Viper Wine (57 page)

He started off with simple figures:

‘Seeds growing are not a perpetual miracle, though you could be excused for thinking so . . .’
He delivered to the audience a reassuring smile.

‘
An ackhorne grows to a spread, vast oak. A single bean to a tall green tender plant . . . And after, death, which is an essential dissolution of the whole compound, must follow: the perfect calm of death.’

The lecture hall’s attention tightened like an archer’s bowstring.

‘Trees look dead during drought, till some rain do fall to cure them of their sickness,’
he said.
‘And then vegetables take a new green habit. Now, my spagyrick art tells me it is nothing else but a nitrous salt which is diluted in the water . . .’

‘Spagyrick?’ said one would-be inkhorn in the front row to another. ‘Alchemical,’ scrawled his friend on his parchment.

‘Salt,’
announced Kenelm, ‘
is the food of the lungs and the nourishment of the spirit.’

He explained that just as the drought-dead tree revives with nitrous salt, so ‘
if it were made proportionable to mens bodyes there is no doubt but it would work alike effect on them
’.

The direction of this lecture was emerging. Its immortal preoccupation was attracting newcomers, and the back of the hall became crowded with more figures: the shadowy form of Sir Francis Bacon, dead seven years ago of a cold caught in the snow at Highgate while investigating the possibility of freezing bodies for their resurrection. Another figure came shuffling in: Old Parr, the Shropshire farm tenant brought to London by Aletheia and Thomas Howard because he was said to be 152 years of age, and who died shortly after his inspection by William Harvey, who declared that the cause of Old Parr’s death was his removal to London. Behind him peeped Mary Shelley, a teenager, 161 years unborn, clasping a notebook.

Sir Kenelm continued quietly, controlling his voice. ‘
In a villa in Rome Cornelius Drebell made an experiment in which salt revived a plant – I saw the wonderful corporifying of it . . . Quercetanus, the famous physician of Henri IV, did the same with flowers – rose, tulip, clove-gilly flower. On first view, they were nothing but a heap of ashes. As soon as he held some gentle heate under any of them, presently there arose out of the ashes, the Idaea of a flower, and it would shoot up and spread abroad to the due height and just dimensions of such a flower.
’

‘The Idaea of a flower?’ asked the autodidact.

‘That is,’ whispered his neighbour, ‘the Platonic ideal, or archetype. The flower in the mind of God.’

‘But whenever you withdraw heate from it, so would this flower sink down, little by little, till at length it would bury itself in its bed of ashes.’

Kenelm was talking loudly now, with glittering eyes. The urgency of his grief pulled him forwards, and the audience with him, into Dark Territory, where he groped for Science.

‘
Athanasius Kircherus at Rome promised he had done it
,’ said Sir Kenelm, ‘
but no industry of mine could effect it.
’ The audience wilted with disappointment. ‘Until . . .’ said Kenelm, reviving them with the word. ‘Until . . .’ He shuffled his papers, cleared his throat.

‘I calcined a good quantity of nettles – roots, stalks, leaves, flowers. In a word, the whole plant. With fair water I made a lye of these Ashes which I filtered from the insipide Earth. I exposed the Lye in the due season to have the frost congeal it. I performed the whole work in this very house where I have now the honour to discourse to you. I calcined them in the fair and large laboratory that I had erected under the lodgings of the Divinity Reader.’

The Divinity Reader, who was sitting in the front row, changed his expression so subtly it was almost impossible to discern the displeasure this had caused. Asparagus watched him with one eye.

‘And I exposed the Lye to congeale in the windows of my Library, among my lodgings at the end of your Great Gallery.’

Most of the audience assumed his library was richly furnished, but Mary Tree, peeping in at the back of the hall, knew how bare he was at heart.

‘And it is most true that when the water was congealed into ice, there appeared to be an abundance of Nettles. No greenness accompanied them. They were white. But otherwise, it is impossible for any painter to delineate a throng of Nettles more exactly. As soon as the water was melted, all these Ideall shapes vanished, but as soon as it was congealed again, they presently appeared afresh. And this game I had severall times with them, and brought Doctor Mayerne to see it, who I remember was as much delighted with it as myself. What reason this phoenomenon?’

‘He’s cracked!’ whispered one tongue-wag to another; the hall murmured with awe and disquietude. Sir Kenelm imagined this meant his audience had grasped the eternal repercussions of his experiment: palingenesis, revivification, transgenic cloning.

‘Good experimental practice,’ muttered an autodidact. ‘But to what infernal end?’

‘The essential substance of a plant is contained in his fixed salt. This will admit no change into another Nature; but will always be full of the qualities and vertues of the Plant it is derived from; but for the want of the volatile Armonicall and Sulphureall parts, it is deprived of colour. If all the essential parts could be preserved . . . I see no reason but at the reunion of them, the entire Plant might appear in its complete perfection. Were this not then a true palingenesis of the Originall Plant? I doubt it would not be so.

‘Then we come to Real palingenesis – as what I have done more than once upon cray-fishes . . .’
He smiled at the cameras, the live link-up with his laboratory.

‘Boyle them two hours in faire water. Keep this decoction, and put the crevisses [crayfishes] into a glasse-limbeck, and distill all the Liquor that will arise from them; which keep by itself. Then calcine the fishes in a reverbatory furnace, and extract their salt with your first decoction, which filter and then evaporate the humidity . . . In a few dayes you shall find little animals moving there, about the bigness of millet seeds. These you must feed with the bloud of an Oxe, till they be as big as pretty large buttons. You may bring them on to what bignesse you please.’

