Viper Wine (8 page)

‘For hardness in women’s breasts, take a purge of jallop, or turneps boyled, and put linen with loose flocks of flax, so ’tis thick and warm, and make a cataplasm using an old mellow pippin. Administer three days after the full of the moon. With this a Lady of Great Quality cured herself.’

‘There was a lady in France that, having had the smallpox,

Flayed off the skin to make it more level.

And whereas before she looked like a nutmeg grater,

After she resembled an abortive hedgehog!’

As the actor from
The Duchess of Malfi
delivered those lines, the audience groaned in unison like a wave crashing, and groundlings round him crossed themselves. The girl in the blue dress had disappeared.

Here was someone else. Cleopatra. A Nubian Queen, tall as an Amazon. She had heavy, contemptuous eyelids and she smiled at Kenelm with heavenly symmetry. She came close to his ear, to talk to him in a whisper, and she put her arm around him, her hand on his back.

‘. . . I went for a face-glow two years ago. The doctor burned me. Have you any idea what it’s like to have your face burned if you are a model? I had second-degree burns to my face. I didn’t work for three months.’

Naomi Campbell, supermodel, 2009

‘
THREE MONTHS!
’ the Amazon shouted.

Re-tuning now complete.

He woke because Venetia was stroking the smoothness of his lower back. He lay still and thankful for her caresses.

Her hand was looking for the dimples that she loved so well, on either side of his spine, above his bottom.

But she felt something unaccustomed, a patch of roughness. At the base of his spine, the skin was raised. Her fingers traced back and forth, trying to read it. What was it? It could be, yes it could be a disease he had picked up on his travels – a flower of the French pox.

Kenelm, awakened, sat up.

‘My pouncing! I had forgot. My pouncing, see? In the south, the sailors have a custom remaining from the Greeks. ’Tis a noble tradition, which—’

‘Enough! Just tell me what it is,’ said Venetia, hiding her face in their pillow, wretched with fear.

Kenelm struck a flint, which made the room instantly darker, turning out the moon. ‘Look,’ he said, handing Venetia the candle and turning over, wrenching up his nightshirt. Venetia pulled back the coverlets. Just above Kenelm’s bottom was a blue-black design, a dirty squiggle in a shape like a little horned man.

‘Mother of God, what is it?’ she said, trying to rub it away.

‘I am pounced, my darling. Pounced and pricked with ink like a savage,’ he said, straining to look back at her across his broad golden-tanned shoulders, which were peeling slightly. ‘It will never come off. It is a custom of the Greeks and the Kings of Guinea, they told me. I had it done with musket lead by my captain, when we were recovering from our battle. We all had one.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘A captain feels no pain.’

‘Mercy, but you might have told me sooner,’ said Venetia, kissing it, but also cross that her husband’s body should have changed for ever without her knowing, and jealous, somehow, of all those men away at sea together. He sat up and pulled off his nightshirt, though the room was cold, and he started undoing the small pearl buttons on the front of her nightgown.

She was quietly thankful that she had not affixed the vinegar poultice to her forehead, which she usually wore to sleep, as a method against wrinkles. She had worn it every night in his absence. He buried his scratch-bearded face in her breasts. They smelled of almond oil, which she rubbed into them every day, to try to make amends for what time and children had done. She feebly tried to delay him from pulling off her whole nightgown.

‘Darling, will you make a beauty tonic?’ she asked, as he reached for her thighs. ‘A youth-cure for me to drink?’

Kenelm considered it unsporting and feminine of her to ask him at this moment, and so he ignored her and continued with his endeavour.

When they were both naked, she felt like Eve in the mural of the chapel at Gayhurst, round and pink and poorly painted. Her feet were cold and when she wrapped them round his warm back he cried out, laughing. He did not allow himself to notice how tense she was, as it would put him off his stride, and he closed his eyes, and he was home, and she was his one true love, and all he ever wanted, and just as she was beginning to forget herself, it was over. They had coupled only twice in three weeks since he returned. His long absence had reduced his need of her. As she lay beside him, the black squiggle was still on her mind.

‘What does your pouncing say?’

‘It is like an amulet or sigil, darling, to draw heavenly influences to my backbone, and assist me in my Work.’

‘But who is the little man?’

‘That is the alchemical sign of Mercury,’ he said slowly, on the brink of sleep. ‘Not very expertly done.’

‘Of course.’

‘Not your name, my darling. That is on my heart.’

‘Oh, very prettily said,’ she scoffed, and in a few moments they were both soundly asleep.

M
OONBEAMS
A
RE
C
OLD AND
M
OIST

‘One would think it were a folly that one could offer to wash his hands in a well-polished silver basin, wherein there is not a drop of water, yet this may be done by the reflexion of the Moon beames only. Hands, even after they are wiped, are much moister than usually.’

‘A Late Discourse by Sir Kenelm Digby in a Solemn Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpelier, Touching on the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathie’, 1664

ALL WEEK, HE
studied long and late in his laboratory. One night, when his candle guttered out after many hours, he was left in a bluish darkness to which his eyes quickly grew accustomed, and he saw it was a night as bright as day outside, and the gardens of Gayhurst were drenched in moonbeams. He stood at the open window of his laboratory, catching them in a glass bubble. He turned it wonderingly in his hand, sending two dashes of moon-juice chasing across the orb.
Moonbeams are cold and moist
, he noted in his ledger.
They leave an acquatic and viscous glutenising sweat upon the glass.

