Viper Wine (17 page)

‘Rose-coloured piss-pots?’ exploded Olivia.

‘Shh,’ said Venetia.

‘— or excessive use and consumption of The Cure may result in the unwonted acquisition of a Life Immortal, by which I mean a failure to decay or die, and now, ladies, if I can ask you to submit to some formalities, please. For the arrangement of credit, I require the head of your household’s name, his escutcheon, tokens armigerous, and so forth. But for prompt payments I require no more than your coin and your smile.’

Venetia tried not to wince at his patter and said tartly, ‘We will pay you today.’

He nodded. ‘For your teeth and gums I can also offer an excellent preparation made of salt of pearls, salt of coral, musk, civet, cloves, Malaga sack and Canary Wine.’

‘Sir, we are not here for dentifrice,’ said Venetia.

‘Indeed. Then for my dedicated services, weekly proffered, without exception, and for weekly supplies of my potent drink distilled here in these my well-appointed premises, and for the delivery of said supply, by discreet and speedy messenger, to my ladies’ own dwellings . . .’

‘Come to it, sir,’ said Venetia.

‘. . . I shall put a price on what is priceless then: fifteen crowns a week.’

The ladies blanched inwardly, but nothing could stop them now, and they nodded.

‘I will have my wife prepare the vipers for the stills tonight.’

The ladies shuddered pleasurably.

‘Did we meet your wife . . .?’ asked Olivia. ‘Downstairs?’ And in that last innocuous word she somehow conveyed a world of judgement upon that lady’s appearance.

‘Aye, that is my Margaret,’ said Master Choice without expression in his voice. ‘You will have your potion, ladies; it will be ready to be fetched tomorrow.’

Venetia thought ‘fetched tomorrow’ was a lovely phrase. It promised so much. And yet she had still not decided if she trusted this apothecary.

‘Sir, of what is this Viper Wine composed?’

‘It is composed, my lady, of skill and faith. No, look you: it is a crafty extract. You know how a viper sheds its skin, I think? You have seen the adder’s lacy stocking, a delicate membrane wriggled loose, and lying discarded upon spiky grass? Aye.’

‘Aye,’ said Venetia.

‘So will we shed our skin alike, leaving it behind us perhaps on Cheapside pavement?’ giggled Olivia.

‘No, my lady,’ sideways-smiled the apothecary, ‘but the same rich liverishness which restores the viper’s skin will act upon your own complexions.’

If it worked, it was surely to be paid for again hereafter. Venetia was well acquainted with the tale of Faust. These things do not come for free. And yet. She had taken mandragora in childbirth, had she not? And it had eased her pain and done no harm. And for fevers she had been helped by many remedies. She did not like this man, but she would take his Physick.

‘Ladies, I must have from you a nickname for my book, to guard your privacy.’

‘Call me Proserpina,’ said Olive.

‘And me . . . Anastasia,’ said Venetia, thinking her middle name suitably exotick for this purpose.

‘Ladies, your cure will be delivered to you discreetly in a crate that might as well hold strawberries as a miraculous potable venom known as the Venice Treacle, the Teriaca or sometimes, to initiates, as
Benzoardicum Thericale.
’

He continued at a normal pitch: ‘You may do as you think, but it would be most beneficial to take this drink with the right hand on the left side of the mouth, thus, and to begin the treatment at the waxing of the lunar cycle, thus’ – he pointed a long stick at the blackboard beside him, where was etched in chalk a diagram of the phases of the moon – ‘in other words, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE – and ladies, I will lastly advise you to put your good faith and deserving trust in me, for no Physick works without the will. So tell me how you like your drinks next time, sweet ladies, adieu.’

He gave a very deep bow with his hands set together, like a priest. Soon they were vizarded and dashing home through the rainy streets.

‘I am so glad we went.’

‘So glad,’ said Venetia.

‘So very glad. He is such a handsome man,’ exclaimed Olive, as if she could not keep it to herself any more. ‘I really am a little in love with him!’

Venetia looked at her friend sharply. ‘But Endymion . . .’

Olive said that Endymion was never at home, being so often on the King’s business, that she saw him not once a moon.

