady Digby to try his Viperish Infusions, he tempted her with all the skills of his quick tongue: flattery, accompanied with a little denigration, designed to make her doubt herself. (‘You are radiant, my lady, but you are runckled, and there is nothing worse than runckles, for they multiply . . .’) Then he explained the latest cosmetic Infusions practised in Italy, with diagrammatic explications and the like – for he knew her soul was Considerate, prone to cognition, rather than feeling. She was discriminating. She preferred to survey a topos from many angles before proceeding. In this respect she was somewhat like a man. All the while Choice managed to maintain – and in this he was most sly – the air of someone who did not want to give his expertise away lightly. He did not press the Infusions on her but kept them back, carefully concealed, like a valuable miniature in a kid-skin pouch. He made her suspect he might be guarding it for another, more deserving customer. He played upon her vanity and ambition like a flute.

‘Next, Choice, I would like you to work your Ingenuity, your marvellous skill, upon my lips. “Rubious portals of pearls” that they once were, to Ben Jonson. Or – this was Wat Montagu, I think –

“From cupid’s hallowed gates, let fly

The words of love I lay my glory by.

Thy lips all bounties give, all peace supply . . .”’

She sang the words, letting the notes float loudly across the room, putting on a show for him, twisting her wrists sinuously, like a mad Courtesan. It must have been a sport she learned a time ago at court.

‘Or Venus, mistress, let me die . . .’

The music that she heard in her head took her a final twirl, before she sank before him in a smiling curtsey.

Choice clapped, out of embarrassment, because he wanted to make it stop. And yet he had to admit, she was magnificent, in her bravado. It was commonly said that women had no Character at all, but that seemed not to be the case with the women that came to his shop of beauty. If anything, they had too much.

He could see that her lips were still well-formed, and yet the pigmentation of her cupid’s bow had become less distinct with time, and the out-size puffery of her cheeks made her lips seem less full, so they had become lost in the overall design of her face. He wondered how he could possibly accentuate them. He had never treated lips before. He paused, choosing his words daintily, as ever. Since he was a boy his eloquence had worked for his own protection and promotion. How could it be otherwise, with six brothers and no way of getting his mother for himself?

‘Until Saturn is out of its retrograde, you will do harm by moving your face. The Viperish Infusions are working, and for the sake of their, ahem, continued success, you should guard your face and rest it quiet.’

Choice hoped this would keep her from showing herself abroad too much, and frightening the clientele.

He could see by Venetia’s face that she did not think much of his suggestion. She was always being told to stay in bed, safely away from view, until she was ready for churching after childbirth, or her husband was home, or the pox was no longer abroad. Well, she would not stay closeted. Not this time. Besides, she was going to mass with the Queen at Whitehall on the morrow.

‘And my lips? When will you bring them to that pitch of beauty I require?’

There was such trust, such dependence, in her voice, that Choice’s tongue flickered with pleasure, as he marvelled at how this knot he had tied could grow tight, and tighter still.

‘O lady, worry ye not, we will bless your lips with venom.’

A L
ETTER FROM THE
M
OUTH OF
H
ELL

TO MY DEAREST
Son, Kenelme Digby Esquire, I write thee now from the side of a great beast. The beast’s colicky stomach rumbles all night long (as yours did once, when you were newly born) yet I can sleep well enough, because I am of that strong Digbean constitution, which you are too. What a blessing we both have in that. The beast snores even now as I write, and light rocks are sent bouncing around your father’s head and the ground trembles a little. The beast, as I tell you now, in manly confidence (please be sure your mother does not take this letter, and read it) is a tall and glowering mountain. I am about two-thirds up.

I set out accompanied with a strong cohort of local Cicerones, which is to say guides, tho. their number has diminished as the climb has become perilous, the air thicker and so on, and now I am left with one good man
[there was some crossing out which young Kenelm could not read].
It seems, dear son, that in the last hour or so my one remaining guide has left me and taken with him the cooking-pot. Perhaps it was the darkness which is lately seen in the sky at noon which offence’d him. All is well, at any rate, as he leaves me to my profound Observations uninterrupted.

Many Unnatural Disturbances beset this country as we approached the beast. Inland basins were all dry or suck’d up as if the land thirsted for water. At Castellammare di Stabia the sea began to boil and churn. At Santa Maria di Pugliana great rocks were hurled down upon the village, and the church bell rang of its own accord. On Sunday the sea tide turned sharply, leaving fishermen’s boats stranded and dancing fish exposed along the shore. Then the wave was thrown back at the land with great vehemence. None can say what this indicates, although there is a belief amongst the populace that the local landowner, absentee, and reviled for stopping up one of the public wells, is rebuk’d by this action of nature.

