‘Sir Kenelm Digby was such a goodly handsome person, gigantique and great voic’d, and he had so gracefull elocution, and noble addresse, that had he been dropped out of the Clowdes in any part of the World, he would have made himself respected. But the Jesuites spake spitefully, and said ’twas true, but then he must not stay there above six weekes.’
John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 1669–96
WORD WAS SPREADING of his voyage, and Kenelm received letters from men requesting to visit him, some wishing to see his treasures, others to discourse with him about his exploits, so that news of his discoveries might be spread abroad. Well, thought Kenelm, since Venetia keeps me at Gayhurst still, so let the world come to me.
And here they were, men with a strange thirsty curiosity that tipped so quickly between sycophancy and impertinence. Young scholars, who wrote everything he said down in tiny handwriting; older men, whose fighting days were over and made a living from telling tales as gleemen or pamphleteers. Some were genuinely interested in Kenelm’s voyage, others merely keen to win his favour, or take from him something that they could use, for their weekly corantoes, digests, news packets, or their own prestige. They crowded round him, asking him to pose and to show off his treasures, and he happily acceded to their requests, for he never needed much encouragement, and soon he was standing upon the table in the great hall, demonstrating how he defeated the French and Venetians with thrusts and parries.
Yet he felt his visitors did not look upon him as a man like themselves, but saw him as if through an eyepiece or a view-finder: their interest fell upon him like white light, lightning fast and interrogative. And so, entranced and blinded by the imaginary flashbulbs and the glaring light of attention, Sir Kenelm gave his first press conference.
‘Is it true you seized more than a year’s revenues in your escapade?’
‘How many French cutlasses brought you hither?’
‘On what day fell this sea-battle at Scanderoon?’
‘But how many French men died?’
‘So, gentlemen,’ said Sir Kenelm, answering the question he liked best, ‘the great battle fell upon my birthday, the eleventh of June. I dare say some errant wit and companion of Ben Jonson – one of the Tribe of Ben – will make a pretty verse of that. Luckily “June” goes well with “Scanderoon”, as you see.’
Digby did not mention that he had commanded his ships to sail around the Gulf of Iskenderun for two days, treading water and polishing their muskets, in order that they might attack on the auspicious day of his birth.
‘Your crew were set about by pestilence?’ asked one man, a Polack with a long nose called Samuel Hartlib.
‘Yes, a swinish fever brought aboard from Spanish ships. We had not reached Gibraltar but three score of my men were already dead . . .’
This had them all scribbling in their wastebooks. Samuel Hartlib, who was compiling a grand Encyclopaedia, wanted to know about quarantine and the prevention of infection, and so forth, but most of the other visitors had no interest in long and complicated truth. They wanted him to say something quick and epigrammatic, preferably exciting or bloody or moralising – any of these would do.
‘You’re not the kind of man who turns back, though, are you?’ said Michael Parkinson, ingratiatingly.
‘Are you an authoritarian below decks? Do you swing the cat-o’-nine-tails?’ said Jonathan Ross, a fool with weak ‘Rs’.
‘Ask my crew,’ said Kenelm.
‘We did,’ said Ross. ‘Some of them liked it a lot.’
Ignoring the hubbub, Kenelm told them how he picked up hands at Tangiers, poor Scots and English sailors whose liberty he bought at some expense. ‘I will be repaid by the Crown very shortly,’ he told the assembly.
There was a small communal sigh, as if the company did not believe the Crown honoured its dues, but none knew the worst of it, which was that the debt would remain unpaid until the reign of Charles II, thirty years later.
‘And did you divide your profits amongst your crew?’ asked Paxman, wincing with his own pertinence.
‘Yes,’ said Kenelm. ‘On modest terms, their liberty being their main reward.’
A soft Irish man called Wogan said: ‘I’d be frightened beyond my wits if this happened to me, but tell us, is it true your crew fell to mutiny?’
