EXPECTING TO HEAR the sound of the sea, Sir Kenelm lifted to his ear a shell. Instead he heard battle, Englishman fighting Englishman, bloody outcry, rapine and regicide. Peculiar. This shell gave him a queer feeling, and looking at it as if it had a bad smell, he put it down on his dressing table, and decided not to include it in his costume.
The masque was on tonight. The masque was where they went to dream, communally. It was glamour, enchantment. It made Icons of women and Heroes of men. It was a mirage, which rose and was then extinguished, never recreated. It was the aery, playful sport of the Higher Imagination. It was castles perched upon clouds of air, princesses and darling fauns, and naughty comic dwarves. The masque was Disney. It was the very opposite of the brawling ultra-violence that the public theatre had become, all bloodshed and confusion, incest and people running about with hearts on sticks.
Sir Kenelm wondered if this rift between court and town entertainments, between the country’s head and its belly, indicated the kingdom’s physiognomy was a healthy one, or no.
Perhaps he should wear the family ruby. It was a twisted heart, asymmetric, and set in a fine enamel representing the Pelican in her Piety, the white bird pecking her breast to feed blood to her family, or rather, the whole nation. It was an old design, fashionable in Elizabeth’s day. That evening’s masque had the ingenious theme of Light and Darkness, and during the moments of Darkness, his ruby would glint and glimmer, burning with its own light, the light that all true jewels held within them, be it ever so elusive. The ruby had refused to shine in the dark ever since his father’s execution, but Kenelm had seen its rays growing stronger lately. He held it up to the light, breathing on it, polishing and turning its golden setting, trying it out upon his breast, his cap, his collar.
Because it was Mistress Elizabeth’s Twelfth Night holiday, Venetia was pacing round the house playing the part of housekeeper for the night, checking no candles were left burning in the upper rooms, that the dogs had been fed, that the boys’ breakfast was ready for the morrow: that the bills had been paid, and that the cook had the keys on the Malaga sack barrel, which was no more than half-full, so that the household could get pleasantly yet not injuriously drunk.
Venetia did all this wearing her watchet-silk masqueing gown, hung with wing-like capes upon her shoulders and tied at her wrists, so as she darted into the nursery and kissed the boys as they ate their supper, they thought she was the most exquisite mother-nymph. They were proud of her small waist and her expensive scent, and young Kenelm got up and bowed to her, as he had been taught, and she kissed him, and held him close, but not too close, because he had honey down his shirt-front and she was in her costume.
The river was smooth and silty-white as they went by wherry to Whitehall Stairs, joining a queue of water taxis at the palace jetty, bobbing as they waited to disembark in the last of the winter-afternoon light. All through December, Venetia had been staying at the palace much of the day and sometimes overnight, preparing for the masque, and now she returned as a guest and player. In truth, there had been little rehearsing, but frequent rising and descending in mechanical chariots, in order that the ladies could endure it without too much fear. The actor from the Globe was used to working with male players only, but he was impressed to see that women could project their voices ‘almost as well as men’. He did not wish to tire the ladies out unduly, though, so much time passed with his demonstration of the art of splitting a chestnut in the air with a rapier.
‘Enough chain and jewel in my boat tonight to sink her,’ said a wherryman called Plank.
‘I had that Spanish ambassador in my boat once,’ said his friend John Duckett. ‘Gondomar. The one they mocked senseless at the Globe. ‘Signior-ee-ee’, that one. Not a tipper.’
‘I had that courtesan in my boat tonight,’ said Plank. ‘Mistress Lively. When I cries Oars, Oars, I don’t expect ’em to come running. Maybe I’ll try crying Rollocks instead.’
Across the city, in Fenchurch Street, the Twelfth Night festivities stopped the constant traffic of customers through Choice’s premises. With the servants and apprentices off, the place had an unaccustomed silence.
Lancelot Choice leaned back with his hands behind his head. ‘Ah, my dear,’ he said to Margaret. ‘Is this not peace indeed?’
Margaret looked up from the sweaty keel of her cooking pot. ‘Oh, mightily so,’ she said pleasantly, out of habit, while wiping down her apron, which was dirty from dismembering rodents, and pushing a foot-pedal, which turned the vipers on their spit.
Her method of preparing the Wine had become more efficient lately, allowing larger batches to be produced quickly, and if a little golden eye or skein of skin fell into the pot, it was unlikely to be removed.
