At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice.
Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.
From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel’s snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.
Hermione Eyre is a journalist and former croupier. She read English at Hertford College, Oxford and was a staff writer and TV critic at the Independent on Sunday for seven years, then chief interviewer at the London Evening Standard Magazine. This is her first novel.
| 1 | Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed by Anthony van Dyck 1633 by permission of the trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery |
| 2 | Gayhurst House © Hermione Eyre |
| 3 | Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby by Peter Oliver © Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
| 4 | Sir Kenelm Digby 1603-65, by Peter Oliver © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
| 5 | Sir Kenelm’s alchemical notebook, from the Wellcome Library, London © Hermione Eyre |
| 6 | Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, by Anthony Van Dyck, 1633 by permission of the trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery |
| 7 | Sir Kenelm Digby 1603–1665 by Anthony Van Dyck © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London |
| 8 | Gresham College, 1740 Engraving by George Vertue of Gresham College, looking East, showing the entrance from Old Broad Street, from John Ward’s Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (1740) |
| 9 | ‘The Madagascar Portrait’ of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, by Anthony Van Dyck circa 1639 © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
. . . slknxsnaosihnfbbfcalslnjzalkn . . .
Please tune your receiver to the required frequency
‘smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenvgttaviras’ – Cryptic anagram sent on 30 July 1610 by Galileo Galilei to his patron Johann Kepler.
Tuning in progress
‘altis simum planetam tergeminum observavi’ – the same anagram rendered into Latin.
Tuning complete
‘I have observed that the most distant of planets has a triple form’ – Galileo’s anagram announces his discovery of the rings of Saturn.
SIR KENELM DIGBY and his young son were standing on a hillock, gulping at the stars. It was June, and the heavens were royal blue, humming and hung with silver moonfruit. The son, who had been hastily wakened, wore a nightshirt, and half-laced boots; the father’s doublet was loosened, as he had dined well. He was lately home from a sea voyage that had kept him away a year, and the boy fancied he still smelled salty.
‘Which one do you want, darling?’
The boy pointed to a speck below Saturn, between the Perseids and the lower Cassiopeia constellation. Sir Kenelm hoisted little Kenelm onto his shoulders easily. ‘Well, you have chosen wisely. You have chosen a moon of Saturn, which hangs about the big planet like you hang about my neck.’ Sir Kenelm grasped his son’s ankles, making him squirm with pleasure. ‘Your planet is covered in a frozen crust, like the River Thames in winter, except it is mint-green coloured and striped with orange, like a tiger.’
‘Roaaaaar like an Araby tiger.’
‘Indeed. Under the ice on your planet, there is a sea which bursts up through the ice into great plumes, like the grandest fountains you see in palaces. The moon stays close to its father Saturn with a girdle of light and dust which keeps them in each other’s thoughts. This moon is much smaller than Saturn; it is the same size as England, and would take only five days to ride across. It is a pleasant little planet, although a trifle cold, and I think you would not like it as much as you like your own bed.’ Sir Kenelm was stomping over the grass tussocks now, back to Gayhurst House.
‘How old is my planet?’ asked the boy, who was at that point in life when the concept of age is new and compelling. Sir Kenelm knew the earth to be about four thousand years old: he had found fish bones in the English hills, deposited there by the Flood. But this moon of Saturn?
‘Oh, it is a young planet,’ said Sir Kenelm. ‘Of about one thousand years.’
Sir Kenelm did not know that everything he had just said was true. Or at least, that it would be said again four hundred years later, when images and data from the Cassini monitor arrived on earth. Sometimes his mind was double-hinged, and could go forwards as well as back. He was often like a string that vibrated with strange frequencies, but most of the time he was the most obstinate fool imaginable.
He could not even remember if, thirty years ago, his father had also waked him and walked him out to look at the stars. His mother once said something of the sort. Kenelm tiptoed noisily past the sleeping nursemaid into the boys’ room, which smelled of cloves and sweet vomit, and as he tucked young Kenelm in his cot, he seemed to remember being tucked in himself, like an obverse image, and a distant bell rang in his mind, which sounded like a revelation, until he realised it was the church bell up the lane at Olney marking the hour. Had he been taken out in his bedclothes to wish upon a falling star? It seemed unlikely, but it was hard to remember events before his father’s Great Undoing.
Venetia’s door was unlocked. Her candle had burned out and Sir Kenelm unlaced himself in the dark, with practised hand. He touched the fragment of the wand of Trismegistus which he wore round his neck as a talisman, said his alchemist’s Amen three times, and slipped into bed next to Venetia, fitting his chest to the warmth of her back, breathing the stale perfume of her hair. He loved her so deeply when she was sleeping. Venetia, asleep, was Perfection. Awake she was Problematical. Since he came home Venetia had become more . . . anxious. More challenging. More troubled. These and other tactful verbal constructions, euphemisms and put-downs for women from the future crackled like static through Sir Kenelm’s sleeping mind as it drifted up, up into the darkness above their curtained bed, up, above the brick gables of Gayhurst, up, above the darkened, gaping fields of Buckinghamshire and the badly drawn outline of the British coast, until he could go no further and simply bobbed, like a tethered balloon, while satellites in orbit sallied gently past his ears.
