Viper Wine (39 page)

Master Choice pursued his rearing horse. The girl was struggling in the water, almost submerged. Venetia looked around. This was the drainage for brewers and tanners, lime-burners and beet-boilers. It was scummed and murky. But there was no one else to do it. She did not stop to think of herself, or to face her Maker. The Wine had made her a Virago. Doubtless the girl, a city child, had not learned to swim; Venetia had played a water nymph at Enstone House for a summer. She threw her fur off her shoulders and kicked off her slippers, and shut her eyes and leaped, and then she was cold, and wet, and she was grasping a handful of the girl’s hair, and her coat, and they were kicking one another, strangers keeping one another half alive, as the river carried them along.

Venetia felt that she might not live to perform in the Queen’s Twelfth Night Masque, and she imagined all the courtiers observing the briefest silence in her memory, before beginning their merry dance again.

As they seemed to be going under, Venetia felt the Wine kick in her gut, and give power to her shoulders. In childbirth or in feverish fits, she had clung to the thought of Kenelm, and how she could not leave him, and this had kept her alive. But now the Wine insulated her, so the violence of the water did not scare her. She could not die; the sweet Wine needed her. The South Ditch was deep and its currents were strong, and Venetia managed to cling onto a branch, but it was only floating, brought down by the autumn flood, and the current sped them onwards. The girl screamed. Venetia managed get hold of the bank just past the brambles, and to cling on, and so drag herself and the girl onto land.

They lay there, filthy and panting.

The girl spat brown water. Venetia had managed to keep her mouth closed.

‘So there we are, lass,’ she said, rubbing the girl on the back.

‘Ah-boo boo boo hoo,’ cried the girl, holding up her grimy skirt, and showing she had lost a boot. ‘Booo, boo, hoo.’ She cried like a bad impersonation of someone crying. The ill-tempered horse was now tied up safely, and Lancelot Choice approached them, holding out Venetia’s slippers.

‘You poor ladies,’ he said gallantly, as if they had both befallen a misfortune, but he had luckily come to the rescue. ‘Let me help you.’

‘Give me my slippers, sir,’ she snapped. ‘I shall carry them safely home. But I thank you for your kind consideration.’

‘My lady, be careful on the stony ground,’ said Choice, gesturing to the broken path that lay between her and her home.

‘Thank you, but I think it can do me less harm than your horse can,’ said Venetia. ‘Besides, I want to get back to my box of turnips. And you to your Margaret, no doubt. My best to your poor Margaret.’

Folk from the household were running out, calling alarum, and Venetia looked back at the sobbing girl, and considered taking her into her house and making her clean, so she would not be in trouble when she got home – but then she decided she could not be bothered with it, and sent the girl on her weeping way. The proximity of danger had focused her mind. Trivial things will take up your whole life if you let them, she thought. Let someone else see to it the child is washed. I have saved her life.

Mistress Elizabeth, out of breath and disturbed by all these odd occurrences, blurted out that to her mind, the girl was a baggage not worth saving.

Stinking and bedraggled, Venetia went into the scullery and, ignoring everyone, opened up her crate of seething red vials. She held one up and drank it down. She did not care who saw. Afterwards she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, like a man.

Later, as Mistress Elizabeth helped her out of her dirty clothes, and wiped her body with a cloth – this leap into a running sewer did not seem occasion enough for a bath, which would be too dangerous to undertake so lightly – Venetia talked aloud.

‘Women are precious vessels. We must comport ourselves carefully, and not spill or knock ourselves. With good cause. If any mishap befall, if you slip or sprain or twist, or get a fever, splodge or stain, then you are ruined. You are broken. It is not possible to mend any of us back again – no more men than women, but a broken man has given service, while a broken woman is a pity and a nuisance.’

Mistress Elizabeth wrapped Venetia in a blanket, hoping to comfort her out of such speeches. Venetia tingled all over with strength, with pins and needles in her blood, and she wanted to run, or take another risk, or get out of breath, and she wondered what the drink had unleashed in her.

She did not tell anyone about this incident, not even Kenelm. She did not mean to hide it from him, but she did not see how to explain it. He would only worry. The servants never spoke of it again, above a whisper, and the household somehow ended up believing that an accident had befallen their mistress, but that a handsome delivery man had saved her from the Fleet.

In her head, the vipers were always moving, turning over one another, their hot smooth bodies restless and sleek. The three vials lasted her barely two days, and she went to fetch more from Choice’s lodgings herself. It was her last chance before the rehearsals for the Queen’s Masque, and she felt drawn there by the whispering silk-stiffness of her dress. She could have forced herself not to visit Choice, but it was so much easier to let herself go to him. As she walked, she could hear the vipers hissing in her skirts.

‘I go to Dr Sebagh’s and have the “vampire facelift”. They take a phial of blood from your arm, separate the plasma, and inject it into your face. It helps the skin repair itself.’

Actress Anna Friel, 2012

At the entrance to Fenchurch Street she darted into a blind alley, because she saw Belinda, Lady Finch, coming in the opposite direction. She was accompanied by someone but Venetia could not see who it was; she heard a snatch of light voices as the ladies passed by. She wondered if another lady of the court was also hiding from Venetia, in a doorway, and another lady hiding from that lady.

Perhaps Choice was now beset by ladies demanding Wine. Could that be the reason he had not supplied her with a full consignment of vials? Had she sunk so low in his esteem that the blood which was hers to drink went to other women first? Would the whole court now be growing dewy skinned, with deep black pupils? Indignantly she rapped at the door, which she noticed had been overpainted afresh, while above the door the sign of the star had been embossed in rich gilt.

