Viper Wine (16 page)

Chater looked uneasy and made an equivocal expression of interest, and in his momentary distraction he let his horse pause to crop the green grass, and fell behind Kenelm. In silence they trundled back to east London across the Isle of Dogs, where the King’s kennels yelped as the knight and chaplain passed by, silhouetted against a peachy early-evening sky.

S
IDE
-E
FFECTS
M
AY
I
NCLUDE

‘I wax now somewhat ancient . . . one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.’

Sir Francis Bacon, 1593

TWO LADIES WEARING
fashionable vizard-masks were walking along Cheapside, in fast and purposive unison, towards the physicians’ quarter on Fenchurch Street. They passed three children fighting for a farthing in a puddle, who stared up at them as if the ladies were creatures of a different species. A manservant stepped aside to allow them passage, deferentially looking away. A woman collapsed in a doorway watched them, her eyeballs liverish yellow.

‘No one has seen us,’ whispered Venetia, clasping Olive’s arm. Venetia had taken the precaution of wearing mourning clothes, so as to be more anonymous. Her dramatic soul enjoyed this and she declared that she was dressed ‘for the funeral of her own honesty’. This was the first time that she had deceived her Kenelm. Well, the first time she had deceived him explicitly. The first time she had deceived him explicitly in a long time. Quite a long time. There were always matters untold between a man and a woman, of money, and trifling secrets of past affections, were there not? And all those abstruse points which one already understood, and facts one already knew, but allowed him to explain high-handedly, because it pleased him to do so. But this was disobedience. She trod a little faster.

The artist William Peake, son of the court painter, had lately come to take their double portrait. Venetia felt kindly towards him ever since, ten years ago, he made a divine little painting of her in masquing costume at the request of the Earl of Dorset. This time, she began the sitting in good faith, putting her confidence in him as he turned over his sand-timer to measure out his fee at four-pence the hour. She felt they presented a goodly show to the world, a handsome couple, on the cusp of new things. They sat for him in brightest daylight by the window of their great hall, which warmed Venetia, and helped to calm her.

‘How are the cheekbones? Do they need shadow underneath? Is the make-up excessive? In colour shots, this is disaster. If the jawline is dubious, try to avoid being shot from below. If you cannot relax, for heaven’s sake, take a tranquilliser before shooting starts.’

Princess Luciana Pignatelli,
The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book
, 1971

Peake sketched while looking at them with an unkind intensity, as if he saw them as planes and surfaces and colour-contrasts, rather than as people. It made Venetia feel, she whispered to Kenelm, as if she were ‘a cut of veal-calf’.

Kenelm’s moustaches twitched but he suppressed a laugh. They both sat very still, listening to Spenser, which Chater read aloud, while Master Peake’s light-maker held up a frame of white cloth, to reflect the best of the winter sun upon them, and Mistress Elizabeth hovered, as instructed, with a box of pearl-powder and a mortar of egg-white, ready to tend to Venetia’s face if she asked for it, as he sketched them, first with chalk on blue paper, while an assistant mixed his paints. Halfway through, Master Peake asked her to
relaxez-vous
,
madame.

‘I feel perfectly relaxed,’ said Venetia, ‘so what can you mean?’

He asked Venetia if she would mind showing a serene countenance.

‘I am filled with serenity, sir, it flows quite through me!’ said Venetia.

‘No, no, madam, just . . .’ He gestured with two fingers to his forehead, as if wiping away a frown. Venetia did not reply. She did not think she had been frowning at all, sitting here with Kenelm, holding the attention of this roomful of people,
The Faery Queene
echoing in her head. With a muscular effort she widened her eyebrows, to remove this alleged frown. After a minute or two, however, with her mind on the Queene’s noble knight Artegal, her face must have fallen into repose, because Peake made again his encouraging hand-gesture to her forehead.

‘Sir, do you not need those two fingers for your painting?’ she said, through her teeth.