‘Mutiny is over-putting it. It was a small act of lower-deck rebellion amongst my new crew, bold fellows, worn down by their privations. A skipper hurled his trencher at the galley cook because he would give him no more biscuit. Some other men rose and started shouting also. I resolved this by means of diplomacy and pickled beef. First I put this malcontent in irons, but then since I could not send him home, the English packet being days away, I resolved to break his will, so I had him ducked and towed behind the ship, after which he confessed to his secret guilt of having previously raided the purser’s store, which was a great mercy since it made him only a thief, not a hero. To the honest men, I made a speech, praising them, letting them know they would all be fairly dealt with, and that our mission would bring us gold, and more than that, gold with the King’s blessing, and all the men cheered, and I rolled out the kegs of salt beef I had been saving for just such an occasion.’
‘How came you then to land?’ asked Dimbleby, trying to hurry him.
‘By signals between ships, and by secret confabulation with my navigator Sir Edward Stradling, and Captain Woodcock, who commanded our third ship, the Janus, I resolved to change our convoy’s course so that we might stop within seven days to buy provisions at Zante.’
Never, never had he felt such relief as when they dropped anchor in the bay at Zante and he knew that full-scale mutiny had been avoided. When the old women came down to the harbour hawking their foodstuffs, and the men waded ashore eagerly, he could have kissed the deck for gratitude. He saw a turtle waving to him from the shallows, and he dived into the lapis-blue waters to take him for a trophy. Hermes had made a lyre out of a tortoise shell as a gift for his brother Apollo. What was it that Apollo had gifted him in return? Some choice planet. But then as he swam closer he saw the turtle appeared to be at prayer, with his flippers together, and his wrinkled eyes shut fast, and Kenelm knew he must spare the turtle.
‘And how came you to do battle with the Venetian galleasses?’ asked Anthony à Wood, scribe and antiquarian, who had lately incorporated the distinguished ‘à’ between his born names.
‘Well, sir, like a swan with young they hissed at us. They wished to protect their convoy of French ships, and I wished them to know that the French were our enemies, and our enemies’ friends are our enemies. We drew back, gathered up our strength, and came down on them like Englishmen. The battle we fought was close to, or something like, three hours in length, and each fought well and bravely. Load, aim, fire! Load, aim, fire! We were working under Phoebus’s glare, to which our Celtic skins were not well-disposed, but the tiger was up in our blood, and so we loaded, so we aimed, and so we fired – until very timidly, like a ladies’ petticoat, the little white Venetian handkerchief rose . . .’
Sir Kenelm did not mention how furious the English vice-consul in Iskenderun had been. The first he knew of Kenelm’s attack was the noise of his cannonade resounding across the bay. He called the angriest alarum possible. Kenelm’s actions jeopardised years of his diplomacy, he said. ‘Your privateering, sir,’ he roared, ‘will cost the honest English merchants of Aleppo in fines, in lost trade, and in goodwill. They may never recover this route.’
‘I heard the vice-consul was full of condemnation,’ said John Aubrey, with relish.
‘He was apoplectic, wasn’t he?’ said Paxman.
‘Well, he lamented exceedingly the loss of his toy pigeons’ eggs,’ said Kenelm, speaking slowly, with a subtle purpose. ‘A few of which were cracked by the resounding noise of my English cannonade, which made the hens and chicks afrit. We were in the midst of battle, but his chief concern was all for his pet eggs,’ Sir Kenelm said with a note of regret in his voice that the vice-counsel should be so odd a fellow. The company laughed knowingly; canned laughter rang through the hall at Gayhurst.
‘So we routed Venice. None of my crew were lost, but one of the Venetians’ number died, I heard. I was graceful in conquest and I did not burn or scuttle the galleasses, though I could have. But I was mindful of the harm this would do our British traders. So I left with honour only.’
The assembled company raised a cheer and poop-pooped as if it were the Last Night of the Proms; Digby did not think it necessary to tell them about the reaction of the Venetian ambassador in London, or the royal summons he received shortly afterwards:
‘Sir Digby is to leave those seas and come home so that further opportunity for offence may be removed.’