Margaret’s illness had not killed her, but it had left her weaker. The skin around the viper’s bite was still engorged, shiny-smooth and new, and she limped, and felt the pain of it during thunderstorms. Choice, conversely, had gained a new sleekness and authority as their enterprise prospered.
‘Now would be a very good time for us to twist the lancet,’ he said. ‘To set our vipers wiggling in a new direction. I conceived of the idea three weeks ago, and yet we have not tried it out.’
Margaret sucked her teeth.
‘What a nice piece of work you are, waiting till our Twelfth Night holiday to spring this on me—’
‘Margaret, we must offer our ladies something more than Viper Wine, before they lose their appetites.’
Margaret said they could not try the Experiment tonight, because wax was too low.
‘Another candle needs be fetched, then.’
With an unforgiving glance at him, she went. Lancelot Choice considered the serum, splattered about the vial, which he had milked yesterday from the fattest adder, holding its head fast and enraging it until it spat its bile with impotent spite into his beaker. Choice was not a sentimental man but he felt a certain male kinship for this lethal beast, shackled from birth, deploying its ultimate defence, which turned into a dribble in his captor’s beaker. Still, here was enough poison to kill a man; the immature viper’s bite that Margaret had suffered was enough to paralyse her limb for two weeks; thus one tiny tear, one globule – a little bead to sit upon his finger’s end – that was plenty for his purpose tonight.
While he was waiting, checking his face in the glass, he thought of his new client, the girl who would not stop talking. She was full of thoughts and questions, and the better part of his nature thought he ought not to treat her, as she was too young. But then he considered what he was for. He was no conjuror, no cunning-man. He could not make a girl beautiful, no more than he could roll back the years. But he could lightly tweak a woman’s blood, so she was more luxuriant in all her parts, and woozy with confidence. Thus he found himself helping this Child, making another Customer of her by telling her ‘Non semper erit aestas’ – ‘it will not always be summer’. Take precautions while you may.
She carried her vials away, beaming. He considered it a prescription for anxiety.
Margaret’s tread was slower than usual on the stairs, and when she came in she sighed heavily at him.
‘Be not so, Margaret,’ he said sternly, sharpening the lancet with a frisking noise.
She grimaced.
‘’Tis only a smally-wee incision.’
‘Will sutures be made?’
‘Only if the wound gapes incontinently.’
She watched like a slaughter-lamb as he laid out the cloth upon their dinner table carefully, with the pillow at the head’s end.
He smiled, and his beauty, the symmetry of his steady gaze, comforted and inspired her.
They prayed, kneeling side by side, and then, according to their plans, he got onto the table and lay down. Margaret covered his neck and shoulders with a dirty, stained towel, so that a new one might not be spoiled with bleeding. She breathed upon the lancet, and wiped it on her apron, before beginning.
He had marked his forehead for incision with a small chalk line.
‘Be not too slow, Margaret, but slice with conviction,’ he said.
‘Quiet!’
The blood did not shed much, but pooled thickly under the cut. She fed the serum of adder poison, diluted down with three parts witch hazel, into the wound using the tip of the lancet and pressed it shut. She wiped her finger on the towel before starting on the other side.
When he raised his eyebrows, his skin creased upwards, giving him the two curved wrinkles across his forehead that they called ‘the Lawyer’s Moons’ or ‘Moon-tides’. They had planned that Margaret should erase both Moons today, but as she moved around him, with the lancet flashing, he sat up, sharply.
‘Enough – ’tis well done. I had rather put the risk upon my next patient, for women take their medicines differently to men, and it is Saturn in my stars, so I should not have the full treatment. I shall see how that takes. I must not jeopardise the practice; our business is maintained by my beauty.’
The immobility took hold after a few hours. He barely needed a bandage, and as night fell, he began reproaching Margaret for not making him take the treatment on both sides of his face, because at present his brow showed only a Half Moon. One side was stretched and taut, the other traced with care. To be sure, the wounded side had lost something of its animation, but it had gained an uncanny smoothness, very like a side of bacon.
‘It is a good rule of my art, which I should remember, that everything must be done with symmetry.’
‘Should the hiss-pissers have my other ankle too, then?’
‘I have a mind to ask for the second dose this instant,’ replied Choice, looking in the glass. ‘This is the very thing a Lady needs to finish what the Wine has started. I will take one or two of the Ladies into my confidence, and show them how the example works upon my own skin. This will inspire their admiration, nay their jealousy.’
