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 drop 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.
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.
‘So,’ said Kenelm, ‘Venetia fears to reach her mid-climacteric. Of course her mother, dying early, never reached that age.’
‘She never knew her mother . . .’
‘No, and therefore she has no example of how to do it. How to age. It is proving a trouble to her, I fear, John.’
‘Venetia is still beautiful.’
‘Those very words do pain her. When I tell them to her, she turns and shrinks away. It is the “still” she cannot stand.’
‘She is so vain?’
‘She is a woman. No, come, it is the way the world has made her, John. She was “a beauty”, it was her very essence and her designation.’
‘Now she is “a mother”.’
‘Aye, and a good one, but many women are mothers and only a few are beauties. It is a strange and cruel punishment, John, to be stripped of a title for no reason other than the movement of time. Imagine if you declined from “poet” to “former poet” within a few brief years. Or if you were “scholar” then “still very scholarly” then “once a scholar”.’
‘Scholar, poet, these are titles earned, not born . . .’
But Kenelm was in his stride. ‘Consider how her mother died when she was a few months old, and how she never found another mother but was passed around like a poppet, and stroked, and made much of, especially by great men. That she never turned into a lisping, painted chit is only because she has a character of great depth; indeed, her immortal soul is as profound as a man’s, I do believe.’
‘Why then will she not make peace with this? With her decaying beauty? She is a part of nature as much as you or I or this tree. She cannot step aside from time and nature. Nor more than you can, Ken.’
Sir Kenelm sighed. ‘That argument if rehearsed enough would have kept us from inventing paper, and wheels, and cannon, and wearing clothes . . . You would say to the man Leonardo, on the brink of creating a practicable flying machine: “Oh stop, sir, you cannot step aside from nature.” We meddle with nature all the time, John, in the breeding of hounds, in the cultivation of potatoes in our English soil. In the creation of this orchard, even. As I am a production of the Almighty Architect, then is not everything I do with a pure heart also a production of His?’
Sir Kenelm liked saying this. It excused his presumptions: his alchemy, his experiments in natural magick, his manipulation of the rays of the sun and moon. He believed himself to be within the Catholic definition of Natural Law in so much as he worked, always, to advance the greater good. If he could find the Philosopher’s Stone, he would share it, spread its wonders wide and bring about a Universal Cure. He searched his heart regularly, held it up to the light, and tried his conscience – but still he felt the sting of vulgar eyes. He knew that he and his wife were seen as brash, a dubious spectacle. But he did not wish to stand in line with other men just for the sake of it. If he could raise the white sulphur into exaltation, he would do it; if he could hasten the Age of Gold, he would.
‘My wife and I,’ said Kenelm slowly, pausing before they strolled through the orchard, towards the house, ‘are both spoiled goods. We are bright, fine-worked pots, but crack’d inside and fixed with clay.’
Venetia stayed late abed that morning.
This was uncharacteristic, but she found she could not rise.
Perhaps she was still angry about the spoiling of the apples. Mistress Elizabeth had not directed the farmhands to it and three barrels at least had been left to mulch. She shouted at her, and then she went to her room and cried. For what? For mouldered apples?
Yesterday she was in her knot garden at the front of the house, clipping the box-hedges using her dainty silver shears – play-gardening, as Kenelm called it – when a youth in the livery of the Earl of Dorset arrived. She put down her basket and smiled her famous smile at the livery boy, the smile Ben Jonson had written a sonnet about, and Peter Oliver painted; the smile that was so much in demand that a royal writ was put out to send any unlicensed copyist to prison, and still copies came. She stood there, her hip askew, so confident, the breeze in her flowing hair, her loose country dress full and soft. ‘Madam,’ said the boy, bowing like a silly sapling, then looking her full in the face. ‘Could you tell me where to find her most gracious beauty Venetia, Lady Digby?’
He was holding a tall fair lily – a gallant reference, she supposed, to the single fleur-de-lis on Kenelm’s coat of arms – and aflame with nerves and excitement, he glanced back and forth at the house, as if he thought the great dame herself might at any moment appear in a cloud of golden light.
Venetia laughed it off and said, ‘Why, that lady is before you.’ And as the youth looked at her with disbelief, and as his face turned from disappointment to, yes, repulsion, she remembered, as she had to keep remembering, that she was no longer herself. Her teeth were going, though they were always so good, and she had not yet learned to smile without showing them. She saw, in the mirror of his face, as the young boy’s pupils shrank, how much she had changed. And still he did not present her with the lily. Did he think she was a presuming and ironical chambermaid, testing him?
