ANOTHER LETTER CAME for Venetia from Penelope, delivered by a hooded plague doctor. Venetia’s first impulse was to have it burned at once, but she had suffered a fit of penitence over her burning of Pen’s last two letters, fearing that she had destroyed Penelope’s final farewells to this world, or even admissions of florid secrets. This was unlikely, given Penelope’s nature, but every imagination responds to an unopened letter. Venetia would not touch this new letter herself, but curiosity drove her to make Chater open it, in front of the fire, using tongs, while she watched from the semi darkness of the other side of the room, dramatically covering her nose and mouth with her veil, her hands clasped in prayer for Penelope. Straining by firelight to read the writing, Chater managed to make out a few phrases.
‘Our Old Pippin . . . has had a ham bone. He had great pleasure of it, dragging it to his bed, even though his teeth are fewer than they were . . .’
Chater and Venetia’s mood of spiritual earnestness cooled. The letter was full of platitudes about the weather, her dogs, and news of her embroidered bed-jacket.
‘So we risk our lives for kennel talk,’ said Venetia. ‘She is on her deathbed, and yet I never read a more boring letter!’
But then Chater read aloud a few fond words of friendship, which touched her, as well as a passage in which she implored Venetia to come and nurse her, saying she would do well to catch the smallpox from her as it was a light visitation and not likely to cause much scarring.
Venetia thought Pen must be out of her mind with illness, but she decided to send her a comforting little present – some tansy from the botanical gardens at Holborn.
Venetia drank her draft of Venus Syrup – although she did it every day, it could never become so drab a thing as a habit – and an hour later, with the Wine stoking her blood, she rapped at the door of the Terrestrial Paradise, a small garden door in the long brick wall. It was known as Sir John Parkinson’s Terrestrial Paradise because it was a place of rare beauty, arranged like another Eden with all the herbs in harmonious groupings. He made a play on his name and called it the sole paradisus terrestris, Park-in-Sun.
The bricks in the wall were deep red, and she was absorbed with looking at their marbled veins like lumps of beef, when a gardener appeared at the door, hooded, and carrying a broom.
The Terrestrial Paradise was largely dank earth, dotted with greenish shrubs, hawthorn spikes, reeds and mouldy, broken bulrushes. Some plants had petrified where they stood, crucified to wires, while others had liquefied to mush. A small pond was cracked like a mirror in the middle, and frosted solid around its edges. All was hung over with a pall of blue woodsmoke, issuing from behind the brickwork nurseries.
Venetia had forgotten, somehow, that the garden would be dead or resting, buried below the sod. In that darkness, as in the darkness of the womb, small seeds were swelling, kicking as they unfurled. Venetia tiptoed into the garden, careful not to wake the sleeping plants.
‘Are you Demeter? It’s winter now, until she come again, so tell me you are her, lady, and I shall give you a pomegarnet,’ said the Gardener.
As she smiled, she could taste the dry, metallic wine returning in her throat, making her giddy again, and she swallowed twice so as not to choke. They passed a snoring beehive, and a vicious black bramble, which had formed itself into an empty cage, and a pair of seedy yellow-brown pokers, formerly red hot, now weeping glue. The walked past a row of stumpy trees, pollarded like beggars, and then they passed under the ribs of a trellis arch, and a bush bristling with anaemic sprouts of Old Man’s Beard.
‘Those that decay I leave to rot,’ said the Gardener. ‘It’s untidy, but Dame Kind likes it better that way. She’s a mucky lady. She loves a bit o’mulch. It makes everything else come up fresher. The old shrivellers make the new ones come on faster. It’s none that die but aren’t useful to the rest.’
They walked onwards to the covered nurseries where Venetia expected she would find Parkinson pickling peppers, perhaps, while he waited for spring. But when the gardener opened the nursery door and Venetia ducked under the doorframe, she smelled at once the foetid warmth of artificial summer.
