Viper Wine (48 page)

Chater’s eyes stretched when Venetia told him she would need his help. He placed his hand faithfully across his chest, delighted to serve her. Since Sir Kenelm was gone abroad again, and Father Dell’Mascere had become so devoted to the choir, he was hers entirely, and he was inwardly agog to know what new barbarity or self-punishment she was planning, and what role he could possibly play in it.

And yet all she seemed to want was the promise of his company. She told him she was taking to bed for thirty days and thirty nights, and she wanted him to read to her every day, and to have charge of the boys at their meal-times. He was to let no visitors nor correspondence pass into her chamber, and to see that thin potage and manchet bread were sent up, as they were all she would sup.

‘And a little brandy posset, I may have need of that.’

At first Sir Kenelm thought it was another Expedition ahead of him, lighting fires. He called out ‘Hallooo’ and then remembered he was in Naples. ‘
Buon giornooooo
 . . .’

There was no reply but a hot and salty gust of sulphur, which hit him like a whip, and he realised the fires were globules of burning matter, spontaneously generated by the wind and rocks. No wonder the heat was growing more intense. This was a journey of some fascination. He felt as if he were observing a vast alchemical Work performed by God – the moment when the dragon’s sister puts forth her flux. He had drunk the last of his flasks, but what of it – onwards was the only way. He felt the mountain grumble its assent.

Venetia paced around her chamber like Sackerson, the tethered bear at Southwark. She expected that the lack of Wine would leave her enervated and supine, but no, she could not pass a moment’s stillness. As soon as she stood up, she wished to stand no more; as soon as she reclined, she wished to stand. She was like an ant on a fire-griddle. Her legs carried her back and forth, but her will, her whole soul, was contrary and dissatisfied with every proposition. She tried to read her Bible while she walked about, and this helped for a time, as she leafed through the pages, although her mind was soon too restless to finish any sentence, any thought. She itched all over her body, a phantom prickle that moved onwards as soon as she pursued it. It was only after some time that she realised she ought not to be using the heavy, rough edge of her Bible to scratch herself. She kissed the Bible and put it away with a trembling hand. What was the point of this torment, if not to become Good?

A vast belch of smoke and gas from the top of the mountain threw Sir Kenelm backwards. As he righted himself he saw melted ore dribble down the side of the steaming mountain as if from a smithy’s pot. It poured with a sensuous power, setting into furrows and dollops that blackened as he watched. This orange quickening, this incandescent flow, held him fascinated as he sat on a rock, covered in pumice dust, sweat, and shirtless, from the heat. So vulcan’s mountains did exist, and more than that, the mountain he had three-quarters climbed was one of them: a volcano.

It had erupted before, he knew, and it would again, and it was humanity’s curse to be continually surprised by it. Communal memory had forgotten the Roman towns below the sod, as it would remember and forget them again. His skin was cracking because he had removed his clanking armour, his bio-suit, his gas-mask. He smelled the bitumen that sealed up Herculaneum, and he choked on the dust that re-covered its charred treasures a thousand years later, silting up the runways, the resorts, the roundabouts. He felt the feather-light stones of many eruptions simultaneously.

Akathisia – (from the Greek ‘inability to sit still’) a profoundly uncomfortable feeling of inner restlessness. A symptom of opioid withdrawal.

Venetia could contain herself no longer. She left her chamber and headed for Sir Kenelm’s study. As soon as she began walking downstairs, her body ached to be at rest, and as soon as she paused, she wished to walk again. She flung Chater out of the way with a look when he tried to stop her going into the study. He watched grimly, afraid she was going to do something desperate. He believed she was missing some drug that Kenelm usually gave her and he worried that she might eat antimony, or swallow one of his telluric compounds.

She bent to unlock the door and caught a glimpse of herself, puff-faced and desperate, distorted by the brass doorhandle. She pushed aside Kenelm’s stacks of books, and stumbled towards his laboratory table. As she stepped nearer she swerved towards her goal. From the back of his chair she seized the sheepskin he wore on his cold nights’ work, and buried her face in it, catching the scent of him, and shuddering into it for comfort.

Lo, the walkers approach the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and yet they withstand the heat . . .

A wet mirage danced ahead of him, watermarking the sky, and Sir Kenelm trod towards it, his hair crisped by the heat, his mouth parched, his curiosity infinite.

He longed to look inside the Crater, thinking he would see visions from Dante’s
Inferno
: alchemists degraded in the tenth chasm of hell, or the dreadful procession of sinners with their heads on backwards, their tears falling down their buttocks. Every step took him closer to his father, whom he would surely find in the circle reserved for plotters, holding his own heart aloft and calling, ‘Thou liest!’

He could not tell if he was crying because he approached a great theological mystery, or if the hot sulphur in the air was making his eyes run rheum.

‘I thought I beheld the habitation of Hell, wherein nothing seemed to be much wanting besides the horrid phantasms and apparitions of Devils . . .’

Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath, on climbing Vesuvius to look in the crater in 1638

She was twice a mother, monthly cursed, inured to routine aches and torments, which she knew so intimately, they became part of herself. Pain was nothing to her. It was constant, a tame companion. What she was suffering now was different – it seemed to have no source, but traversed her whole person and her mind. She vomited and perspired and shook. She scrabbled to look in her scrying glass, expecting to see that without the Wine, she had aged a lifetime already. All she could see in the glass was her young self, tempting and taunting her.

A thunderclap and torrents of rain would have cooled Sir Kenelm, only the rain fell hot, almost scalding, and it carried streaks of ashes down his torso. He shielded his face with a bandage improvised from his garter. Looking up, he saw a rolling wave of red-hot molten lava cascading over the lip of a distant peak, spooling downwards, gloopy, implacable. He let the image burn upon his inner eye, so he could be sure of his own understanding when he told this tale again.