Edict from Charles I, 1629
Instead, he demonstrated many wonders to the gentlemen of the press, such as the size and motion of a dolphin – which he re-enacted with his arms stretched wide – and, to keep them entertained, his oldest trick: picking up a chair with one hand by its leg, until he became red in the face and the veins on his neck stood out. He offered the chair to the nearest visitor, the Pole and polymath Samuel Hartlib – ‘Your turn.’
By the expression on his face, Kenelm feared Hartlib had a physical deformity that he kept well hidden. But then Hartlib smiled, and said he must be heading towards Banbury before the light was lost. Kenelm felt sad and foolish that he had played the martial, warlike side of himself today, when he should have spoken like a scholar.
‘Will you go hither again?’ called out one of the crowd, holding out a black baton at him as if it were a poignard, aimed at his mouth.
‘What present did you bring to your wife?’ called another, not looking at him directly, but through the mask of an artificial eye.
‘Snails!’ cried Sir Kenelm. ‘For the restoration of . . . any lady’s complexion, they are mightily good.’ He felt he had said a wrong thing, and resolved to comment no more.
‘Do you still love your wife?’ asked a woman with a notebook marked ‘Viper Wine’, who had somehow infiltrated the throng.
‘More than ever,’ said Sir Kenelm. ‘And who are you, miss?’
‘I am the author,’ she said.
Exasperated with all of them, and wanting finally to communicate something that was close to his heart, his higher self, Kenelm told them about the archaic sculpture of Apollo he found on the isle of Milos. ‘I tried to bring it home with me, but a hundred sailors could not move it. These sailors must be kept busy, you know, or they will fall to other fancies . . .’
It was such a figure, this Apollo. So full of prophecy. His blank eyes stared and his hair was wild, flaring. As Sir Kenelm looked at his full lips, heavy with breath, he thought he saw Apollo speak.
‘All men should seize control of their lives,’ said Kenelm, determined to finish on a rousing note. ‘Look, we change, or else we must be overtaken by change. It is my motto, you know – not my family motto, which is “None but one” – but one far more meaningful to me, my own adopted aphorism, taken from Seneca – “Vindica te tibi” – “Vindicate yourself for yourself!” Or, indeed, “To thine own self be true”. Or, my favourite rendering . . .’
Sir Kenelm, standing upon the table, staring, wild-eyed in imitation of Apollo cried: ‘You must change your life!’
‘Vindica te tibi.’
Motto stamped on the books in Sir Kenelm Digby’s library, now held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford
‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern’ – ‘You must change your life.’
Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, 1908
‘When I went on my voyage to sea, shee [Venetia] so wholly retired and secluded herself from the world till my return . . . All the while she kept only with her ghostly Father.’
Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to his sons, 1633
When he was first away, gliding towards Scanderoon, he was in love with the sea, with the changefulness and power of it. The Eagle leaped and dived, and he laughed as it threw him forward mid-step and jogged his hand as he drank. The sea teased him, and caught him out; at night, it rolled him over and about, until he retched and longed for land and puked into his hat.
At home, on the solid grass of Gayhurst, young Kenelm ran round and round, roaring, trying to become dizzy. Venetia stood on the steps as if she were watching him, but actually staring into the green-shaded distance, baby John over her shoulder.
Just off the coast at Deal, the spyglass told them that an enemy ship was rising on the horizon – their first prize. With greatest haste, the Eagle’s quadrant and maps were hidden, the men mustered, games of dice put away, salt pork stowed, muskets powdered, cannon loaded with ordnance, private prayers whispered, and everything made ready for attack. The ship was now so close it was possible to discern, with the naked eye, that it was a Dutch vessel, and therefore unassailable, neutral. Glumly the crew watched it sailing past.
When Kenelm had been gone a month, and no more letters came from him, Venetia deemed it time to give young Kenelm his present. It was a model ship, a galleass daintily made of wood and cork, with parchment sails and miniature oars and coloured paper bunting. On its deck was a built-in dish, designed to carry salt at a banqueting table. All its cannon were fixed apart from one which could be taken out and filled, if money allowed, with pepper. Young Kenelm took it as his solemn duty to look after this ship, which although it was as big as he could hold, he bore to his room at night and carried down with him each morning.
