Viper Wine (12 page)

Protestantism had his respect, and Catholicism his heart, but Hermetical philosophy, the Great Work, engaged his Imaginative soul, his deepest self. To be Catholic, to be Protestant – both seemed so limited when there was a Third Way. The real devotions he practised were in his laboratory, in the sublimations and transubstantiations, when the red sulphur died and the white peacock rose.

The Queen had been generous to them, though sometimes Kenelm wished she would be less so. Her talk of undertaking a barefoot pilgrimage in honour of Kenelm’s ‘martyred’ father grieved and embarrassed Kenelm. It could only open old wounds. He found himself snapping at her, Let it lie, madame –
laisse tomber, madame, je vous en prie.
After this outburst, he expected to fall out of favour with her, but he found she was fonder, warmer with him, and she began to call him her Chevalier d’Igby.

The fact that it was not a mass, only vespers, held outdoors, convinced Kenelm finally that they ought to attend, and Venetia threw herself into preparation, but their ambivalence showed itself in multiple mis-starts and delays to their journey – a lost pair of shoes, a carriage boy unbidden. The house was still in chaos with only half their things unpacked, but the business of the move seemed to have taken Venetia out of herself. She had found new strength, albeit superficial, glib and smiling, and in the coach she was full of chat and speculation about how changed their friends would be.

Young drabs and dolls and tuppenny-boys were gathered on the Strand watching the traffic of carriages arriving at Somerset House, and as the Digbys’ escutcheoned coach turned the corner, many surged forward in unison to greet their goddess. Venetia, recognising this crowd-frenzy that always attended her, clutched Kenelm’s hand, saying ‘No, no!’ excitedly, and shielding her face. But the crowd’s movement had been motivated only by the opening of a beer-hatch on the lower Drury Tavern, and as they ran and queued it was clear they had no interest in the Digbys’ coach at all. Kenelm, preoccupied by the royal halberdiers, barely noticed Venetia’s mistake; Chater, whom they had invited to ride with them, bit his lip and looked out of the window.

Carriages rammed the street, and pikemen were checking every guest. The church chimes had already stopped when the Digbys finally entered the courtyard. The evening sky was like a stage-cloth, marbled pink and blue, and the air was Popish with incense, sweet clouds that hastened night and judgement on them all, as swallows turned tricks in the air, fast and faster till they became bats. Outdoors pews were packed with the congregation, whom Venetia ate up with her eyes, at least a hundred friends, or something like friends – so many massed and half-forgotten faces that Venetia had not seen for several years’ exile at Gayhurst during her childbearing and Kenelm’s absence. As they processed up the aisle of courtyard flagstones, Chater trotting in behind them, Venetia’s eyes roved over everyone:

Master Stump’s brow has become heavy since he lost his property. My Lady Cecil’s face still has a lovely trusting turn, white as a legume, which never felt a moment’s sin or pleasure. Dame Peterkin’s jaw will not be trifled with. If those dark curls piled on top of her head are her own, then dogs can sing syllogisms. They’re wired horse hair, I warrant. That fine lady, whoever she is, has an ale-sot’s puffed and broken veins; this man eats too much meat and his eyes bulge. God forgive us all, for our souls are written in our faces.

There is my coz Lettice – red is not a becoming colour to her – let me reach to hold her hand briefly. Bless her, for she cannot have found any friends yet – there she is sitting next to two old matrons twice her age. Lady Vavasour has drunk the silver tincture cure for the French pox, and her skin has turned grey-blue.

Old Dame Overall has plaisters under her wig that draw the sagging skin tighter off her face. Dame Overall’s friend, her sister perhaps, has not used any plaisters and looks softer, looser, older. Hard to judge who looks worse between them. One has fought, the other submitted. Both are tragic.

Venetia nodded respectfully at Aletheia Howard, the Countess of Arundel, thinking: She has filled her paps out with paper and her eyebrows are made from mink-hair and egg white, but she looks good on’t.

Is that Olivia Porter? I do believe it is. Greetings, my dear. No sign of Endymion – he is more careful than to show himself here but he sends his wife alone. Olive looks unnaturally radiant. Like a fifteen-year-old girl who knows too much of life. And yet she is a mother of four living and more dead. I swear nature alone never made her cheek so flushed and peachy. I shall know more of this.