There were sprays and blossoms here, green shoots and flung-open flowers. A bud-rose was splitting apart like a slashed doublet. Venetia could feel the pores of her skin opening in the wet warmth, her nerves relaxing. Titania wintered here, no doubt. Venetia wandered about the hot-house in a daze. There were miraculous little pansies, smiling, and tall papery blooms of Lady’s Slipper. There were blowsy orange poppies that they call Welsh poppies, which Venetia pinched between thumb and finger to check they were real and not made of silk, so she tore half a petal, and left her thumbprint upon its delicate skin – but who would believe this winter flowering without testing it?
Spiky and shock-headed, comically proud to be alive, were a whole guard of daffodils, in December. And vegetables, too, peasquash, beans and marrows, putting forth bright yellow flags as if it were August. Parkinson’s greatest patron was the Queen – it seemed he furnished her with fruit and flowers all year round.
‘Are these goodly fruits and flowers,’ she asked the Gardener passionately, ‘fit to eat? Not hollow, or blighted, or corrupted by unseasonal flowering?’
The Gardener laughed and shook his head.
‘They are real, in other words, and worthy of love,’ she murmured.
One plant was squat like a marrow but spined like a porcupine. It bit Venetia’s finger when she touched it, and the buzzing of a blow-fly sounded very loud and large in her ear. As she walked unsteadily about, another bush reached out to pluck at her gown, and she turned about in time to see it recoil, its fronds whispering and shuddering.
‘The best plant to eat in here’, said the Gardener, ‘is the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary,’ pointing to a little plinth where sat a mass of wool and fern, somewhat like an old mop crossed with a dog.
‘He is the reason we keep this nursery pen so warm, because he’s a precious beast indeed. He’s come from beyond the Alps, beyond the Tartar Sea, from a place called the Ural, and he’s thought to be about to issue forth live lambs, which will graze around him, joined to this plant by an umbilical stalk. We’ve feed for the lambs in case they come early,’ he said, kicking his foot towards a sack propped against the wall, ‘but there’s been no bleating from this corner yet.’
‘Is he plant or animal, then?’
‘A mickle of one and a muckle of the other, my lady,’ said the Gardener, inserting himself between Venetia and the Vegetable Lamb, so that she would not harm him through carelessness.
‘Sometimes I make a melody, to bring him on a bit.’
The Gardener turned and started sweeping, heaving his broom and singing:
‘Only the dove and the lamb live here
Lions nor vultures nay breathe the air
Sweet music and nay narry distress
In the sole paradisus terrestris.’
He carried on sweeping and singing, and he had such tenderness in his voice, she felt the Vegetable Lamb must surely grow with the nourishment of his tunefulness.
‘Master Parkinson is fixed on bringing about the production of lambs from this plant,’ said the gardener. ‘Namely, the production of meat from seed. He says none will go hungry if we can do it, and the taste of this lamb is said to be uncommonly good. Every time I sleep for more than a few hours, or our fire goes out, then he berates me, saying the Lamb is the Joy of Man’s Vegetable Desiring, and I jump to my work again, because it seems likely that after the earth has discovered potatoes, meat should be picked from a tree.’
Some visitors to the Park-in-Sun denied the Vegetable Lamb, and said it was no better than a bush wearing a wig, and called it a hoax and a nothing, and the Gardner heard them, and yet he kept his faith in the Vegetable Lamb.
As Venetia stood in front of it she was convinced she heard it gurgle. The Vegetable Lamb’s tails hung from its stunted boughs, and as she looked at them, wondering what Kenelm would make of them, they began to shake and wriggle with the foolish happiness of cloned lambs, gambolling about transgenic laboratories where they were tended by a thousand white-coated shepherds. She blinked, looked again, and saw that the Vegetable Lamb’s tails merely trembled where she breathed upon them, though Dolly the Sheep’s great granddam (to the power of a thousand) already grazed on the Derbyshire vale. Moved by the strangeness of the Spirit, she performed a quick cross and genuflection, in front of the Lamb, and the gardener followed suit.
‘We always strive to build Utopia in our garden. For if we bring plants here from Every-where across the world, then here becomes No-where, a place that is only full of the best. And Utopia is a good place, and yet no-place, and so we have it here, where there are no seasons. My master always replies so: “God would be much honoured if we could do it.” And so I say also, God would be much honoured if we could devise a true understanding of the parentage of grasses and reeds . . .’