The back of the hall had become a Sergeant Pepper’s gallery of faces, Sir Walter Raleigh and Helen of Troy, Dr Dee and Marilyn Monroe and Guido Fawkes, and also your face, and the face of every other reader of this chapter, and the present author, wanting to see everything, but caught behind the crowd of long-dead figures, and busy imagining what was going on instead.

Sir Kenelm was in his stride:
‘All this leadeth me to speak something of the Resurrection of Humane bodyes
—’

The puritans at the back of the hall took this as their cue to stand up and shout, each in turn:

‘Necromancer!’

‘Abominable Popist!’

‘This meddles in life and death!’

Zealots of many stripes, Ayatollahs and Popes and pro-life campaigners yelled:

‘Do ye not respect the sanctity of the grave?’

‘Where lies your dead wife?’

Asparagus barked at them, and Sir Kenelm tried to answer their questions one by one, facing down their protests with the bald strength of a man who has already been to his wits’ end and back, but Endymion Porter and Sir John Scudamore set about a scuffle with them, restraining one Puritan man and knocking another’s hat off. The Puritans continued shouting all the while, proclaiming that Judgement was nigh. Chater made a discreet and hasty exit on his own. The Gresham College porters soon came and bundled the Puritans out of the hall, and the audience of learned men and cavaliers were left in uproar, arguing over the innocence of the widower, and the insupportable nature of Puritans. Sir Kenelm remained in the midst of them, silenced. The cold draft of dissent blew through the hall; all the spirits in attendance were long departed.

Later that evening Mary Tree tended Kenelm like an invalid, so weakened was he by his lecture. As she took away his cups and plates, and watered the sick sunflower that crisped upon his windowshelf, she decided that until Venetia’s death was solved, he would never be able to heal himself, and moreover, until he cleared his name, he would never be easy.

‘Credulity mingled with precise observation in his wide-ranging, receptive mind . . . Some of his research made positive contributions to scientific progress.’

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, 2012

‘He was the very Pliny of his age for lying.’

Henry Stubbes (1605–1678)

I
N THE
V
IPER’S
N
EST

MARY TREE RETURNED
many times to walk the apothecaries’ district. She knew she must look, to the passer-by in the street, like a disfigured woman drawn to the chirugeons’ doorsteps but too poor or shy to ring their bells. In fact, she was making keen observations of all the establishments, eavesdropping and talking to friendly matrons about the use of dried millipedes, and if they were ever known to be poisonous (they were not), if milk teeth were ever used in beauty rituals (not so far as anyone could tell her), and meanwhile, she continued to study the plaques and emblems that the apothecaries displayed, and the correspondence they sent, always looking for the seal of the fat viper.

It was thus that one afternoon she presented herself upon the doorstep of Lancelot Choice.

‘Come in, dearie,’ said Margaret, who was in an excellent mood, having just discussed with Choice the viability of putting down a deposit on a middling-size manor they had been to see in Bishop’s Stortford, complete with dovecote, granary and knot-garden. Margaret took the opportunity to squint at Mary Tree’s complexion as she came in, while Mary shrank instinctively from her, being unduly sensitive to this kind of look, which she had known all her life.

The Choices had become well-versed in not suggesting to their clients what might be the matter, be it ever so obvious, and both of them simply looked at Mary Tree, waiting for her to speak first.

‘May I purchase one vial of your favourite red drink?’ she said.

‘Well,’ said Choice, putting his feet up and using his ivory letter-opener to emancipate a piece of correspondence, talking all the while, ‘you must understand, miss, that the efficacy of the Wine is achieved by regular daily consumption. A single draft would be wasted – as good as poured away by moonlight. Moreover, it might prove altogether injurious to a young lady such as yourself, if taken in isolation and without due consultation, analysis of your condition, your blood, water, parentage, and so forth.’

‘Very well,’ she said, having decided to submit to whatever games Choice played.

‘So let me look at you in the light.’

When she was by the window, Choice studied her and sucked his teeth. ‘This will be no easy work,’ he said, and crossed to his desk to fetch the visitors’ book. Mary reproached herself for coming, Marked as she was, to such a merchant of Beauty. Of course he would find her unfit to practise upon. ‘I require your name, and your coin, and then the consultation can begin.’

‘Excuse me, sir, for what is probably my foolishness, but I think I can see a sheriff on the steps outside the house – would you reassure me that we are not about to be interrupted?’

Choice came to the window quickly and went down to check, and, left alone with the book, Mary flipped through its pages as quickly as she could, scanning the clients’ names, but she could not find the name she sought, or even the initials, and she began to realise that the patients were listed under pseudonyms. She thought she heard his tread on the stairs, and her hand trembled as she turned the densely covered pages again, which grew more crowded week by week.

‘Anastasia’ she saw, repeated. Then simply ‘Anastas’. It was enough.

When Choice returned she was signing her own name, unsteadily. She laid out the coin he wanted, which she had earned through her work at Gresham. She did not begrudge it, as she knew she had what she needed. Venetia Anastasia Stanley – what student of glamour, what attentive lady’s maid, could fail to recognise that rank, outlandish middle name?

He reassured her with no more than a batsqueak of irritation that there were no sheriffs waiting outside, and proceeded to give her a lecture on the fit and proper use of the Wine for curing plainness, dispelling fits of anxiety, and begetting marriage.