SUNTANNED AND ALIEN, Sir Kenelm stood in the middle of the bright green grass at Gayhurst, directing five farmhands who were carrying a vast column, obelisk-shaped, and bound in old tarpaulin and ropes. ‘Avast! Heave-ho, ho, ho!’ cried Kenelm, who kept forgetting he was no longer captain of two ships. Pope Sixtus V had once held a competition for the best device to winch obelisks into the streets of Rome; now Gayhurst would have its monument also. As the men heaved, the shrouded obelisk rose slowly, tilting like a giant peg.
Kenelm stepped into the house, where his brother was in the main hall, beside a stone sarcophagus, a primitive wooden faun, a crouching woman sculpted out of white marble with one buttock missing, a thick roll of tapestries, an immense shield furred with rust, a bundle of new French cutlasses, sticky-black in parts, seven superhuman-sized caryatids and a gleaming cardinal’s sedan.
‘Is this all?’ said John, looking about him.
‘Well,’ said Kenelm, trying not to rise to his brother, ‘there is also the matter of fifteen thousand pieces of silver, which I share with the Crown. And a little painted French harpsichord that I have already sent to the Queen.’
‘I like this one,’ said John, inspecting the crouching Venus.
‘Oh, but you should have seen what we had to leave behind. The isles of the Cyclades are so full of statuary, John, it is as if a busy London street had been put under an enchantment, and everybody turned to stone.’
But John was more interested in the French cutlasses, striking fencing poses with them, just to feel their weight.
‘I also collected books, when I found them. There are some choice volumes in my study.’
‘Ah yes. Books. Most pirates go looking for books,’ said John.
Kenelm suggested that since it was fine, they should set out for their special place, the Old Dam bank, site of their fraternal games, where they used to build forts, and play swing-bobbin, and, later, where they went to loiter and smoke. On their way across the garden they saw the obelisk, now in an upright position, unwinding from its tarpaulin. A metalwork construction, pyramid-shaped, it bristled with small trapezoidal spurs, sticking out at angles. It was a beautifully constructed radio mast.
‘I picked that up from a French fleet,’ said Kenelm. ‘They removed it from one of the isles.’
‘Which one?’
‘I would have asked them, but I was busy avoiding being killed by their cannon. I believe it may have come from the sacred island of Delos, where no one is ever buried or born. I fancy it is some oracular rod, some instrument of divination.’
Its metal filaments hummed with a breath of Buckinghamshire air.
‘Did any take you for a pirate?’
‘Plenty, until our letter of marque was in tatters through showing.’
‘Who fights better, the Frenchman or the Spaniard?’
‘There’s two reasons why the French are ill-served by their system of command. First, there are too many serving midships . . .’
They continued to talk in this fashion, as brothers do, while they walked through the orchard, which was glowing green and leaf-lit. Both bent under the boughs, being tall and well-made, and John broader than Kenelm, although he was younger. Fruit was already putting forth quicker than it could be collected, and apples and pears lay spoiling. In ten years’ time, Gayhurst would be shut up because of the Civil War, and the orchard would again be full of rotting fruit, until locals loosed their pigs there, but this was the long peaceful summer of 1632, and the ripeness and bounty of fruit everywhere had led to indolence and decay. A high whiff of cider hung in the air. Sir Kenelm saw a perfect, smooth russet apple resting on the grass and bent to pick it up. A wasp flew out from its mushy underside.
‘My wife is growing jealous of her face,’ said Kenelm. ‘She guards herself from view. She preserves the use of her face for great occasions only, and keeps it out of vulgar sight, by means of games light and dark and candlelight and veils and whatnot. She keeps her curtains fast in daylight. She flinches from my sight.’
‘It pains you.’
‘Yes, John, I think it does,’ said Kenelm, relieved to be speaking about this difficult subject. ‘I had intended to remove us all to London after two or three days, so I could take advantage of men’s interest in my exploits, but she has it in her head that we must stay here yet another week. I begin to think she dreads going to town, John – being seen in company. It is the work of this new Italian mirror that she uses. It is backed with mercury, you know. Her crystal glass did no harm at all. Now she goes out hooded on the most innocuous errands. When she took the boys to see the shearing at Stoke Goldington, when she tended her little garden yesterday. Why? Perhaps she thought the ploughman would drop his bridle, or Joe the farmhand gape in wonder at her ruined cheek? I do not mean to be unkind, John, but I do not like this Sphinxy business of concealment. I love to look upon her, and I think that she should love to be looked upon by me.’
‘She is how old?’
‘Five years senior to me. That age when a woman is neither young nor old: thirty-three. Forget I told you that – her age. She always has me say she was born in 1600, so she passes for thirty-one.’
‘But she’s thirty-three. That’s some way from the grave.’
‘Painting with lead does much injury. I think she fears her next climacteric.’
‘Her what?’
‘That age which is by seven divisible, John. You know how it goes. Every seven years we are made again. A woman at her mid-climacteric is at a turning point. Remember Queen Elizabeth’s Grand Climacteric at sixty-three? Our mother spoke of it. Such a dangerous age, it was thought to be, that there were celebrations when the Queen lived.’
‘Our mother had a new dress . . .’