Strangest of all to relate was the profane hush which settled over everything: the sweet wind, foamy sea, racing sky – all these were mysteriously suppressed, or suspended, so that the World itself seemed not to turn. No birds sang, flies vanished and horses were as amaz’d as men. This was, they say, the final Sign or Import of some great Violence to come. This came to pass on Tuesday. Today is Friday. Please to keep this letter safely in case the beast wakes and my notebooks are destroyed—

Kenelm was interrupted here, because his lantern was extinguished, although he could not discern why. A gust of sulphurous wind had dowsed the wick perhaps? Feeling slow on his feet, Kenelm stepped outside his little pavilion made of Ottoman rugs and elegant pilasters, pitched upon the rocky mountain-slope, and now sorely asquint, but still standing. He strode a healthy distance from his camp, to a promontory where he could breathe better, and he looked across the tranquil moonlit bay towards Ischia, where the sea doubled the luminescence of the moon, and he recognised God’s benediction.

It began to rain – he could hear the noise of the raindrops falling all around him. And yet the pitter-pat was too sharp, too biting, and he realised the sky was sending down not rain but tiny particles of stone. They hit his head like miniature agassi or hailstones, bouncing off his shoulders. He went back inside his pavilion, and cradled his head within his arms, until he fell into pleasant dreams of standing atop this ill-mannered mountain.

A spring morning dawned, shared by all those who happened to be alive at the same time as one another, that unwitting complicity that means everything and nothing, and goes unnoticed, or glimpsed by historians or curious novelists. In Italy, Kenelm woke with a start on the side of his mountain. In Rome, Athanasius Kircher was up early, working on his Polygraphia Nova, a universal artificial language that was not yet a failure. In Amsterdam, Rembrandt felt the heavy coin of his first princely commission, and knew it would be enough for him to offer marriage. In Fleet Street, Samuel Pepys was kissed and held aloft in his swaddling by his father, for he was one month old that day, according to his wet-nurse Goody Lawrence. In Cambridgeshire, Oliver Cromwell, newly married, taking his morning contemplation in the Fens, heard God’s voice in the croaking of a bullfrog: ‘Repent, repent.’

In the Whitehall Palace gardens, Venetia was tiptoeing along the Avenue of Limes, playing hide-and-seek with Queen Henrietta-Maria. The early golden sunshine and the shadows of the trees striated the path, and in the deep shadow, she noticed a gardener was hiding with a rake and a wheelbarrow behind a tree, not as part of the game but out of deference to it. She could not bestow a smile on him, or her face might break from its tightness.

Before her, up the path, she heard a giggle from behind a tree and saw a flash of the Queen’s holy body darting away, towards the parterre. Venetia gave chase, tripping daintily in her cork-soled platform shoes over the gravel, elated to have been chosen by the Queen to join her after mass as a sportful companion for her recreations. She only chose pretty companions.

Today Venetia had shown herself unveiled in the Great Hall for the first time since her Infusions. Lucy Bright kept away, on the other side of the hall, even though she must have seen her. Venetia tried not to think about what this meant. Ben Jonson was another one whose gaze she feared; his Discriminating Eye. He made it his business to know about all the minutiae of life, alchemists’ receipts, and shopkeepers’ books, and soldiers’ slang, and he took a particular interest in great ladies’ Improvements, and she was half expecting him to re-work one of his old satiric poems for her –

‘Ah, Venetia, here she is, busy distilling her husband’s land / Into decoctions, and in her chamber manned / By ten Physicians, lying about the spirit of amber, oyle of talc . . .’

But instead of teasing her, he fell quiet and stared at her, taking in the new uneven, puffery of her face and eyes, the stiffness of it. ‘The ambitious faces of the time . . .’ he muttered, quoting himself as usual. ‘The more they paint, are the less themselves.’ The beauty he had so long ago desired – loved without hope – had now destroyed itself. He always thought her so royally assured of her own perfections, but he saw in her wounded face how vulnerable she had become.

It would be kind to flatter her, and more than that, it was expedient. The venality in his soul stirred as he saw an opportunity. Sir Kenelm was master of three thousand a year.

‘I shall write a poem celebrating your new blooming beauty, lady, which has a turn of the Orient about it, I believe. “Matchless, Unusual, Oriental Shee . . .”’

So pleased by this was Venetia, so keen to take it as her due, she forgot to consider the fact that, since the fire that consumed his house, Ben was almost destitute, with a dwindling list of patrons. Before they parted, he lowered his black-clad bulk towards her, whispered ‘Matchless’ in her ear, and puckered his slack lips, depositing upon her cheek a Judas kiss.