Viper Wine (49 page)

‘I think I see, sir,’ said Choice. ‘You would be pleased to benefit from my drink of beauty.’

‘That’s it!’

‘In order to improve your complexion.’

‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ Endymion smote his fist upon the table. ‘It’s too much swagged and bagged; it’s too ruddy. It needs attention.’

Choice stood up and stepped closer, looking across Endymion’s face. ‘Too coarse, too rubicund, too jowly,’ said Choice, peering at him. ‘Too scarred and stubbled . . .’

‘Well, steady, sir, let us not kill the cat with kindness.’ Endymion pretended to laugh, raising a hand defensively in the air. It was clear his pride was pricked by Choice’s words. Choice had not treated a man’s complexion before, and he saw he was going to have to exercise more tact.

‘Beside the pallor of the Stuart house, my face is like . . .’

Choice declined to suggest ‘an old walnut shell’ or ‘a crack’d barque’s bottom’.

‘My face is like a man’s, sir, a man’s. Hearty and oaken. But I am the procurer of the King’s paintings, and it does not become me to resemble a man of war. Maecenas was no knocker, but he has the benefit of being rendered in marble. I cannot resemble Apollo, who is the god of sculpture, but I should look a little more like a lover to my good wife.’

Tempting as it was to Choice to become the physician in a farce, and treat the amorous wife on one side of the door and her proud husband on the other, taking money and favours from both, while feeding them up on the same decoction – yet he was more prudent than that. He knew how farces ended: with a tradesman carted off to the stocks or worse.

‘Nothing would give me greater honour, sir, and I can offer you an infallible tonic for the gout, or the stone. I can give you a powder that will turn your hair white as chalk overnight. I can offer you a honey poultice for a sore thumb. I give ladies a drink that helps them through their moon-times. But for the delicate matter of which you speak, I have no Cures or Simples that are guaranteed . . .’

With care, Choice wriggled, and span, and got himself out of the job. It hurt, to let such a customer go, and after the loss of Venetia too. But he preferred a customer who held no public office; who had no recourse to lawyers; who had no standing with the sheriffs, guildsmen or magisters; who could write a love-note but not a legal writ; and who was, above all, anxious to protect the precious egg of a virtuous reputation. In short, Choice preferred his customers to be female.

Venetia had never visited St Bartholomew’s before, and now she knew why. Although she lived six minutes from its poxy portals, she could not stomach it. It was too much for any healthful person to bear; as she stood here, with the saintly Sister, she had to fight the impulse that told her, Get out, get out, and save yourself.

The ear was offended first. The groans and occasional cries could be heard all along the cloister. Then, upon nearing the sick room, the stench, and the stickiness underfoot, which no amount of rushes could disguise. Venetia could hardly bear to look at the men, semi-clad, covered in pustules, or with swollen tongues lolling. She knew they must feel envy, or longing, as they saw her standing there, covering her little nose with her lavender kerchief, but they only stared into the distance with a sick, blank acceptance. Surely these were the worst cases, displayed to her by the Sister thus to play upon her feelings, like any Shiver-Jack begging in the street?

‘These are the Hopefuls, waiting to be seen,’ said the Sister. ‘We call them Hopefuls because we hope the physicians will find their cases of interest, and if they do not, we feed them, keep them warm, send them hither upwards or beyond.’

A woman crouched in the corner looked blessedly whole, until she turned her head to one side revealing a goitre on her neck, blue-black and stiff as a fungus on an oak tree.

She was here because she was become Good. She had made over £100 of her gaming monies to Bartholomew’s, which was the work of a very Good woman, not to say an excellent gambler. At their game of cards later that day, she would tell Penelope all she had seen, so she must not forget the details – the woman’s purple goitre. That man without limbs. With her presence here and her donation, she had atoned. For what crime, she could not exactly remember, but she knew Penelope was cross with her.

Thank God in His Mercy she had brought a basket of bread and cake. The Sister was talking about bloodletting and stools and Venetia could not endure to hear any more.

‘Sister, please you take this present from the Digby household, and make a note that I, Lady Digby, was here to give my peaceful good wishes,’ she said, offering the basket to the Sister with a generous motion that allowed her to turn on her heel and, nodding at the patients right and left with due seemliness, which disguised her haste, she sashayed out into the cloister, and the fresh, foul world beyond.

I
N
W
HICH
S
HE
L
OSES AT
C
ARDS

‘
IS LETTICE MARRIED
yet?’ asked Venetia, adding, a little too graciously, ‘I do hope they will be happy.’

She was wearing her new plain grey dress, twice as expensive as a gaudy one, and yet infinitely suitable, she thought, for someone who had gained wisdom through suffering.

Olive threw a glance at Pen, who caught it.

The cards made secret fans in their hands. Pen put down a ten and a Tib with a smack of the thumb.

‘They were married at midnight last Saturday. To preserve her estate since her father’s demise it was done withal speed,’ she said.

‘Well, I do rejoice!’ said Venetia. ‘I pray they will be happy despite everything.’

