Viper Wine Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Title Page

  Prologue

  White Noise

  A Discourse Between Brothers

  Fame

  Sir Kenelm Holds a Press Conference

  Moonbeams Are Cold and Moist

  Of Fountains and the Creatures in Them

  I Saw Eternity the Other Night

  Yellow Submarine

  Side-Effects May Include

  Of Sunflowers and Sealing Wax

  My Name Is Mary Tree

  ‘There Are No Ugly Women, Only Lazy Ones’

  Sir Kenelm’s Infinite Library

  The Apollo Room at the Devil Tavern

  The Opium Garden

  Venetia Furiosa

  Syringes and Lemons

  Inigo Jones’s Motion Pictures

  Two Guessing Games

  The Masque of ‘Luminalia’

  Lenten Scars

  Adulterated Candies

  A Letter from the Mouth of Hell

  In Which She Loses at Cards

  Let Me Speake!

  In the Viper’s Nest

  Noctambulations in the Form of the Quincunx

  Fugue of Destruction

  Bletchley Park to Outstation Gayhurst

  Peace Through War

  Epilogue: Mary Tree

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice.

  Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.

  From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel’s snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hermione Eyre is a journalist and former croupier. She read English at Hertford College, Oxford and was a staff writer and TV critic at the Independent on Sunday for seven years, then chief interviewer at the London Evening Standard Magazine. This is her first novel.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed by Anthony van Dyck 1633 by permission of the trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

  2 Gayhurst House © Hermione Eyre

  3 Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby by Peter Oliver © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

  4 Sir Kenelm Digby 1603-65, by Peter Oliver © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

  5 Sir Kenelm’s alchemical notebook, from the Wellcome Library, London © Hermione Eyre

  6 Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, by Anthony Van Dyck, 1633 by permission of the trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

  7 Sir Kenelm Digby 1603–1665 by Anthony Van Dyck © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

  8 Gresham College, 1740 Engraving by George Vertue of Gresham College, looking East, showing the entrance from Old Broad Street, from John Ward’s Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (1740)

  9 ‘The Madagascar Portrait’ of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, by Anthony Van Dyck circa 1639 © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

  Viper Wine

  A Novel

  Hermione Eyre

  Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, by Anthony Van Dyck, 1633

  PROLOGUE

  From letters written by Sir Kenelm Digby, May–June 1633

  WHEN SHE HAD been dead almost two days I caused her face and hands to be moulded by an excellent Master, and cast in metal. Only wanness had defloured the sprightliness of her beauty but no sinking or smelling or contortion or falling of the lips appeared in her face to the very last.

  We found her almost cold and stiffe; yet the blood was not so settled but that our rubbing of her face brought a little seeming colour into her pale cheeks, which Sir Anthony Van Dyck hath expressed excellently well in his picture . . . A rose lying upon the heme of the sheet, whose leaves being pulled from the stalk in the full beauty of it, and seeming to wither apace even whiles you look upon it, is a fit emblem to expresse the state her body then was in.

  [This painting] is the onely constant companion I now have . . . It standeth all day over against my chaire and table, where I sit writing or reading or thinking, God knoweth, little to the purpose; and att night when I goe into my chamber I sett it close to my bed’s side and methinks I see her dead indeed; for that maketh painted colours look more pale and ghastly than they doe by daylight. I see her, and I talke to her, until I see it is but vain shadows.

  Nothing can be imagined subtiler than her hair was. I have often had a handful of it in my hand and have scarce perceived I touched anything. It was many degrees softer than the softest that I ever saw.

  Her hands were such a shape, colour and beauty as one would scarce believe they were natural, but made of wax and brought to pass with long and tedious corrections.

  Many times she received very hard measure from others, as is often the fortune of those women who exceed others in beauty and goodness.

  I have a corrosive masse of sorrow lying att my hart, which will not be worn away until it have worne me out.

  I can have no intermission, but continually my fever rageth. Even whiles I am writing this to you, the minute is fled, is flown away, never to be caught again.

  In a word, shee was my dearest and excellent wife that loved me incomparably.

  WHITE NOISE

  . . . slknxsnaosihnfbbfcalslnjzalkn . . .

  Please tune your receiver to the required frequency

  ‘smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenvgttaviras’ – Cryptic anagram sent on 30 July 1610 by Galileo Galilei to his patron Johann Kepler.

  Tuning in progress

  ‘altis simum planetam tergeminum observavi’ – the same anagram rendered into Latin.

  Tuning complete

  ‘I have observed that the most distant of planets has a triple form’ – Galileo’s anagram announces his discovery of the rings of Saturn.

  SIR KENELM DIGBY and his young son were standing on a hillock, gulping at the stars. It was June, and the heavens were royal blue, humming and hung with silver moonfruit. The son, who had been hastily wakened, wore a nightshirt, and half-laced boots; the father’s doublet was loosened, as he had dined well. He was lately home from a sea voyage that had kept him away a year, and the boy fancied he still smelled salty.