‘Aye, which she never wore again.’
John split a cobnut between his teeth. Their mother wore no more gay dresses after their father was Undone. Kenelm remembered seeing all the servants leaving in a procession down the drive at Gayhurst, their belongings strung over their shoulders, and he thought at least Bessy or Nurse Nell might turn and wave to him or to the house, just to bid farewell, but none did.
After their father was executed their mother wore her stiff ruff and the same mourning clothes till the black washed out of the linen, and they lived quietly at Gayhurst behind thick fortified walls and scanty windows, scraping porridge from their old rough bowls, keeping the same Tudor household habits, labouring under their Catholic shame, and the new iniquity that attached to their name.
At Kenelm’s majority everything changed. He came back from his travels and showed them how to become Stuarts, with fashionably floppy clothes and continental politesse, and he used all his money on getting his knighthood, and knocked dozens of windows into the house, making it his own. And he chose a wife whom everyone counselled against. John wondered if he would have had the courage to do any of that, but decided he would not have wanted to.
‘So,’ said Kenelm, ‘Venetia fears to reach her mid-climacteric. Of course her mother, dying early, never reached that age.’
‘She never knew her mother . . .’
‘No, and therefore she has no example of how to do it. How to age. It is proving a trouble to her, I fear, John.’
‘Venetia is still beautiful.’
‘Those very words do pain her. When I tell them to her, she turns and shrinks away. It is the “still” she cannot stand.’
‘She is so vain?’
‘She is a woman. No, come, it is the way the world has made her, John. She was “a beauty”, it was her very essence and her designation.’
‘Now she is “a mother”.’
‘Aye, and a good one, but many women are mothers and only a few are beauties. It is a strange and cruel punishment, John, to be stripped of a title for no reason other than the movement of time. Imagine if you declined from “poet” to “former poet” within a few brief years. Or if you were “scholar” then “still very scholarly” then “once a scholar”.’
‘Scholar, poet, these are titles earned, not born . . .’
But Kenelm was in his stride. ‘Consider how her mother died when she was a few months old, and how she never found another mother but was passed around like a poppet, and stroked, and made much of, especially by great men. That she never turned into a lisping, painted chit is only because she has a character of great depth; indeed, her immortal soul is as profound as a man’s, I do believe.’
‘Why then will she not make peace with this? With her decaying beauty? She is a part of nature as much as you or I or this tree. She cannot step aside from time and nature. Nor more than you can, Ken.’
Sir Kenelm sighed. ‘That argument if rehearsed enough would have kept us from inventing paper, and wheels, and cannon, and wearing clothes . . . You would say to the man Leonardo, on the brink of creating a practicable flying machine: “Oh stop, sir, you cannot step aside from nature.” We meddle with nature all the time, John, in the breeding of hounds, in the cultivation of potatoes in our English soil. In the creation of this orchard, even. As I am a production of the Almighty Architect, then is not everything I do with a pure heart also a production of His?’
Sir Kenelm liked saying this. It excused his presumptions: his alchemy, his experiments in natural magick, his manipulation of the rays of the sun and moon. He believed himself to be within the Catholic definition of Natural Law in so much as he worked, always, to advance the greater good. If he could find the Philosopher’s Stone, he would share it, spread its wonders wide and bring about a Universal Cure. He searched his heart regularly, held it up to the light, and tried his conscience – but still he felt the sting of vulgar eyes. He knew that he and his wife were seen as brash, a dubious spectacle. But he did not wish to stand in line with other men just for the sake of it. If he could raise the white sulphur into exaltation, he would do it; if he could hasten the Age of Gold, he would.
‘My wife and I,’ said Kenelm slowly, pausing before they strolled through the orchard, towards the house, ‘are both spoiled goods. We are bright, fine-worked pots, but crack’d inside and fixed with clay.’
Venetia stayed late abed that morning.
This was uncharacteristic, but she found she could not rise.
Perhaps she was still angry about the spoiling of the apples. Mistress Elizabeth had not directed the farmhands to it and three barrels at least had been left to mulch. She shouted at her, and then she went to her room and cried. For what? For mouldered apples?
Yesterday she was in her knot garden at the front of the house, clipping the box-hedges using her dainty silver shears – play-gardening, as Kenelm called it – when a youth in the livery of the Earl of Dorset arrived. She put down her basket and smiled her famous smile at the livery boy, the smile Ben Jonson had written a sonnet about, and Peter Oliver painted; the smile that was so much in demand that a royal writ was put out to send any unlicensed copyist to prison, and still copies came. She stood there, her hip askew, so confident, the breeze in her flowing hair, her loose country dress full and soft. ‘Madam,’ said the boy, bowing like a silly sapling, then looking her full in the face. ‘Could you tell me where to find her most gracious beauty Venetia, Lady Digby?’
He was holding a tall fair lily – a gallant reference, she supposed, to the single fleur-de-lis on Kenelm’s coat of arms – and aflame with nerves and excitement, he glanced back and forth at the house, as if he thought the great dame herself might at any moment appear in a cloud of golden light.
