Viper Wine (4 page)

F
AME

‘Venetia Stanley was a most beautifull and desirable creature . . . She was so commonly courted that it was written over her lodging one night in
literis uncialibus
[in capital letters]: “PRAY COME NOT NEER, FOR DAME VENETIA STANLEY LODGETH HERE.” . . . She had a most lovely and sweet turn’d face, delicate darke-browne haire. She had a perfectly healthy constitution much enclining to a
bona roba
(near altogether). Her face, a short oval; dark-browne eie-browes about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eie-lids.’

John Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
, 1669–96

‘When she raises her eyelids, it’s like she’s taking off all her clothes.’

Colette,
Claudine and Annie
, 1903

TEN YEARS AGO,
when the sun revolved around the earth and James I was King, crowds used to scream when they saw Venetia’s carriage approaching. Girls and beardless boys would wait hours for the chance to see her pass. In those days her face was always at the window of her carriage; she would even cross back and forth between both windows, to give all-comers a chance to see her. She was more spoken of than seen, like a great sight of nature, a cave or a crystal, Wookey Hole or the Badbury Rings. Except unlike those monuments she would never stay still, and her life was a constant kicking up of dust, for she was very often undertaking journeys, to preserve herself from rakes and bloods and panting nobles, so she said.

Sometimes horseguards had to clear the street to let her pass. Servingwomen dropped their dishes and crossed themselves when they saw her; men who met her either became so bold and eloquent they would not stop talking, or lost their train of thought and coloured. She had a face luscious enough to make her most banal remark seem profound, and she had grace and pride besides, a self-sameness, which was hers and only hers: a
haecceitas
in Latin – a ‘thisness’. Venetia Anastasia was noble born, of course, and yet she would not walk stiffly, like so many ladies, but loose and smooth, and all her hair and flesh was hers, not stuck with patches or white-faced with fard or sewn with horsehair. She was warm and live, and there was carnality in the slowness of her blink.

Venetia by Peter Oliver, circa 1619

No wonder women would not let her near their husbands. When the nobles referred to her between themselves, they whistled and drew curves in the air with their fingers. They called her ‘
bona roba
’, which sounded like a compliment, but implied she was light. Her name was often abbreviated familiarly to ‘Venice’ – especially by knaves seeking to play up a small acquaintance. Kenelm’s mother would rather send her son to Madrid than suffer him to marry her – and it became fashionable to remark, saucily, that though Mary Digby sought to send her son to Spain, he had as lief stay at home in Venice.

The bloods of the English court were then in Madrid kicking their heels pretending to hasten ‘The Match’ between Charles of England and the King of Spain’s daughter. Elaborate Habsburg protocol had clouded the matter, but the English were beginning to recognise that the Infanta was not to be wooed. They never saw the Infanta, except behind a screen. Charles wanted an opportunity to appeal to her, face-to-face, and he discovered that every morning she walked with her ladies barefoot through the dew of her private garden.

Kenelm was the boy in the tree who gave the signal to John Suckling that the Infanta was come out walking; Suckling leaped over the wall, and broke Charles’s fall after him. And so England’s heir jumped, rolled through the rose bushes, and accosted the Infanta he would make his bride, who ran away screaming.

While Kenelm was in Madrid, Venetia became celebrated at court. Both Sackville brothers pursued her, and songs were made up about her, and women copied her hair, and her clothes. She always favoured intense blues, and as she grew more scandalous, receiving Richard Sackville’s kisses, and his younger brother’s favours, the shades of blue she wore grew stronger. She was seen in a shocking new draper’s hue that flashed like a kingfisher’s wing, a very Papistical blue, unreliable, continental, the
ne plus ultra
of blues. It was made from a pigment of lapis lazuli – it would have been cheaper to buy a dress of beaten gold – and when she wore it in the sun she seethed like one of Kenelm’s alchemical mithridates. The new blue was called ‘Ultramarine’, a word that rolled about country folks’ mouths too much, so they called it ‘Venetia’s Blue’ instead.

In Wiltshire once she stayed upstairs above an inn, as John Aubrey recorded, with high-born gents attending – Sackville, and some of his roaring rakells – with only her cousin George Stanley as keeper of her modesty. The landlord was delighted and put a sign outside the tavern (in capital letters), which pretended to warn people off, but only served to advertise her presence. Crowds assembled. It was on the feast of St Philip, close after St George’s day, and there was mischief abroad and summer dust in the air. St Philip’s day used to be the old feast of Floralia, and women were decked in flowers, coronets of daisies and scabious and viper’s bugloss, and they gathered outside the tavern, for women were always as wont to see Venetia as the men. Before nightfall the innkeeper was drunk dry. Men from villages as far as seven miles away – strangers, never seen before – were drumming on the empty kegs.

Venetia peeped out of the upstairs window wearing a borrowed servant’s cap and shaking out a dishclout, so those below, certain it was not she, shouted up clamouring for news of Lady Venetia and she, quite sullen, shouted back, ‘There’s no such fine lady here, only wenches and strumplings tonight!’, then disappeared inside and slammed the window.

Eventually the magistrate’s men came and dispersed the crowd for public affray. Her roaring friends adored it, but the innkeeper wanted compensation.