There was only the noise of his brush on canvas.

‘You might do better to change your painting rather than my countenance,’ she said. This artist had made an ominous beginning.

Perhaps her hands were ill-positioned, but it was too late to move them, and soon she lost the feeling in her left little finger, and then her whole arm. Her head swam with Spenserian dreams. Kenelm nudged her twice, because he thought she was sleeping.

It was not until the end of the day that they saw Peake’s double portrait.

His sense of perspective was very poor, so that while Kenelm looked fit and lean, she had been rendered plump and dwarfish, with chins that redoubled and a non-existent neck. Her eyes were flat and gazing, like a dead hare in a Dutch still life, and the expression in them was nervous and doubting, while her lips smirked and her cheek was sallow. Poor artist! He could not manage to bring off a face at all any more. He had, admittedly, done her hair well.

‘Master Peake, we have wasted your time,’ she said.

Kenelm started to say something, until she gave him a look.

‘I think you are more suited to painting cheeses and pieces of fruit, no? At least they have no friends and relatives to say whether it is a good likeness or no. No; dear sir, you would make a lovely painter of inanimates. But for women you have no longer the knack. We are so sorry that you shall not have this commission from us, for you are a good man and you used to be a good painter, I remember. You will have your money for today’s labour. But your skill today, sir, why is it so much less than when you made my portrait last time?’

Peake was already packing away his brushes brusquely, and he stopped to look Venetia significantly in the eye.

‘Madam, it must be because I am ten years older.’

Peake’s words echoed loudly in the panelled chamber, so resonantly that everyone must have heard him, through the household and beyond, and in the garden the leaves on the trees trembled, and the dandelions shook, and the clodded earth rumbled, and even further away, in a Hollywood screening room, Marlene Dietrich froze with fury as she turned to listen to her cameraman deliver the same wasp-sting words. Sir Kenelm ducked out of the room, pretending he had not heard, leaving Venetia in charge, as usual.

She took pleasure in dismissing Peake. He was lucky to be paid at all, frankly.

Venetia thought of the old pagan goddesses with their smashed noses and their broken arms. The acolytes turn against their queen, she thought, once her powers start to wane. The old statues have to be desecrated, reviled, to make way for the new.

So here she was, marching through Eastcheap in search of medicine that would improve bad painters, and cause rude old courtiers to remember their manners, and turn her inside out, so the serenity she felt was visible again. They came onto Fenchurch Street, where the physicians’ premises were close beside each other, signed by the mortar and pestle. Some had reassuringly expensive facades, painted with College crests and appended with prestigious names: here was a foreign physician; there was Robert Fludd, under a Barber Surgeon’s sign. The clients going about the street – a gent with a bandaged jaw: and a man and woman holding each other closely, with shy hope on their faces, as if they had come for a cure for childlessness – seemed to be persons of quality. There were no beggars with wailing brats or old women selling heather, as there usually were hanging about outside an apothecary’s. They entered a door under the sign of a star, painted with the gold letters LANCELOT CHOICE.

Inside the air was close, spicy, and tickle-your-nose. In spite of the dark atmosphere, the ladies did not remove their veils. They stood silently in front of the grey-haired woman who climbed down off a ladder to serve them. Venetia and Olive both drew breath, but neither spoke. It was unexpectedly difficult to say for which preparation they had come.

The old woman introduced herself as Mistress Choice, and said softly, ‘Is it a private audience you are desiring?’ They nodded. In a sweet bedside voice she said, ‘Then I will procure the master for you.’ She stepped back from the counter, and hollered down the stairs on solid lungs: ‘Here’s CUSTOM!’

In the privacy of the doctor’s consulting room, the ladies unveiled. It was tidy, stacked with tiny drawers and ceramic pots, and hung with fashionable embroidered fabric. There were none of the old apothecary’s trophies, no stuffed monstrous fishes or clouds of desiccated herbs, not even any pulled teeth or false limbs or old plaisters lying about. A window let in the cool light of day, and the room smelled faintly of soap.

