Viper Wine (56 page)

When he spoke of her illness, Chater referred darkly to ‘the drink incarnadine’ or ‘the ruby wine’. He never said that this drink was to blame for her death, and yet he came always to the brink of saying this, and would then go no further, switching instead to the theme of his loyalty to Sir Kenelm, and asking moon-eyed questions about Sir Kenelm’s health and vigour, and once even enquiring if the shape of his calf held up, which was a question Mary could not answer.

‘Ommmm . . . We must all be reborn, says Plato, because there are a fixed number of souls, and many bodies constantly being born, so each soul must play its part again, and again . . .’

It seemed to Mary Tree, as she banked Sir Kenelm’s fire, while he sat muttering in front of it, that no one would have any peace until they had a better understanding of why Venetia had died, but then Mary had to go and put the ashes out by the kitchen garden, and service the water butt, and clean the swilling-house floor, before it was time to turn the maslin bread, and at last, to sit silently at the servants’ table. Here, she discerned that the others, in imitation of their professors, held away from her, putting up a discreet barrier of indifference, as if she, too, smelled of crayfishes and slander.

When she made Kenelm’s bed, Mary was frightened by a cold hand which she clasped under the pillow. It was so heavy it felt as if it were drawing her down, and made her start, but she quickly realised that it was a bronze made from a cast taken of Venetia’s hand, and Mary understood why Kenelm would wish to hold it close to him. She propped it up on the counterpane, but it looked amiss, almost as if it were waving, so she tucked it under his pillow again.

‘Ommm . . .’ His concentration slipped, and . . . Ping! Celestial spam arrived in the brain of Sir Kenelm.

‘Private cord blood storage facility – insure the future health of your loved ones by preserving their precious stem cells.’

Sir Kenelm accepted this enticing premise. ‘Umbilical cord blood and tissue is one of the richest sources of stem cells in the body with even better regenerative potential than bone marrow . . . We use cryo-preservatives, which are easy to remove post-thawing. Storage facilities are monitored with twenty-four-hour security. From £2,000 with additional phlebotomy costs.’

The Buckinghamshire radio mast was becoming less discriminating in the messages it sent to him. Previously it had blocked requests for money.

‘Cord blood can be used for treating: juvenile chronic leukaemia, Diamond-Blackfan anaemia, Neuroblastoma, Sudden Death Syndrome, autoimmune disorders including Omenn’s disease . . .’

Too late, too late, sighed Kenelm, and the message disappeared. He could feel himself becoming, for the first time in his life, self-involved, greedy in his thinking, when he should be disinterestedly intellectual. Grief seemed to have taken away all his strength. At least he was doing one pure, unmotivated thing, besides working on his project of palingenesis. He was teaching Mary Tree how to read.

Mistress Elizabeth came to Gresham College to deliver a basket of Kenelm’s bedding and sundries. After the dissolution of the Digby household she was expected to go and live with the boys and Mary Mulsho on the Gayhurst estate, but it emerged, to everyone’s surprise, that she had a husband in service with another recusant family in the city, and she was setting up house with him instead.

Mary Tree took the opportunity to question Mistress Elizabeth about Venetia’s possessions and the contents of her closet when she died. Elizabeth responded with guarded hostility, thinking this wench wanted a garter, or an under-garment, or a scrap of lace or tiffany for a talking point. And so she kept her counsel, and told Mary Tree nothing.

When Mistress Elizabeth had gone, Mary discovered, at the bottom of the basket, a pair of lady’s silver slippers, very finely made, with short heels and marks where chopines or pattens had once been attached. Mary sat a little straighter as she held them, as if they had rebuked her for her impropriety, and yet she also wanted to hold on to them, like treasure, as they gleamed. When Sir Kenelm came in he looked at them absently, and took them into his hands with ceremony, as if to say they were now in his safekeeping, and as Mary crept away, she thought she overheard him saying ‘in case she has need of them again’.