In harbour at Lisbon, Kenelm was woken urgently and struggled on deck to see one of his ships, the Samuel, glowing upon fiery water. One of its tall masts was listing like a falling tree, endangering the deck of the Eagle, and there was much shouting to lookey-loo as it creaked, and the wind threw smuts at them and blew the flames brighter. Thus the second ship in Kenelm’s convoy was burned down to the waterline and scuttled and her thirty crew sent to try their luck in Lisbon or where they would. ‘The horizon is vast enough for each of us,’ he said, flinging a purse of coins to the sailors across the foreign sky.
Venetia’s eyes began to get accustomed to the smallness of a new silk stitch. Her needlework, a bed-jacket decorated with leaves and strawberries, was designed in such detail that the berries were gilt with tiny pips, and Venetia had to unpick her too-crude work again, until her stitches were as small as pinpricks. Looking up from her lap to talk to her priest Chater, she caught baby John as he uncomprehendingly snatched at the toy ship, snapping away a splint off the mast.
The Eagle suffered. It came on quickly one night, during supper. The first mate sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. Kenelm thought he was affecting Melancholy, or had lost his manners, until he saw several of the crew slumped in slothful postures, heads lolling, or laid out on the benches. A petty officer serving soup put down his ladle and grasped his belly, sinking to his knees as bloody bile issued from his mouth.
That same day at Gayhurst the sky split open with rain that played like a band of drummers upon the roof and puddled underneath an open casement in the Hall. Young Kenelm sat up from his afternoon sleep with a cry and ran out of the nursery and downstairs, as fast as his legs could go. As Venetia saw him she remembered, too – and clasping John to her breast as he gurgled she ran through the rainstorm to the middle of the lawn where they had left their rugs and cups and the model ship. Rain had pooled in its salt-cellar, and the paper sails were dark and waterlogged.
Before they reached Gibraltar, half his men were dead. The ship’s surgeon sewed the corpses into their hammocks as shrouds, and always drew his final thread through the dead man’s nose; a sea custom, a last chance. Every time Kenelm saw the surgeon sewing, and he knew the needle was nearing its final jab, he expected the body to sit upright and scream. But there was no such resurrection.
Venetia had Mistress Elizabeth make new sails for the toy ship, out of underskirts. They sailed her upon an old horse trough clouded with green weed. Venetia stared into its murkiness, and saw only her own reflection and a bottomless kingdom of water-fleas.
Passing the Barbary Coast, he entered for the first time the Sea of the Middle Earth, or Medi-Terreanea. Kenelm hunched overboard looking for monsters in the sunny waters. He saw a long pulsing sea-beast with a head like ribbons that he thought must be a squid, and a bristling silver ball of fishes followed by a train of seagulls. Kenelm watched out to see if the horizon inclined, now he sailed closer to the round belly of the world.
After stitching for so long, Venetia began to believe that the strawberry she sewed was the world, and each stitch a mile, and each seed a league, and the plumpness of the berry was the Equator, and its hasp the Polar Land of Ice, and the blood-drops accidentally shed by her needle were little planets, dribbled across the canvas.
Had the largeness of Kenelm’s life diminished hers, somehow?
Although they are not subject to our sense
A world may be no bigger than two pence . . .
For millions of these atoms may be in
The head of one small, single, little pin
And thus small, then ladies may well wear
A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.
Margaret Cavendish, ‘Of Many Worlds in this World’, 1650
Kenelm paced back and forth his creaking cabin, preparing a speech the night before sailing into battle.
Venetia paced up and down the upstairs corridor with baby John at her shoulder, rubbing his back.
Kenelm heaved-ho, squinting in the glare.
Venetia cried out in frustration and threw down her needlework.
Kenelm felt his sword run through an enemy body, like a knife into a peach. It was his birthday, 11 June.
Venetia swore to eat no more suckets and do no more sewing.