Venetia wandered away, drawn to a peaky-looking lily that perched on the edge of a trestle of blooms. It was of an achingly sad, voluptuous disposition, its heavy head on an angle. She touched her cheek against its cantilevered petals. It smelled of summer, of Gayhurst, of Floralia, of her son’s bare suntanned legs. The skin was fibrous with a waxy touch upon it. It had flourished by special pleading, and careful maintenance, and yet it was as beautiful as any woodland or hedgerow flower – more so, because in its plenitude and hot-house refinement, there was something overly sensual and rare. It had been kept constantly warm here, taken outside into sunlight and shielded from frost, cosseted and fed and watered, nurtured against nature into a constant bloom. It was a lily that had drunk of Viper Wine. She looked at its pert stamen, and wondered if it was barren.
The lily, looking back at her, creaked fibrously into bloom, exhaling a breath of musk and cream and incense, inviting Venetia closer until she could smell its glandular undertow. As she closed her eyes, its rusted stamen stained her neck with two brown imprints, fang marks that smudged into love-bites.
Tansy, or Mugwort, or Gold Buttons – by any name it was as helpful to a woman with the smallpox – was sprouting in the medicinal section of the nursery, and the gardener cut her a good quantity. It cost, but of course it cost. They stoked the fires here constantly, and watered as frequently too: there was foetid greenness growing on the window casements, becoming thicker all the time, blotting out the light more now than when she had stepped inside, as if the pace of life in here were unstoppably quick, and oppressed by the close atmosphere, she darted outside into the wholesome cold.
The Gardener saw her scratching herself surreptitiously under her shawl, and he moved in front of her, blocking her path, looking intently into her eyes, scanning them with his own. Even in the garden light, her pupils were too wide.
‘Papaver somniferum,’ he said, more to himself than to her. ‘I wish you joy of your dreams, my lady.’ With a small bow, he pointed her towards the tiny door in the wall. ‘Take care to waken from them.’
Penelope had her tansy by nightfall, but the lily pollen stains clung to Venetia’s skin until evening when Kenelm, searching her body and breathing her incense-scent, found the yellow smudge of them on her neck, and removing them with his thumb and his hot tongue, covered that spot with loving kisses, which suck’d the vessels under her skin so gently she could barely feel them breaking, and pleasured in the feeling, until she realised what he was doing and told him to stop, in the name of her honour.
He had the bare plaster wall in their chamber covered with leather, tooled into fleur-de-lis patterns, and its richness went in at the eye, yet pleased the fingers, without touching.
Godly men and women, Puritans so-called, preferred plain things, of lasting quality. But Kenelm was in love with decoration, opulent colourings and fretwork. To his mind there was nothing that could not be improved with a few swirls and spandrels.
He bought young Kenelm a pistol, inlaid with pearl and chased with silver. It had the enchantment of all miniature things, and its cartridges were pluggits of cork.
The sound of Venetia approaching made him weak: the sigh of her skirts, the lush heaviness of them. He pinched the lawns and tiffanies she wore between his fingers, feeling their fine grain, marvelling at the abilities of worms.
Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows,
That liquefaction of her clothes . . .
Venetia’s silks were a fetish for her admirers, who used to crouch at keyholes to watch the rhythm, the pattern of her walking, and the flare of her gown as she stooped or stepped. It gave young men a frisson to think that the silk moved because she had a pair of legs, independently articulated like a perfect doll, which (yes, no word of a lie) divided at the top . . . For Kenelm the doll was gone, replaced by the woman he loved, but an echo of the fetish remained, in the rustle of her silk, and the flow of her sateen, its indecent slipperiness.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!
Venetia’s hair was curled with the expensive new pomander he bought her, which was spiced with bergamot and ambergris from the belly of the whale, a scent that came to define that time of their lives even as they were living it, so that whenever Kenelm caught it he sighed for last week, last month, last year.
He wondered: was his wife his greatest luxury of all? It was the other way round. There was no luxury without Venetia.