‘Well, ladies,’ said Mistress Choice, putting her hands on her hips. ‘Is it the usual?’

Olivia and Venetia looked at each other, unsure what to answer.

‘Your courses are late and you’re wanting a help-me-along?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Olivia, colouring. ‘No, no. We want your Viper Wine.’ Mrs Choice looked surprised and gratified, and made a little non-judgemental curtsey. ‘Pleased to be of service, ladies. I’ll just fetch the Physician.’ Mrs Choice went away quickly, being certain not to look too closely at them, since she knew ladies who came for these treatments were often sensitive.

Mr Choice entered. He was tall, and handsome, and he knew it. ‘Thank you,’ he said, dismissing Mistress Choice. Was she his wife or his mother? Venetia guessed wife. He had the air of one who liked to be the more beautiful one in a relationship. His face was remarkably well made up and smooth for a man. His hair was long like Kenelm’s except he wore, as a modish affectation, one lovelock behind his left ear, loosely plaited into a little tail. He was not wax pale, like some, but his paint matched his skin colour. His blush was subtle and his eye twinkling. Venetia felt the inadequacy of her own paint, hastily applied that morning. Perhaps Lancelot Choice drank his decoctions himself. He, and not his wife-mother was the bait for business, the model of what could be achieved. He greeted them warmly with a deep bow in front of each of them, then relaxed into his chair, which like a throne commanded the room.

‘I hear you are Viperish,’ he said.

They laughed nervously.

‘We live in a wondrous age, my ladies, a golden time in which it is no longer necessary to present the marks of ageing and decrepitude. We improve our treatments all the time. You will find no puppy’s piss here – that charm is by the by. We have only the most infallibly efficacious cordials, wines, salves, unguents, ointments and still other guaranteed means of enhancing your beauty, and with ladies such as yourselves it would be a deep privilege to be of service. I will make a quick investigation first. If you would . . .’

He beckoned Venetia to the window. He gently held her chin in his soft hand, breathing sweetly on her face. She saw up close his perfect skin, and felt a stab of, what, jealousy? He angled her cheek to the light and stroked it professionally. He asked her to smile, and she obliged. ‘So polished, perfect, round and even / As it slyd moulded off from Heaven . . .’ These words Ben Jonson had written about her face. He had compared her smile to the rising sun. She felt it shine a little weaker every day. ‘I’ll give you something for the teeth later,’ said Choice. He recognised her, of course, but did not show it. He placed his finger between her brows, and asked her to frown. He made a light-hearted hum.

The same procedure he repeated for Olivia, who laughed flirtatiously at the coldness of his fingers. He took this in silence.

‘First I must warn ye, and I shall warn ye as follows. The Cure you ladies so desire, which we know to be Viper’s Wine, but I shall hereto term only as “The Cure” – The Cure may act upon ye as it has acted a thousand times before, which is as you ladies desire, but it may also act otherways, namely in the occasioning of fits, ague, local dropsy, grand dropsy, or a great increase in . . .’ Choice said the word with disapproving relish, ‘Conker-pezzans.’

Olivia turned to Venetia, who murmured, ‘Concupiscence.’ Olivia looked down into her lap, smiling.

‘Ladies, I must continue to warn ye, and I shall warn ye as follows.’ Choice spoke as if thoroughly bored. ‘The Cure, if wrongly administered, at the improper time of the moon or in poor faith, bad temper or impious attitude, or if administered in conjunction with other cures that have come not from Lancelot Choice, nor are not known to Lancelot Choice, may result in twitches, conniptions, mild scratching of the body and face, or delirium tremens. It may result in tempora-ra-rare-y frantick distraction, delightful dreams, an
aurora mirabilis
that emits a gentle rose-coloured light around your person or in your water —’