Before the letters could reach them telling of his victory at Scanderoon, the family observed mass in the chapel at Gayhurst, and prayed for Kenelm’s birthday to St Barnabas, and to St Christopher and St Lucy for sailors in peril. Young Kenelm solemnly brought his model ship to the altar, tattered like any treasured toy, and the family’s confessor, Chater, held it up to the altar, so it dominated the chapel. Even though it was now a good deal easier for young Kenelm to carry, the ship seemed to have grown immense with significance. As the bell tolled his absence from Gayhurst, the model ship filled the chapel. And all the while Sir Kenelm lay sunbathing on the deck of his little barque on the silver-silk ocean, as gentle winds carried him through Cyclades.
‘Now towards her latter time she [Venetia] grew fatt, yet so that it disgraced nothing of her shape.’
Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to his sons, 1633
THE DIGBYS WERE at supper.
‘How are your studies, love?’
He nodded and munched. He was almost certain their dining room was smaller than before he went away to sea. Perhaps his senses had grown through exercise of Imagination. Venetia’s habit now was to sit across the table from him, in the half-light. In their courtship they had sat so close they might keep hold of each other constantly; her stockinged foot in his hand, her finger dancing upon his gartered knee.
‘What are you eating, dearheart?’ she said, peering over. ‘Ship’s biscuit again?’
She was so interested in his diet, wanting so much to please him and make him strong. Women had too much love in their bodies, he mused. They could not contain it, it made them solicitous and overweening in matters beyond them. You could see it shining in their faces sometimes. Women needed to disburden themselves of love, and they would smother any small person or furry beast with it, even a shrub, a plant! It was too much, and Kenelm wondered if they could be leeched of their love, as of blood. One of the reasons Venetia had so much power over him, at first, was because she seemed like a man, never fussing, never over-flowing in her affections, but cool and sanguine. She was – or at least, she had been – the very opposite of his mother.
Kenelm was eating bacon and eggs, with a Wagon Wheel on the side. He had developed a liking for these foodstuffs, which he had brought back with him from the Med, where he had obtained them through trade with merchants who were carried on strange tides and backward-blowing winds. They called these bright edibles ‘Returned Goods’, but whence they had been returned – the New World? Venetia viewed with displeasure another foodstuff he had brought home: a suspect pink and tasteless meat called Spam. Odd roots and infusions were often arriving from abroad, and they either became indispensable, like potatoes and tea, or were never seen again.
Sir Kenelm kept recipes and instructed the kitchen. He pursued pleasure craftily, like a good master of husbandry. He paid lavishly for saffron and pepper; mace and nutmeg. Venetia bargained over every penny, for the satisfaction it brought her, but Kenelm believed that the best things were, invariably, the most expensive. He sniffed the good from the best; he checked the eyes of trout for clarity, and sent for virgin Hampshire honey, and green rosemary, agrimony and thyme. He tasted every dish before seasoning it, chewing thoughtfully; he craved umami, the fifth taste.
Eggs quicken – by contraries – the salt taste of bacon, he wrote, to himself, scrawling a brief note that brought the English fry-up into existence: Two poched eggs, with a few fine dry-fryed collops of bacon are not bad for breakfast. His arteries squelched appreciatively.
He never thought to publish his recipes: that would be done after his death in 1669 by an opportunist scribbler who played up Kenelm’s connections. The book’s contents page was a feast of namedropping. ‘My Lord Lumley’s Pease Pottage’; ‘Hydromel as I made it weak for the Queen Mother’. It was a rum sort of immortality.
‘Sir Kenelm Digby is remembered chiefly for his cookbook . . . it was the first to recommend bacon and eggs for breakfast’
The Encyclopaedia of English Renaissance Literature,
Volume I, 2012
The cook came to Venetia close to tears, asking if Sir Kenelm could be kept out of the kitchen, as he was always using up the best honey for his fermented drinks, or throwing away perfectly good potage, or telling the kitchen mort that she should use none but the best herbs, even for scullery work. He created a great amount of mess when he made his meath drinks, and this delayed the serving of supper till the boys were listless with hunger. But Venetia, who took no interest in the kitchen, would not say a word against Kenelm’s cooking.