‘Palingenesis,’ said Kenelm, over a spoonful of potage, ‘from the Greek,
palin
, again, and
genesis
, birth, means the re-birth, revival, resuscitation or regeneration of living persons from their ashes or putrefying matter . . .’

‘’Tis more effective to make anew,’ muttered the Professor of Geometry, ‘which is why Talus the Iron Groom in Spenser’s book is germane to the purpose, being composed of an un-compostable ferrous material, which is to say, in a word—’

The Professor of Divinity broke in: ‘I thought “palingenesis” referred more usually to the conjuror’s impostorous practice of creating a miniature castle, flower or other such vain fancy out of ashes, for the amusement of a vulgar crowd. In my ignorance I was not aware that it had been practised upon persons living, or dead.’

Sir Kenelm did not notice the professor’s withering tone of voice. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, sir,’ he replied enthusiastically. ‘Not yet, not yet! It is not practised, but it exists in the minds of men already, as a word, an idea, an ideal and a dream, and as we know that truth and fiction are so intimately connected that Galileo calls his astronomy a fiction—’

‘Iron,’ continued Geometry. ‘Iron will, and no discernment, this is what makes an Iron Groom. He is in truth a weapon that walks about upright, composed of armour and clockwork. Armies of Iron Grooms would spare a nation in the wars . . .’

‘Then Spenser’s verses brings ideas to birth also,’ said Kenelm. ‘Make him, sir. Make the Iron Groom. Bring him to being. For as we dream, so we ought to do.’

‘Now I consider it, the phoenix rises from the ashes,’ said the Professor of Divinity. ‘It is no work of man to bring this about, though. It is heresy to attempt it.’

‘Try, try, try, and let them try me,’ said Kenelm. ‘La.’

The others ignored him, being busy looking into their own thoughts and pottingers.

Mary Tree having the duty of cleaning Sir Kenelm’s belongings, it was natural that she should find among them various relics of Venetia, including a box containing cosmetic pots and other feminine impedimenta, which she dared to suppose were the contents of Venetia’s closet. For the first week she respectfully refused to look inside it, and for the second week she left it in a prominent place in his rooms, hoping Sir Kenelm would do that instead of her. By the third week, she decided to take the matter in hand.

Two gallypots of subliming calomel; a beaker of brandy; a few sticky vials stained red; private correspondence with a midwife; a large quantity of bloody face-bandages, hidden in a wash-bag; dried herbs that Mary Tree could not identify, though they made her sneeze; a wrapper bearing the wax seal of a fat viper, and a few words of commendation from an apothecary; an enamel box containing two milk teeth, thought to be young Kenelm’s; and a large quantity of millipedes in a jar, presumably waiting to be used in a beauty preparation.

Mary Tree did not know what to do with this intelligence, only that she must keep it in mind. As she fell asleep she ran over the letters and word-sounds Sir Kenelm was teaching her, and she recited this list over and over, laying the letters out in front of her eyes, which started to crawl before her as she fell asleep, and formed into snakes like the fat viper on the apothecary’s seal.

All around her, in their lamplit kingdoms, the Gresham professors followed their callings, the Astronomer using his mariner’s astrolabe to navigate stormy seas of cloud, and the Professor of Law poring by candlelight over his edicts and assizes. The Professor Without Portfolio, for his part, gazed for hours into the red glow of his furnace at the ashes of a mound of cow-parsley, willing them to revive.

When the night was at its darkest, and the ashes were cool, he put on his black overmantle and took, after the fashion of a Melancholy Man, solemn perambulations about the gardens of Gresham and beyond, walking in the figure of the circle and the square. He smelled the spirits of the earth, rising up as the ground exhaled its night vapours, and he wondered whether the world still turned or if it was all over now.

Moonlight picked out the veined cheeks of ivy leaves, and the willow tree’s hair fell finely as it turned its back to him. Sir Kenelm glided beyond the kitchen gardens, and he saw the stock pond wink at him, and the long white arms of the path rise to beckon him. He lay down on the wet grass and rested his face on the breast of the earth, and talked to the soil.

