Viper Wine (55 page)

‘Washermaid?’ he asked.

‘No, sir, I am Mary Tree,’ she said, stepping backwards so she might look the porter in the face. Conscious of her Mark, as usual, she was relieved when the porter managed to find it in his heart not to look at her too strangely.

The porter looked down and saw a fresh-faced maid without much to distinguish her from any other.

Mary swallowed. This was the last time, perhaps, that she would need to announce herself and her odd quest to a stranger. She began: ‘I have some business with Sir Kellem Digbaine—’

She broke off and tried again, more slowly. ‘I mean, Sir Kenelm Digby. Is he known to you here?’

‘Well,’ said the porter, with savour that presaged a long and equivocatory discourse. ‘If you mean the gentleman whose hair is long as an hermit’s, who never removes his black mantle, and rarely speaks a word, except to friends, and moreover, demands large quantities of crayfishes for calcification, then perhaps we have an understanding. But as you probably mean only to be meddling with his business of grief, then stay away.’

When you have been travelling for many months with one object in mind, and you come near to that object, almost within touching distance, small frustrations can be unduly discouraging. Mary Tree heard that tightening hum inside her head that told her she was close to crying.

Mary had already been forced to mourn her long-cherished idea of Venetia, and given up for ever her private fantasy of becoming her lady’s maid. Now her whole quest, her long ordeal, was being disparaged by this St Peter, this gatekeeper.

‘Is he here or not?’ she said in a voice that was more high-pitched than she wished it to be.

‘If you mean, is he present or absent, I can tell you that he’s not quite neither, since he’s so distracted by his loss, he’s liable not to hear you, or if he hears you, he may not see you, unless you be a crayfish, in which case he would have you calcified as soon as not.’ The porter looked at her sternly. ‘There are those who would prosecute him for his loss, and drag him through town for a business about which they know nothing, and if you’ve been put up to this by the Lord Chamberlain, and wish to get a false confession out of him, again I say, stay away.’

Mary Tree summoned the last of her strength. She knew she presented a poor spectacle of a girl: weary, with clothes grown shabby from journeying. She was stained across her face, and she could not read or write, but although she had no family, she was friends with all the world. She said with dignity: ‘I find your words an insult, sir. I’m here because he is the Keeper of the Powder of Sympathy, which is the only remedy to heal my kinsman, Richard Pickett.’

The porter’s hatch rammed closed in her face, and she thought her pride had ruined her whole enterprise, until the visitors’ door within the door clicked open, and the porter showed her in.

‘To avoid envy and scandal . . . he [Digby] retired into Gresham-colledge, where he diverted himself with his Chymistry and the Professors’ good conversation. He wore there a long mourning cloak, a high-crowned hat, his head unshorn . . . as signs of sorrow for his beloved wife.’

John Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
, 1669–96

Mary Tree sat on a step within the quiet embrace of Gresham College, clasping the bound and blackened shard of glass.

The college struck her as somewhere between an almshouse for the insane, and one of the old friaries. A man brushed past her, engrossed in a book that he held up to his face, reading as he walked, pigeon-toed, across the quadrangle. She held the cruel shard to her chest and considered its pathetic bandage, grown brown with dirt. This was the last of her many waits, and it was not a long wait, although it had a semblance of eternity as the light began to be lost from the quadrangle.

Sir Kenelm came moving quickly across the flagstones, his black garments clinging to his body, now so much leaner that he seemed taller. He was carrying the Powder in one hand, and a basin slopping with water.

He barely looked at the girl, but he registered that her eyes were sincere.

‘We shall perform the ceremony on the grass here, so that the healing Atomes may be carried through the air to your – your father, is it? What is his name?’

‘He is my kinsman – but only by marriage,’ said Mary, before clasping her mouth as people do when they wish to take their words back. ‘I mean, he is as much my father as any man in this world. His name is Richard Pickett.’

Sir Kenelm paused. He stopped his hand.