Venetia laughed it off and said, ‘Why, that lady is before you.’ And as the youth looked at her with disbelief, and as his face turned from disappointment to, yes, repulsion, she remembered, as she had to keep remembering, that she was no longer herself. Her teeth were going, though they were always so good, and she had not yet learned to smile without showing them. She saw, in the mirror of his face, as the young boy’s pupils shrank, how much she had changed. And still he did not present her with the lily. Did he think she was a presuming and ironical chambermaid, testing him?
Edward Sackville must have talked up her beauty to his livery boy. It was his way. Since he became an earl his talk carried more weight. The boy had been expecting a treat: to see the woman with the smallest waist in London. Once that had been almost true. Now . . . ‘Have you no mouth to keep your tongue in, or do you stand there like a dimmock?’ she snapped. As she heard herself speak, she felt ashamed. This is what it is, she realised, to become bitter, to spit out rude gall because your bones are turned to brittleness. She turned and took off her embroidered gardening gloves, while her rage subdued, and then she reached out and took the boy’s hand, as if it belonged to her.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, leading him inside the house to her drawing room, intending, by allowing him into her feminine bower, and by spending a short time asking him questions about his life and opinions, to make him adore her for ever. But after their spiced cup arrived, and she had poured it, she went upstairs to fetch her fan, and while she was looking for the fan, she found an old keepsake from Sir Kenelm, and soon she became unaccountably sleepy. It was already dark when she awoke, remembering the boy downstairs, who had vanished, leaving that long, drooping lily beside her cold cup of spiced wine.
Venetia was surprised at herself. She knew she was voluble and impatient, and many men found her too bold – except Sir Kenelm, who loved her strength – but she was not usually careless enough to abandon a young boy so thoughtlessly. But sometimes carelessness is a way of getting out of what we cannot do. She had always thrived on company. Now she was beginning to conceive a dread of daylight.
No wonder she went out veiled these days. It was a necessary precaution. She wiggled her toes in the cambric bed-sheet, to check she was still alive. ‘The rising sun / Which once I saw / Is now high in the heaven.’ She often made up madrigals about nothing at all, just to make her thoughts musical. She really ought to rise. Chater must have led matins without her. She would tell him she had been at private prayer.
What was it Dr Donne preached, which had so affected her? They went to so many funerals she could not remember whose it was where Donne had looked so thin and shrunken standing in the pulpit, his voice so slow that as he began a new sentence, one feared he might not live to finish it. And yet the light and dark began to mingle in his speaking, and promise answered question, so that questions died away, and on the flow of his speech he carried them, speaking so kindly, so privately to the very heart of each of them, until all were moved to glad wet tears, and the inverse of the doctor’s face, black-skulled, with bone-white burning holes for eyes, remained imprinted on her mind’s eye even now.
Her pillow book was buried in the covers beside her, and she turned to the page where she had copied down that delicious passage: ‘That which we call life is but Hebdomada Mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, dying seven times over. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and so forth, until age dies and determines all.’
Ripeness, she thought, is but the first sign of rot; there is no rest to be had anywhere on this planet. Since it turns, and turns, how can we ever be still? Sir Kenelm had the blame for that. He was the first to tell her that the earth was a hazelnut tossed in the air.
She could feel a new coarsening in her hair, which Kenelm had always stroked and made her laugh by telling her that the Greeks said a soft-haired creature was a soft-hearted one. Throwing back her blankets, like pulling off a plaister, Venetia considered her famous feet, once described by one of James I’s Scots poets as ‘wingèd dreams, each toe a wish’, splayed out fat and graceless on the counterpane. In private she sometimes made horrid faces in the glass, and wobbled her puckered thighs, deliberately tormenting herself. This morning she could not be bothered even to do that.
Ageing is imperceptible. It happens as gradually as a stone staircase wears, or a fan kept in sunlight fades. But to Venetia it had happened slowly and then suddenly, like a huge stock of water drains for a long time, hardly depleted, till the last swills vanish quickly.
I can bear it, she thought, because my husband bears it. He sees beyond the skin. He has deeper vision than most men. Why else would he love me, spoiled as I am? Each day we remain here together, before we go to town, we become more like a family, and he and I grow close again. We kiss each other every night; we wake together every morning. To my love, my husband, I am like a tree he sits beneath; he does not perceive my leaves a-turning.
Every day, the lowing cows in the valley told her it was almost noon, and every day their lowing seemed to come round faster. She rang for Mistress Elizabeth, and set about the business of dressing, unfastening and fastening, and refreshing her curls, thinking of her boys and her husband and preparing her face for the day’s duties of smiling, as Elizabeth tied her stays and fixed her overskirts, and once apparelled in all the fine and starchy fabrics of her station, Venetia felt more like herself. But as the cows bellowed across the far fields, she caught a view of herself in the glass, and screamed a silent scream.
‘That incomparable Sir Kenelm Digbie’s name does sufficiently Auspicate the work. There needs no Rhetoricating Floscules to set it off.’
George Hartman’s Preface to The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Open’d, 1669
Pop! went a woodlouse on the fire.
Scrunch, escrunch, replied Sir Kenelm’s comfortable nib. He was writing up his private notes from the last meeting of his clandestine university, the Invisible College.
Ten Solutions for the Condition of Man, he wrote, as identified, proposed and debated by select fellowes of the Invisible College at their meeting last in ____shire.
