Viper Wine (2 page)

A D
ISCOURSE
B
ETWEEN
B
ROTHERS

A
UGUST 1632

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.

Gayhurst House

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?’