‘How is your transubstantum, darling?’
‘Not today. Today I have written up a list of desiderata.’
‘A long list?’ asked Venetia, who often had to coax him into talking about his Great Work.
‘Indeed.’
‘For your Invisible confrères?’
‘Exactly.’
‘I wish you would tell me what you mean by desider . . .’
‘Desiderata. My darling,’ he said. ‘I only mean a list of what we most desire. That is to say, the most pressing needs of man. Contraptions to help us remain underwater, powerful electuaries, and so forth. For unless we dream, how can we do? So we begin by dreaming.’
She smiled. ‘I dreamed last night that we had a daughter. I had forgot that until now.’
He wiped his mouth with his napkin, and beamed lovingly at her, and took a big bite of Wagon Wheel. He had bartered the biscuits for nutmeg in the Bosphorus, bushel for bushel.
‘Our daughter was very like me,’ said Venetia. ‘Is that the sort of dream you mean?’
‘Yes, but on a universal scale. The needs and wants of all.’
‘So I might dream that all women could have daughters if they were of a mind to, or sons if they had none, and we might put it on your list, and by being noted down it should by your efforts and degrees of Physick become true.’
Kenelm nodded as he speared a slab of Spam with his fork – they were fancy eaters now, using continental eating irons, though they had grown up using knives and fingers.
‘But I expect that is already on your list, of course. I must think more deeply . . .’
‘The list was compiled by scholars and philosophers and I have added to it also,’ said Kenelm airily.
Venetia was quiet.
‘A serum to rub on cats’ noses, that would help us understand them speak?’ she said, trying to make him laugh. ‘Or perhaps a fish that flipped out of its element every time your distant loved ones had you in their thoughts? So you knew that they were safe. A drink to make you full even when you are hungry? Now that would help with fasting.’
Kenelm laughed at her, and shook his head.
‘Teeth that do not rot?’ she asked, thinking of her mouth. ‘Flowers that never die?’
‘I know where those are plucked,’ said Kenelm, putting his arms around her and reaching to caress her in a manner that was firstly affectionate, and secondly indicated he wished her to stop talking.
‘Cloths that clean themselves? Maids that sweep tirelessly and never eavesdrop?’
‘Aye, those are golems.’
‘Artificial music, after Francis Bacon – music that no orchestra plays, but echoes for days, years. Ah, here’s the best. Childbirth without pain?’
‘But now we come close to heresy,’ sighed Kenelm, kissing her on the forehead. ‘It is the curse of Eve, and we cannot end suffering, they say, else we would not be human. Though I agree, my darling, if Bathsheba could speak she would have a tale to tell when she came back from mousing.’
Venetia closed her eyes. ‘Enduring beauty?’
‘My darling, you are the most beautiful of all the women in the world.’
Venetia turned from him, nauseous because the compliment was over-blown and false. But she could see by his eyes that he meant it kindly, and she forgave him. She knew he was treading carefully to avoid that phrase she hated – ‘still beautiful’.
‘Immortality,’ he said. ‘There’s the rub. We are immortal souls in heaven, and on the earth we are immortal threefold-wise. In writing, which is our voice. In portraiture, which is our likeness. In children, who are the heirs to our bodies as well as our estates . . .’
‘Threefold, yet you forget the fourth,’ said Venetia. ‘In memories. In the minds of the living, though we are dead, we walk and talk.’
‘Aye, and so we are never dead till all who knew us die. There’s something in that, Venice. It may be that one day we will bring that memorie, that imprint on the mind, to material presence. To see the past or future in a scrying glass is already done. To take the imprint of the voices of angels on waxy tablets is already done. Why not the inner eye’s projection also? If you can dream it, you can do it. There’s something in that, aye.’
Turning over these profound speculations in his mind, he wandered back to his study, and as soon as he went through the door everything his wife had said vanished from his mind, and so did her very existence, as he picked up his comfortable nib again and fell to writing: rewriting his list of desiderata, entirely the same, but a clean copy, ready to send to his confrères.
