Viper Wine (6 page)

‘How came you then to land?’ asked Dimbleby, trying to hurry him.

‘By signals between ships, and by secret confabulation with my navigator Sir Edward Stradling, and Captain Woodcock, who commanded our third ship, the
Janus
, I resolved to change our convoy’s course so that we might stop within seven days to buy provisions at Zante.’

Never, never had he felt such relief as when they dropped anchor in the bay at Zante and he knew that full-scale mutiny had been avoided. When the old women came down to the harbour hawking their foodstuffs, and the men waded ashore eagerly, he could have kissed the deck for gratitude. He saw a turtle waving to him from the shallows, and he dived into the lapis-blue waters to take him for a trophy. Hermes had made a lyre out of a tortoise shell as a gift for his brother Apollo. What was it that Apollo had gifted him in return? Some choice planet. But then as he swam closer he saw the turtle appeared to be at prayer, with his flippers together, and his wrinkled eyes shut fast, and Kenelm knew he must spare the turtle.

‘And how came you to do battle with the Venetian galleasses?’ asked Anthony à Wood, scribe and antiquarian, who had lately incorporated the distinguished ‘à’ between his born names.

‘Well, sir, like a swan with young they hissed at us. They wished to protect their convoy of French ships, and I wished them to know that the French were our enemies, and our enemies’ friends are our enemies. We drew back, gathered up our strength, and came down on them like Englishmen. The battle we fought was close to, or something like, three hours in length, and each fought well and bravely. Load, aim, fire! Load, aim, fire! We were working under Phoebus’s glare, to which our Celtic skins were not well-disposed, but the tiger was up in our blood, and so we loaded, so we aimed, and so we fired – until very timidly, like a ladies’ petticoat, the little white Venetian handkerchief rose . . .’

Sir Kenelm did not mention how furious the English vice-consul in Iskenderun had been. The first he knew of Kenelm’s attack was the noise of his cannonade resounding across the bay. He called the angriest alarum possible. Kenelm’s actions jeopardised years of his diplomacy, he said. ‘Your privateering, sir,’ he roared, ‘will cost the honest English merchants of Aleppo in fines, in lost trade, and in goodwill. They may never recover this route.’

‘I heard the vice-consul was full of condemnation,’ said John Aubrey, with relish.

‘He was apoplectic, wasn’t he?’ said Paxman.

‘Well, he lamented exceedingly the loss of his toy pigeons’ eggs,’ said Kenelm, speaking slowly, with a subtle purpose. ‘A few of which were cracked by the resounding noise of my English cannonade, which made the hens and chicks afrit. We were in the midst of battle, but his chief concern was all for his pet eggs,’ Sir Kenelm said with a note of regret in his voice that the vice-counsel should be so odd a fellow. The company laughed knowingly; canned laughter rang through the hall at Gayhurst.

‘So we routed Venice. None of my crew were lost, but one of the Venetians’ number died, I heard. I was graceful in conquest and I did not burn or scuttle the galleasses, though I could have. But I was mindful of the harm this would do our British traders. So I left with honour only.’

The assembled company raised a cheer and poop-pooped as if it were the Last Night of the Proms; Digby did not think it necessary to tell them about the reaction of the Venetian ambassador in London, or the royal summons he received shortly afterwards:

‘Sir Digby is to leave those seas and come home so that further opportunity for offence may be removed.’

Edict from Charles I, 1629

Instead, he demonstrated many wonders to the gentlemen of the press, such as the size and motion of a dolphin – which he re-enacted with his arms stretched wide – and, to keep them entertained, his oldest trick: picking up a chair with one hand by its leg, until he became red in the face and the veins on his neck stood out. He offered the chair to the nearest visitor, the Pole and polymath Samuel Hartlib – ‘Your turn.’

By the expression on his face, Kenelm feared Hartlib had a physical deformity that he kept well hidden. But then Hartlib smiled, and said he must be heading towards Banbury before the light was lost. Kenelm felt sad and foolish that he had played the martial, warlike side of himself today, when he should have spoken like a scholar.