  ‘Which one do you want, darling?’

  The boy pointed to a speck below Saturn, between the Perseids and the lower Cassiopeia constellation. Sir Kenelm hoisted little Kenelm onto his shoulders easily. ‘Well, you have chosen wisely. You have chosen a moo
n of Saturn, which hangs about the big planet like you hang about my neck.’ Sir Kenelm grasped his son’s ankles, making him squirm with pleasure. ‘Your planet is covered in a frozen crust, like the River Thames in winter, except it is mint-green coloured and striped with orange, like a tiger.’

  ‘Roaaaaar like an Araby tiger.’

  ‘Indeed. Under the ice on your planet, there is a sea which bursts up through the ice into great plumes, like the grandest fountains you see in palaces. The moon stays close to its father Saturn with a girdle of light and dust which keeps them in each other’s thoughts. This moon is much smaller than Saturn; it is the same size as England, and would take only five days to ride across. It is a pleasant little planet, although a trifle cold, and I think you would not like it as much as you like your own bed.’ Sir Kenelm was stomping over the grass tussocks now, back to Gayhurst House.

  ‘How old is my planet?’ asked the boy, who was at that point in life when the concept of age is new and compelling. Sir Kenelm knew the earth to be about four thousand years old: he had found fish bones in the English hills, deposited there by the Flood. But this moon of Saturn?

  ‘Oh, it is a young planet,’ said Sir Kenelm. ‘Of about one thousand years.’

  Sir Kenelm did not know that everything he had just said was true. Or at least, that it would be said again four hundred years later, when images and data from the Cassini monitor arrived on earth. Sometimes his mind was double-hinged, and could go forwards as well as back. He was often like a string that vibrated with strange frequencies, but most of the time he was the most obstinate fool imaginable.

  He could not even remember if, thirty years ago, his father had also waked him and walked him out to look at the stars. His mother once said something of the sort. Kenelm tiptoed noisily past the sleeping nursemaid into the boys’ room, which smelled of cloves and sweet vomit, and as he tucked young Kenelm in his cot, he seemed to remember being tucked in himself, like an obverse image, and a distant bell rang in his mind, which sounded like a revelation, until he realised it was the church bell up the lane at Olney marking the hour. Had he been taken out in his bedclothes to wish upon a falling star? It seemed unlikely, but it was hard to remember events before his father’s Great Undoing.

  Venetia’s door was unlocked. Her candle had burned out and Sir Kenelm unlaced himself in the dark, with practised hand. He touched the fragment of the wand of Trismegistus which he wore round his neck as a talisman, said his alchemist’s Amen three times, and slipped into bed next to Venetia, fitting his chest to the warmth of her back, breathing the stale perfume of her hair. He loved her so deeply when she was sleeping. Venetia, asleep, was Perfection. Awake she was Problematical. Since he came home Venetia had become more . . . anxious. More challenging. More troubled. These and other tactful verbal constructions, euphemisms and put-downs for women from the future crackled like static through Sir Kenelm’s sleeping mind as it drifted up, up into the darkness above their curtained bed, up, above the brick gables of Gayhurst, up, above the darkened, gaping fields of Buckinghamshire and the badly drawn outline of the British coast, until he could go no further and simply bobbed, like a tethered balloon, while satellites in orbit sallied gently past his ears.

  A DISCOURSE BETWEEN BROTHERS

  AUGUST 1632

  SUNTANNED AND ALIEN, Sir Kenelm stood in the middle of the bright green grass at Gayhurst, directing five farmhands who were carrying a vast column, obelisk-shaped, and bound in old tarpaulin and ropes. ‘Avast! Heave-ho, ho, ho!’ cried Kenelm, who kept forgetting he was no longer captain of two ships. Pope Sixtus V had once held a competition for the best device to winch obelisks into the streets of Rome; now Gayhurst would have its monument also. As the men heaved, the shrouded obelisk rose slowly, tilting like a giant peg.

  Kenelm stepped into the house, where his brother was in the main hall, beside a stone sarcophagus, a primitive wooden faun, a crouching woman sculpted out of white marble with one buttock missing, a thick roll of tapestries, an immense shield furred with rust, a bundle of new French cutlasses, sticky-black in parts, seven superhuman-sized caryatids and a gleaming cardinal’s sedan.

  ‘Is this all?’ said John, looking about him.

  ‘Well,’ said Kenelm, trying not to rise to his brother, ‘there is also the matter of fifteen thousand pieces of silver, which I share with the Crown. And a little painted French harpsichord that I have already sent to the Queen.’

  ‘I like this one,’ said John, inspecting the crouching Venus.

  ‘Oh, but you should have seen what we had to leave behind. The isles of the Cyclades are so full of statuary, John, it is as if a busy London street had been put under an enchantment, and everybody turned to stone.’