Choice was pacing around.
‘It is good commerce, Margaret, to always offer customers more . . .’
‘Lie thee down, then,’ she said, and took up the blade again, so their Twelfth Night revelry might be completed.
In the Palace courtyard the plaster spaniels in the fountain had stopped chasing the mallard around the mechanical clock, their movement stilled by ice, their ears and noses white with frost. The gravel looked sugar-glazed and the sky full of goose-down, as the revellers arrived in their furs and over-mantels, nervous and excited; even the oldest councillors of state, who had been coming to masques for thirty years, had a quickness in their air-hanging breath, wishing well on the occasion. Sir Francis Knollys, Penelope’s husband, muttered prayers for the masque’s success when he awoke that morning, because this game, this play, this ceremony held the symbolic power of the nation’s dignity, and as his thin old black-stocking’d legs stepped into the hall, he felt that if this evening’s entertainment fell apart or failed, the state would falter too. The threat of Popish plot or powder made the masque more precious.
They were seated according to precedence – a complex operation overseen by the Earl Marshall. With ambassadors and bishops, the audience had swelled close to four hundred, but the whole show was meant to feel as small and intimate as possible, a private entertainment for the King and his favourites. Thus the set was designed for Him alone, so only His seat, beneath the canopy of State, saw the vanishing point of all perspectives: to Him, each optical illusion was perfectly maintained. Those whom politics had consigned to side-seats could see string-pullers, sea-tossers, lantern carriers. They saw the man who made the moon rise, climbing his rope-ladder into the starry black-clothed heavens. When Venus – Henrietta-Maria, of course – rose like a (fully-clothed) goddess from the waves in a huge scallop shell in Neptune’s Triumph, they saw the stagehands cranking the waves about her; the King saw only sea. They saw the workings of the clock; he saw only the time.
Kenelm was waiting in the audience, bantering with his fellow gentlemen of the Bedchamber, but he was nervous for Venetia, playing with his gloves, turning them back and forth. He wanted her to perform well, of course, but more than anything, he wanted her to be happy with how it had all gone; he felt so powerless as he sat there in the eternal predicament of the watching spouse.
Inigo Jones had presented two masques every year for the last eighteen years, but his blind mother had never attended. Tonight, instead of standing in the wings, watching anxiously and pacing like a revenant, Inigo was sitting with his mother in the audience, holding her hand, and describing to her the masque.
‘There is a rich curtain, overlaid with the word “Luminalia”, the title of our piece. In front of the curtain is a tableau of naughty cherubim – sons and daughters of the court – in antic postures. Little Lord Maltravers is riding a model snail. Another boy is shooting toy arrows, another blowing a writhen trumpet, making that confused sound. Lady Hutchinson’s daughter is asleep inside a pumpkin flower. Another is drawing with a vast pencil, quite as big as she is. Another is hardening darts in a candle. Oh, it is excellently done. And – now we stand, Mother.’
The cornets proclaimed the arrival of His Majesty, unconstitutional king, who would not deign to deal with parliament, but preferred to sit with nymphs and zephyrs. When he was in his seat – or rather, upon his throne – Inigo’s commentary began again. ‘Every candle in the place has been extinguished, abruptly.’ The half-alarmed gasp of the audience led him to reassure his mother – ‘It is done by direction thus. Now the curtain rises, discovering a scene of darkness. Countryside and woods, and further off, a calm river, lit by nothing but a Harvest moon. It is reflected in the river below, this being achieved by a concealed mirror.’
The Hall was left in darkness and silent contemplation, admiring this night-time vista, until a barn owl’s long, low call came, gently upon a flute.
‘Ah,’ admired Inigo’s mother, and clasped his hand tighter.
Then a long-eared owl’s shriek startled the audience, and the night seemed to take on depth and breadth, as if mice were being hunted in the forest, and the trees rustled on cue.
A nightingale’s liquid song poured out of the darkness, and then a frisson passed through the audience. ‘A bat has flown across the moon,’ whispered Inigo, ‘by means of wire.’