‘Will you go hither again?’ called out one of the crowd, holding out a black baton at him as if it were a poignard, aimed at his mouth.

‘What present did you bring to your wife?’ called another, not looking at him directly, but through the mask of an artificial eye.

‘Snails!’ cried Sir Kenelm. ‘For the restoration of . . . any lady’s complexion, they are mightily good.’ He felt he had said a wrong thing, and resolved to comment no more.

‘Do you still love your wife?’ asked a woman with a notebook marked ‘Viper Wine’, who had somehow infiltrated the throng.

‘More than ever,’ said Sir Kenelm. ‘And who are you, miss?’

‘I am the author,’ she said.

Exasperated with all of them, and wanting finally to communicate something that was close to his heart, his higher self, Kenelm told them about the archaic sculpture of Apollo he found on the isle of Milos. ‘I tried to bring it home with me, but a hundred sailors could not move it. These sailors must be kept busy, you know, or they will fall to other fancies . . .’

It was such a figure, this Apollo. So full of prophecy. His blank eyes stared and his hair was wild, flaring. As Sir Kenelm looked at his full lips, heavy with breath, he thought he saw Apollo speak.

‘All men should seize control of their lives,’ said Kenelm, determined to finish on a rousing note. ‘Look, we change, or else we must be overtaken by change. It is my motto, you know – not my family motto, which is “None but one” – but one far more meaningful to me, my own adopted aphorism, taken from Seneca – “
Vindica te tibi
” – “Vindicate yourself for yourself!” Or, indeed, “To thine own self be true”. Or, my favourite rendering . . .’

Sir Kenelm, standing upon the table, staring, wild-eyed in imitation of Apollo cried: ‘You must change your life!’

‘
Vindica te tibi.
’

Motto stamped on the books in Sir Kenelm Digby’s library, now held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford

‘
Du mußt dein Leben ändern
’ – ‘You must change your life.’

Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, 1908

‘When I went on my voyage to sea, shee [Venetia] so wholly retired and secluded herself from the world till my return . . . All the while she kept only with her ghostly Father.’

Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to his sons, 1633

When he was first away, gliding towards Scanderoon, he was in love with the sea, with the changefulness and power of it. The
Eagle
leaped and dived, and he laughed as it threw him forward mid-step and jogged his hand as he drank. The sea teased him, and caught him out; at night, it rolled him over and about, until he retched and longed for land and puked into his hat.

At home, on the solid grass of Gayhurst, young Kenelm ran round and round, roaring, trying to become dizzy. Venetia stood on the steps as if she were watching him, but actually staring into the green-shaded distance, baby John over her shoulder.

Just off the coast at Deal, the spyglass told them that an enemy ship was rising on the horizon – their first prize. With greatest haste, the
Eagle
’s quadrant and maps were hidden, the men mustered, games of dice put away, salt pork stowed, muskets powdered, cannon loaded with ordnance, private prayers whispered, and everything made ready for attack. The ship was now so close it was possible to discern, with the naked eye, that it was a Dutch vessel, and therefore unassailable, neutral. Glumly the crew watched it sailing past.

When Kenelm had been gone a month, and no more letters came from him, Venetia deemed it time to give young Kenelm his present. It was a model ship, a galleass daintily made of wood and cork, with parchment sails and miniature oars and coloured paper bunting. On its deck was a built-in dish, designed to carry salt at a banqueting table. All its cannon were fixed apart from one which could be taken out and filled, if money allowed, with pepper. Young Kenelm took it as his solemn duty to look after this ship, which although it was as big as he could hold, he bore to his room at night and carried down with him each morning.

In harbour at Lisbon, Kenelm was woken urgently and struggled on deck to see one of his ships, the
Samuel
, glowing upon fiery water. One of its tall masts was listing like a falling tree, endangering the deck of the
Eagle
, and there was much shouting to lookey-loo as it creaked, and the wind threw smuts at them and blew the flames brighter. Thus the second ship in Kenelm’s convoy was burned down to the waterline and scuttled and her thirty crew sent to try their luck in Lisbon or where they would. ‘The horizon is vast enough for each of us,’ he said, flinging a purse of coins to the sailors across the foreign sky.