‘Despite everything . . .?’ queried Olive.

‘Oh, you understand me,’ said Venetia, and although she wanted very much to add more, she did not. She was Good now, was she not? She played a six, with an indifferent pout. ‘I wish them every earthly joy.’

‘I think your face is gaining its old sweetness,’ said Pen gently.

‘You are so much more whole,’ agreed Olive. ‘No little girls would now be affrighted by you; no, not at all.’

The story of the incident in the Queen’s garden, when the Earl of Newcastle’s tot ran crying from Venetia, had clearly been doing the rounds.

‘I thought we’d have some China Oranges,’ said Pen, changing the subject. ‘To look at, of course, not to eat. They’re such bright worlds, I fancy they dress a table.’

‘Some silly girls do be dancing and fidgeting. It is the way of children,’ said Venetia. She was becoming used to her new attitude of forbearance. If she carried on like this, she would grow almost saintly. It was only a pity that the Wine would not leave her alone. She was free from it, and had not drunk it for a month and ten days, and yet it came into her mind unbidden, moving discreetly, like a scent, or a distant memory, or a tune she could not quite hear, so stealthily that it seemed to gain admittance without knocking, until there it was, beside her, pawing her shoulder, mewing for attention.

‘And so you have me,’ said Olive, laying down a Knave, King, Queen.

Venetia paid with the last of her coin.

‘The rest of my pot has gone to the lazars at Bartholomew’s,’ she announced. ‘I think when you have won so much gold at the table as I have, you ought to think of those less fortunate, who have no arms or legs, or who have great goitres at their throats the size of, oh, at least a double fist. The last occasion I was there I saw one growing on a poor woman, fair in other wise.’

The other ladies turned slowly to look at her incredulously, as if they had never seen her before. Penelope stopped with her posset cup halfway to her lips. But Venetia did not notice. She had thought about the woman a good deal that day. She was not so very far away from going back to see if she could pay for a physician to remove the putrid growth. It would be such an easy thing to accomplish. She knew now what the lancet could do.

She had been so long concerned with being seen that she had not seen at all; she had suffered a physician to cut her, though she was sound in body. It was a miracle she had been delivered from this folly; it was a miracle that Kenelm had cherished her since he came home, without seeming to notice the small puffiness, the tiny symmetrical scars she bore.

She looked at her friends, with tears brimming.

‘Forgive me, ladies, I am grown conscionable at last!’ And she pressed her kerchief over her eyes.

‘Venetia, darling . . .’ Olive put her arms around her. ‘You lost today but you are still the best player of us all, the best I have ever encountered.’

‘Come, come,’ said Pen. ‘She is moved not by her loss but with higher thoughts. Let her have a moment with her spirit. Then we will plan our May Day tournament. We shall visit the King’s park, where there is a new pavilion for sports. Will Kenelm come?’

‘No,’ sniffed Venetia. ‘I do not like him to see me at the gaming table, it shows too much cunning in me.’

‘I’faith,’ said Pen, ‘I think he knows the cunning in you and loves you for it.’

‘We all do,’ said Olive, and they embraced across the table in a thrice-fair hug, something like the Graces, before they set about beating one another in one final, ruthless game.

‘One Small Step for Man . . .
’

Kenelm was back in his library.

Clouds of inspiration scudded across the ceiling; cherries of virtue swagged the stained-glass windows, so well done it was a wonder birds did not shatter them with pecking. The door of the library locked with a willing click, and he was at last at home in his own mind. Through the windows he could glimpse his green thought-garden, where Van Dyck’s tall and prickly sunflower grew ever higher, glowing with its own fierce brightness, like a nuclear daisy.

He might read while he leaned against any shelf, or at his desk hidden in a little scriptorium at the rear of the library. He could rise from his reading with some deep question, stroll to the pertinent section, put his finger upon the book he wanted, and browse onwards from there, ranging over his shelves, like a honeybee across a wildflower meadow.

This library was his very soul made visible.

There were, admittedly, one or two problems.

Overspill was stacked against the far wall, and in front of every section – as, Greek, French, Americas – a little pile of extras that did not fit upon the shelves was propped upon the floor. He must have been too conservative in his initial estimations; moreover, during the time it took to build the library, he had, inevitably, acquired more – bagfuls from Naples and Genoa.

The library was so over-filled that it would take twice his life to read everything it contained, and still the library was incomplete. A glaring white hole remained on the far wall: their Van Dyck painting was not yet in situ, and he felt an unanswerable need for it. That emblem of their union, of their blessed equity and love, was the very thing he wished to have presiding over his library, and yet it was absent. Having been away, he needed his props, his paintings, to tell him who he was, and how happily he was married, just as the Great Cross at Cheapside told him he was almost home again.

As a favour to Van Dyck, Kenelm had agreed to forgo his painting for a short while, allowing the artist to display it at his studio at Blackfriars, to beguile and inspire visiting patrons. They came for a solo portrait, then they saw the Digbys’ panoramic grouping, and lo, the whole family was signed up.