1. The Transmutation of Base Metals into Gold.
To this entry he added underneath, with a loose calligraphic flourish:
– Already almost perfectly achieved.
A log on the fire collapsed with a sigh.
2. Perpetuall Fire.
Kenelm checked his notes, crossed out ‘Fire’ and wrote ‘Light.’
A wasp on the window sill rubbed its forefeet together with an infinitely small squelching noise.
3. The Emulation of Fish – the art of continuing long underwater and exercising functions freely thereof, without Engines, by Custome and Education only.
4. Flight – the Emulation of Birds. Note that King Bladud, magus, flew unaided at Bath. His skill – quaere.
He could half-hear snatches of Mistress Elizabeth and Alice outside, chattering ‘. . . lost her bloom.’ ‘What bloom?’ ‘Blooming long ago.’ He rose and pulled the bottle-glass casement shut.
5. The Cure of Wounds at a Distance – by means of the Powder of Sympathy viz. Kenelme Digby’s private receipt.
The laden bough of a pear tree sagged a fraction lower in the orchard. Sir Kenelm’s sleeve brushed rhythmically across the paper; he drew the title with a dragging curlicue. This was his special topic: his legacy. He believed he had the means to cure wounds from a distance, without even meeting the patient. His method was to treat the weapon, not the wound. A bullet, knife, musket, or any vicious instrument could be conveyed to him, and he would treat it with his most precious Powder of Sympathy. The patient writhed and the wound burned as the Powder was rubbed across the blade or bandage; then, if the wound was left open, cleaned but unbandaged, it received the healing Atomes through the air.
‘Pray do not think me peradventure Ineffectual or Superstitious . . .’
Digby always introduced his Powder carefully, because so many men suspected him of sorcery. It was a powerful cure, and Digby felt the burden of being its first practitioner in England. To pass his knowledge on, he entrusted the Invisible College with (almost) all his arcane and valuable material pertaining to the cure, which he delivered as a lecture concisely in two hours, before the Botanists completely stole the show with their diagrammatic explications and so forth. His signet ring clinked against the inkwell as he made notes of the Botanists’ suggestions:
6. The Acceleration of production of Vegetables from Seed.
7. Attaining of Gigantick Dimensions in persons, animals, vegetables.
8. Great strength and agility of body exemplify’d by that of Frantick, Epileptick and Hystericall persons.
The lid on a pot in the kitchen rattled.
Sir Kenelm shuffled the scrap-paper notes he made at the meeting; his head produced as if of its own accord a low humming noise of concentration. His armillary sphere, sitting on the corner of his desk, seemed to respond, and as one of its brass zodiacal hoops shifted of its own accord, the earth’s attitude moved by half a degree.
9. The making of Armour light and extremely hard.
10. Varnishes perfumable by rubbing.
Number 10 was another of his own contributions, based upon the Duke of Tuscany’s writings. Perhaps varnishes could make base, dirty places fresh, or conjure the smell of a distant loved one – he had taken with him to sea Venetia’s kerchief, but its incense-scent was soon gone. It worried him, and he feared she had expired, and taken the scent with her to heaven. Only her letter brought him relief.
His nib protested with a squeak as he wrote:
11. The Making of Parabolicall and Hyperbolicall Glasses. Already practised though without the requisite exactitude.
Some Glasses could be used to perform natural magick, such as the Burning-Glasses of Archimedes, which whipped the sun’s cavalry into lined formation and so set fire to enemy ships three miles away.
12. The Making of Glass Malleable.
This, in his private estimation, would never happen.
In the scullery, a maid rent one of his old shirts loudly in two.
13. Potent drugs to alter or exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory and other functions, appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.
14. Pleasing dreams exemplify’d by the Egyptian electuary.
The Egyptian alchemist Zosimus had a herbal formula for pleasant dreams which some of the Invisibles were working to recreate. Kenelm believed that men’s minds were enlarged by dreaming, because then they breathed the spirit of gracefulness, or pneuma.
In the kitchen a pan of water came to the brink of boiling.
15. Freedom from necessity of much sleeping.
Geese panicked; wood smoke laughed out of the tall chimneys at Gayhurst; wind played notes across the neck of an old bottle. He was now writing fast, from Imagination.
16. The recovery of youth, or at least some of the marks of it, as new Teeth, Hair coloured as in youth.
A cockerchaff spun on its back, whirring like a clock. One of the piles of books in his study crashed to the ground. He thought he heard Venetia scream. He reached out to touch the armillary sphere on the corner of his desk and sent the earth’s girdle spinning.
17. The prolongation of life itself.
Sir Kenelm felt a shadow fall, and he knew Mercurius had left the room. He put down his nib and closed his eyes.
‘Venetia Stanley was a most beautifull and desirable creature . . . She was so commonly courted that it was written over her lodging one night in literis uncialibus [in capital letters]: “PRAY COME NOT NEER, FOR DAME VENETIA STANLEY LODGETH HERE.” . . . She had a most lovely and sweet turn’d face, delicate darke-browne haire. She had a perfectly healthy constitution much enclining to a bona roba (near altogether). Her face, a short oval; dark-browne eie-browes about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eie-lids.’
John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 1669–96
‘When she raises her eyelids, it’s like she’s taking off all her clothes.’
