Viper Wine (43 page)

And as the dance brought faces closer and then carried them away, like tides in a stately sea, Kenelm looked for his wife, overfilled with pride and anxious to praise her with kisses, but he could not see her. Perhaps it was the rapture of the dance, and the enravishment of the masque, or the work of a nimble apothecary, but he could not find his wife.

Confused, entranced, he saw echoes of her in other women. Aletheia Howard had the set of her eye; Mistress Whisk the pallor of her brow. Belinda, Lady Finch, had something of Venetia’s new glowing serenity; none of them frowned, or seemed capable of displeasure. Even Lady Vavasour was dancing, as if she wished to make a show of herself, though she had not disported at court for ten years or more. What epidemic of beauty was this? Was Venetia’s beauty catching, like a virtuous plague? All the ladies had lost their cracks and wrinkles, their scorched lead faces. There was a proud communal bloom to them, like a richly cultivated bed of roses.

He thought he caught a glimpse of her, but a mole on the upper lip told him it was Olive, Lady Porter.

Guide me, spot of beauty, to my Venice, like the morning star, muttered Kenelm, reaching out, blind, somnambulant.

Then he saw Lady Porter’s double, but he realised it was Anne Ogilvy.

No, here was Venetia, flashing azure in her famous dress. He had found her. Kenelm reached to twirl her, but then he recoiled, repulsed because it was not Venetia, only Lettice, blazing in Ultramarine: Lettice as her living likeness from their courtship, years ago.

He let the dance carry him onwards, into the figure of four the dancing master called ‘shining star’.

They all raised their left hands, and he saw the far point of the star was Venetia, but then he turned and found another Venetia at his left, and still another at his right.

‘Did you see me?’ shouted Endymion. ‘I was the Spirit of Everything that Can Be Imagined!’

Edward Sackville was showing off also, turning his ankles for the ladies. He was incorrigible. Whenever Kenelm wanted to hurt himself, like holding his finger over a candle, he considered how Sackville had sought to sleep within Venetia’s encircling arms.

Uplifted by the dance and cuffed about the head by wine, Kenelm looked wildly about for Venetia, but he could not see her. He had lost the art to know his true Una from the many false Duessas, his original from the multiplying counterfeits.

Kenelm turned round and about, thinking of those early days, when so many faked copies of Venetia’s portrait came, unlicensed, from the limners, and each copy’s copy degraded a degree, a minim too heavy in the chin, a jot too wide about the eyes, until the only thing about the portrait that was hers was the name engraved below.

His head wheeled, but his legs were carried onwards by the dance. Sweat made his blond quiff stand up like a staff.

There was a great cry and the crack and clatter of silver and glass, and Kenelm guessed the banqueting table had been turned over at the far side of the hall. It must be midnight already.

He saw a foreign ambassador run out to try to put right the damage to the banquet, and laughed at him for not knowing the midnight tradition of turning over the table. The feast was always overturned, for sport’s sake. At the crack of the table a new galliard struck up, faster and louder than before, and the crowd leaped to the music.

Venetia was revealed, strobe-lit, in the midst of it all, moving, yet not out of breath, smiling like the goddess of the dance. Behind the serene mask, her thoughts were tumbling: the child Lettice wears my dress, my Ultramarine that Edward Sackville called the colour of Jerusalem’s sky. I never gave it to her. I brought it for the Queen, not for her. Now she dances with my husband, and leads the masque as the Morning Star. She usurps and supersedes me. If this is the natural order of things, henceforth nothing in me is natural. Bring me to drink the gaudy immortal. Let me become super-natural.

The drums beat out a new tune: ‘Love Will Tear us Apart.’

Venetia was thrown opposite a young blood called Wharton, who was dressed as a shepherd, in a rich silken cape, ringlets and Arcadian sandals. His hair was bright blue. ‘Madam,’ he bowed deeply. ‘I adore your daughter Lettice.’

Kenelm stamped with the music, feeling the terrible, preordained joy of it, the heartbreak, tearing us apart.

‘Again.’

The song made him feel like a link in the endless chain of human longing, as he flicked the sweat off his blond quiff, he danced with every sinew of his body, the music animating him like a spirit-wound clockwork man.

Here she was. As he came close, he leaped and kissed Venetia once, which was all the steps would allow. The dance could not be interrupted by any one couple. The dance was bigger than the dancers. Everyone was intertwined, like a living weave. Moving back and forward, around and about, with steps their bodies knew so well their heads could forget them, and caught in the automatic bliss of repetition they turned to and fro, surging and stamping, dancing together in mutual regard and Kenelm rose, jumping, ecstatic, amongst a vast crowd of moshers, waltzers, pipers, ravers, tranceheads, and Pan himself was calling the tune.

L
ENTEN
S
CARS

T
HREE
M
ONTHS
L
ATER

‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’

Isaac Newton

VENETIA WAS SITTING
at her dressing table in the grey morning light, peeling the night-bandages from her face. She heard her son Kenelm’s quick footfalls approach her door, and did not stir to let him in. He rattled the doorhandle, and she ignored it. Let him think she was still sleeping. She wanted nothing more than to let him crawl into her bed, to cuddle his hot little body, but she could not let him see her before she had applied her paint. He would judge her wounded, or in pain. He would cry out in alarm, perhaps, the first time he saw his mother’s scabs. So she must wait till she was made up for the day before she greeted him. His morning kisses, his closeness, was the very thing she must deny herself if she was to keep his love.

Over the months following the masque, Venetia had lost her taste for sleep. She went through the motions of sleeping, drawing her curtains, putting on her nightgown, larding and binding her face and resting for a few hours, when she slept more than she realised, but lightly. To her it seemed that most of the night she lay seething, waiting for the dawn.