Then he saw the red chargers foaming towards him, and he turned on his heels, and with the heat bellowing at his back, he ran.

Would she do well to die here? A chill calm settled upon her, and morbid presentiments passed swiftly before her eyes, like black shadows under a boat, indistinctly glimpsed through blood-warm waters.

He ran over the pumice, sliding with heavy speed downwards after so long ascending.

Another rumble announced a great vomit from this beast’s belly – HERE IT COMES! He ducked, and as the words came to him, it arrived: the pyroclastic surge.

Panting, he came to the site of his old camp, but there was nothing but the highest pennant of his pavilion sticking out of a great ash-slide. His notebooks, his books and baggage – gone. He felt this was a signal that he should continue downwards with all haste. He realised for the first time the recklessness of his endeavour. He thought of Virgil – ‘
Facilis descensus Averno
’ – It is easy to descend into Hell. The difficulty is coming back.

Venetia fell at last into a lucid sleep, tossing and thrashing as the poison left her body. If it was true that snakes soaked up all the putrid qualities of the earth, no wonder she had been so deformed by their moral poisons. And yet she would do it all again, in a heartbeat.
Il faut souffrir pour être belle.

Kenelm longed to return directly to his love, his boys, his home. As he clambered over the lower crags of the summit, he felt the blessing of the sea-winds on his face, cooling and reassuring him. No one would believe his tale of climbing the vulcan’s mount. He would do better to regale the Tribe of Ben with stories of how he had been caught between Scylla and Charybdis, or how sirens had sung to his ship.

In Naples, he had no hero’s greeting, for most of the townsfolk had gone to safer ground, and at his lodgings there was only an old dog lying in the shadows, who barely looked at him. He slept for a long time, disorientated by the quiet of the lodging house, waking only to drink with the thirst of a shipwrecked man. Finally one afternoon his body decided he was fit to rise, and when he was clean and steady enough to walk abroad, he lit fifty candles before the Virgin, and bought Venetia a set of pearls, earrings and necklace, at great price. The pearl trader should have been pleased to find a customer but when he saw Kenelm, he instantly perceived his love, his wealth and his homesickness, and Kenelm could do nothing about this, as he could not hide what he was. He felt the pearls glowing with their own luminescence, even in the dark drawstring purse next to his heart.

Venetia slept heavily. Chater tiptoed about her room, drawing the curtains, opening the windows. The household was beginning to fear for her, and so was he. It was not even Lent any more, and yet she remained in her chamber day and night, taking only gruel and brandy posset. On the far side of the bed were two stale pots that Mary had missed. He studied Venetia’s slumped body, and he went, quickly, to fetch from his chest his priestly articles, his unguent, his Bible, his bell.

‘May the Lord make haste to save thee,’ he whispered, panting, making a sign of absolution over her sleeping body and ringing the tinkling bell, getting his pot of salve ready to administer extreme unction.

‘Oh, Chater,’ she replied, in a thick, crabbed voice. ‘Leave me alone and let me be.’

‘I do not wear a rug. My hair is 100 per cent mine.’

Donald Trump, 2004

JING, JANGLE: THE
new bright brass bell above Choice’s door sounded more strongly than usual. The customer upon the doorstep was a gentleman, well dressed, in late middle age, with a bluff countenance and broken veins across his nose. He sniffed deeply as he took off one tough leather glove, then another, and thwacked them upon his knee as he sat down opposite Choice. He was surely known to the court, from his dress, and there was a heaviness to all his motions, a roughness, which was somehow sensual. He seemed loath to say for what he had come, and he looked around the room a few times before beginning.

‘I hear your trade multiplieth.’

‘Indeed, sir. May I ask your name, for my book?’

‘Don’t put it in the book. Between ourselves, my name is Endymion Porter.’

Choice coughed. He knew that those love letters from Olive promised no good. He only hoped her husband was not here to demand a duel. He would not pull pistol for that doxy.

‘I’ll tell you straight. I’m used to passing time with Continental physicians, so I am well acquainted with their practices, their Methods and their Manners. Your trade holds no secrets for me, Choice.’

Choice could not help observing that Endymion Porter carried an over-sized sword. He had the look of a man who was not afraid to knuckle-fight, either; a gentleman who was not always gentle. He spent his time buying art, Choice knew, and he supposed he drove hard bargains. Choice was reassured by the nearness of his lancet, in a drawer in his desk. He knew it was there; he could have it in his hand in two quick movements.

‘Now, I’m not a handsome man, but I have a certain look to me. I’m frequently about affairs of state abroad, and I find a swarthy, weather-worn complexion does follow after time spent in the sun. I’ve Spanish blood. It’s on my mother’s side. It’s from the mother that the dermis comes, they say. The fleshy parts are generally bequeathed by the softer sex. I read it once, in Fludd’s great book—’ He broke off. ‘You fellows do work upon a man, you do. With your silence! Ah, me. So let us to it . . .’

Endymion slapped his glove across his thigh again. Choice was beginning to perceive gratefully that the former ambassador to Spain was not here to avenge his wife’s honour.

But just as Endymion was about to tell Choice what it was he wanted, he got up and distractedly perused the monkey skull that Choice displayed in a small cabinet of wonders, a new acquisition that he kept above his desk, flanked by fashionable flame-drapes.

‘What the goodyear is this? It’s never a child’s, I hope . . .?’

Choice was used to prevaricators. ‘What’s my duty for you, sir?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you what it is. I’m a man of action. I travel for my employ. I’m often painted by great artists. I sit to them at great length. The paintings are passed around, from court to palace. I must play the man I am, d’you see? I must improve my aspect. At present, I am great. I do not resemble greatness.’