Viper Wine (59 page)

‘A Knight Errand, no small Bull,

Because the good spirit moved upon the water

With his Venetian, with her Cup of Viper Wine, that never Awakened,

Whether drunk or no, etc. The Flood’s days not equivalent.’

From the prophetic writings of
Lady Eleanor Davies, 1635

The printer nodded. This was good. The benefit of Eleanor Davies’ prophecies was they were too vague to constitute libel. And anything about Lady Digby was selling, these days.

The magistrate’s men arrived in the third watch of the night to find Lancelot and Margaret Choice still packing their many belongings, sewing gold into their hems and cramming silver and plate behind the wattle and daub.

Once they were apprehended, a search of their premises revealed a vast quantity of vials, expensive medical compounds – none adulterated, according to the assayer – as well as a great deal of esoteric equipment thought to be used for the preparation of Viper Wine. A harsh smell led the magistrates to a large quantity of decocted horses’ stale, presumed to be pregnant mare’s urine. But those live, mute and unwilling chorus players in this drama were nowhere to be found. The sheriffs searched Choice’s premises with caution, expecting to find a horde of black flickering tongues and seamlessly uncurling bodies under any counter, or in any wash basket, a tangle of tender grey undersides and gold-green backs wriggling.

The premises were turned over from top to bottom, and suspicion fell upon the cellar with its unusual furnace, and its reptilian stink, although there were no twisting scaly bodies to be found there, not even one dead worm behind an old flagon.

Olive, full of blissful, forbidden emotions, shuddering every time her coach bumped and smelling the scent of Choice’s pomander on her hands, did not think to peep inside Choice’s baggage until she had repaired to her bedroom and the trunks been sent up after her. She looked at them for a while, wondering what male delicacies, what hose, combs and nightshirts might be inside. She did not consider herself the type to pick a lock, but she wanted to touch his things before bed, and she first tried her hair-pin, then her letter-knife, and then the heel of her chopine. And so like a too-tempted heroine, she cracked the lock, and, raising the sturdy lid, she also raised the household with her screams.

N
OCTAMBULATIONS IN THE
F
ORM OF THE
Q
UINCUNX

AROUND MIDNIGHT KENELM
woke, gasping, and began his nightly walk through the college gardens, pacing the back meadow back and forth, up and down, in the shape of the quincunx. The mystical sign of five: the arrangement of five dots on a playing card, the formation of the trees planted in the garden of Cyrus: the quincunciall lozenge. He walked slowly between each of its essential points, a solemn revenant, summoning her up.

When he had read, in the ink of a common handbill, that Choice was to be prosecuted for supplying Venetia with deadly Viper Wine, he fell into a long and profound sleep, which lasted the entire day. Now midnight was become his noon, and he walked abroad while everyone else slept.

The trees around him swayed, wind-tossed, and he heard each rustling leaf speaking for a different woman: one purged to death by a quack; another poisoned by pain-relief for botched surgery; a third killed by complications following liposuction.

He called to Venetia gently, across the stock pond of Gresham College. He saw her ripple in reply, moving towards him over the pond’s milk-white surface. He wished to tell her only that he was sorry. He should have known she would find an apothecary to do her bidding after he denied her. She was ever blessed with a will. He thought he heard her laughing in the bulrushes around the stock pond. Then she was in the air above him, free as breath. It was fitting that he could not see her now, as he had failed to see her, though he looked at her every day, though he lay beside her, though they were as hand in glove. He had studied more closely his papers and his letters, his Chymical preparations; he had taken more interest in his work than his wife. But she should have been his Great Work.

Geese woken by a fox clattered across the marshes, honking: ‘Real-life shocker: I had a nose job and my husband didn’t even notice.’

He did not feel she had betrayed him with her secrecy. He understood that she had taken the Wine as an undertaking of pride, in privacy. She was trying to fill the crack in her nature, the needy flaw that was her secret deformity. He failed: he should have fixed her flaw with love, cherished her so she had no need of Wine. When he was young he thought they were Plato’s ideal lovers, that they were the same person, ripped apart at the Fall, and forever searching for one another, till they sealed each other up with congress, in this lifetime and the next. Now he was uncertain. Perhaps men and women could not make one another whole; perhaps love was not sufficient.

He tried to hear her voice over gusting leaves, but the lamenting trees around him spoke like a tragic chorus, each leaf telling of another travesty: gums blackened by painting with lead; breasts operated on seventeen times for a non-existent problem; healthy bodies, cut apart by greedy physicians; women misled, traduced, deluded.

Once, Kenelm felt it was his privilege to see how the world was ensouled, to perceive the anima behind every living thing, to see the sparkling atoms in coal dust dancing on the wind. Tonight, it was maddening to hear every leaf’s tale of woe.