‘Oh, my dear,’ he said. ‘I have received word of him last month. I knew of him a little for his learning of the Caesars. I had a letter which told me of your journey, and – would you like to see the letter?’

Mary Tree nodded first, and then shook her head.

‘I cannot read, so you best tell me.’

Sir Kenelm sat down with her quietly on the cloister wall. He noticed that she must once have had a mulberry stain upon her cheek, which was now as faint as the moon in the afternoon sky.

‘The letter that came, from Devon, I think, from one calling themself a neighbour of the household, makes me think we shall never send forth enough healing Atomes to help him now, for his mechanical physiognomy is beyond our reach.’

‘Has he gone to France?’ said Mary keenly, rising up.

‘No,’ said Kenelm. ‘No, it is further than that he has gone. The letter bid me tell you that he would never rise again, being sick of his wound unto death.’

Mary Tree considered the grey pall that coloured the sky, and shivered.

‘He made a good end of it, passing quickly with a hot distemper upon his heart,’ said Kenelm, who had been moved by the letter.

Mary Tree seemed to be muttering to herself.

‘I should have been faster on my journey,’ she said, more to herself than Kenelm; then, ‘I have let him down.’

Sir Kenelm did not appear to have heard her, or if he had, he did not seem to know what to say. Mourning had clogged that quick facility he always had for talking. But with an effort of will it began to return.

‘If the wound was so penetrating as it sounds to have been, the Cure would not have helped him,’ he said. ‘It treats infection following on from wounds, not the injuries themselves. So your journey might have taken, oh, months, and he would have been no more saved.’

She wiped away a snot-smear.

‘Does the letter speak of a dog called Asparagus?’ asked Mary.

‘I think no, but I will have another look betimes. We shall find you a place here tonight so you can rest a-while and take some sustenance,’ said Kenelm. ‘There are many rooms here in this college, wherein all my world is now. It is a Sympatheticall place. There are sizars and servants here, though there are not many who are as yourself, which is to say, women – but you will find that Goodwife Faldo who runs the household will look after you.’

He saw that this cheered Mary Tree, and he smiled at her with his new, uncanny, counterfeit smile, and whispered, less to her than to the cold and darkling night itself: ‘I have many pertinent designs for the Divine Regeneration of Beings.’

The college quad caught and magnified the whisper, so that it reverberated as clearly as if he had spoken the words in the great amphitheatre at Ephesus.

After achieving sleep for a few hours, Kenelm woke and bid good morrow to his wife. He fancied she was as pale as ever, although, in keeping with his new habit, he moved the painting into the daylight with him when he rose out of bed, holding it to the window to check she had not developed overnight a blue pall, nor any other distemper of the grave.

As she was making up Sir Kenelm’s fire, Mary Tree made a resolution that when Asparagus was conveyed to London, he would be Sir Kenelm’s constant companion. The morning needs of a wolfhound, however base, would be preferable to this daily practice of picture-gazing, which she could not help but consider morbid. In his empty rooms there was precious little else to look on. He would be so much the better when he had that grey-whiskered muzzle to gaze upon every morning.

Kenelm’s bookshelves were bare, and in need of dusting. Mary was surprised that so great a scholar as Sir Kenelm possessed no books. She, Mary Tree, loved to hold the three books she owned, and when he found her looking at her small volume of flower remedies, he took it from her, and then returned it to her instantly, as if it burned his hand.

At the sunlit breakfast table of Gresham College’s great hall, Sir Kenelm instigated a conversation about the custom of the farmers of Saxony, where families who are struggling to feed themselves through a hard winter first toast their grandparents with Meth or Hydromel, then inter them into coffins laid in the ice, where the old people remain frozen until the arrival of more abundant food in spring, when they are disinterred and revived again with more strong drink. The Professor of Astronomy, who was morose after a long night waiting for clouds to part, thought this sounded like an errant foolery. The Professor of Divinity chewed his bacon collops, and did not speak; but when Kenelm used the word ‘resurrection’, he stopped chewing momentarily, showing a face that was highly discouraging.