Edward Sackville must have talked up her beauty to his livery boy. It was his way. Since he became an earl his talk carried more weight. The boy had been expecting a treat: to see the woman with the smallest waist in London. Once that had been almost true. Now . . . ‘Have you no mouth to keep your tongue in, or do you stand there like a dimmock?’ she snapped. As she heard herself speak, she felt ashamed. This is what it is, she realised, to become bitter, to spit out rude gall because your bones are turned to brittleness. She turned and took off her embroidered gardening gloves, while her rage subdued, and then she reached out and took the boy’s hand, as if it belonged to her.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, leading him inside the house to her drawing room, intending, by allowing him into her feminine bower, and by spending a short time asking him questions about his life and opinions, to make him adore her for ever. But after their spiced cup arrived, and she had poured it, she went upstairs to fetch her fan, and while she was looking for the fan, she found an old keepsake from Sir Kenelm, and soon she became unaccountably sleepy. It was already dark when she awoke, remembering the boy downstairs, who had vanished, leaving that long, drooping lily beside her cold cup of spiced wine.
Venetia was surprised at herself. She knew she was voluble and impatient, and many men found her too bold – except Sir Kenelm, who loved her strength – but she was not usually careless enough to abandon a young boy so thoughtlessly. But sometimes carelessness is a way of getting out of what we cannot do. She had always thrived on company. Now she was beginning to conceive a dread of daylight.
No wonder she went out veiled these days. It was a necessary precaution. She wiggled her toes in the cambric bed-sheet, to check she was still alive. ‘The rising sun / Which once I saw / Is now high in the heaven.’ She often made up madrigals about nothing at all, just to make her thoughts musical. She really ought to rise. Chater must have led matins without her. She would tell him she had been at private prayer.
What was it Dr Donne preached, which had so affected her? They went to so many funerals she could not remember whose it was where Donne had looked so thin and shrunken standing in the pulpit, his voice so slow that as he began a new sentence, one feared he might not live to finish it. And yet the light and dark began to mingle in his speaking, and promise answered question, so that questions died away, and on the flow of his speech he carried them, speaking so kindly, so privately to the very heart of each of them, until all were moved to glad wet tears, and the inverse of the doctor’s face, black-skulled, with bone-white burning holes for eyes, remained imprinted on her mind’s eye even now.
Her pillow book was buried in the covers beside her, and she turned to the page where she had copied down that delicious passage: ‘That which we call life is but Hebdomada Mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, dying seven times over. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and so forth, until age dies and determines all.’
Ripeness, she thought, is but the first sign of rot; there is no rest to be had anywhere on this planet. Since it turns, and turns, how can we ever be still? Sir Kenelm had the blame for that. He was the first to tell her that the earth was a hazelnut tossed in the air.
She could feel a new coarsening in her hair, which Kenelm had always stroked and made her laugh by telling her that the Greeks said a soft-haired creature was a soft-hearted one. Throwing back her blankets, like pulling off a plaister, Venetia considered her famous feet, once described by one of James I’s Scots poets as ‘wingèd dreams, each toe a wish’, splayed out fat and graceless on the counterpane. In private she sometimes made horrid faces in the glass, and wobbled her puckered thighs, deliberately tormenting herself. This morning she could not be bothered even to do that.
Ageing is imperceptible. It happens as gradually as a stone staircase wears, or a fan kept in sunlight fades. But to Venetia it had happened slowly and then suddenly, like a huge stock of water drains for a long time, hardly depleted, till the last swills vanish quickly.
I can bear it, she thought, because my husband bears it. He sees beyond the skin. He has deeper vision than most men. Why else would he love me, spoiled as I am? Each day we remain here together, before we go to town, we become more like a family, and he and I grow close again. We kiss each other every night; we wake together every morning. To my love, my husband, I am like a tree he sits beneath; he does not perceive my leaves a-turning.
Every day, the lowing cows in the valley told her it was almost noon, and every day their lowing seemed to come round faster. She rang for Mistress Elizabeth, and set about the business of dressing, unfastening and fastening, and refreshing her curls, thinking of her boys and her husband and preparing her face for the day’s duties of smiling, as Elizabeth tied her stays and fixed her overskirts, and once apparelled in all the fine and starchy fabrics of her station, Venetia felt more like herself. But as the cows bellowed across the far fields, she caught a view of herself in the glass, and screamed a silent scream.
‘That incomparable Sir Kenelm Digbie’s name does sufficiently Auspicate the work. There needs no Rhetoricating Floscules to set it off.’
George Hartman’s Preface to The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Open’d, 1669
Pop! went a woodlouse on the fire.
Scrunch, escrunch, replied Sir Kenelm’s comfortable nib. He was writing up his private notes from the last meeting of his clandestine university, the Invisible College.
Ten Solutions for the Condition of Man, he wrote, as identified, proposed and debated by select fellowes of the Invisible College at their meeting last in ____shire.