Colette, Claudine and Annie, 1903
TEN YEARS AGO, when the sun revolved around the earth and James I was King, crowds used to scream when they saw Venetia’s carriage approaching. Girls and beardless boys would wait hours for the chance to see her pass. In those days her face was always at the window of her carriage; she would even cross back and forth between both windows, to give all-comers a chance to see her. She was more spoken of than seen, like a great sight of nature, a cave or a crystal, Wookey Hole or the Badbury Rings. Except unlike those monuments she would never stay still, and her life was a constant kicking up of dust, for she was very often undertaking journeys, to preserve herself from rakes and bloods and panting nobles, so she said.
Sometimes horseguards had to clear the street to let her pass. Servingwomen dropped their dishes and crossed themselves when they saw her; men who met her either became so bold and eloquent they would not stop talking, or lost their train of thought and coloured. She had a face luscious enough to make her most banal remark seem profound, and she had grace and pride besides, a self-sameness, which was hers and only hers: a haecceitas in Latin – a ‘thisness’. Venetia Anastasia was noble born, of course, and yet she would not walk stiffly, like so many ladies, but loose and smooth, and all her hair and flesh was hers, not stuck with patches or white-faced with fard or sewn with horsehair. She was warm and live, and there was carnality in the slowness of her blink.
No wonder women would not let her near their husbands. When the nobles referred to her between themselves, they whistled and drew curves in the air with their fingers. They called her ‘bona roba’, which sounded like a compliment, but implied she was light. Her name was often abbreviated familiarly to ‘Venice’ – especially by knaves seeking to play up a small acquaintance. Kenelm’s mother would rather send her son to Madrid than suffer him to marry her – and it became fashionable to remark, saucily, that though Mary Digby sought to send her son to Spain, he had as lief stay at home in Venice.
The bloods of the English court were then in Madrid kicking their heels pretending to hasten ‘The Match’ between Charles of England and the King of Spain’s daughter. Elaborate Habsburg protocol had clouded the matter, but the English were beginning to recognise that the Infanta was not to be wooed. They never saw the Infanta, except behind a screen. Charles wanted an opportunity to appeal to her, face-to-face, and he discovered that every morning she walked with her ladies barefoot through the dew of her private garden.
Kenelm was the boy in the tree who gave the signal to John Suckling that the Infanta was come out walking; Suckling leaped over the wall, and broke Charles’s fall after him. And so England’s heir jumped, rolled through the rose bushes, and accosted the Infanta he would make his bride, who ran away screaming.
While Kenelm was in Madrid, Venetia became celebrated at court. Both Sackville brothers pursued her, and songs were made up about her, and women copied her hair, and her clothes. She always favoured intense blues, and as she grew more scandalous, receiving Richard Sackville’s kisses, and his younger brother’s favours, the shades of blue she wore grew stronger. She was seen in a shocking new draper’s hue that flashed like a kingfisher’s wing, a very Papistical blue, unreliable, continental, the ne plus ultra of blues. It was made from a pigment of lapis lazuli – it would have been cheaper to buy a dress of beaten gold – and when she wore it in the sun she seethed like one of Kenelm’s alchemical mithridates. The new blue was called ‘Ultramarine’, a word that rolled about country folks’ mouths too much, so they called it ‘Venetia’s Blue’ instead.
In Wiltshire once she stayed upstairs above an inn, as John Aubrey recorded, with high-born gents attending – Sackville, and some of his roaring rakells – with only her cousin George Stanley as keeper of her modesty. The landlord was delighted and put a sign outside the tavern (in capital letters), which pretended to warn people off, but only served to advertise her presence. Crowds assembled. It was on the feast of St Philip, close after St George’s day, and there was mischief abroad and summer dust in the air. St Philip’s day used to be the old feast of Floralia, and women were decked in flowers, coronets of daisies and scabious and viper’s bugloss, and they gathered outside the tavern, for women were always as wont to see Venetia as the men. Before nightfall the innkeeper was drunk dry. Men from villages as far as seven miles away – strangers, never seen before – were drumming on the empty kegs.
Venetia peeped out of the upstairs window wearing a borrowed servant’s cap and shaking out a dishclout, so those below, certain it was not she, shouted up clamouring for news of Lady Venetia and she, quite sullen, shouted back, ‘There’s no such fine lady here, only wenches and strumplings tonight!’, then disappeared inside and slammed the window.
Eventually the magistrate’s men came and dispersed the crowd for public affray. Her roaring friends adored it, but the innkeeper wanted compensation.
Her beauty made her almost wild. And her wildness made her beautiful. She could do as she pleased. Sometimes she wore her hair loose and half-tangled, sometimes she slouched and sucked her cheeks. Sometimes she danced when there was no music. She was never sluttish, and to kiss someone she did not love was an abhorrence to her, except when she felt like it.
Men had a passion then for the paintings of Titian, which they would keep hidden in their closets, showing them to one another as favours, by candlelight – and there was something of the Titian about Venetia, whose pomegranate smile’s red and whiteness was a splitting fruit. Her black fur cape was always about to slip to show her shoulders, like the girlie in the painting Stradling brought back from Madrid and carried always with him in his travelling trunk. Other times she was all froth and fancy, Fragonard’s slipper already flying off its swing, a hundred years too soon.
