Viper Wine (15 page)

‘Sirs,’ said Drebbel, ‘your rowing is at fault, not my mathematics.’ Jeering ensued. The argument was abated by one of the sons-in-law who said, without conviction, that they would all sail, but not till a few hours hence, when the river-tide had turned.

Endymion Porter and Edward Carew went off to climb the ferny Greenwich wilderness up the hill about the tower, or glimpse the ruins of the old Plesaunce palace, while others lay about under the awning, chatting, but in an off mood, disputatious, doubtful. Kenelm wandered for a slash behind a tree.

Legs unsteady, his head aching from the submarine, he laced himself up and headed back, slowly, pausing to inspect the shoresmen’s horses, careless talk from the awning was carried on the breeze towards him. Their voices were guilty with gossip.

‘Aye, his father. Pale, he looked, and his eyes very puffy, but he made a goodly show of it.’

‘At Powles, was this?’

‘Aye, he was dragged through the street behind a horse’s tail. The other plotters were jackanapes. They were ill-made men. Not him. He looked more like a thing of heaven than of the other place. The crowd was oh, deathly quiet as he bade farewell to each of his former friends by name: “My Lord Darnley, long have I loved thee”; “Dear Lady Segismund, goodbye”, and so forth, just as easily as he was wont to do when he went from court or out of the city, to his own house in the country.’

‘He was as fair and fine a man as I have ever seen.’

‘As fair and foul. He tried to kill our fathers, mine certainly, and yours, and yours.’

‘When he was convicted he cried out to the jury, “Do you forgive me?” And to a man, they answered, “Aye.”’

‘He was awake to till the very last?’

‘Yes, hung by the neck only a little, so he saw his bowels turned out in front of him, and then the hangman went to work on his vitals, and leaned on his knife to get purchase on his heart, and held up before the crowd, so!’

Kenelm heard his friends make low tutting noises. He shut his eyes before the sun and saw shapes pulsing red and melting white. It was a tale he knew well; it was his father’s execution.

‘Then the hangman gave his cry, “Behold the heart of a traitor!” To which the man himself replied: “Thou liest!”’

The company made groaning noises; someone thumped upon the table. ‘Nay, nay,’ said one voice, ‘I do not believe it.’ Another voice: ‘Francis Bacon saw it.’

Sir Kenelm could take no more and strode into the tent. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and only a stiffness in his neck showed he was not himself. For a second the three men seemed to think they had got away with it.

Ned said, ‘Ken, we thought you were up the hill.’

‘Aye,’ Kenelm said tightly.

‘We meant no insult by our talk, I would have you know that, Ken, I would,’ said Ned, rising.

‘Aye, you would,’ said Ken in a playful, frightful voice. Then he put on his hat, backwards, and picked up a half-eaten lobster from the table and made it dance like a puppet, waving its claws, and saying in a high pipsqueak voice: ‘Oh, Lord Darnley, oh, Lady Segismund, farewell, it seems I am a traitor. I never meant to harm ye . . .’ Ken put the lobster’s face right up against Ned’s. ‘I would have warned you if I could, before we made our little firework display . . .’ The three men laughed, loudly and uncomfortably. The lobster’s two black eyes shook on their stalks and his empty carcass danced, as it looked around at them all, full of wonder and pathetic malice, and Kenelm had him sing ‘Eeee’ in a creaky voice, like the puppet Mr Punch, while the lobster, consumed by anger, started bashing its head against on the table, sending shell-shards flying.

‘Eee, I would have you know I was played like a puppet by the plotters,’ said Kenelm in his lobster falsetto. ‘My wife?’ The lobster looked urgently in the face of Sir James, then up and down his body assessingly, and the uncomfortable laughter grew. ‘No, you are not my wife.’ It turned to Ned Denny, and looked him inquisitively up and down as well. ‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘You are not my wife either.’ The lobster shook its head. ‘My son?’ it said, looking around again, then seeming to have seen its own puppeteer, threw itself on Kenelm’s own neck. The others jumped back, laughing, embarrassed. Then the lobster looked again sad and alone, squeaking: ‘But now, aye me, I am undone, I am for the pot.’

And Kenelm threw the lobster on the bright red cooking coals and then tipped a cup of bastard over him so the whole mess sizzle-screamed and smoked. The men cheered and tapped their signet rings against their tin cups, so they ding-ding-dinged. But they were mighty confused and their blood was up, in case at any moment Kenelm turned upon them with a poignard.