None of the other professors would sit by Sir Kenelm, as they had developed a prejudice against him for the pungent smell about the east side of the college, caused by his experiments with crayfish. This was the first reason that they kept their distance. The second reason was the common belief that he had murdered his wife. These two offences combined extremely effectively, even in the mind of the Professor of Logic.

Most mornings, Sir Kenelm sat with Mary Tree, reading aloud from Discorides’ book of medicine, while Mary Tree followed another copy with her eyes. Since he had no books now, he had been obliged to borrow both of them from fellow Greshamites. He handled the book he read from carefully, as if it were the first he had ever seen, and he spoke slowly, taking care to see that she had the right place, so that with time she would be able to read for herself, he hoped.

Later, while the morning sun was still golden, Mary Tree went down to the banks of the Fleet where Sir Kenelm sent her looking for nettles, cuckoo-flower or sweet william. ‘They must be fresh and fair, for my purpose,’ he told her. ‘Both buds and flowers withal.’ She carried with her a basket and wore Sir Kenelm’s hawking gloves.

Kenelm sat cross-legged before the fire, meditating upon the meaning of ‘metempsychosis’.

At noon, Mary Tree spent an hour in conversation with Chater when he came to Gresham to get his washing done and collect his stipend. She perceived instantly, by his walk, by the sit of his hat, by the cast of his eyes, that he was a Catholic, though he wore no illicit garments. But she was not afraid to talk to him, nor he to her, it seemed. He was the type who found her Mark more fascinating than repellent, she supposed, and he hung about her as she performed her tasks, looking moody and uninterested but, as she perceived, taking solace from their conversation, which was necessary for his uneasy soul. Although Mary Tree was loath to show too much prurient interest in talking about Venetia . . .

‘Ommmm . . .’ said Kenelm, meditating. ‘Pherecydes of Syros taught Pythagoras who taught Plato that souls migrate, by metempsychosis, into other bodies. Orpheus turned into a swan; Thamyrias a nightingale; tame beasts were reborn as wild creatures, and musical birds in the bodies of men . . .’

. . . Chater wished to talk of nothing else: Venetia’s illness, how he had tended her, and his fears for her, which were rebuffed by her constant affirmation that she was perfectly well. Mary Tree expected him to talk of how dignified and gentle she was, and how she gave to charity, but none of these topics seemed to move Chater; he did not expound on her sweet nature.

‘Oh, to make her wait was foolish, such impatience she had!’ he said. ‘Sometimes she was taken by choleric moods, when she would suffer to have no one with her but her Chater.’ His lower lip was beginning to quaver with fond remembrance. ‘In those moods she could put lightning up me just by looking.’ Tears were welling in the undersills of his eye. ‘I would jump to serve her, and she would tolerate me only, letting me know of my foolishness with the tilt of an eyebrow.’

‘She was so unkind?’ asked Mary Tree.

‘She was so magnificent,’ said Chater. ‘Such a one as her leaves this life’s little stage empty. She had a mirror placed high in the alcove of her withdrawing salon,’ he said almost to himself, smiling.

‘So she could regard herself secretly?’ said Mary Tree, who thought she was beginning to understand Venetia’s character.

‘Ha! No, not for such seeming shallowness. She was not vain, you understand. She merely had splendour to maintain. No, she fixed the mirror there because she used it to secretly view the cards her friends held, I fancy. Winning was everything to her. To take money from other gamblers – this was her best delight.’

Mary pondered this. ‘Even from her friends?’

‘Oh, more from her friends than anyone.’

That these words came from a priest made them even more confounding.

‘She loved Sir Kenelm?’

‘Oh, unto death. She thought he was growing maggot-brained, and she used to say she despaired of him, and she thought no one else would have him, except her. When he went away she declined like a plant without the light. She would rather go hungry than appear before Sir Kenelm without her face painted and her eyes coloured, except when she was in the mood for candour, when they would spend all day at home together in their bedchamber . . . I brought them sweet sack and figs and books. I was their trusted one.’