1. The Transmutation of Base Metals into Gold.
To this entry he added underneath, with a loose calligraphic flourish:
– Already almost perfectly achieved.
A log on the fire collapsed with a sigh.
2. Perpetuall Fire.
Kenelm checked his notes, crossed out ‘Fire’ and wrote ‘Light.’
A wasp on the window sill rubbed its forefeet together with an infinitely small squelching noise.
3. The Emulation of Fish – the art of continuing long underwater and exercising functions freely thereof, without Engines, by Custome and Education only.
4. Flight – the Emulation of Birds. Note that King Bladud, magus, flew unaided at Bath. His skill – quaere.
He could half-hear snatches of Mistress Elizabeth and Alice outside, chattering ‘. . . lost her bloom.’ ‘What bloom?’ ‘Blooming long ago.’ He rose and pulled the bottle-glass casement shut.
5. The Cure of Wounds at a Distance – by means of the Powder of Sympathy viz. Kenelme Digby’s private receipt.
The laden bough of a pear tree sagged a fraction lower in the orchard. Sir Kenelm’s sleeve brushed rhythmically across the paper; he drew the title with a dragging curlicue. This was his special topic: his legacy. He believed he had the means to cure wounds from a distance, without even meeting the patient. His method was to treat the weapon, not the wound. A bullet, knife, musket, or any vicious instrument could be conveyed to him, and he would treat it with his most precious Powder of Sympathy. The patient writhed and the wound burned as the Powder was rubbed across the blade or bandage; then, if the wound was left open, cleaned but unbandaged, it received the healing Atomes through the air.
‘Pray do not think me peradventure Ineffectual or Superstitious . . .’
Digby always introduced his Powder carefully, because so many men suspected him of sorcery. It was a powerful cure, and Digby felt the burden of being its first practitioner in England. To pass his knowledge on, he entrusted the Invisible College with (almost) all his arcane and valuable material pertaining to the cure, which he delivered as a lecture concisely in two hours, before the Botanists completely stole the show with their diagrammatic explications and so forth. His signet ring clinked against the inkwell as he made notes of the Botanists’ suggestions:
6. The Acceleration of production of Vegetables from Seed.
7. Attaining of Gigantick Dimensions in persons, animals, vegetables.
8. Great strength and agility of body exemplify’d by that of Frantick, Epileptick and Hystericall persons.
The lid on a pot in the kitchen rattled.
Sir Kenelm shuffled the scrap-paper notes he made at the meeting; his head produced as if of its own accord a low humming noise of concentration. His armillary sphere, sitting on the corner of his desk, seemed to respond, and as one of its brass zodiacal hoops shifted of its own accord, the earth’s attitude moved by half a degree.
9. The making of Armour light and extremely hard.
10. Varnishes perfumable by rubbing.
Number 10 was another of his own contributions, based upon the Duke of Tuscany’s writings. Perhaps varnishes could make base, dirty places fresh, or conjure the smell of a distant loved one – he had taken with him to sea Venetia’s kerchief, but its incense-scent was soon gone. It worried him, and he feared she had expired, and taken the scent with her to heaven. Only her letter brought him relief.
His nib protested with a squeak as he wrote:
11. The Making of Parabolicall and Hyperbolicall Glasses. Already practised though without the requisite exactitude.
Some Glasses could be used to perform natural magick, such as the Burning-Glasses of Archimedes, which whipped the sun’s cavalry into lined formation and so set fire to enemy ships three miles away.
12. The Making of Glass Malleable.
This, in his private estimation, would never happen.
In the scullery, a maid rent one of his old shirts loudly in two.
13. Potent drugs to alter or exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory and other functions, appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.
14. Pleasing dreams exemplify’d by the Egyptian electuary.
The Egyptian alchemist Zosimus had a herbal formula for pleasant dreams which some of the Invisibles were working to recreate. Kenelm believed that men’s minds were enlarged by dreaming, because then they breathed the spirit of gracefulness, or pneuma.
In the kitchen a pan of water came to the brink of boiling.
15. Freedom from necessity of much sleeping.
Geese panicked; wood smoke laughed out of the tall chimneys at Gayhurst; wind played notes across the neck of an old bottle. He was now writing fast, from Imagination.
16. The recovery of youth, or at least some of the marks of it, as new Teeth, Hair coloured as in youth.
A cockerchaff spun on its back, whirring like a clock. One of the piles of books in his study crashed to the ground. He thought he heard Venetia scream. He reached out to touch the armillary sphere on the corner of his desk and sent the earth’s girdle spinning.
17. The prolongation of life itself.
Sir Kenelm felt a shadow fall, and he knew Mercurius had left the room. He put down his nib and closed his eyes.