She was no great reader or writer, but that can make a person’s foxy instincts sharper. She could feel when she was being looked at, even in the dark, and she had a sense for secrets. She was impatient, and restless, and most men found nothing wifely in her. Neither Sackville brother wanted her for marriage, though once she let the elder walk with her alone in public, which gave the gossips much to munch on.
Higher delights and sweeter fancies she always sought, till, surfeiting of joy, she held an Evening of Melancholy, to which all the guests wore black. From the astrologer-physician Richard Napier she bought candles that were mixed with puck’s fog, so they flamed with silver light, and she set smoked mirrors round her black-draped room, and in the brittle black-and-white light, she glowed like a siren of the silver screen, whose every film is lost.
She was named for the opulent, liquid State whence dark impassioned canvases came. Once in a court masque of the Great Rivers called Tethys Festival, she played Venice. Her Grace Lady Elizabeth Stuart was the nymph of the Thames, and the Countess of Essex the nymph of the Lee, and the Viscountess Haddington the nymph of the Rother, and Venetia, just fourteen, was the nymph of the Grand Canal. She was meant to be part of the set dressing, playing a cloud, but James’s Queen, Anna of Denmark, picked her out and promoted her so that she might walk solo across the stage wearing a Doge’s cap, very still and solemn, pulling a long, heavy green train behind her. Before she left the stage, she cast one deeply knowing smile back at the audience.
‘F’neesha! F’neesha!’ the women waiting to see her chanted as they waited to kiss her hand. She was excessively, undeservedly venerated, which is a form of oppression.
She would not have understood why it should be considered that. She loved attention, sought it out. Great ladies, stars and princesses often believe that public adoration confers on them an influence or power, which it is their destiny to put to use. But Venetia did not have this do-gooding impulse. She went through the motions of charity only. She had the heart of a pagan pleasure-goddess, and her instincts told her to look after her own, and to hell with the rest. The adulation made her run faster and stronger, gathering power as she lost control.
But within Venetia ran a crack, which fame had covered, and now her fame was gone the crack showed again, deeper and wider. The attention she received curdled to scrutiny, the envious admiration to calumny, or pity. And that was only the beginning, only the first turning of the tide that would roll against her, now her name was two broken promises. In the year of her birth, only maggot-brained philosophers would repeat the heresy that the earth moved round the sun. But the printing presses shifted heaven and earth, so that our sublunary pit was re-imagined as a magnetic ball or ‘terrella’, which rotated around the sky, and by the time she was thirty this was the new orthodoxy, and there was a new king.
No wonder she wore a mask and veil these days, now she had tired eyes, and even the new king was no longer new, and the earth moved round the sun.
Dapper: I long to see her Grace.
Subtle: You must be bath’d and fumigated first:
Besides, the Queen of Fairy does not rise
Till it be noon.
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1610
Bidding her coachman wait behind a brake of trees, Venetia climbed out at a spot near the Dingles, the bank of cottages beyond the loam pits at the far side of the village of Clophill, six miles from Gayhurst. Hooded, and wearing her tall wooden chopine platforms, she picked her way around a chicken-foot lying on the verge at the crossroads. She was undertaking to visit one Begg Gurley. Most tradespeople – hatters, seamstresses, apothecaries – visited Lady Digby at home, but Begg Gurley was not exactly a tradesperson. She did not pay calls, as she might be apprehended in the street for soliciting her devious trade; she left no footsteps for fear they would be filled with wax by her enemies and thus her feet turned lame. If Venetia was discovered at her cottage, at least it would be clear she had come of her own accord. Blind Begg Gurley was a wise-woman, and some called her Dame Kind, or Mother Nature, while others called her Witch.
As she approached the cottages, with their flags of chimney smoke flying, a mongrel licking its flank eyed her from one doorstep, and a dirty child ran away shrieking. She had been here once before, seeking advice on how to make friends with Kenelm’s mother Mary Mulsho, and together they had wrapped Mary Mulsho’s dirty kerchief up in string and buried it in the garden, and although Venetia had found the whole process a little embarrassing, still, who was to prove it had not worked?
‘Is that my friend Lady Diggy?’ she heard a voice call within. ‘Will she not pull back the curtain?’
Venetia did so, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the smoky room, she recognised the huge motherly figure of Begg Gurley sitting in her wicker chair, her head back, her eyes closed, her hands poised apart on her knees. As she felt Venetia’s shadow her eyes flipped open.
‘Oh my lady,’ she said quietly, looking straight through Venetia with cloudy white eyes. ‘You poor lady.’
She stretched open her arms wide and Venetia fell to be hugged to her bosom. ‘There, there.’ Burying her face in the rough flannel of her frontage, Venetia cried a brief burst of tears that came from nowhere like rain in April. ‘There, there,’ said Mother Nature, patting her back. ‘Begg will make all better. Is it my Lord Sir Kenelm?’
‘Yes, I fear his lack of love,’ said Venetia, sniffing.
‘Is it my Lord’s absence?’
‘No. He is so good to me and I only hope he means it.’
Venetia felt understanding radiating from Begg. She was even comforted by her purblindness because it meant she could not turn an assessing eye upon her face.