She awoke before her fire was made, and she was at her dressing table when Mistress Elizabeth brought her morning posset. As soon as Mistress Elizabeth was gone, and sometimes a little before, she unlocked her cabinet and emptied a new vial into her drink, making a curdled pink bowlful, her first Viper brew of the day, which she sipped quickly, whispering Lenten psalms. Then she performed her daily tractations. It required time and care to bring her scabs and stiffness off.

She sent for a bowl of scalding water, which she poured on pot-pourri and hooded herself over, and when the rising velvet vapours of hot rind and valerian root had softened her mood and steadied her breathing, she began to palpate her face, starting with her temples: fifteen circles of the left, fifteen circles of the right; and back again. Her fingertips were the best method, she found; she had no use for the little jet beads Choice had sold her for the purpose. Next she worked across her brow, first rubbing her fingers in myrrh-grease, the better to soften the crusts and serrations that formed overnight. Perhaps that was why she could no longer sleep: she could feel her skin thickening over, like water frosting or custard blistering. It was wonderful to sense how fast she reacted to the treatment; that prickling sensation of new scabs forming was the opposite of slippage, wastage and decay. Instead of slackening, she was tighter by the hour.

Because it was Lent, the pain was particularly appropriate; she considered her tractations almost an Observance. Not quite the Stations of the Cross, which Henrietta-Maria undertook with such piety. Venetia had attended such a pilgrimage around the gardens of the Queen’s villa in Greenwich, when they toured the seven improvised shrines barefoot, Venetia maintaining a displeased silence all the while. She preferred to purify her flesh at home. Venetia slapped her face a dozen times with a cold cloth, to feel the blood tingle in her cheeks.

When they sent a body up for anatomy, the doctor’s men held their torches near the dissection table, and lutes played: the same three chords, and an arpeggio. Kenelm had told her all about the anatomies at Amen Corner. They read aloud the history of the deceased; a sailor, hanged for theft; a woman of no virtue, nursed through her agonies at Bartholomew’s. Ever a different story, ever the same ending. Then the thorax, the parlour of the body, cut open with a razor; the heart, revealed to tell its story.

She had grown up believing that the heart was the font of all affection and kindness; that usurers and villains whose cadavers were opened were found to have no heart; that heartache was real, not a figure of speech; and that all one’s deeds were inscribed on the heart, so that when the body died, the heart was taken into the House of Judgement to be read, like a book, by God. Now she was told that her heart was a two-chambered pump, which pounded like a brewery or a city system of locks and canals, pressurised, efficient. Previously the blood was quickness and life, and the heart was hope and care and tenderness, but now the blood fetched and carried, and the heart was two pistons and a plunger. She was a mechanical being, then, so why not mend her?

How she missed Kenelm, now he was away at sea again. She longed for him, fearing for his safety, and yet she had taken full advantage of his absence. She went to Choice directly Kenelm sent word he was at Dover. She must be cut open quickly, so she had time to heal before he was back. She tensed every time she heard the Mercury letter-boy’s bell, in case it was a note from him saying he was come home early, although she knew by experience that Kenelm never came home early. He was too enraptured with the world for that. He was gone to sail across the Bosphorus on the wings of a mechanical eagle – or if not, then he was witnessing a new city built upon marshes and artificial islands. No, wait; he was gone to see a clock that kept its time by the sun-magnetised seed of a sunflower, owned by a Jesuit from Westphalia. He had talked of all these ventures, and the desire to travel had overtaken him, as it did periodically, so that his will to be gone was stronger than his motivation for going. When he wanted to leave he was caged and fretful until he went. His library building had overspent him for a year, and she gave him some of her private monies – her gambling fund – to send him on his way.

She had rehearsed the Procedure in her head so many times, but when it came to it, she put forth no more than a track of ruby tears across her forehead and down each cheek; afterwards, she produced only small degrees of pus. She barely noticed the pain. The elation of her new endeavour carried her onwards. It was the most advanced treatment possible, practised by her trusted Physician. The tiny quantity of Viperish serum he introduced into her wounds was enough to sweetly paralyse, but not to harm. She knew it was poison, but everything worth having is a poison.

Since the Queen’s Twelfth Night Masque, she had never been at a loss for direction; she had not felt alone, but always accompanied by her mania. Whether she was playing with baby John or directing the household, the mania expressed itself in one word, which like an incantation she heard repeated in her head: ‘
younger
’. It was an imperative, to herself, to Choice, and it summed up her new purpose. She said it through tight lips, like a curse, a profanity, or she smiled it with the impatient glee of a girl. ‘Younger, younger.’ It had no answer, no context. One simply repeated the command.

She could hear the boys running about the corridor, trying to get her attention. Her little loves! She visited young Kenelm at his military practice in Bunhill Fields the other week, turning up in her white veil, interrupting the marching song, and telling the lieutenant soldier she was taking him home. She wanted to spoil him for his saint’s day, so they could be alone together again for the afternoon, as they always had been, playing Rise Pig and Go, or Fox i’the Hole. But when they were home, and he would not drink his beaker of ale, she realised he was not happy, and he told her in a stiff little voice that she was the only mother to come to the artillery field, and that she should not do it again.

With Kenelm away, she wore soft clothes about the house, and took porridge for supper, and relaxed all her habits. It was a comfortable, drab life, enlivened by the riveting project of her Improvement.

Her morning face-palpations took about an hour. It was necessary work; one treatment led to another, as calf to kine. She heard the clatter of the cattle going willingly to the market down Cowcross Street to Smithfield, and she looked at herself in the mirror with the wide eyes of a milk-calf. She laughed, and a scab in her cheek lifted, stinging her back to piety.