‘He is busy with great affairs, I suppose.’

‘He is busy fetching the King’s fancies from Spain, paintings and rugs and whatnot. I see no harm with visiting a beauteous, courteous, humane apothecary . . .’

‘Secret,’ Venetia warned, gripping Olivia’s hand, eyes flashing under her vizard.

‘Ouch!’ said Olivia.

When Venetia came home, there was no one about. Living in London was suiting Chater very well. He was spending much of his time at Westminster, arriving home in high spirits. His friend Father Dell’Mascere was giving him instruction again, and he had befriended the Queen’s Dismal Dozen, picking up some of their Capuchin intensity. Well-cut cassocks, good art, fine wine, gossip from Rome – it was all exactly what Chater needed. He had developed a new dramatic style, quoting Revelations and the eschatological parts of John. His homilies on Sundays had become quite riveting.

She took the spare key from the parlour box, and let herself into her husband’s study. The door would not open fully – stacks of books prevented it. She was shocked to see how the books had multiplied. His bibliomania was almost an illness. He seemed to feel responsible for all the orphan books sequestered by the monasteries after the break with Rome. To be sure, illiterates made use of the old manuscripts for wrapping crab apples and lining shoes and cleaning muskets, and she could see why Kenelm wished to save some – but this was insanity. One could barely walk across the room.

On the long table by the window were arranged limbecks and curved retorts, full of coloured waters, but they looked dusty, and she wondered how much Kenelm used them. Upon his desk, where his ledger was open, she saw his wastebooks, letters and scrawled memoranda. She could not help seeing a bill – forty groats for his leather shoes! But beyond that she looked no further. She was no Percy Pry-snout.

She only wanted to take a particular precaution. At his shelves, she found the works on herbs and Physick – the English Leechbook,
The Secrets of Master Alexis the Piedmontese
,
The Breviary of Healthe
,
Galen’s Art of Physick
,
The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides
, John Gerard’s
History of Plants
, a new copy of John Parkinson’s
Garden of Pleasant Flowers
, with the pages barely cut. And there it was. The book that drew her hand was the nameless grimoire, bulging and tattered – her husband’s own scrapbook of remedies, copied one by one over two decades or more. Her heart pricked with tenderness to behold the care young Kenelm had taken with his handwriting. Although his writing was smaller in his youth it already had the rhythm and confidence of his spoken voice, putting forth occasional vain flourishes. Some receipts were blotted and stained with chemicals. The pages were many, and she let herself pass an idle moment on the advice to procure conception – purslain, nettle, candied nutmeg, powdered root of English snakeweed, and so forth, thrice daily – but it did not indicate how to beget a daughter. She turned on till she found a page marked ‘Viper Wine –
Benzoardicum Thericale
’.

Take a viper, hold her fast by the neck so she cannot stir or wag at all, and with a pen-knife cut her throat open, so you may be able to tear out her tongue and innards. Prepare a great many vipers after this fashion. Separate their tongues, hearts and livers. Bake gently overnight in a furnace. Add opobalsamum, or Peruvian Balsam, little by little. Take some good opium, well chosen, dry it very gently till it be friable, and crumble. Sift through a hairen cloth, with a good spirit of wine tartarised, and the stale of a brood mare in foal. This quintessence is of extraordinary good virtue for the purifying of the blood, flesh and skin. Preserves from grey hairs, renews youth, etc.

So Lancelot Choice was, at least, no quack. She had seen enough. If Kenelm would not sanction this, why was its recipe in his collection? Some elements of it worried her, though. The stale of a brood mare in foal – was she to drink a horse’s gilded piddle? The dogs barked, but it was Chater’s voice that she could hear nervously chiding them. Kenelm was not come home yet. With fast and urgent fingers, she turned the book around to read the scrawled marginalia:

‘Conjugated equine oestrogens have been used for several decades for post-menopausal hormone replacement. The preparation is in the form of an extract from the urine of pregnant mares . . .’

