Viper Wine

C
ONTENTS

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

A
BOUT THE
B
OOK

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.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

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.

L
IST OF
I
LLUSTRATIONS

Viper Wine

A Novel

Hermione Eyre

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

P
ROLOGUE

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.

W
HITE
N
OISE

. . . 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 moon 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.