There was no answer. Venetia bowed her head and slumped her shoulders, willing herself not to be noticed, nor to stand out. She tried to blow herself out like a light, so no one would see her. It did not suit her. She was meant to flame, not cower. At last, the door opened a crack and a young apprentice, a boy she had never seen before, peeped out.

‘My lady, we can’t be having you today—’

Venetia was not going to accept this. She laughed at the very idea that he would keep her on the doorstep.

‘Move for me, or there will be all hell cut loose,’ she said in a very icy, smiling voice.

Stepping inside, she unveiled and, seeing a new smart leather book on the counter, which she judged was the book of appointments, she stood leafing through its pages avidly, while the apprentice shook his head and stammered. The clients were identified by initials and pseudonyms only, and she was idly puzzling over some of them when, screwing up his courage, the apprentice plucked the book out of her hands and hid it under the counter. To remove her from the main corridor, he showed her into the back room where there was a wooden chair. She sank into it gratefully. ‘Well, sweet boy, I must see your Master Choice. Where is he?’

The apprentice held his head in his hand. ‘I don’t know. Upstairs. Oh, I wish you weren’t here, madam.’

‘Are his other customers so much more important to him? Is he with a very great lady?’

In his anxiety the apprentice stretched his mouth very wide and started to devour his own knuckle.

‘Is it the Queen? Why else would you be so indelicate with me? I was counted something in my day, you know . . .’

It occurred to her that Olive and Master Choice might be enjoined in adulterous bliss upstairs, while the apprentice guarded the door.

But then upstairs she heard deep voices that penetrated the floorboards like a rumble, and the sound of a chair scraping, and heavy treads on the stairs, and she realised she had misunderstood.

The apprentice stopped chewing his fingers’ ends, and threw his hand at Venetia in despair.

‘My lady, one of the Sheriffs of the City is upstairs interviewing Master Choice about his use of improper and Papistical cures!’ he hissed.

She could hear them coming down the stairs with great clanking steps.

‘Too many great ladies coming here, in and out, all day long. The Sheriff suspects a Popish plot. If, if, if he discovers you here, it will be so much the worse for us!’ The apprentice was now dancing on the spot, performing a small jig of worry and fear.

Venetia looked around the room. She heard the Sheriff and his lieutenant in the hallway, and guessed they were about to come in. She ran across the room, unbolted a small door under the stairs that she took for a cupboard, and darted down a flight of steps. The door slammed shut behind her. A black stink brushed her face, and she guessed it was a curtain, which she grappled with, heaving it aside.

It was unexpectedly warm, for a cellar. It smelled of death and sadness, but then most cellars do. God help her, for she was having such a day. She could see nothing in the darkness, but she soon became aware of a presence in the cellar, betrayed by a small, soft sound, like skin passing across skin.

In darkness we are made, and to darkness we return.

The sound was constant but irregular, like the action of a thousand independent fingertips.

All flesh is grass, all grass is flesh.

The sound surrounded her, cosseting her senses, like the crested tempter at the ear of Eve. She had always known she would be drawn here eventually, into the darkness of the pit. She knew where she was, and what a multitude of scaly enamelled bodies she was amongst, but she could not see them, only sense them. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she became aware of a soft glow from a furnace, she could discern an outline of tubs or pens, roughly knee-high, although she could not see anything inside the pens, but she could feel her heart beating all about her, as if she were split into so many long living coils, tumbling over one another.

She tried to imagine she was surrounded by old shovels, empty earthenware jugs and bottles of wine, as in any other cellar. But viperish thoughts crammed into her mind, and she feared for her little boys and prayed they never played upon rotten logs, nor squeezed inside the brackish caverns of decaying trees.

She wondered if the creatures recognised her as one of their own. Would they be attracted towards her in the dark, smelling the blood of their brothers in her veins? Would they hunt her like a rabbit or a mouse? She tried to make her breathing less fast and shallow. Snakes were creatures of the night. Could they see her in the dark, though she could not see them?

She stayed very still, breathing with forced gentleness. She fancied she heard a smooth unspooling, somewhere inside her chest, as if the enemy that had long kept itself coiled about her heart now wound into her throat. In front of her face in the darkness she felt she could discern the distant wet papping of a mouth opening and closing. She did not want to tread upon a soft lethal body, so she froze, resolved not to move until she saw where she stood. The cellar was pulsing, yet strangely calm, or at least she made up her mind to find it so. She told herself the poor creatures might be happy nestling together here, until their little time was up.

In the room upstairs, the Sheriff concluded his interview with Master Choice, that wondrous talker, and smooth-tongued gent, and the only sign he was unnerved was his crenelated necktie, too stiff upon his throat. The men shook his hand and wished him and his wife well. Margaret’s wound was healing well enough that she hobbled to bid the Sheriffs adieu, her paralysed leg stiff like a strut beneath her. The blue had left her lips and the fever passed, but she swore she would never return to that place – the place where Venetia, at that moment, was crouching in the dark.

The commotion upstairs had roused the vipers, which she could hear rising up and hissing, expecting, perhaps, a fresh consignment of flesh, or baring their fangs in the latest battle of the long war that had dispatched so many of their gold-green brothers . . .

Take a viper by the neck, and hold her so she cannot wag or stir at all . . .

The door to the viper pit flew open and she saw daylight, and Master Choice, and his apprentice, and she raced up the stairs out of the cellar, without looking behind her. Lancelot Choice shut the cellar door fast and bolted it, so she might not see where she had been, and what amongst.

It was necessary for her not to look behind her, if she were to continue drinking her Wine.