British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology
, 2000

She had seen enough. She closed Kenelm’s book, kissed it, put it back on the shelf. Making ready to leave his study, she heard a small rattle behind her, and noticed it came from the lid of a pot that had been left in the fire – probably some opiate or rare balsam he was baking dry – and she made a mental note to tell him not to leave his bonoficium unattended, until she remembered that this would betray her trespassing, and so, like a guilty thing, she slipped away, and the rustle of her silk dress, she fancied, sounded like a hiss.

O
F
S
UNFLOWERS AND
S
EALING
W
AX

THE LAWN AT
Charterhouse was scattered with daisies, and Sir Kenelm Digby and Antoon Van Dyck were treading delicately, careful not to crush a single flower. The grass had put them forth overnight, as if to welcome Van Dyck back to England: star-spangles thrown across the green.

‘Our chain has been broken too long,’ said Van Dyck, stretching out his hand to Kenelm. In the strong morning sunlight his fingertips glowed with illuminated blood.

‘Only a few years,’ said Sir Kenelm, reaching towards him. ‘’Tis as nothing, if you consider that the golden chain of knowledge that joins us both also travels backwards from Zosimus and, through us, oh infinitely forwards.’

The men continued across the grass together, holding hands. Their friendship was Masonic, sealed by the chanting of an Orphic order behind a curtain in Tuscany ten years ago – and whenever they saw one another they spoke freely of the ensouled world, becoming at times perilously high-minded, with the unselfconscious pleasure of men who hold each other in mutual regard. They did not talk of family life or love, or even why Van Dyck had come to London. They talked of the new telescopes that revealed daily new Magneticall sun-spots and shadow-valleys of the moon.

Upstairs in her closet, Venetia peered at the sun-spots and craters on the dead planets of her cheeks, vastly magnified by the instrument of horror that was Kenelm’s magnifying glass. She had never met Van Dyck and she was preparing for his scrutiny, leaning over her mirror with the magnifying glass. Every day, a new way to mortify herself.

Downstairs, on the lawn, Kenelm fell on one knee and put his eye to a daisy, which was open and gazing at the sun, beaming back the great orb’s power from its tiny yellow copycat planet. The black aperture of Kenelm’s eye – his pupil – shrank to behold the daisy’s brightness. Hermes Trismegistus said that the sun was a god made visible. Kenelm could almost see the powerful magnetic rays communicating between this plant and the sun: therefore he did not trample on these tiny fringed observant
day’s eyes
, which opened and closed with the light.

Van Goose! A sudden remembrance of Ben Jonson’s nickname for Van Dyck came to Venetia. It was a masque-night foolery, to turn a Dyck or Duck into Goose. Perhaps she had met the artist before. She could not remember. But if she had met him, or if he had seen her acting, which was more likely, it would have been more than twelve years ago. She pulled an evil face at herself in her mirror.

Kenelm looked around him, to check they were definitely alone, and that Chater was not listening. ‘So you believe,’ said Kenelm, ‘that there is something reasonable in this heretical claim that earth goes around the sun?’ With a curious swivelling motion, all the daisies on the lawn turned their faces towards their conversation.

‘Indeed I do,’ said Van Dyck. His Dutch voice always struck Sir Kenelm as so musical. The gold ring on Van Dyck’s finger, passed down to him by generations of faithful Catholics, flashed alarum as he ran his hand through his hair. ‘It is a pity His Holiness will not accept it.’

‘I cannot accept it,’ said Sir Kenelm, shaking his head. ‘It goes against everything. I respect the theorists but not the theorem. Besides,’ he said, ‘I am attached to my armillary sphere, my world of brass. I do not wish to buy another one just yet. A universe is costly, you know. And my planets are in harmonious alignment just as they are.’

Van Dyck never quarrelled. He shrugged. ‘I have a friend arriving here later today who perhaps can tell us more about this. My guest is coming by sedan chair, and he is almost seven feet tall, and he knows more of the sun than you or me.’ A smile played around Van Dyck’s lean chops, but Kenelm was annoyed that he would not have Van Dyck to himself all day. Antoon was a hither-thither kind of fellow, really – he had not been a good correspondent while he was away. But that was artists for you.