‘Praise the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,’ said Venetia, bobbing to the altarpiece set up where the new chapel would rise. Yes, she believed in the reading of faces, which was why she was wearing a veil to church: I would rather they thought me modest than knew me blown.

In front of the altar stone, beside the candles, glowed bowls of new roses, fresh red. A blown rose had more grace and pathos than a crisp new rose, but no one wanted a blown rose. You wouldn’t give so much as a penny for their soft, wide-open faces, and their petals, which dropped at the lightest finger-touch; their pale evening scent carried further than new roses, but was touched with tiredness and putrefaction. The saying jingled in her head like coin –
Against the blown rose they will stop their nose, that kneeled unto the buds.

Venetia preceded Kenelm into their reserved pew. Oh Lord, thank you for giving us a good pew, near the front. Here we are again, foremost at the Queen’s court. It is the very smartest place to be this evening, like a little piece of France. Forbidden Vespers practised
en plein air
, the very nerve. Oh Lord, forgive me for taking mass only at home, in private. Oh Lord, keep Kenelm safe and let him not fall out of standing in the eyes of men. Oh Lord, let him be made a lord. We can see almost everyone here from this pew. Oh Lord, who suffered for our sins, thank you. Oh Lord, let them not think my beauty gone. Oh Lord, protect my children. Oh Lord, forgive me always.

Their thoughts high and low interwove until the congregation’s mind seemed to condense and take shape into clouds of incense hanging above them.

First came the Dismal Dozen, the Capuchin friars sent over by Cardinal Richelieu, hooded, and flat-footed, their censers swinging, ropes of tiny skulls knotted at their waists. Next, the Queen, looking as excited as a girl on her saint’s day, accompanied by her favourite, the Scots Franciscan, Father Conn. Venetia stood facing the altarpiece solemnly, refusing to look gawpishly at the congregation. She felt their eyes, hot with scrutiny: has Venetia had the pox? Is she with child again, or is she merely fat? Well, she supposed, some heads here must be at prayer.

As Father Conn prayed for the purification of the soul of the new chapel’s architect, Master Inigo Jones, she heard a deep voice call ‘Amen’ too loudly. It was Ben Jonson. Jonson and Jones were still at odds, then. The one could not make a masque without the other, for every setting needs a theme, and yet they loved to quarrel. She could see Jonson’s great bulk in a pew also near the front. How that man swells! He must be close to 20 stones. Venetia could not resist leaning forward, to catch another look at his eyes, one of which seemed to have grown larger and lower than the other, perhaps because of a palsy. He winked at her – or was it a twitch? He was gross, distended, and yet the odour of the person he used to be clung to him.

They loved each other well, when they were both beginners, she a beauty and he a Coming Man of Letters, poor and hasty and a little self-glorious, but the quickest wit she ever knew. He could mimic a voice, or pick up a person’s mode of speaking, as quick as walk in mud. They used to talk in their own language together, laughing in corners. Now, though they were both changed, her heart rose to meet him as ever before, and she knew that human love was stronger than decay. The platitude was true: love endured. Love overcame. Not in an empty, courtly, sonneteering way, but manifestly. She knew this – and yet she could not forgive herself for growing older.

While her lips said the catechism, Venetia thought of Olive, and her bright, peeled complexion, and yearned to know what change had overtaken Olive. Was she in love? Was she ill? There was something feverish in her eye, which showed unusually dark. She thought of asking Kenelm if he noticed anything different about Olive, but she knew the answer would be no. Seeing her standing glowing and pert at the corner of her pew, he might have remembered how much he liked her, or been struck how pretty she was. But he would never have questioned why, or how – or even observed his own observation. Half of us, she thought, are surface creatures; half of us have deeper understanding.

Veiled, Venetia was a riveting spectacle to the congregation. It was as if an arrow were pointing to and obscuring her face. People longed to see what had become of her. Those who could not help themselves craned their necks as she went past, longing to see her ravaged, no matter that they prayed for her beauty’s preservation. There was even something compelling about the veil itself, the sheerest pale grey Cyprus that seemed to breathe with her. The veil was the perfect costume – demure, disguised. Reformed, perhaps. She knew she ought to pay lip-service to the idea that she was reformed now she was married and no longer infamous, and so forth, but she had always been impervious to the idea that she was scandalous in the first place. She had never been kept, never a courtesan. Her private wealth had given her outrageous freedom, that was all. There was nothing in her that knew how to apologise. She was so sure, so completely certain, as she entered any room, of her power, of her contribution to the sum of beauty in the world. And yet she had always been vulnerable too, wounded by the smallest slight, and turned into a pathetic self-doubting creature by such a nothing as a kind word left unsaid, or a sum she could not add.