‘And now from the hollow cavern under the stage, a chariot rises, drawn by two great owls. They are the sons of the Lord Devereux. Their feathers are given by the King’s kestrels. In the chariot sits a matron dressed in purple, stars of gold upon her dark hair, over her face a veil of russet cyprus. She is a singer from the Queen’s company called Mistress Streisand. Her lips are purple coloured. She rises—’
‘Night!’ said Mrs Jones.
‘Aye, she is Night, and she wears two black wings, which are pigeon feathers dyed. Her chariot rests in the air a moment, so all may see it. She is lit with a very blue flame only, a compound of chymistry given me by Kenelm Digby; all else is darkness yet.’
‘Why dreadful queen dost thou appear/ So early in this hemisphere?’ asked the chorus.
Mistress Streisand’s reply filled the hall with vibrations of Night. Venetia watched from the wings, rapt with delight as darkness spiralled out of Night’s mouth, rising up from her lungs. The singer was so certain of her art, it came as naturally as if she were talking. When the aria paused, she closed her lips momentarily, as if tasting the music, before soaring into a new, more anxious key, like a sky turning from blue to indigo. The King pointed his staff at her, and she paused.
Pause.
Her mouth stayed open as if gargling one enormously long note; her purple cyprus veil was suspended mid-air.
The King revolved his staff of state.
Rewind!
Her lips closed momentarily, as if tasting the music, before soaring into a new, more anxious key, like a sky turning from blue to indigo. The King watched, smiling dispassionately. He considered rewinding that moment again, but did not. The song and the singer raced each other on towards their apogee, and as she reached the highest note, the great curtain covering one of the windows in the hall was rent down, as if by her singing, and the darkness she had brought with her across the world outside was revealed, to fulsome applause.
‘Now Night’s attendants appear,’ whispered Inigo. ‘The first Vigil is in blue with a bat upon her head. The second is in black, and wears a screech owl. The third wears a dormouse, and she is laced in silver dew. Now they dance with the figures of Sleep.’
Sweet music crept across the audience, and the Vigils of Sleep danced a stately saraband, while Inigo spoke quietly in his mother’s ear.
‘There’s Oblivion, a knave who always missed his rehearsals. There’s Silence, an old pantaloon with a garland of peach-tree upon his head. And there’s Sleep himself, a fat man in black. Sleep looks very like Ben Jonson, but I do not think Ben Jonson moves fast enough to represent Sleep.’
By the heavy sigh of fabric and the sound of relaxation in the audience, Inigo’s mother knew the curtain had fallen. A night-watchman’s bell rang from the back of the hall.
‘Here is the anti-masque, mother – nothing but foolish knavery. I must to the Queen.’
Inigo slipped out between the rows, while two thieves ran through the hall, carrying clanking bags of plate and alarming the audience for a moment, until it became clear it was a mock-disturbance staged by actors, and the thieves were pursued by two night-watchmen, wearing false bellies and crying fury.
Next came Groucho Marx, dressed as a cook, with a tray of popcorn cornets.
‘This is my room and region, the Banqueting House. Nothing is to be presented here without my acquaintance and allowance to it.’ He handed out popcorn to the audience, giving it to those who did not want it, telling others that they did not deserve it, and extemporising as only he could. He called out for his fellow cook, who thickened sauces with sulphur and made custards of Mercury. ‘Have you got a Philosopher’s Egg – I want to make an omelette . . .’
Kenelm laughed loudest of all, because he knew the words were directed at him. His hair tumbled down his collar lank and golden. He was worried Venetia had not yet appeared.
‘Now,’ shouted Groucho, ‘who is for the pot?’
An apprentice cook came pulling into the hall two dwarves, Jeffrey Hudson, the Queen’s Lord Minimus, and Archibald Armstrong, the King’s dwarf, strung together with ropes around their necks like partridges.
‘A brace of dwarves, Master cook!’ shouted the apprentice. ‘Delicate birds.’
‘Very good, so in we go,’ said the dwarves climbing up a ladder, bowing to the audience, and jumping into the pot.
‘It looks warm in there,’ said Groucho Marx, puffing on his cigar. One of the dwarves escaped out of the false bottom of the pot, and Groucho chased after him.
‘The ingredients are escaping – that’s a recipe for disaster.’
In the wings, the Queen and her ladies were peeping through the curtain, and laughing and shaking with delight at the spectacle.
After the waggish anti-masque, a new mood of serenity prevailed, as the curtain rose.
‘Another setting, Mother – the City of Sleep. Gold towers, windmills, and other extravagant edifices.’