Her beauty made her almost wild. And her wildness made her beautiful. She could do as she pleased. Sometimes she wore her hair loose and half-tangled, sometimes she slouched and sucked her cheeks. Sometimes she danced when there was no music. She was never sluttish, and to kiss someone she did not love was an abhorrence to her, except when she felt like it.

Men had a passion then for the paintings of Titian, which they would keep hidden in their closets, showing them to one another as favours, by candlelight – and there was something of the Titian about Venetia, whose pomegranate smile’s red and whiteness was a splitting fruit. Her black fur cape was always about to slip to show her shoulders, like the girlie in the painting Stradling brought back from Madrid and carried always with him in his travelling trunk. Other times she was all froth and fancy, Fragonard’s slipper already flying off its swing, a hundred years too soon.

She was no great reader or writer, but that can make a person’s foxy instincts sharper. She could feel when she was being looked at, even in the dark, and she had a sense for secrets. She was impatient, and restless, and most men found nothing wifely in her. Neither Sackville brother wanted her for marriage, though once she let the elder walk with her alone in public, which gave the gossips much to munch on.

Higher delights and sweeter fancies she always sought, till, surfeiting of joy, she held an Evening of Melancholy, to which all the guests wore black. From the astrologer-physician Richard Napier she bought candles that were mixed with puck’s fog, so they flamed with silver light, and she set smoked mirrors round her black-draped room, and in the brittle black-and-white light, she glowed like a siren of the silver screen, whose every film is lost.

She was named for the opulent, liquid State whence dark impassioned canvases came. Once in a court masque of the Great Rivers called Tethys Festival, she played Venice. Her Grace Lady Elizabeth Stuart was the nymph of the Thames, and the Countess of Essex the nymph of the Lee, and the Viscountess Haddington the nymph of the Rother, and Venetia, just fourteen, was the nymph of the Grand Canal. She was meant to be part of the set dressing, playing a cloud, but James’s Queen, Anna of Denmark, picked her out and promoted her so that she might walk solo across the stage wearing a Doge’s cap, very still and solemn, pulling a long, heavy green train behind her. Before she left the stage, she cast one deeply knowing smile back at the audience.

‘F’neesha! F’neesha!’ the women waiting to see her chanted as they waited to kiss her hand. She was excessively, undeservedly venerated, which is a form of oppression.

She would not have understood why it should be considered that. She loved attention, sought it out. Great ladies, stars and princesses often believe that public adoration confers on them an influence or power, which it is their destiny to put to use. But Venetia did not have this do-gooding impulse. She went through the motions of charity only. She had the heart of a pagan pleasure-goddess, and her instincts told her to look after her own, and to hell with the rest. The adulation made her run faster and stronger, gathering power as she lost control.

But within Venetia ran a crack, which fame had covered, and now her fame was gone the crack showed again, deeper and wider. The attention she received curdled to scrutiny, the envious admiration to calumny, or pity. And that was only the beginning, only the first turning of the tide that would roll against her, now her name was two broken promises. In the year of her birth, only maggot-brained philosophers would repeat the heresy that the earth moved round the sun. But the printing presses shifted heaven and earth, so that our sublunary pit was re-imagined as a magnetic ball or ‘terrella’, which rotated around the sky, and by the time she was thirty this was the new orthodoxy, and there was a new king.

No wonder she wore a mask and veil these days, now she had tired eyes, and even the new king was no longer new, and the earth moved round the sun.

Dapper: I long to see her Grace.

Subtle: You must be bath’d and fumigated first:

Besides, the Queen of Fairy does not rise

Till it be noon.

Ben Jonson,
The Alchemist,
1610

Bidding her coachman wait behind a brake of trees, Venetia climbed out at a spot near the Dingles, the bank of cottages beyond the loam pits at the far side of the village of Clophill, six miles from Gayhurst. Hooded, and wearing her tall wooden chopine platforms, she picked her way around a chicken-foot lying on the verge at the crossroads. She was undertaking to visit one Begg Gurley. Most tradespeople – hatters, seamstresses, apothecaries – visited Lady Digby at home, but Begg Gurley was not exactly a tradesperson. She did not pay calls, as she might be apprehended in the street for soliciting her devious trade; she left no footsteps for fear they would be filled with wax by her enemies and thus her feet turned lame. If Venetia was discovered at her cottage, at least it would be clear she had come of her own accord. Blind Begg Gurley was a wise-woman, and some called her Dame Kind, or Mother Nature, while others called her Witch.

As she approached the cottages, with their flags of chimney smoke flying, a mongrel licking its flank eyed her from one doorstep, and a dirty child ran away shrieking. She had been here once before, seeking advice on how to make friends with Kenelm’s mother Mary Mulsho, and together they had wrapped Mary Mulsho’s dirty kerchief up in string and buried it in the garden, and although Venetia had found the whole process a little embarrassing, still, who was to prove it had not worked?

‘Is that my friend Lady Diggy?’ she heard a voice call within. ‘Will she not pull back the curtain?’

Venetia did so, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the smoky room, she recognised the huge motherly figure of Begg Gurley sitting in her wicker chair, her head back, her eyes closed, her hands poised apart on her knees. As she felt Venetia’s shadow her eyes flipped open.

‘Oh my lady,’ she said quietly, looking straight through Venetia with cloudy white eyes. ‘You poor lady.’