When Kenelm sat at his desk he closed his eyes and ran his fingertips over the tooled letters of his newly bound books, reading in the ridges and grooves the deep and light luxuries of his life, and imagining he was touching Venetia. He almost went to her, so they might roll all their sweetness up – but he stopped himself, and opened his book instead. They had time enough for that to come: tonight, after dinner; tomorrow; a lifetime, indeed. Was this not the blessing of marriage?
‘It was [my] fortune to fall into the company of a Brachman [Brahmin] of India . . . which man was one of those that the Indians held in great veneration for their professed sanctity and deep knowledge of the most hidden mysteries of theology and nature. [The Brahmin enlightened Sir Kenelm so that] . . . after much patience, and by abstracting my thoughts from sensual objects, and raising my spirit up to that height that I could make right use of these powerful names which this art teacheth, I got a real and obedient apparition as I desired.’
The Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1631
‘A button of gold could stretch, as thin as a hair, from Montpelier to Paris.’
Sir Kenelm Digby, On Bodies and the Immortality of Souls, 1659
‘OMMMMMMM.’
Sir Kenelm was meditating. His pantalooned legs were crossed beneath him, his lacy cuffs rested upon his knees, his dark gold hair lay upon his collar, and his thumbs and first fingers pinched together into a point, like Bodhisattva’s teardrop. His pale eyelashes were closed.
Thoughts of worldly advancement – Sir Francis Windebank said more monopolies were being offered by the Crown, for loans – entered his mind, and he cast them away. He breathed in light, and breathed out darkness.
Thoughts of the tightness of his garters entered his mind, and he cast them away. He breathed in darkness, and turned it into light – for was the meditating subject not using his body as a jordan? As a flask or alembic, for the transmutation of base matter into higher thoughts?
‘Ommmmmmm . . .’
Sir Kenelm had come across his old chest of relics from his teenage travels, rare trinkets he had collected on his journey through Alexandria and Anatolia – tiny jangling bells from a temple; a representation of the evil eye; his Persian cloth, decorated with a design of palms that would in a few decades be called Paisley; some scented sticks that were even now giving off a thoughtful odour; and some rolls of parchment painted with Buddhist mandalas, which had greatly interested him, since they were so similar to English astrologer’s wheels.
‘Ommmmmmm . . .’
There was also a small holy statue which he had bought at great cost, having been assured it was an ancient relic, even though after purchasing it he discovered underneath it a small stamp saying ‘Made In China’.
Sir Kenelm vibrated with the irenic sounds that the Brahmin had taught him would lead first to visions, then to Vedic flying and finally to divine Atman transcendence, as he fingered his Catholic rosary beads.
‘Ommmmmmmm . . .’
Downstairs, in her bedroom, Venetia was standing, an empty vial in her hand, staring at a grey stitch. Innumerable grey threads, twisted together, created one grey stitch. Next to it was a yellow stitch, and next to that another grey stitch, then a green stitch, an umber stitch. Grey, green, umber.
There was no design or purpose to them. They were unreasoning, varicoloured stitches only. As she blinked, her eyelashes were like a heron’s wings flapping.
Grey stitch, yellow stitch, green stitch, umber.
The colours were a jumble-pie.
She took a step back.
From here she could see that each stitch was packed together like sacks of wheat, making up the smoothish surface of a textile, bunched a little with the tension of warp over weft.
She blinked, and the glassy blackness of her iris tightened as she stepped back again, widening her field of vision.
From two steps away, she could see the dark stitches represented depths while the lighter ones were sun-glinting peaks. Each thread of colour served a larger purpose in the picture; her step backwards had created order out of chaos. Perception was everything. She reached for the word pixelated – but it was three hundred years away.
Three steps back, and she saw the stitches were part of the tapestry on her bedroom wall depicting the myth of Hero and Leander – Leander was peeping around a rich curtain, which was made out of yellow and grey stitches, its folds falling in dark green and umber stitches.
So one textile creates the illusion of another, thought Venetia. Each stitch both is a stitch and represents a stitch. And she went close to the tapestry again, and repeated the words, and together they made mad music:
‘Each stitch is a stitch.’
‘Ommmmmmmm.’