‘Scenery, all?’
‘Aye, but so well-made, Mother. Out of the Palace of Morpheus come five nobles, dressed in white and wearing garlands of grapes.’
The King stood, and raised his staff of state . . .
Fast Forward!
The nobles moved with exaggerated, knee-gnashing speed, Thomas Howard the Earl of Arundel, Master Denny, Master Hay, the Lords Lennox and Devereux, processed out of the Palace and marched at the double around the cloud-capp’d tower and down to the front of the stage, as fast as toy soldiers, while the music played at triple speed.
‘And now here come five other nobles, sentinels of the Ivory Gate, whence come only truthful dreams,’ said Inigo, speaking very fast. ‘Lies-and-false-imaginings-come-through-the-Horned-Gate,’ he said, double-quick.
‘Andnowtheybow,’ he added, high and squeaky.
Their little troupe raced to the front of the stage, where they became stuck in the middle of a bow, as the King revolved his staff of state backwards and kept them on slow speed, so that their obeisance took a satisfyingly long time, and their eyelids drooped and their arms made stuttering tracks through the air, so they appeared to have fifteen hands apiece, until he put them onto double speed again.
In the audience, sitting beside the King, the Earl of Strafford clapped powerfully, although his low forehead was contorted into a deep frown. He privately wished the King would not exercise his divine authority thus. It was not politic to play with his nobles, now there was no parliament.
The whole masque remained on Fast Forward as the Sons of Night appeared out of a cave: Endymion Porter, wearing a white sheet and laurel wreath, representing Phantaste, the Spirit of Anything that Can Be Imagined. Endymion played the part with relish, although he could not act, and never would be able to.
Faster!
Then the dawn began to rise, as a hundred little flames, and then another hundred, were lit on cue, their pink glass candleshields turning to create the effect of rosy light.
The King knew the Queen was about to enter, and so he pointed his staff of state respectfully at the scene on stage.
Play.
‘The heavens begin to be enlightened,’ whispered Inigo to his mother. ‘It is a delicious prospect. The scenery turns on its axis – it is made of many triangular posts, which revolve in unison, revealing different scenes.’
‘Your clever notions!’ said Mrs Jones.
‘No, it is only copied from the Greeks. They are called periaktoi. This way they turn, and turn, giving a painted vision of rows of trees, fountains, statues, arbours, grottoes, walks and all such things as might express the garden of Brittannides.’
Happy King, to rule over such a country! Such a pleasant land of grotts and groves, where every subject might walk about his arbours and fountains, without worrying that the land was falling into two factions, whose disagreement would rend the nation’s heart with steel.
The chorus sang: ‘The bright perpetual traveller / Doth now too long the day defer’, which was the cue for the Queen, hiding in the wings, to make herself ready to mount her golden chariot without any back, and she and her ladies prepared for their entrance.
But first, Phosphorus the Morning Star came to light her way.
‘Out of the pale sky, Mother, descends a fiery white bark, sailing across the clouds, bearing the brightest mirror-lamp I could design.’
The audience sighed with rapture at the tiny white boat. Sitting in the prow of the boat were two figures: Lord Mountfitchet, dressed in white silk, paired with Lettice, who was wearing a gown that shone like a sapphire, or kingfisher’s wing. The spitting phosphorus lantern disclosed their smiling childish faces as they played a game of handy-dandy, their palms raised to one another in idle slaps.
Fond applause sounded like summer rain in the hall.
‘The twins of Phosphorus have been chosen to represent the loving unison of the King and Queen,’ said Inigo to his mother, as Lady Darnley stood in the centre of the stage and spoke her lines, clearly and with a sense of irony, even though she was a woman:
‘Their minds within / And bodies make but Hymen’s twin—’
‘A woman?’ asked Inigo’s mother. ‘Speaking?’
‘Aye, Mother,’ said Inigo, squeezing her hand, to indicate she should shew no alarm.
Backstage in the semi-darkness, two sweaty stagehands, Lubber and Vogg, turned the crank that made the Morning Star descend.
‘Ten more?’
‘Ten more and then we move to bring the dawn.’
‘Heave six.’
‘Heave seven.’
‘Think of the King.’
‘Heave nine.’
‘Ten for a job well done.’
