Viper Wine (7 page)

‘Now towards her latter time she [Venetia] grew fatt, yet so that it disgraced nothing of her shape.’

Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to his sons, 1633

THE DIGBYS WERE
at supper.

‘How are your studies, love?’

He nodded and munched. He was almost certain their dining room was smaller than before he went away to sea. Perhaps his senses had grown through exercise of Imagination. Venetia’s habit now was to sit across the table from him, in the half-light. In their courtship they had sat so close they might keep hold of each other constantly; her stockinged foot in his hand, her finger dancing upon his gartered knee.

‘What are you eating, dearheart?’ she said, peering over. ‘Ship’s biscuit again?’

She was so interested in his diet, wanting so much to please him and make him strong. Women had too much love in their bodies, he mused. They could not contain it, it made them solicitous and overweening in matters beyond them. You could see it shining in their faces sometimes. Women needed to disburden themselves of love, and they would smother any small person or furry beast with it, even a shrub, a plant! It was too much, and Kenelm wondered if they could be leeched of their love, as of blood. One of the reasons Venetia had so much power over him, at first, was because she seemed like a man, never fussing, never over-flowing in her affections, but cool and sanguine. She was – or at least, she had been – the very opposite of his mother.

Kenelm was eating bacon and eggs, with a Wagon Wheel on the side. He had developed a liking for these foodstuffs, which he had brought back with him from the Med, where he had obtained them through trade with merchants who were carried on strange tides and backward-blowing winds. They called these bright edibles ‘Returned Goods’, but whence they had been returned – the New World? Venetia viewed with displeasure another foodstuff he had brought home: a suspect pink and tasteless meat called Spam. Odd roots and infusions were often arriving from abroad, and they either became indispensable, like potatoes and tea, or were never seen again.

Sir Kenelm kept recipes and instructed the kitchen. He pursued pleasure craftily, like a good master of husbandry. He paid lavishly for saffron and pepper; mace and nutmeg. Venetia bargained over every penny, for the satisfaction it brought her, but Kenelm believed that the best things were, invariably, the most expensive. He sniffed the good from the best; he checked the eyes of trout for clarity, and sent for virgin Hampshire honey, and green rosemary, agrimony and thyme. He tasted every dish before seasoning it, chewing thoughtfully; he craved umami, the fifth taste.

Eggs quicken – by contraries – the salt taste of bacon
, he wrote, to himself, scrawling a brief note that brought the English fry-up into existence:
Two poched eggs, with a few fine dry-fryed collops of bacon are not bad for breakfast.
His arteries squelched appreciatively.

He never thought to publish his recipes: that would be done after his death in 1669 by an opportunist scribbler who played up Kenelm’s connections. The book’s contents page was a feast of namedropping. ‘My Lord Lumley’s Pease Pottage’; ‘Hydromel as I made it weak for the Queen Mother’. It was a rum sort of immortality.

‘Sir Kenelm Digby is remembered chiefly for his cookbook . . . it was the first to recommend bacon and eggs for breakfast’

The Encyclopaedia of English Renaissance Literature
,
Volume I, 2012

The cook came to Venetia close to tears, asking if Sir Kenelm could be kept out of the kitchen, as he was always using up the best honey for his fermented drinks, or throwing away perfectly good potage, or telling the kitchen mort that she should use none but the best herbs, even for scullery work. He created a great amount of mess when he made his meath drinks, and this delayed the serving of supper till the boys were listless with hunger. But Venetia, who took no interest in the kitchen, would not say a word against Kenelm’s cooking.

‘How is your transubstantum, darling?’

‘Not today. Today I have written up a list of desiderata.’

‘A long list?’ asked Venetia, who often had to coax him into talking about his Great Work.

‘Indeed.’

‘For your Invisible confrères?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I wish you would tell me what you mean by desider . . .’

‘Desiderata. My darling,’ he said. ‘I only mean a list of what we most desire. That is to say, the most pressing needs of man. Contraptions to help us remain underwater, powerful electuaries, and so forth. For unless we dream, how can we do? So we begin by dreaming.’

She smiled. ‘I dreamed last night that we had a daughter. I had forgot that until now.’

He wiped his mouth with his napkin, and beamed lovingly at her, and took a big bite of Wagon Wheel. He had bartered the biscuits for nutmeg in the Bosphorus, bushel for bushel.

‘Our daughter was very like me,’ said Venetia. ‘Is that the sort of dream you mean?’

‘Yes, but on a universal scale. The needs and wants of all.’

‘So I might dream that all women could have daughters if they were of a mind to, or sons if they had none, and we might put it on your list, and by being noted down it should by your efforts and degrees of Physick become true.’

Kenelm nodded as he speared a slab of Spam with his fork – they were fancy eaters now, using continental eating irons, though they had grown up using knives and fingers.

‘But I expect that is already on your list, of course. I must think more deeply . . .’

‘The list was compiled by scholars and philosophers and I have added to it also,’ said Kenelm airily.

Venetia was quiet.

‘A serum to rub on cats’ noses, that would help us understand them speak?’ she said, trying to make him laugh. ‘Or perhaps a fish that flipped out of its element every time your distant loved ones had you in their thoughts? So you knew that they were safe. A drink to make you full even when you are hungry? Now that would help with fasting.’

Kenelm laughed at her, and shook his head.

‘Teeth that do not rot?’ she asked, thinking of her mouth. ‘Flowers that never die?’

‘I know where those are plucked,’ said Kenelm, putting his arms around her and reaching to caress her in a manner that was firstly affectionate, and secondly indicated he wished her to stop talking.

‘Cloths that clean themselves? Maids that sweep tirelessly and never eavesdrop?’