Afterwards, Venetia could not recall how Begg had seemed to know everything without being told. In fact, Venetia had spoken a great deal, and talked of many private matters, while Begg said again and again the word ‘yes’ in little audible gasps, seeming to inhale Venetia’s anxiety, her big body absorbing it like a bullfrog.
Sir Kenelm had done Venetia an injury she had been nursing like an ulcer. Now she could claim sympathy for it. He had brought her, as a present from the Continent, a pair of revolting snails, whorly and horned. ‘He said their slime might be taken as a cure for my complexion, “to hasten its recovery from childbirth” – those were his self-same words.’ As Venetia started to cry, very sorry for herself, her perfect nose growing quite pink, Begg’s eyes focused on a spot above her head, so intently they almost crossed.
‘And his books! He is a man possessed. If he can come by any book, in any language, he must buy it, though there is no shelf left at home, and he can never read them all. And yet he piles them about the house, and touches them fore and aft with his loving hands . . . Sometimes I wish I were a book, that he might make such love to me!’
Begg shook her head gravely, tutting, though Venetia was laughing and crying simultaneously. Thus unburdened, sniffing with satisfaction and dabbing her face, she followed Begg’s eyes up and flinched as, right above her head, she saw a tiny spider descending from the rafters.
‘Don’t mind him, my lady, that’s just my old spinner called Joe,’ said Begg. ‘Him’ll stop his weaving once we have an idea of how to help my Lady Diggy.’ As Begg spoke, her empty fingers twiddled forwards. ‘I think you would do well to receive help, my lady, and it doesn’t seem like many are there that can or will help you, except perhaps some little friends of mine.’ Begg reversed the direction of her twiddling fingers.
‘As it happens, a great dame called Lady Lily Trickle is staying with me today. Perhaps you knows her, as fine ladies do tends to knows one another.’
‘No,’ said Venetia.
‘Lady Lily Trickle,’ called Begg, ringing a bell, ‘wills you join us?’
There was a muffled noise of alarm behind the curtain to the adjoining room, as if Lady Trickle had forgotten to prepare herself in time.
Begg Gurley dropped her voice discreetly low, and said to Venetia: ‘My Lady Trickle is approaching eighty year old, but as you will see I have helped her stay a very dainty lady. She has been courted by a great prince in the past and she is very friendly with fairies.’
Her ladyship struggled out from behind the curtain. She was between three and four foot tall, and her head was covered in a downy blonde hair, rather scant, and her face was round and waxy, like a mooncalf. She was wearing a damask kirtle and mochado waistcoat, and Venetia wondered how she dared. The local sumptuary laws meant that only an alderman or sheriff’s wife could wear mochado. Still, she was the size of a child, and perhaps the rules were excepted for fairies’ friends. Her eyelids were heavy, which gave her a look of insolent pride. She did not speak.
‘Good afternoon, my lady,’ said Begg. ‘Pray, nod once to indicate you are a living person and not an happarition of conjurement!’
She nodded.
‘Pray nod to indicate the truth, and stamp to shew a lie. Do you have help maintaining your beauty, my Lady Trickle?’
She both stamped and nodded, being confused.
‘We shall try again, dear. Do you have help maintaining your beauty?’
She nodded.
‘First, for the protection of our souls, are you in league with the Luciferian?’
She stamped.
‘Good. Are you assisted in the care of your skin by right and proper tidy little people?’
She nodded.
‘How do you pay them – with silver?’
She stamped her foot.
‘With gold?’
She nodded.
‘Thank you, my Lady Trickle, I expect if we are so lucky we will summon some of the tidy folk now to see if they can help our friend Lady Diggy in her trouble.’
Lady Trickle stamped anxiously, twice.
‘What is it pray? Oh, yes. You are concerned that the tidy folk will not come if Lady Diggy can see them. If you will, my lady?’
Venetia had neither given consent nor protested before Begg Gurley and Lady Lily Trickle tied a piece of cloth around her eyes, and she was put to lie back in the wicker chair.
‘One to summon the lords!’ Begg said, and a tiny tinkle-bell rang.
‘Two to call the ladies!
‘Three to bid them dance!’
Venetia felt feathery tickle-steps dancing across her cheeks, and the asthmatic wheeze of Begg Gurley, whose breath smelled of hazelnuts. Venetia felt a laugh rising in her chest, like a fart that will out, and she had to try hard not to explode with laughter. She thought of crows and cold water.
‘My Lady Diggy smiles to feel the little lords and ladies gavotte upon her cheek,’ said Begg.
‘Aaaaye,’ squeaked Lady Trickle. There was the small sound of skin on skin, and Venetia intuited that Lady Trickle had been reprimanded with a slap for interrupting.
‘Now they lay their habilements upon your forehead, their gowns and ruffs,’ said Begg in a syrupy-sweet voice, as if Venetia was a child at bedtime. She felt a light pitter-pat upon her face, as if fresh rose petals with a hint of mildew to them were being dropped upon her forehead from above. ‘La, la, la,’ sighed Begg, as the petals dropped.
‘And now the little folks’ chariots made of vegetables await.’
Venetia could not resist. ‘Are they drawn by mice?’