‘Is a stitch is a stitch is a stitch . . .’
‘Ommmmmmmm.’
‘. . . is a stitch is a stitch.’
As Sir Kenelm meditated, he flew about the world like one of Lucretius’s Atomes, unfettered, unmotivated, drawn by forces of heat and light.
He felt tiny neutral particles, neutrinos, passing through his body, a million squared per second, perpendicular to the sun. The antineutrinos, shadow mirror images, passed behind them.
Venetia picked up one of her fallen hairs, long and gracefully curved, particoloured, silvery at the root and rich black thereafter, where she had coloured it.
A button of gold could stretch, as thin as a hair, from Montpelier to Paris, thought Sir Kenelm. He saw the string, reaching infinitely far like saliva, growing telescopically ever thinner. He plucked at it, and like a harp string, it played a note for a long time, vibrating back and forth across itself.
She took out of its velvet drawstring her black obsidian mirror, a scrying glass. A steel glass showed the truth unpartially, as Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem told, but a scrying glass was much more sensitive. She breathed upon it, and when the white cloud cleared she looked into its deep lake, dark and still.
Kenelm thought about telescopic string, and how it stretched, and yet retained its usefulness, and how a tied piece of string was the strongest thing he knew, and he wondered if Atomes that sailed through the air were string-strung, flying Frisbees.
Venetia looked into the abyss, and saw you looking back at her.
The atom split. Kenelm’s mind snapped back on itself like a rubber band and flew into the future, into particle physics, string theory, superstring theory, supersymmetry, Higgs boson theory, M-theory – all flashing fast and faster, turning like a zoetrope, changing and improving with every spin of the wheel.
Isaac Newton’s mother, still only a child, danced around a maypole in the Lincolnshire countryside.
Venetia lying on her stomach, gazing into the dark lake, looked straight at you and asked: ‘Well, what did you expect? What could I do – except become Narcissus?’
Kenelm felt a tug on the golden string that ran through him, into the future, in the direction of a unifying theorem that reconciled general relativity with quantum mechanics, which they called A General Theory of Everything. Currents of exhilaration pulsed through his vibrating body. Ommmmmm. Alchemy’s Great Work might yet be achieved, three hundred years hence.
Ping! Sir Kenelm lost his concentration momentarily, and celestial spam arrived in his brain: ‘14cm black Wiccan obsidian scrying mirror, highly polished both sides. Dispatched within 1 day, seller guaranteed . . .’ He tried to clear his mind by breathing.
In her mirror, Venetia saw acres of Dark Matter, streaming like fast-forwarded clouds, vapid cosmic gas, the ego in sublimation. She saw herself in eleven different space–time dimensions. At eighteen, at twenty-one, at thirty-three. She saw herself as others saw her, not directly, but in the third person, as object not subject. The string between the first person and the third person broke, and she saw herself as a stranger would see her, with an objective eye. Venetia fished into the darkness and trawled up photographs.
Now she took Sir Kenelm’s hand and made him look into the mirror also, so he could see them streaking across the skies.
Sir Kenelm soared amongst the Dark Matter of the heavens, the distant shores of the cosmos that had no name and no definition, and he was as happy there as he was exploring the terra incognita on his own maps, the Dark Lands beyond the known perimeters of the Indies and the Americas, beyond which a man might found a kingdom in his own image, or at the very least, in his own name.
She dived deep into her glass, falling into her scrying mirror plundered from an Aztec kingdom, made of obsidian glass polished by the excrement of bats – half-digested beetle wing-cases, baby bird bones and enzymes – which had scrubbed its surface into a mirage of almost-wet smoothness, potent as an LED screen.
The Dark Matter swelled and irradiated, bright as sky coral. Venetia and Kenelm fell out of the sky together and landed on their bed, holding each other fast, their ideas tumbling over one another like clattering shells. The signal was lost.
A mouse ran, a dog barked, a bell rang and the display screen flickered and cut out. The visitor from Porlock had arrived, and Mistress Elizabeth was knocking at Venetia’s locked door, calling that Olivia Porter was here and was refusing to take off her outer-garments, saying she was ready to accompany her to the Strand.