‘I meant no dishonour by it, Ken.’

‘The dishonour is all my father’s, sir,’ said Ken, smiling, not looking at him. He bowed graciously, which was harder still for Ned to bear.

Ken insisted on renouncing his seat on the submarine, and did not stay to watch it sail. Instead, he climbed the hill at Greenwich, to stand on the line marked by standing stones and menhirs where the time was once told by the sun. He marched up the steep knoll easily, breathing deeply, rabbits’ scut-tails bobbing ahead of him under the racing sky. It did him good to see the runic stones, to run his finger over their long-carved patterns. He felt as if his time was set to a new o’clock. All things pass.

He wandered next through a sweet sunlit dell where through the bright-lit green he heard a bird cry: Milk, milk milk today?

He paused. It was the London milk-sellers’ street cry, sung by a bird. It came again, swooping and familiar: Milk, milk, milk today?

Another bird replied: Cherries! Cherries!

What was this? Street cries, from tiny feathered throats. The words were indistinct, of course, but the tune was the same as in the market. Had a family of crooked streetsellers been bewitched and sent to live in a nest? Or were these traitors turned skylarks, men’s lying tongues poured into quick little dust-bathing bodies?

Meelk, meelk, meelk?

Che-rries! Che-rries!

The bower was green and silent and Kenelm turned around, looking for the birds, feeling he was being tested like a knight in a fable, who must resist enchantment.

Pipit, pipit, cherries!

Another bird joined in, like a wherryman: Sideside, ho; sideside, ho.

Milk, milk, milk. Freeeeeesh.

Sidey-sidey bankside, ho, pipit.

Perhaps they were rare sentient canaries, escaped from the old Plesaunce palace below. Then how would they know the street cries? More likely – yes, this must be it – they were birds once caged for sale on Cheapside or Seething Lane, who had heard street cries all their lives, and were now either released or escaped, and come to hide out in the trees together and rehearse their cries in strophe and antistrophe. Perhaps that was why they were so tame, singing close to him and yet never letting themselves be seen for fear of capture. Kenelm made a mental note to record this. He recalled something similar in Montaigne.

And there was another strange bird call, Brrring! Brrring! Bright and tight as a bell. Brrring! Brrring!

Speaking? said Kenelm. Hello?

He knew that birds often imitated bells and whistles, calls and ringtones.

Beep, beep.

Ping!

With his arms raised to heaven he span around the glade in a circle while the birds quizzled and cheeped and sang to him in tongues, and his spirit resounded with joy because he was a knight who lived by reason and logic, and knew these birds were not mechanical trifles from a sorcerer’s foundry, or enchanted prisoners of Circe, but only poor little living creatures, escaped. He felt as if he had cut himself free from cobwebs of illusion, and he was resolved to live without them, in the open air of rationality. Experiment, observation, inductive reasoning – these were his methods. Metamorphosis was Ovid’s way, a classical delusion. The ancients’ age of prophecy was over. No longer would men live by myths and children’s stories.

When Kenelm descended from the hill, healed as ever by the efflorescence of new ideas in his fertile mind, he saw that the green silk pavilion had gone, and there was no sign of it except for a stain on the grass, some charred debris and a few loiterers. Chater was waiting with the horses, and Venetia too, her head poking out of the window of her carriage alertly, like a lapdog; confident and hopeful that she was about to see him arrive safely, yet physically unable to relax until it happened.

As she waited, watching the trees blowing, she sang to herself at first, and then, growing bored, and fearful, she thought of all the things she would like to say to Kenelm: first, there are too many books in the house, there is not room to shelve them all, and yet you insatiably buy more, at what cost? All the penniless antiquarians know you for your tender heart and come to our door hawking books in Aramaic script and suchlike fustian babble. And this business of the bathysphere. What fantastick invention will you ride next upon the waves? A harnessed dolphin, or torpedo . . .?

Staring at the Greenwich grass, she was so expectant, consumed, for once, with looking rather than being seen, that she had forgotten that her face was bare and unadorned, with the morning’s paint worn off – until the moment when Kenelm appeared, when the strain seemed to widen the crack in her nature, and she remembered to half-cover her face and look coquettishly at him. They held each other tightly, and pressed their cheeks together. In her happiness she forgot every complaint she had against him. When he held her close, his smell touched her like a drug. He breathed her sweet pomander, and closing his eyes he saw the figure

OR
₇
D
₄

in his mind’s eye, and he knew it to be the codename given to the isolated genetic olfactory receptor in Venetia’s blood which made her swoon for his tired body’s smell, because they were mathematically matched as lovers must be, their sequences interlocking, their separate selves fractions and the sum of their parts a whole number, prime, indivisible.