Venetia’s eyes began to get accustomed to the smallness of a new silk stitch. Her needlework, a bed-jacket decorated with leaves and strawberries, was designed in such detail that the berries were gilt with tiny pips, and Venetia had to unpick her too-crude work again, until her stitches were as small as pinpricks. Looking up from her lap to talk to her priest Chater, she caught baby John as he uncomprehendingly snatched at the toy ship, snapping away a splint off the mast.

The
Eagle
suffered. It came on quickly one night, during supper. The first mate sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. Kenelm thought he was affecting Melancholy, or had lost his manners, until he saw several of the crew slumped in slothful postures, heads lolling, or laid out on the benches. A petty officer serving soup put down his ladle and grasped his belly, sinking to his knees as bloody bile issued from his mouth.

That same day at Gayhurst the sky split open with rain that played like a band of drummers upon the roof and puddled underneath an open casement in the Hall. Young Kenelm sat up from his afternoon sleep with a cry and ran out of the nursery and downstairs, as fast as his legs could go. As Venetia saw him she remembered, too – and clasping John to her breast as he gurgled she ran through the rainstorm to the middle of the lawn where they had left their rugs and cups and the model ship. Rain had pooled in its salt-cellar, and the paper sails were dark and waterlogged.

Before they reached Gibraltar, half his men were dead. The ship’s surgeon sewed the corpses into their hammocks as shrouds, and always drew his final thread through the dead man’s nose; a sea custom, a last chance. Every time Kenelm saw the surgeon sewing, and he knew the needle was nearing its final jab, he expected the body to sit upright and scream. But there was no such resurrection.

Venetia had Mistress Elizabeth make new sails for the toy ship, out of underskirts. They sailed her upon an old horse trough clouded with green weed. Venetia stared into its murkiness, and saw only her own reflection and a bottomless kingdom of water-fleas.

Passing the Barbary Coast, he entered for the first time the Sea of the Middle Earth, or Medi-Terreanea. Kenelm hunched overboard looking for monsters in the sunny waters. He saw a long pulsing sea-beast with a head like ribbons that he thought must be a squid, and a bristling silver ball of fishes followed by a train of seagulls. Kenelm watched out to see if the horizon inclined, now he sailed closer to the round belly of the world.

After stitching for so long, Venetia began to believe that the strawberry she sewed was the world, and each stitch a mile, and each seed a league, and the plumpness of the berry was the Equator, and its hasp the Polar Land of Ice, and the blood-drops accidentally shed by her needle were little planets, dribbled across the canvas.

Had the largeness of Kenelm’s life diminished hers, somehow?

Although they are not subject to our sense

A world may be no bigger than two pence . . .

For millions of these atoms may be in

The head of one small, single, little pin

And thus small, then ladies may well wear

A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.

Margaret Cavendish, ‘Of Many Worlds in this World’, 1650

Kenelm paced back and forth his creaking cabin, preparing a speech the night before sailing into battle.

Venetia paced up and down the upstairs corridor with baby John at her shoulder, rubbing his back.

Kenelm heaved-ho, squinting in the glare.

Venetia cried out in frustration and threw down her needlework.

Kenelm felt his sword run through an enemy body, like a knife into a peach. It was his birthday, 11 June.

Venetia swore to eat no more suckets and do no more sewing.

Before the letters could reach them telling of his victory at Scanderoon, the family observed mass in the chapel at Gayhurst, and prayed for Kenelm’s birthday to St Barnabas, and to St Christopher and St Lucy for sailors in peril. Young Kenelm solemnly brought his model ship to the altar, tattered like any treasured toy, and the family’s confessor, Chater, held it up to the altar, so it dominated the chapel. Even though it was now a good deal easier for young Kenelm to carry, the ship seemed to have grown immense with significance. As the bell tolled his absence from Gayhurst, the model ship filled the chapel. And all the while Sir Kenelm lay sunbathing on the deck of his little barque on the silver-silk ocean, as gentle winds carried him through Cyclades.