  But John was more interested in the French cutlasses, striking fencing poses with them, just to feel their weight.

  ‘I also collected books, when I found them. There are some choice volumes in my study.’

  ‘Ah yes. Books. Most pirates go looking for books,’ said John.

  Kenelm suggested that since it was fine, they should set out for their special place, the Old Dam bank, site of their fraternal games, where they used to build forts, and play swing-bobbin, and, later, where they went to loiter and smoke. On their way across the garden they saw the obelisk, now in an upright position, unwinding from its tarpaulin. A metalwork construction, pyramid-shaped, it bristled with small trapezoidal spurs, sticking out at angles. It was a beautifully constructed radio mast.

  ‘I picked that up from a French fleet,’ said Kenelm. ‘They removed it from one of the isles.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I would have asked them, but I was busy avoiding being killed by their cannon. I believe it may have come from the sacred island of Delos, where no one is ever buried or born. I fancy it is some oracular rod, some instrument of divination.’

  Its metal filaments hummed with a breath of Buckinghamshire air.

  ‘Did any take you for a pirate?’

  ‘Plenty, until our letter of marque was in tatters through showing.’

  ‘Who fights better, the Frenchman or the Spaniard?’

  ‘There’s two reasons why the French are ill-served by their system of command. First, there are too many serving midships . . .’

  They continued to talk in this fashion, as brothers do, while they walked through the orchard, which was glowing green and leaf-lit. Both bent under the boughs, being tall and well-made, and John broader than Kenelm, although he was younger. Fruit was already putting forth quicker than it could be collected, and apples and pears lay spoiling. In ten years’ time, Gayhurst would be shut up because of the Civil War, and the orchard would again be full of rotting fruit, until locals loosed their pigs there, but this was the long peaceful summer of 1632, and the ripeness and bounty of fruit everywhere had led to indolence and decay. A high whiff of cider hung in the air. Sir Kenelm saw a perfect, smooth russet apple resting on the grass and bent to pick it up. A wasp flew out from its mushy underside.

  ‘My wife is growing jealous of her face,’ said Kenelm. ‘She guards herself from view. She preserves the use of her face for great occasions only, and keeps it out of vulgar sight, by means of games light and dark and candlelight and veils and whatnot. She keeps her curtains fast in daylight. She flinches from my sight.’

  ‘It pains you.’

  ‘Yes, John, I think it does,’ said Kenelm, relieved to be speaking about this difficult subject. ‘I had intended to remove us all to London after two or three days, so I could take advantage of men’s interest in my exploits, but she has it in her head that we must stay here yet another week. I begin to think she dreads going to town, John – being seen in company. It is the work of this new Italian mirror that she uses. It is backed with mercury, you know. Her crystal glass did no harm at all. Now she goes out hooded on the most innocuous errands. When she took the boys to see the shearing at Stoke Goldington, when she tended her little garden yesterday. Why? Perhaps she thought the ploughman would dr
op his bridle, or Joe the farmhand gape in wonder at her ruined cheek? I do not mean to be unkind, John, but I do not like this Sphinxy business of concealment. I love to look upon her, and I think that she should love to be looked upon by me.’

  ‘She is how old?’

  ‘Five years senior to me. That age when a woman is neither young nor old: thirty-three. Forget I told you that – her age. She always has me say she was born in 1600, so she passes for thirty-one.’

  ‘But she’s thirty-three. That’s some way from the grave.’

  ‘Painting with lead does much injury. I think she fears her next climacteric.’

  ‘Her what?’

  ‘That age which is by seven divisible, John. You know how it goes. Every seven years we are made again. A woman at her mid-climacteric is at a turning point. Remember Queen Elizabeth’s Grand Climacteric at sixty-three? Our mother spoke of it. Such a dangerous age, it was thought to be, that there were celebrations when the Queen lived.’

  ‘Our mother had a new dress . . .’

  ‘Aye, which she never wore again.’

  John split a cobnut between his teeth. Their mother wore no more gay dresses after their father was Undone. Kenelm remembered seeing all the servants leaving in a procession down the drive at Gayhurst, their belongings strung over their shoulders, and he thought at least Bessy or Nurse Nell might turn and wave to him or to the house, just to bid farewell, but none did.

  Gayhurst House

  After their father was executed their mother wore her stiff ruff and the same mourning clothes till the black washed out of the linen, and they lived quietly at Gayhurst behind thick fortified walls and scanty windows, scraping porridge from their old rough bowls, keeping the same Tudor household habits, labouring under their Catholic shame, and the new iniquity that attached to their name.

  At Kenelm’s majority everything changed. He came back from his travels and showed them how to become Stuarts, with fashionably floppy clothes and continental politesse, and he used all his money on getting his knighthood, and knocked dozens of windows into the house, making it his own. And he chose a wife whom everyone counselled against. John wondered if he would have had the courage to do any of that, but decided he would not have wanted to.