Her unpredictability was like a drug to Kenelm. He was elated by her approval and fearful of her sadness. To hide these passions of his, he had developed a steady, watchful exterior which did not betray how much he regarded her opinion in everything, how very much he wanted her to have her own way. For her to be denied was agony to him. He believed she was always right, even when she was unreasonable. She was deft and sure in all her instincts when he was blundering and over-educated and obscure. Because she was excessive, he had always to play at being reasonable; because she was volatile, he needed to pretend to be steadfast. Thus he was become a man. He reached for her hand after the paternoster.

Kenelm’s mind moved on to his Hermetic studies, as he looked at the bright green stones mounted on the High Cross ahead of them and thought of the mounted, valiant troops of winged horsemen, invisible to the eye, which stream forth in purposive armies out of precious stones, in order to heal, improve and refine – unseen and unseeing, and yet the air is full of them, as thick as motes of dust in sunshine. This put him in mind of the missing emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which had so much goodness emanating from it, and he considered – with the small inhalation that attends a new thought – if it might be discovered buried at the spot on earth where food is most plentiful, health most abundant and people live as long as Enoch who had 350 years . . .

Kenelm wondered where the King was. He had heard he might be here, in disguise. Charles and Queen Henrietta-Maria were good friends now, after their bad beginning. She had been stiff with jealousy of the Duke of Buckingham. Kenelm had seen it himself, when Buckingham was showing off to the King, doing some intolerable little dance for him, the Queen had walked out – furious, not looking back, taking with her a troop of ladies-in-waiting who followed one by one. But Buckingham was dead, stabbed by the ten-penny cutler’s knife of a half-mad soldier, and in his grief the King had found the Queen, and he called her ‘Mary’ and they represented themselves as Hermetic twins, as one person on all matters, except religion. The joke was even whispered at court, after it was censored from the script of Davenant’s winter masque:

‘The King is in love.’

‘With whom?’

‘With the Queen.’

‘In love with his own Wife! That’s held incest in Court.’

Kenelm breathed deeply, as if trying to smell the royal presence. He scanned the congregation for a hooded person, a God disguised. Yes, there were a few cloaked nobles standing suspiciously together, high-ruffed and wearing hats, their heads down. Amid them, short, bow-legged, was that the King? The
Fidei Defensor
? Thus concealed, he could please his wife and yet not displease his people. Ha! We live, thought Kenelm, in playful times. Be mutable, be flexible, Ken. He wondered if the nearness of the King’s body could be felt emanating through the congregation, despite his disguise. Perhaps his royal body also put forth streams of invisible noble cavalry, like a sort of human jewel.

Deposuit potentes . . . Exaltavit humiles . . .
The congregation rose as the censer swung. Chater had slipped into a back pew along with a tutor he knew, and a moody Spanish ambassador. Chater scanned the congregation for people of note and fashionable hats. He noted that Master Wurbeck’s hose were definitely too tight. The boys’ singing rose pure and clear and the storm lanterns were lit down the aisle as the sky turned indigo. Chater noticed that Lady Margaret seemed to be with child again. Chater
loved
church.

He could spy Sir Kenelm if he leaned forwards. Sir Kenelm’s tawny-golden hair was now growing wonderfully long, and curled so naturally. As the congregation knelt Chater caught a flash of Kenelm’s strong stockinged calf. It was as if its veins were throbbing in time with Chater’s heart. Chater shut his eyes. ‘God help me to love Sir Kenelm as my master,’ he prayed, ‘and to assist Lady Venetia in her spiritual progress and never think ill of her.’

Holy water was scattered over the ground and Father Conn raised his voice loud to warn off the scourging angel of plague. And lastly, when night had absolutely fallen, there was a solemn prayer that all those present might be spared by the Lord to live to worship in the new chapel when it had risen from that spot, and in agreement, the congregation with one voice and one heart for the first time in the whole evensong, joined to say a true Amen.