Viper Wine (58 page)

THE FEAST OF THE
I
MMACULATE
C
ONCEPTION OF THE
V
IRGIN

8 D
ECEMBER
1635

THE BRIGHT NEW
bell of the Queen’s Catholic chapel at Somerset House was calling the faithful to attend its inaugural service, a much-reviled mass. Incense seeped from the chapel’s every aperture, its bell-tower, its doors, its tiny leaded windows, and the gust of it carried over the walls of Somerset House and into the nostrils of the godly. Ranks of Puritans stood on the Strand holding hands, that they might peacefully protest; to circumvent them, guests came up from the river.

The tall doors of the chapel gave onto a bright, incense-filled interior, pristine white, with a starry ceiling painted Ultramarine; candelabra on the high altar illuminated the Rubens altarpiece that made the Queen faint at its unwrapping. Most marvellous of all, around the altarpiece was built a new ‘apparato’, a holy game that represented a great carved throng of painted angels and arch-angels, seraphim and cherubim – more than two hundred in number – who flew upwards and opened their mouths and wings in staggered unison, like a flock of heavenly gulls. The workings behind it were whispered to be several cranks operated by Inigo Jones’s unseen hand.

Olivia Porter, following directly behind the Queen, was one of the stars of the ceremony, having just converted to Rome, under the guidance of Father George Conn. Chater himself had effected the initial introductions, and he was in very good odour for it. The Vatican ambassador sent word to Rome claiming – as he had claimed many times before – that the Counter-Reformation in England was finally stirring. Dame Porter was, he wrote, a prominent person, of Protestant English stock, and mother of six children, whom she swore to raise in the Old Faith.

Olivia was no longer wearing mourning colours for Venetia, although she thought of her as she genuflected upon the black and white flagstones. She missed her as a friend and accomplice, and the Wine she missed too, now Chater forbade her to drink it. With dry lips, she said a prayer for Venetia, who had seen the altar-stone laid, but had not lived to see this glorious chapel rise.

Olive was converted, yet she was not changed. Her heart was still open to the pale-faced apothecary who had sent her so many vials of his rubious best blood. She thought of him with secret fondness, which she guarded from Chater particularly.

Chater’s first act of power over her, almost as an exercise of his will, was to put her through the suffering and purgation of giving up the Wine. He swore the pain of this was necessary for her redemption. Olive was always attracted by a new regime, and liked to submit herself to any discipline that promised to change her whole existence, be it prayer or Physick. And so she swapped the Wine for another master: Chater, whose ministrations kept her busy from morning Exercises to evening Devotions. Chater’s cool hand was always ready to lay upon her brow, and during her weak and degraded moments, as the Wine left her body, she felt he truly loved her.

And yet she knew, even as he humoured her daily indecisions, and helped her choose colours that suited her, that she could never be what Venetia was to him; that she did not have her strength, nor will, nor elegance, nor other qualities besides, which Olive could not even name, being so lacking.

One morning, when Chater came to take her confession, he arrived with the triumphant news that the apothecary Lancelot Choice was implicated in Venetia’s death and that the magistrate was soon to be involved. Olive merely pouted and crossed herself in gratitude for her own salvation.

But in the evening, when the children were abed, she slipped away to Fenchurch Street, alone in her private coach, masked and furtive. She would not risk a letter to Choice, but she wanted to warn him, so he might escape imprisonment. It would be better for him to flee to France than for all his clients to be named, and the cause of her ethereal beauty exposed. Besides, there were her love letters to Choice. These must be reclaimed before they fell into the hands of the magistrate. She should never have stopped signing ‘Proserpina’, but her fond heart had led her to be frank.

With her nerves flaming she stood beneath his emblem, the sign of the star. The shop was shuttered for the night and the house was quiet as she waited on the doorstep. She wondered if this meant the household was already packed up, and the Choices fled, and she was about to leave, half disappointed, half relieved that she could slip away, her conscience discharged. But then Margaret Choice answered the door, shockingly dishevelled with her long grey hair, usually tucked away so neatly, swinging about her shoulders, and a mob cap on the back of her head. She was out of breath, and greeted her as Mistress Venetia, before correcting herself. Olive could see she was in a state of high alarm. Except for some braggarts shouting on Cheapside, the street was still. An owl hooted drunkenly from the churchyard of St Mary Axe.

Olive’s ears were not attuned to the night, or else she might have heard a soft slithering of bodies, tipped out of the Choices’ back door into the communal servants’ yard, or over the side wall into the neighbours’ garden, or into the mouldy back alley. But for each viper that darted into the cool dark rat-scented night, there remained a Medusa’s head of vipers in the pits, guilty and convoluted.

Seeing Margaret Choice’s disarray, Olive was about to excuse herself and leave, but Margaret seemed to think she should stay, and showed her into the downstairs parlour. As she waited she heard bumps and scrapings of furniture upstairs, and voices raised. Then Choice came to her, and in a scene straight out of her fond imaginings, he went down on bended knee before her, ardently kissing her hand, and resting his head in her lap.

By the candlelight, she stroked his lustrous dark hair, which smelled of woody pomander, and wondered if this was truly a new beginning. When he raised his head he studied her with such affection, that she almost felt he was not looking at the creases on her neck at all, but contemplating her as a finished piece of art, one of his own finest creations. She shut her eyes, expecting him to kiss her, only he did not.

‘I know; I know,’ he said. ‘We are to leave or be apprehended. It is over. The death of Lady Digby is to be put upon us, unwarranted as this is. We are packing away our properties. But you came; you came to warn us. You are indeed the noblest She alive.’

He played a little with the lace on her cuffs, looking fondly at them.