Venetia in her silver slippers stepped carefully up the darkened stairs to their children, thinking of the rank desires she knew but could not name to her husband. To fuck without issue, or fear of French pox; to remake one’s body; to become another person; to live for ever; to turn base lead into gold for profit and never tell how it was done . . . She felt ashamed to think of them, as if He might be able to see her thoughts. Even thinking them might sully her complexion. These were the shadow-wishes that could never be told.
Kenelm’s candle glowed on his quill and paper, and beyond them on the panelled wall their shadows fell very huge, his fingers like a malformed giant’s, his pen a rod, his parchment a valley, and while his list of his predictions was precisely lit by candle, behind them lay a vast dark trench.
Late that night, when he came quietly into her bedroom, she was awake. He could hear her breath, shallow and agitated.
‘Some women . . .’ she whispered into the dark. ‘Some women . . .’
‘Yes?’ He was listening. The smell of manly warmth and ale-breath told her his face was close. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he was able to hear her better.
‘Some women drink potions, do they not? For their complexion.’
The darkness inhaled. ‘I brought you snails,’ he said.
‘I want no snails,’ she exclaimed, into the blackness of their curtained bed. ‘I need Physick. I need a tonic, like the women drink at court.’
She put her cold hands around his neck.
‘Will you make me one?’
He sighed.
‘Will you?’
Clouds passed over the moon. A bat flickered over their bed.
She asked again, her voice strangled with urgency. ‘Will you?’
‘No, because you have no need of any potions, my darling Venice. I like you just as you are.’ And he took her in his arms, feeling strong and manly, and stroked her hair, and whispered goodnight.
They lay awake, their bodies crackling with frustration. She had suffered a double indignity, admitting her vanity, her weakness, and all for nothing. He had refused her. She did not understand it. Usually he refused her nothing. Kenelm, on his side of the bed, was fighting to stop himself feeling cross with her. He had come home in triumph; it was the very least she could do to stay beautiful for him. She was only five years older than him – many wives were older than their husbands. And if she could not keep her beauty, she should at least maintain her faith in her beauty, since that was the chiefest thing, was it not? After a certain age, did beauty not become an act of will, or character?
He did not want her to discover the cures that other women drank. He had seen the effects of Belladonna and the cure of Antimony. He had seen skin scorched by Ceruse – the vinegar in it as bad as the lead, no doubt – and cheeks raw with Fucus, which could be almost any chymicall matter stoppered in a gallypot, and what the courtesans called Pinchers, tiny pegs concealed under the wig which drew the slack skin off the jaw.
He knew the initial glow was followed by slow disfigurement, as the new smoothness turned to crusted immobility, or, in the case of Pinchers, he had heard that the skin slackened so at night, with the pin removed, the skin fell down upon the shoulder and breast. And he knew a corruption of spirit seemed to follow. These women were always forced by their pride to lie and say they pinched not, they painted not, and they were touched by Nature’s hand alone. And everyone pretended to believe them, and showed them such hypocrisy, curtseying to their new face, but laughing as soon as they turned their back.
Gayhurst was silent as a stone, the woods were dark and still. Kenelm turned over onto his side, and sleep lapped gently over him, submerging his mind.
No, he did not want her drinking potions. They could be dangerous, corrosive. He thought of the woman in The Duchess of Malfi who flayed her face off to remove smallpox scars. Why had his uncle taken him to see The Duchess of Malfi when he was only twelve? He had nightmares for weeks.
Beauty treatments could lead to slipping in the wit-house, pitting in the droolers.
The radio signal has been lost.
‘Desquamation of the epidermis, cornified desquamation, crythema (redness) . . . All these are possible skin conditions resulting from radiotherapy . . .’
Bleep! Re-tuning in progress . . .
He twitched and fell, reaching out to catch her. He thought he saw her face distended, a Picasso portrait. Word-torrents poured through his sleep, lists from past and future medical dictionaries.
‘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.