‘I just wanted to fit my wedding dress better,’ wept the oak.

‘I needed to boost my confidence,’ whined the ash.

‘My husband was never meant to know,’ thrashed the elm.

Each of the leaves was different, rotted to filigree stems, or curled into brittle cadavers. They rustled in drifts under the trees. He had not realised vanity had undone so many.

Seized by inspiration, he tore off the collar of his gown and blindfolded himself, to represent his lack of insight in their marriage: and he held his arms open and trudged towards her, like a blind beggar, staggering in the direction of the stock pond.

‘The surgeon received two hours’ training . . .’

‘It was a surfeit of leeches, applied every hour . . .’

‘The implants contained industrial-grade silicone . . .’

He marched towards reunion with her, ready to drown, longing for the cold seal of water over his head.

The horrors of Hieronymus Bosch’s hell wiggled before his eyes, and he saw the special circle reserved for silver-tongued apothecaries, so-called surgeons and shysters of the knife and lancet. They were held down on operating tables, their lips injected by frog-headed beasts, or their skin peeled by giant pincer-fingers, or force-fed Wine in great purple draughts until their guts burst.

He marched towards the black oblivion, until he stopped, because of his boys, who ought not to be orphans. Not at their tender years – two little ones the same ages as he and his brother when they were unfathered. He stood alive on the brink of the stock pond, listening to the electricity twitching along the crossrail track, feeling the nearness of death, the roar of the future far below him. He backed away, slowly, from the edge.

‘Understanding and love are the natural operation of a reasonable creature; and this last, being the only thing that is really in his power to bestow, it is the worthiest and noblest that can be given.’

The Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby
, 1631

Into the Fleet ditch Olive’s house-men tipped the scaly bodies, some dead, some dying, rearing up in anguish, floundering. By the light of a lantern they slipped into the coursing water, like a meadesman’s eel-catch reversed and running backwards, so the trunk was disgorged of tell-tale snakes. Some floated on the scum, others swam across the surface, propelling themselves in living ogees, moving with instinctive grace, rippling outwards to colonise the night.

Worms turned up all over town in the months that followed, clogging drains and making nests under downstairs beds. They were found in toolboxes and coffins, cellars and sinkholes across London. One bit a woman as she waited at the Cripplegate pump, another killed a baby in Eastcheap.

Soon after, the world turned upside down. The spirit of Mercurius abandoned the isle of Brittanides, which he had formerly loved so well, and left its groves to rot, as brother killed brother, and mothers turned against their sons. Does that sound too poetic? The facts alone, then.

Lady Eleanor Davies took leave of her senses and stormed the private side of Lichfield cathedral, together with two females. She pronounced herself Metropolitan and Primate, and sat in the Bishop’s throne, flanked by her holy handmaids. Her next action was to pour tar over the (new) tapestries and altar-hangings.

Sir Kenelm paid a vulgar necromancer, one John Evans, to summon a spirit for him. The conjurer disappeared in a sulphuric cloud, later claiming that he was propelled upwards out of his dwellings in the Minories in east London, carried bodily over London, and landed in a field in Battersea. Whether Sir Kenelm was satisfied by this display is not recorded.

Van Dyck’s mistress, Margaret Lemon, mad for him, and jealous of his canvases, bit his thumb to stop him painting. With a splint and bandage, he painted still, although his cavaliers and courtiers were no longer coiffed and elegant, but wearing armour, and worried countenances, and holding instruments of war.

F
UGUE OF
D
ESTRUCTION

‘It is strange to note how we have slid insensible into the beginnings of a Civil War by one expected accident after another.’

Letter from Parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke to his wife, 1642

IT STARTS WITH
flecks of torn-up paper, carried on the wind: the demand for Ship Tax, 1637, shredded with the fingertips and blown to all hell.

It builds with the dipping of white handkerchiefs in the blood shed by William Prynne’s ears, their tips cut off at Smithfield for his seditious libel against the masques of the Queen and her ladies.

The rose window of the cathedral shatters with the iconoclast’s cry, and so it has begun. A horse is led in to feed from the altar, and the font’s naive traceries of Matthew and Mark are hacked away.

Parliamentarian troops, billeted at Gayhurst, carve their names on the masonry.

The Medieval frescoes in Gayhurst chapel are painted over. Adam and Eve, pink and ineptly drawn and vulnerable – whitewashed and gone.

Venetia’s family’s estate, Tonge Castle, is burned rather than ceded to Parliamentarians.

The Madonna at Snittlefield that Mary Tree once venerated: smashed.

The farmer turned iconoclast, William Dowsing, prays before he wrecks the icons of 150 churches in Suffolk. He works with a hammer, alone.

Six hundred deer are slaughtered wantonly and left to rot in Corse Lawn, Gloucestershire, by men and women desirous of noble blood.