He did not convene with ghosts, but apparitions of men who had not yet been born. Pre-ghosts, proto-ghosts. Widowers with pink eyes and foreign clothes, heavy spectacles misted with tears. He could not understand their customs, or their style, or rank, but he recognised their suffering.

‘Have you found no cure for this, three, four hundred years hence?’

‘No cure, no cure,’ sighed the wind.

‘Some ease for the mind,’ drawled the earth. ‘Talking, talking.’

‘Shock therapy,’ lashed the tree.

‘But no ease for the soul,’ sang the wind.

‘Pills to take away the pain. Sleeping draughts for wakeful hours,’ groaned the willow.

‘No cure for loss,’ spat the wind.

‘This is love’s price,’ announced the bell of the church of St Margaret. Four in the morning.

Sir Kenelm lifted himself upon one elbow, into the pose of Melancholy Thoughtfulness. A pattern of grass-blades was indented on his cheek and he was numbed by cold, as he desired. He resembled the statuary upon his own tomb. He realised why he felt no fear of the darkness, nor of the spirits he encountered. He had become a ghost himself.

But as the dawn came, when he paced lightly back to his rooms across the quadrangle, his feet left prints upon the wet grass.

A D
ISCOURSE
C
ONCERNING THE
V
EGETATION OF
P
LANTS

S
POKEN BY
S
IR
K
ENELM
D
IGBY, KNIGHT, AT
G
RESHAM
C
OLLEGE

[Sir Kenelm’s words are in the following chapter taken verbatim from a transcript of his lecture made at Gresham College in 1665 to the embryonic Royal Society.]

THE LECTURE HALL
at Gresham College was full of contained expectation, like a pot before the boil. This being the occasion of Kenelm’s first public address since
the accident,
it was the cause of much interest, some salacious, and a large and varied crowd assembled, each trying to wear a casual face. Alongside the usual Gresham lecture-goers, the earnest autodidacts and shrewd men of business, there were more dubious visitors, newsbook writers, and common tongue-wags, as well as idle moochers come in out of the cold. They sat mixed amongst Sir Kenelm’s coterie, his correspondents through the Invisible College, Sir John Scudamore, Samuel Hartlib and Endymion Porter, his hair flowing over his collar, and out of breath, coming in at the last. There was also a distinguished divine, sent to gather intelligence by Archbishop Laud, while at the back of the hall glowered a row of half a dozen Puritans with their high hats on and their arms folded.

Chater could not help staring at Endymion. His countenance was too tight about the eyes and jowls, which had been clipped and pinned. His nose seemed to have been worked over as an afterthought, and it was somewhat raw, as if grated. After feasting his curious eyes too long, Chater pretended to look away. Endymion tapped Chater on the shoulder, while Chater shrank like a guilty sea urchin. In a low voice, Endymion told him to keep his eyes to himself.

‘Or else take a closer look at what my surgeon has effected,’ said Endymion, leaning in towards Chater, his vein-shot eyes bulging as he raised his collar to show off a blood-blister, ‘to put right the ravages of cannonshot. I’ve been taken by pirates in the Channel oft enough on my service for the King, and now I’ll not be served with timid prying eyes, so look at me and take your fill, sir.’ Endymion sat down with heavy satisfaction.

Sir Kenelm came in walking slowly, an antic figure.

‘He [Sir Kenelm] lived like an Anchorite in a long grey coat accompanied by an English masty [mastiff] and his beard down to his middle.’

Finch Manuscripts, 1691

While Kenelm arranged his papers, his dog Asparagus settled under his chair. Kenelm surveyed the crowd. So many shunned him now. There was no Davenant, no Killigrew, no Cavendish, no Thomas Howard, no, not even James Howell, even though his life was once saved by practice of the Cure of Sympathy.

Kenelm started with a few droll asides, about the longness of the lecture and the shortness of life, to put everyone at their ease. He was thinner, and his hair was scarce, but he still had an easy and natural manner of speaking, a warmth that was almost entirely unforced. He enjoyed his own presence and his voice; he was made for broadcasting.