Chater looked on with long face and bulging sad eyes as they embraced. Venetia went on ahead in her carriage, trundling lightly over the grassy tracks, while Kenelm mounted the horse brought for him by Chater.

Kenelm felt wrung dry. Today he had breathed underwater and drunk sunlight, he had been cheered as a hero, taken part in an enterprise worthy of a new Atlantis – and yet at the last his old dishonour had come up, bringing out the bitterness in his blood. Chater intuited something was amiss by Kenelm’s stiff bearing, his troubled eyes. They talked as their horses ambled home, and gradually Kenelm spilled his heart to his family chaplain, as if in an open-air confession.

‘Of course, I have heard people speak about my father’s crime all my life, talking, supposing, casting slurs or looking at me with a curious eye . . .’

‘Were you there that day?’ asked Chater. A good priest knew one essential question would open up a story, like a key.

‘At my father’s ending?’ said Kenelm blankly. ‘I was.’ He kept a heavy silence, but Chater could feel there was more to come.

‘I saw him tied to the wicker hurdle, face-down that his breath might not pollute the common air, as the sergeant put it. My mother drew my face into her skirts, but I peeped a look anyway. I was not yet three. He was hanging by his heels, his face twisting, very red. I think I thought it was some horrid game. There was a great noise of halberdiers’ drums. I remember nothing else. Later, my mother told me she held me up to see him for the last time. We were not allowed to touch him, only stand in the crowd and shout. There was another plotter – Bates – whose wife forced herself through the guards, and flung her arms around her husband, who whispered where his gold was hid. We were not so canny. I’m told my father smiled at me and that he told me to look after my mother. Though I have never done so. I am a bad son to her.’

‘Come, sir, that is not true,’ said Chater, hoping Kenelm would go back to the more interesting matter of the execution, which he did.

‘We did not see his ending. My mother and I were led out of the crowd quickly, so we might be spared the next sight. The crowd they say was very silent. That was a great comfort to my mother: a silent crowd.’

‘You are very brave.’

‘I am not brave, nor was my father brave, nor my mother unfortunate. All these words are forbidden if your trouble has been brought upon yourself by plotting and powder. You bear it, no more, no less.’

Their horses snorted to one another, sharing irritation at the early-evening flies.

‘They say my father’s heart was plucked before his eyes. The man who looks at his own heart and speaks is a candidate for Catholic sainthood. There are other examples recorded. But as Laud would often tell me, my father was a good man misguided. He did not wish to kill the King and Parliament, only to frighten James. It was the others who were treacherous. I like to think it might be true. Laud said my father was the kind of man who believed that every beggar deserved payment; he was too tenderhearted. Once when he was young he came home shoeless, because a poor boy had asked for his shoes. Two hundred years ago they might have canonised my father. Instead, he is a two-penny pamphlet, a shudder, an effigy for the bonfire, a tale to tell while feasting, no more.’

Chater did not like to see Sir Kenelm so disconsolate, and wanted to say something cheerful. ‘Still you were exceeding fortunate.’

‘Of course. To keep his lands and property was more than we had right to hope for – to be his son and yet be knighted, that was a true kindness. He liked to make a show of forgiveness.
Beati pacifici
was James’s motto . . .’

‘Blessed are the . . .’

‘Cheesemakers,’ said Kenelm.

‘Peacemakers, surely . . .’ said Chater hastily.

‘I only meant to have my sport with you, Chater,’ said Kenelm. ‘Perhaps the old Scot bore my father love. He’d an eye for a lovely lad. You know those men who dote on men.’

‘Aye,’ said Chater, looking down at his bridle.

‘They have in the composition of their bodies too much blood, it is said. In Siena the Duke of Tuscany’s old apothecary assured me that leeches judiciously applied – you need not ask to which part of the body, sir – took away those desires that they wish to be rid of, by destroying the excess of manliness and laying siege to those particular atoms charging about their blood – and so restoring them to their wives. But occasioned by the use of male leeches only, I am told.’