‘There she goes,’ said Lubber, nodding his head to the Queen’s satin slippers, which he saw at eye-level through a chink in the wooden stage structure as she traversed the upper gallery. They were white and sewn with pearls, and Vogg raised his cap to the slippers, although their wearer would never see this act of veneration.
‘I feel towards her as if she’s my own daughter, but then my wife says that’s because I’m so often carpenter for her wooden boards and foot-rests, so it stands to reason.’
The music swelled. The architect did not know it, but the velvet black eye mask that his mother wore to hide her cataracts was damp with tears. In her mind’s eye the spectacle was unbearably rich. ‘And now the Queen enters,’ he whispered, getting to his feet, and taking his mother’s arm to help her up, as the royal trumpeters sounded her entrance.
‘She descends from the upper part, in a chariot heightened by gold. Reflectors set all about the hall redouble every candle’s light, which in turn reflexes onto the masquers, their silvery habits. The Queen’s majesty is highest, and several of her ladies are with her, seated somewhat lower. She wears a heavenly crown, ha. She cannot wear the crown of England, because of her religion, so the costume is chosen to make a point. About the Queen’s person are rays of sunlight, somewhat like the Madonna at St Sulpice. She smiles. The sky grows lighter, and more pink. This rare effect is created by reflectors being turned inwards, towards diaphanall glasses, filled with water that shews like the ruby stone of the orient. The habit of the masquers is close bodices, and their colour is Aurora, embroidered with silver. Diadems of jewels lie atop each head, and falls of white feathers, and tiny round metal discs, which we call “Oos”, reflect the light—’
‘Too much detail,’ said Inigo’s mother. ‘Tell me something interesting.’
He could not speak at all being, for a moment, too hurt.
‘Each costume costs about thirty pounds,’ he said.
Having descended almost to earth, Aurora was now entertained in mid-air by a cloud of zephyrs, which ascended from the stage in the chariot that used to belong to Night.
‘Hup two,’ said Lubber.
‘Hup three,’ said Vogg.
‘Oh, these zephyrs.’
‘Keep them cranking.’
‘Are they made o’ lead?’
‘Think of the tankard.’
‘Aye, think of the ale.’
‘Turn this thrice and we’ll be done.’
‘Twice and we will o’ercome.’
The last turn of the wheel was always the hardest.
‘But look, there she sits amongst the clouds!’ said Lubber, peeping through the scenery at the Queen on stage, his whole aching body covered in goosebumps of awe.
‘Is she not a flying thing of wonder!’ marvelled Vogg.
Venetia was chiefest amongst the zephyrs, and she sat highest upon their chariot, reclining in luxuriant pose, her head inclined backwards and her white neck and shoulders exposed by a gown that threatened to slip from her shoulders at any moment, while the two younger zephyrs waved large silk fans and pretended to play their paper harps, plucking, as the musicians below them made their real harps vibrate with fine appeasing melodies and glissandos.
Venetia’s chariot paused mid-air, and realising she was half in shadow, she found her light by leaning forward. With a whip in her hand like Boudicca, she fixed the audience with her arch and glistering eye, as super-celestially camp as any priestess or diva, before or since. She spoke:
‘Thy journeys never can be past
But must forever last
Tis not limited how far
Because it still is circular – the audience rippled with laughter, as was her design –
Thy universal beams cannot grow cold
Nor mortally wax old
Nor will they ever tire
Fed with immaterial fire.’
Applause powered her silver-gleaming chariot higher, so she seemed to levitate upon the goodwill of the audience, their admiration plumping her skin, till she shone like a creature of phantasy. She felt herself gathering, rising, filled full of honey fame, which overflowed into her cracks and privities, as she flew upwards like no earthly dame, her eyes ecstatic, her hair curling with pleasure.
Sir Kenelm forgot to be nervous for her. She was here, his water nymph from Enstone House –
The King jabbed his staff of state at her –
Pause.
Not a cell divided, not a hair greyed, not a mole darkened, not a line deepened, and the plaster spaniels no longer chased the mallard round the fountain of Whitehall Palace.
In 1584 a government decision was made that Queen Elizabeth’s beauty was to be maintained in portraiture, and she did not age from that time forward.
The zephyrs’ light fabrics were caught in mid-air, their cheeks mid-smile.
Venetia ran outside into the night air, to cool her skin, which flamed with happiness. She was cured of her own mortality, and like someone freed from long confinement she ran into the darkness, and panting at the edge of the muscled, tossing Thames, and she gasped as she saw that even the river had paused.