‘Aye, those are golems.’

‘Artificial music, after Francis Bacon – music that no orchestra plays, but echoes for days, years. Ah, here’s the best. Childbirth without pain?’

‘But now we come close to heresy,’ sighed Kenelm, kissing her on the forehead. ‘It is the curse of Eve, and we cannot end suffering, they say, else we would not be human. Though I agree, my darling, if Bathsheba could speak she would have a tale to tell when she came back from mousing.’

Venetia closed her eyes. ‘Enduring beauty?’

‘My darling, you are the most beautiful of all the women in the world.’

Venetia turned from him, nauseous because the compliment was over-blown and false. But she could see by his eyes that he meant it kindly, and she forgave him. She knew he was treading carefully to avoid that phrase she hated – ‘still beautiful’.

‘Immortality,’ he said. ‘There’s the rub. We are immortal souls in heaven, and on the earth we are immortal threefold-wise. In writing, which is our voice. In portraiture, which is our likeness. In children, who are the heirs to our bodies as well as our estates . . .’

‘Threefold, yet you forget the fourth,’ said Venetia. ‘In memories. In the minds of the living, though we are dead, we walk and talk.’

‘Aye, and so we are never dead till all who knew us die. There’s something in that, Venice. It may be that one day we will bring that memorie, that imprint on the mind, to material presence. To see the past or future in a scrying glass is already done. To take the imprint of the voices of angels on waxy tablets is already done. Why not the inner eye’s projection also? If you can dream it, you can do it. There’s something in that, aye.’

Turning over these profound speculations in his mind, he wandered back to his study, and as soon as he went through the door everything his wife had said vanished from his mind, and so did her very existence, as he picked up his comfortable nib again and fell to writing: rewriting his list of desiderata, entirely the same, but a clean copy, ready to send to his confrères.

Venetia in her silver slippers stepped carefully up the darkened stairs to their children, thinking of the rank desires she knew but could not name to her husband. To fuck without issue, or fear of French pox; to remake one’s body; to become another person; to live for ever; to turn base lead into gold for profit and never tell how it was done . . . She felt ashamed to think of them, as if He might be able to see her thoughts. Even thinking them might sully her complexion. These were the shadow-wishes that could never be told.

Kenelm’s candle glowed on his quill and paper, and beyond them on the panelled wall their shadows fell very huge, his fingers like a malformed giant’s, his pen a rod, his parchment a valley, and while his list of his predictions was precisely lit by candle, behind them lay a vast dark trench.

Late that night, when he came quietly into her bedroom, she was awake. He could hear her breath, shallow and agitated.

‘Some women . . .’ she whispered into the dark. ‘Some women . . .’

‘Yes?’ He was listening. The smell of manly warmth and ale-breath told her his face was close. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he was able to hear her better.

‘Some women drink potions, do they not? For their complexion.’

The darkness inhaled. ‘I brought you snails,’ he said.

‘I want no snails,’ she exclaimed, into the blackness of their curtained bed. ‘I need Physick. I need a tonic, like the women drink at court.’

She put her cold hands around his neck.

‘Will you make me one?’

He sighed.

‘Will you?’

Clouds passed over the moon. A bat flickered over their bed.

She asked again, her voice strangled with urgency. ‘Will you?’

‘No, because you have no need of any potions, my darling Venice. I like you just as you are.’ And he took her in his arms, feeling strong and manly, and stroked her hair, and whispered goodnight.

They lay awake, their bodies crackling with frustration. She had suffered a double indignity, admitting her vanity, her weakness, and all for nothing. He had refused her. She did not understand it. Usually he refused her nothing. Kenelm, on his side of the bed, was fighting to stop himself feeling cross with her. He had come home in triumph; it was the very least she could do to stay beautiful for him. She was only five years older than him – many wives were older than their husbands. And if she could not keep her beauty, she should at least maintain her faith in her beauty, since that was the chiefest thing, was it not? After a certain age, did beauty not become an act of will, or character?

He did not want her to discover the cures that other women drank. He had seen the effects of Belladonna and the cure of Antimony. He had seen skin scorched by Ceruse – the vinegar in it as bad as the lead, no doubt – and cheeks raw with Fucus, which could be almost any chymicall matter stoppered in a gallypot, and what the courtesans called Pinchers, tiny pegs concealed under the wig which drew the slack skin off the jaw.

He knew the initial glow was followed by slow disfigurement, as the new smoothness turned to crusted immobility, or, in the case of Pinchers, he had heard that the skin slackened so at night, with the pin removed, the skin fell down upon the shoulder and breast. And he knew a corruption of spirit seemed to follow. These women were always forced by their pride to lie and say they pinched not, they painted not, and they were touched by Nature’s hand alone. And everyone pretended to believe them, and showed them such hypocrisy, curtseying to their new face, but laughing as soon as they turned their back.

Gayhurst was silent as a stone, the woods were dark and still. Kenelm turned over onto his side, and sleep lapped gently over him, submerging his mind.

No, he did not want her drinking potions. They could be dangerous, corrosive. He thought of the woman in
The Duchess of Malfi
who flayed her face off to remove smallpox scars. Why had his uncle taken him to see
The Duchess of Malfi
when he was only twelve? He had nightmares for weeks.

Beauty treatments could lead to slipping in the wit-house, pitting in the droolers.

The radio signal has been lost.

‘Desquamation of the epidermis, cornified desquamation, crythema (redness) . . . All these are possible skin conditions resulting from radiotherapy . . .’

Bleep! Re-tuning in progress . . .

He twitched and fell, reaching out to catch her. He thought he saw her face distended, a Picasso portrait. Word-torrents poured through his sleep, lists from past and future medical dictionaries.