He tipped the moonbeams onto the back of his hand, where he saw them dissipate into a silver sheen on his skin, waxy like the belly of a snake. Could lunar rays assist in safely beautifying a complexion? He made a private note in Latin.

The next night was cloudy.

The night that followed, he and his wife stood out in their garden under the huge moon, two owls in flapping nightgowns. Sir Kenelm held a silver basin up to catch the moon-dew, and Venetia dipped her face into the splashing shimmers. The pores across her nose and cheeks were picked out by the light, and he angled the basin, so the light caught the places under her eyes where the skin was very thin, the veins standing out like the underside of an ivy leaf. The softness twisted across her face, like an inverse sunbeam. If men tanned by daylight, wherefore could they not be healed by night light? As above, so below. ‘It is a potent moisture,’ breathed Sir Kenelm. ‘I can see the refulgent beams at work.’ Venetia shut her eyes and inclined her face deeper inside the basin, until a cloud on the silver formed in the shape of her sigh.

She looked up at him. The elms waved violently behind her. She was radiantly beautiful again. The cure had worked already. She was her Platonic self, ageless, transcendent. Or was she only softened by the moonlight? He reached out to put his arms about her, to claim and hold this sepia-tinted, black-and-silver Venus, but she was already gone, hastening back across the lawn to bed, her nightgown wind-swollen, her hair flying.

After a week of nightly moonbaths, she could discern no improvement in her complexion, although her husband maintained there was a new, subtle, luminosity. His well-meaning comments, his encouraging tone, hurt her more than anything. She found herself commenting on his alchemical work in a sarcastic, disbelieving tone, as if her pride were a debit and credit sheet. Come, she told herself, be bigger than that, but it was not easy.

On the Sunday morning, Kenelm lay half asleep in her bed, while she sat in front of her glass at her toilette, making ready for their private mass held by Chater in their chapel, with a few other recusants from the other side of the shire also in attendance. He asked her if she could see the good effect on her complexion. She did not answer. He suggested that he could see the blue vein on her forehead better than before, as this usually pleased her. It was one of her marks of beauty. He asked if she wanted to try the lunar cure again tonight. Silence. He looked at the stiff outline of her shoulders as she sat at her dressing table, and inferred there was trouble coming. Her voice was strange and cold: ‘I cannot go with you to court.’

‘Venetia, come—’

‘I cannot bear it. I do not know why you persist in this nonsense of moonlight – this, ha, lunacy – when there are other, better cures available, which you well know.’

‘Other cures? What do you mean? Have I not provided you with every safe cure I know of? Have I not imported snails into our grounds from distant climes, at some cost? And yet you will not have them for healing purposes, neither taking their slime to drink nor submitting to have them crawl upon your face.’

She turned to look at him, and her skin was blotchy with tears.

‘I will not speak of those snails! I would have thought that you, a man of Physick, schooled in chemistry, would know better than to chase after village remedies.’

Sir Kenelm leaned forward, very serious. ‘It is because I know the power of Physick that I caution you against it.’

‘Other ladies drink preparations.’

‘You have no need of other ladies’ cures. You barely have any need of a cure at all.’

‘You do not understand.’

‘I do, my love.’

‘And yet you do not, my darling.’

That evening, though the moon was a bright crescent, they lay abed all night.

O
F
F
OUNTAINS AND
T
HE
C
REATURES IN
T
HEM

‘At Sir Anthony Cope’s a house of Diversion is built on a small island in one of his fish ponds, where a ball is tosst by a column of water and artificial showers descend at pleasure. But the Waterworks that surpass all others of the country, are those of Enston, at the rock first discovered by Thomas Bushell Esquire.’

Dr Robert Plot,
Natural History of Oxfordshire
, 1677

‘
Quaesisti nugas, nugis gaudeto repertis
’ – ‘You were looking for trivial amusements – here they are, enjoy them.’

Inscription on people-squirting fountain at Augsberg, recorded by Michel de Montaigne, 1570

WHEN KENELM WAS
fifteen, and under the tuition of Bishop Laud, he was given leave to go home for the feast of Trinity, and spent a day riding slowly east across the sun-parched countryside. As he rode he felt freed, gradually, of all the stiff, correct conduct Laud enforced, and their continual, courteous conflict on matters of religion. Kenelm had smuggled a copy of
The Odyssey
out of Laud’s library and plodding along, sometimes half-sleeping in the saddle, his mind drifted to monsters, whirlpools and mermaids’ tails. But whence did they propagate, if they had no legs?

In Oxfordshire, on the homeward stretch, he rode up through Pudlicote towards the River Glyme and spied a fine church tower and brook. This would do as a place to water Peggy, his pony, whose real name was Pegasus, but who was definitely a Peggy. As he approached, the bells began to ring out.

‘What church is this?’ he asked a woman passing by.