‘Would you be the kindest, sweetest dame that ever lived, and take for us two trunks of possessions? Your coach would be the perfect vehicle. Only our best plate and some of my new clothes, and books of mine. I doubt their safeness on the Continent, and you are the most trusted friend I have. The letters you speak of are safely stowed within the trunks; these are yours now. The other contents, I will come to claim from you in a matter of months. And until then, you shall keep for me also this, my heart’s kiss’ – he put his slightly wet lips upon her palm – ‘in your safe keeping.’

With this he closed up her hand, and the way he spoke was so purposive, so full of warmth and carnal intent, that Olive felt as shocked with herself as if she had already committed adultery. The moment was broken only by an odious scratching sound upstairs, as if someone were trying to take up a floorboard. Olive could have lingered there all night, but the trunks were packed, and waiting in the ante-room, and Choice and Margaret hoist them onto Olive’s coach themselves. Margaret disappeared quickly upstairs, while Choice urgently embraced Olive, running his thumb over her cheek as he had done at their first appointment, bringing Olive close to delirium. He was about to kiss her, when a sound from the street seemed to startle him, and he saw her out with all haste, slamming the door behind her.

Choice was arrested at his premises that night. He was detained on grounds that he had not paid his tax computations, pending a claim against him by the Crown for the improper practice of his trade. He was a lapsed member of the College of Physicians, and thus he retained no protection from their offices, and indeed, they pledged to assist with his prosecution.

Choice’s confinement meant the freedom of others, namely the women who depended on his Wine. They woke up to its absence, and noticed daily with a deeper pang that it came no more, like the letters of a failing love affair. Next, they began to suffer cramps and deliriums. When they visited his shop, sweating, their nostrils wide as horses’, some joined the creditors arguing over the flame drapes, hoarsely demanding their Wine. Other ladies sat in the street crying, while still others, who had not been so badly bitten by the Wine, crept away when they saw the over-sized gilt star from above the door, Choice’s proud emblem, which once blazed so high, resting upended in the street-mud.

Without the Wine, Lettice was oppressed with agonies of self-doubt and shyness and would not show her face in public for several weeks, until she began to see that without her potion she was still a countess. Sackville, noticing that his bride had lost her easy chatter, was forsaken, and learned to tolerate her quietness, until her spirits picked up and her old garrulousness returned, and even increased, and because of her new position, people were more inclined to listen to her, and to take her opinions seriously. And so she grew in confidence until her conversation was widely said to be her greatest attribute, though some secretly called her windbag.

Aletheia was vexed and fractious when her darling Wine no longer arrived, until she heard the suggestion that Venetia had died from taking Choice’s decoction. She had always assumed Venetia’s supplier was Sir Kenelm, and the shock of Choice’s arraignment put her off all her complexion-enhancement, even her cheek-stuffers and chest lotions, and she threw away her metheglins and tonics, and took on a new project: the colonisation of Madagascar. The isle was hazardously remote at present, to be sure, but in a few years, once trade routes were established, it would prove a gentle pleasure garden. Its groves were chattering with tame monkeys, stripy-tailed and shiny-eyed, and the tree-leaves grew as big as serving platters, and cloves were as plentiful as corn. Aletheia instructed her lawyer to swiftly acquire the deeds to the island on her behalf.

Her husband went along with her plan, as he felt there was no hope for England, where the King was not honouring his debts, and Parliament was addled, and the Puritans growing ever more incautious. Aletheia was delighted that, for once, the Earl had seen sense, and they began the enterprise with a joint purpose that united them for the first time in years. They were painted by Van Dyck in ceremonial dress, with a globe in front of them, Aletheia holding compasses trained on the Kingdom of Madagascar.

‘The Madagascar Portrait’ of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, by Anthony Van Dyck, circa 1639

Dorothy Habington liked this development very ill, and took to her bed, and talked of jumping in the Thames. Aletheia, storming into her room when it was finally unlocked, cast her casements open, and briskly bid her throw herself out and snap her neck –
rompi l’osso del collo
– or make herself useful. Dorothy rose from her torpor and rallied further when Aletheia promised to make her Viscountess of Madagascar, and so the three of them planned their cultivation of the island, with zestful maps and drawings.

Penelope became drawn into the business against the King, as her husband was one of the star chamber who resisted him. Her plainness and her lack of pride came to be a badge of calling, which defined her – such was the deformation that politics, in that unstable time, practised upon character.

News of Lancelot Choice’s arrest was on every tongue, published in ballads (where his name half-rhymed usefully with ‘vice’) as well as handbills, corantoes and letters between friends carried by little Mercury boys, running. It spilled into every empty ear, and soon the tired and unkind story of the supposed guilt of Kenelm was exchanged for this new, spicy tale of corrupted commerce. Songs were made up about Choice’s trial, and prayers for him to be brought to justice were said in church. The story of the lethal apothecary carried on the flow of opinion and washed down the runnels of the communal mind.

The visionary Lady Eleanor Davies, whom Venetia once watched declaiming in the Bourse, was seized by one of her vatic inspirations when rising from a too-hot bath and composed oracular verses, which she urgently declaimed to her publisher that night, waking him for the purpose:

‘Pathmos Isle

Hieroglyphick Demonstrations

Paganism rites celebrated.

That fiction, ravished Europa

True as the rape in maps and tapestries ordinary.

Brace of spaniels, Her Grace’s swimming match—’

‘Er, what does it signify, my lady?’ interrupted her publisher. ‘It’s just that I’d rather not be put in Chancery for my pains, so no libel, I beg you.’

‘Its meaning? I have no inkling of its meaning. It comes to me. I am the channel only. The meaning is occluded, even to the author. But the significance is plain to all.’ She resumed: