‘I wax now somewhat ancient . . . one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.’
Sir Francis Bacon, 1593
TWO LADIES WEARING fashionable vizard-masks were walking along Cheapside, in fast and purposive unison, towards the physicians’ quarter on Fenchurch Street. They passed three children fighting for a farthing in a puddle, who stared up at them as if the ladies were creatures of a different species. A manservant stepped aside to allow them passage, deferentially looking away. A woman collapsed in a doorway watched them, her eyeballs liverish yellow.
‘No one has seen us,’ whispered Venetia, clasping Olive’s arm. Venetia had taken the precaution of wearing mourning clothes, so as to be more anonymous. Her dramatic soul enjoyed this and she declared that she was dressed ‘for the funeral of her own honesty’. This was the first time that she had deceived her Kenelm. Well, the first time she had deceived him explicitly. The first time she had deceived him explicitly in a long time. Quite a long time. There were always matters untold between a man and a woman, of money, and trifling secrets of past affections, were there not? And all those abstruse points which one already understood, and facts one already knew, but allowed him to explain high-handedly, because it pleased him to do so. But this was disobedience. She trod a little faster.
The artist William Peake, son of the court painter, had lately come to take their double portrait. Venetia felt kindly towards him ever since, ten years ago, he made a divine little painting of her in masquing costume at the request of the Earl of Dorset. This time, she began the sitting in good faith, putting her confidence in him as he turned over his sand-timer to measure out his fee at four-pence the hour. She felt they presented a goodly show to the world, a handsome couple, on the cusp of new things. They sat for him in brightest daylight by the window of their great hall, which warmed Venetia, and helped to calm her.
‘How are the cheekbones? Do they need shadow underneath? Is the make-up excessive? In colour shots, this is disaster. If the jawline is dubious, try to avoid being shot from below. If you cannot relax, for heaven’s sake, take a tranquilliser before shooting starts.’
Princess Luciana Pignatelli,
The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book, 1971
Peake sketched while looking at them with an unkind intensity, as if he saw them as planes and surfaces and colour-contrasts, rather than as people. It made Venetia feel, she whispered to Kenelm, as if she were ‘a cut of veal-calf’.
Kenelm’s moustaches twitched but he suppressed a laugh. They both sat very still, listening to Spenser, which Chater read aloud, while Master Peake’s light-maker held up a frame of white cloth, to reflect the best of the winter sun upon them, and Mistress Elizabeth hovered, as instructed, with a box of pearl-powder and a mortar of egg-white, ready to tend to Venetia’s face if she asked for it, as he sketched them, first with chalk on blue paper, while an assistant mixed his paints. Halfway through, Master Peake asked her to relaxez-vous, madame.
‘I feel perfectly relaxed,’ said Venetia, ‘so what can you mean?’
He asked Venetia if she would mind showing a serene countenance.
‘I am filled with serenity, sir, it flows quite through me!’ said Venetia.
‘No, no, madam, just . . .’ He gestured with two fingers to his forehead, as if wiping away a frown. Venetia did not reply. She did not think she had been frowning at all, sitting here with Kenelm, holding the attention of this roomful of people, The Faery Queene echoing in her head. With a muscular effort she widened her eyebrows, to remove this alleged frown. After a minute or two, however, with her mind on the Queene’s noble knight Artegal, her face must have fallen into repose, because Peake made again his encouraging hand-gesture to her forehead.
‘Sir, do you not need those two fingers for your painting?’ she said, through her teeth.
There was only the noise of his brush on canvas.
‘You might do better to change your painting rather than my countenance,’ she said. This artist had made an ominous beginning.
Perhaps her hands were ill-positioned, but it was too late to move them, and soon she lost the feeling in her left little finger, and then her whole arm. Her head swam with Spenserian dreams. Kenelm nudged her twice, because he thought she was sleeping.
It was not until the end of the day that they saw Peake’s double portrait.
His sense of perspective was very poor, so that while Kenelm looked fit and lean, she had been rendered plump and dwarfish, with chins that redoubled and a non-existent neck. Her eyes were flat and gazing, like a dead hare in a Dutch still life, and the expression in them was nervous and doubting, while her lips smirked and her cheek was sallow. Poor artist! He could not manage to bring off a face at all any more. He had, admittedly, done her hair well.
‘Master Peake, we have wasted your time,’ she said.
Kenelm started to say something, until she gave him a look.
‘I think you are more suited to painting cheeses and pieces of fruit, no? At least they have no friends and relatives to say whether it is a good likeness or no. No; dear sir, you would make a lovely painter of inanimates. But for women you have no longer the knack. We are so sorry that you shall not have this commission from us, for you are a good man and you used to be a good painter, I remember. You will have your money for today’s labour. But your skill today, sir, why is it so much less than when you made my portrait last time?’
Peake was already packing away his brushes brusquely, and he stopped to look Venetia significantly in the eye.
‘Madam, it must be because I am ten years older.’
Peake’s words echoed loudly in the panelled chamber, so resonantly that everyone must have heard him, through the household and beyond, and in the garden the leaves on the trees trembled, and the dandelions shook, and the clodded earth rumbled, and even further away, in a Hollywood screening room, Marlene Dietrich froze with fury as she turned to listen to her cameraman deliver the same wasp-sting words. Sir Kenelm ducked out of the room, pretending he had not heard, leaving Venetia in charge, as usual.
She took pleasure in dismissing Peake. He was lucky to be paid at all, frankly.
Venetia thought of the old pagan goddesses with their smashed noses and their broken arms. The acolytes turn against their queen, she thought, once her powers start to wane. The old statues have to be desecrated, reviled, to make way for the new.
So here she was, marching through Eastcheap in search of medicine that would improve bad painters, and cause rude old courtiers to remember their manners, and turn her inside out, so the serenity she felt was visible again. They came onto Fenchurch Street, where the physicians’ premises were close beside each other, signed by the mortar and pestle. Some had reassuringly expensive facades, painted with College crests and appended with prestigious names: here was a foreign physician; there was Robert Fludd, under a Barber Surgeon’s sign. The clients going about the street – a gent with a bandaged jaw: and a man and woman holding each other closely, with shy hope on their faces, as if they had come for a cure for childlessness – seemed to be persons of quality. There were no beggars with wailing brats or old women selling heather, as there usually were hanging about outside an apothecary’s. They entered a door under the sign of a star, painted with the gold letters LANCELOT CHOICE.
Inside the air was close, spicy, and tickle-your-nose. In spite of the dark atmosphere, the ladies did not remove their veils. They stood silently in front of the grey-haired woman who climbed down off a ladder to serve them. Venetia and Olive both drew breath, but neither spoke. It was unexpectedly difficult to say for which preparation they had come.
The old woman introduced herself as Mistress Choice, and said softly, ‘Is it a private audience you are desiring?’ They nodded. In a sweet bedside voice she said, ‘Then I will procure the master for you.’ She stepped back from the counter, and hollered down the stairs on solid lungs: ‘Here’s CUSTOM!’
In the privacy of the doctor’s consulting room, the ladies unveiled. It was tidy, stacked with tiny drawers and ceramic pots, and hung with fashionable embroidered fabric. There were none of the old apothecary’s trophies, no stuffed monstrous fishes or clouds of desiccated herbs, not even any pulled teeth or false limbs or old plaisters lying about. A window let in the cool light of day, and the room smelled faintly of soap.
‘Well, ladies,’ said Mistress Choice, putting her hands on her hips. ‘Is it the usual?’
Olivia and Venetia looked at each other, unsure what to answer.
‘Your courses are late and you’re wanting a help-me-along?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Olivia, colouring. ‘No, no. We want your Viper Wine.’ Mrs Choice looked surprised and gratified, and made a little non-judgemental curtsey. ‘Pleased to be of service, ladies. I’ll just fetch the Physician.’ Mrs Choice went away quickly, being certain not to look too closely at them, since she knew ladies who came for these treatments were often sensitive.
Mr Choice entered. He was tall, and handsome, and he knew it. ‘Thank you,’ he said, dismissing Mistress Choice. Was she his wife or his mother? Venetia guessed wife. He had the air of one who liked to be the more beautiful one in a relationship. His face was remarkably well made up and smooth for a man. His hair was long like Kenelm’s except he wore, as a modish affectation, one lovelock behind his left ear, loosely plaited into a little tail. He was not wax pale, like some, but his paint matched his skin colour. His blush was subtle and his eye twinkling. Venetia felt the inadequacy of her own paint, hastily applied that morning. Perhaps Lancelot Choice drank his decoctions himself. He, and not his wife-mother was the bait for business, the model of what could be achieved. He greeted them warmly with a deep bow in front of each of them, then relaxed into his chair, which like a throne commanded the room.
‘I hear you are Viperish,’ he said.
They laughed nervously.
‘We live in a wondrous age, my ladies, a golden time in which it is no longer necessary to present the marks of ageing and decrepitude. We improve our treatments all the time. You will find no puppy’s piss here – that charm is by the by. We have only the most infallibly efficacious cordials, wines, salves, unguents, ointments and still other guaranteed means of enhancing your beauty, and with ladies such as yourselves it would be a deep privilege to be of service. I will make a quick investigation first. If you would . . .’
He beckoned Venetia to the window. He gently held her chin in his soft hand, breathing sweetly on her face. She saw up close his perfect skin, and felt a stab of, what, jealousy? He angled her cheek to the light and stroked it professionally. He asked her to smile, and she obliged. ‘So polished, perfect, round and even / As it slyd moulded off from Heaven . . .’ These words Ben Jonson had written about her face. He had compared her smile to the rising sun. She felt it shine a little weaker every day. ‘I’ll give you something for the teeth later,’ said Choice. He recognised her, of course, but did not show it. He placed his finger between her brows, and asked her to frown. He made a light-hearted hum.
The same procedure he repeated for Olivia, who laughed flirtatiously at the coldness of his fingers. He took this in silence.
‘First I must warn ye, and I shall warn ye as follows. The Cure you ladies so desire, which we know to be Viper’s Wine, but I shall hereto term only as “The Cure” – The Cure may act upon ye as it has acted a thousand times before, which is as you ladies desire, but it may also act otherways, namely in the occasioning of fits, ague, local dropsy, grand dropsy, or a great increase in . . .’ Choice said the word with disapproving relish, ‘Conker-pezzans.’
Olivia turned to Venetia, who murmured, ‘Concupiscence.’ Olivia looked down into her lap, smiling.
‘Ladies, I must continue to warn ye, and I shall warn ye as follows.’ Choice spoke as if thoroughly bored. ‘The Cure, if wrongly administered, at the improper time of the moon or in poor faith, bad temper or impious attitude, or if administered in conjunction with other cures that have come not from Lancelot Choice, nor are not known to Lancelot Choice, may result in twitches, conniptions, mild scratching of the body and face, or delirium tremens. It may result in tempora-ra-rare-y frantick distraction, delightful dreams, an aurora mirabilis that emits a gentle rose-coloured light around your person or in your water —’
‘Rose-coloured piss-pots?’ exploded Olivia.
‘Shh,’ said Venetia.
‘— or excessive use and consumption of The Cure may result in the unwonted acquisition of a Life Immortal, by which I mean a failure to decay or die, and now, ladies, if I can ask you to submit to some formalities, please. For the arrangement of credit, I require the head of your household’s name, his escutcheon, tokens armigerous, and so forth. But for prompt payments I require no more than your coin and your smile.’
Venetia tried not to wince at his patter and said tartly, ‘We will pay you today.’
He nodded. ‘For your teeth and gums I can also offer an excellent preparation made of salt of pearls, salt of coral, musk, civet, cloves, Malaga sack and Canary Wine.’
‘Sir, we are not here for dentifrice,’ said Venetia.
‘Indeed. Then for my dedicated services, weekly proffered, without exception, and for weekly supplies of my potent drink distilled here in these my well-appointed premises, and for the delivery of said supply, by discreet and speedy messenger, to my ladies’ own dwellings . . .’
‘Come to it, sir,’ said Venetia.
‘. . . I shall put a price on what is priceless then: fifteen crowns a week.’
The ladies blanched inwardly, but nothing could stop them now, and they nodded.
‘I will have my wife prepare the vipers for the stills tonight.’
The ladies shuddered pleasurably.
‘Did we meet your wife . . .?’ asked Olivia. ‘Downstairs?’ And in that last innocuous word she somehow conveyed a world of judgement upon that lady’s appearance.
‘Aye, that is my Margaret,’ said Master Choice without expression in his voice. ‘You will have your potion, ladies; it will be ready to be fetched tomorrow.’
Venetia thought ‘fetched tomorrow’ was a lovely phrase. It promised so much. And yet she had still not decided if she trusted this apothecary.
‘Sir, of what is this Viper Wine composed?’
‘It is composed, my lady, of skill and faith. No, look you: it is a crafty extract. You know how a viper sheds its skin, I think? You have seen the adder’s lacy stocking, a delicate membrane wriggled loose, and lying discarded upon spiky grass? Aye.’
‘Aye,’ said Venetia.
‘So will we shed our skin alike, leaving it behind us perhaps on Cheapside pavement?’ giggled Olivia.
‘No, my lady,’ sideways-smiled the apothecary, ‘but the same rich liverishness which restores the viper’s skin will act upon your own complexions.’
If it worked, it was surely to be paid for again hereafter. Venetia was well acquainted with the tale of Faust. These things do not come for free. And yet. She had taken mandragora in childbirth, had she not? And it had eased her pain and done no harm. And for fevers she had been helped by many remedies. She did not like this man, but she would take his Physick.
‘Ladies, I must have from you a nickname for my book, to guard your privacy.’
‘Call me Proserpina,’ said Olive.
‘And me . . . Anastasia,’ said Venetia, thinking her middle name suitably exotick for this purpose.
‘Ladies, your cure will be delivered to you discreetly in a crate that might as well hold strawberries as a miraculous potable venom known as the Venice Treacle, the Teriaca or sometimes, to initiates, as Benzoardicum Thericale.’
He continued at a normal pitch: ‘You may do as you think, but it would be most beneficial to take this drink with the right hand on the left side of the mouth, thus, and to begin the treatment at the waxing of the lunar cycle, thus’ – he pointed a long stick at the blackboard beside him, where was etched in chalk a diagram of the phases of the moon – ‘in other words, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE – and ladies, I will lastly advise you to put your good faith and deserving trust in me, for no Physick works without the will. So tell me how you like your drinks next time, sweet ladies, adieu.’
He gave a very deep bow with his hands set together, like a priest. Soon they were vizarded and dashing home through the rainy streets.
‘I am so glad we went.’
‘So glad,’ said Venetia.
‘So very glad. He is such a handsome man,’ exclaimed Olive, as if she could not keep it to herself any more. ‘I really am a little in love with him!’
Venetia looked at her friend sharply. ‘But Endymion . . .’
Olive said that Endymion was never at home, being so often on the King’s business, that she saw him not once a moon.
‘He is busy with great affairs, I suppose.’
‘He is busy fetching the King’s fancies from Spain, paintings and rugs and whatnot. I see no harm with visiting a beauteous, courteous, humane apothecary . . .’
‘Secret,’ Venetia warned, gripping Olivia’s hand, eyes flashing under her vizard.
‘Ouch!’ said Olivia.
When Venetia came home, there was no one about. Living in London was suiting Chater very well. He was spending much of his time at Westminster, arriving home in high spirits. His friend Father Dell’Mascere was giving him instruction again, and he had befriended the Queen’s Dismal Dozen, picking up some of their Capuchin intensity. Well-cut cassocks, good art, fine wine, gossip from Rome – it was all exactly what Chater needed. He had developed a new dramatic style, quoting Revelations and the eschatological parts of John. His homilies on Sundays had become quite riveting.
She took the spare key from the parlour box, and let herself into her husband’s study. The door would not open fully – stacks of books prevented it. She was shocked to see how the books had multiplied. His bibliomania was almost an illness. He seemed to feel responsible for all the orphan books sequestered by the monasteries after the break with Rome. To be sure, illiterates made use of the old manuscripts for wrapping crab apples and lining shoes and cleaning muskets, and she could see why Kenelm wished to save some – but this was insanity. One could barely walk across the room.
On the long table by the window were arranged limbecks and curved retorts, full of coloured waters, but they looked dusty, and she wondered how much Kenelm used them. Upon his desk, where his ledger was open, she saw his wastebooks, letters and scrawled memoranda. She could not help seeing a bill – forty groats for his leather shoes! But beyond that she looked no further. She was no Percy Pry-snout.
She only wanted to take a particular precaution. At his shelves, she found the works on herbs and Physick – the English Leechbook, The Secrets of Master Alexis the Piedmontese, The Breviary of Healthe, Galen’s Art of Physick, The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, John Gerard’s History of Plants, a new copy of John Parkinson’s Garden of Pleasant Flowers, with the pages barely cut. And there it was. The book that drew her hand was the nameless grimoire, bulging and tattered – her husband’s own scrapbook of remedies, copied one by one over two decades or more. Her heart pricked with tenderness to behold the care young Kenelm had taken with his handwriting. Although his writing was smaller in his youth it already had the rhythm and confidence of his spoken voice, putting forth occasional vain flourishes. Some receipts were blotted and stained with chemicals. The pages were many, and she let herself pass an idle moment on the advice to procure conception – purslain, nettle, candied nutmeg, powdered root of English snakeweed, and so forth, thrice daily – but it did not indicate how to beget a daughter. She turned on till she found a page marked ‘Viper Wine – Benzoardicum Thericale’.
Take a viper, hold her fast by the neck so she cannot stir or wag at all, and with a pen-knife cut her throat open, so you may be able to tear out her tongue and innards. Prepare a great many vipers after this fashion. Separate their tongues, hearts and livers. Bake gently overnight in a furnace. Add opobalsamum, or Peruvian Balsam, little by little. Take some good opium, well chosen, dry it very gently till it be friable, and crumble. Sift through a hairen cloth, with a good spirit of wine tartarised, and the stale of a brood mare in foal. This quintessence is of extraordinary good virtue for the purifying of the blood, flesh and skin. Preserves from grey hairs, renews youth, etc.
So Lancelot Choice was, at least, no quack. She had seen enough. If Kenelm would not sanction this, why was its recipe in his collection? Some elements of it worried her, though. The stale of a brood mare in foal – was she to drink a horse’s gilded piddle? The dogs barked, but it was Chater’s voice that she could hear nervously chiding them. Kenelm was not come home yet. With fast and urgent fingers, she turned the book around to read the scrawled marginalia:
‘Conjugated equine oestrogens have been used for several decades for post-menopausal hormone replacement. The preparation is in the form of an extract from the urine of pregnant mares . . .’
British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2000
She had seen enough. She closed Kenelm’s book, kissed it, put it back on the shelf. Making ready to leave his study, she heard a small rattle behind her, and noticed it came from the lid of a pot that had been left in the fire – probably some opiate or rare balsam he was baking dry – and she made a mental note to tell him not to leave his bonoficium unattended, until she remembered that this would betray her trespassing, and so, like a guilty thing, she slipped away, and the rustle of her silk dress, she fancied, sounded like a hiss.