It was stiff as beaten egg-white.
She would never age, but always be beautiful.
The pause had killed the river’s flow, and reduced it to a representation of a river; the pause had killed the soft redoubled light that played around the Banqueting Hall, and the smell of the candles, and the slight wobble of the chariot. The pause had killed the moment, and the moment lay there dead and ready for the taking, glossy and permanent.
The King hummed, scratched his royal head. He picked the moment up, and put it in his pocket, intending to look at it again later.
He revolved his staff of state.
Rewind.
He wanted to make the candles in the hall burn backwards, and the zephyrs’ fans suck up the air they had dispersed, and their fingers to unpluck their harps, and Venetia to retract her smile. But he could not make it happen.
Queen Elizabeth never looked in the mirror after 1584, and her courtiers were so certain of this that the ladies of her bedchamber once daubed her nose with cochineal, or so Ben Jonson said.
Venetia realised the River Thames had not paused, only frozen.
It was the cold, making her confused, and the vipers in her blood were tricking her imagination, so in her vanity she believed she had arrested time. For the last few days the river had been viscous and becalmed, and now it was a massy solid, and presently there would be skating on it, and bowls. She heard the hubbub of voices inside the masque and she knew she must go inside.
The King rotated his staff impatiently.
Rewind was stuck. He could make a singer repeat her line as many times as he liked, but he could not make the candles unburn, nor could he make the Thames flow backwards, nor could he put a grown smile into bud again.
Even he, the King, divinely entitled to rule as God’s representative on earth, could not achieve this simple thing.
It was hard being King.
Play, play, play, play – let us dance and sing, for tomorrow we die. Handy-dandy, whirlabout. The performance was over, and a new game had begun, the courante starting up, calling the dancers to the floor. The masquers quitting their chariots and clouds, stumbled in their haste to join the dance, still wearing their diadems and falls of feathers, so that the masque continued, in the form of dancing. The masquers and their audience joined and mingled, hot atoms seething amongst the cold, turning formally between each other, hands raised in a courtly contretemps, heads bowing in obeisance, heels tapping out a demi-chasse.
And as the dance brought faces closer and then carried them away, like tides in a stately sea, Kenelm looked for his wife, overfilled with pride and anxious to praise her with kisses, but he could not see her. Perhaps it was the rapture of the dance, and the enravishment of the masque, or the work of a nimble apothecary, but he could not find his wife.
Confused, entranced, he saw echoes of her in other women. Aletheia Howard had the set of her eye; Mistress Whisk the pallor of her brow. Belinda, Lady Finch, had something of Venetia’s new glowing serenity; none of them frowned, or seemed capable of displeasure. Even Lady Vavasour was dancing, as if she wished to make a show of herself, though she had not disported at court for ten years or more. What epidemic of beauty was this? Was Venetia’s beauty catching, like a virtuous plague? All the ladies had lost their cracks and wrinkles, their scorched lead faces. There was a proud communal bloom to them, like a richly cultivated bed of roses.
He thought he caught a glimpse of her, but a mole on the upper lip told him it was Olive, Lady Porter.
Guide me, spot of beauty, to my Venice, like the morning star, muttered Kenelm, reaching out, blind, somnambulant.
Then he saw Lady Porter’s double, but he realised it was Anne Ogilvy.
No, here was Venetia, flashing azure in her famous dress. He had found her. Kenelm reached to twirl her, but then he recoiled, repulsed because it was not Venetia, only Lettice, blazing in Ultramarine: Lettice as her living likeness from their courtship, years ago.
He let the dance carry him onwards, into the figure of four the dancing master called ‘shining star’.
They all raised their left hands, and he saw the far point of the star was Venetia, but then he turned and found another Venetia at his left, and still another at his right.
‘Did you see me?’ shouted Endymion. ‘I was the Spirit of Everything that Can Be Imagined!’
Edward Sackville was showing off also, turning his ankles for the ladies. He was incorrigible. Whenever Kenelm wanted to hurt himself, like holding his finger over a candle, he considered how Sackville had sought to sleep within Venetia’s encircling arms.
Uplifted by the dance and cuffed about the head by wine, Kenelm looked wildly about for Venetia, but he could not see her. He had lost the art to know his true Una from the many false Duessas, his original from the multiplying counterfeits.
Kenelm turned round and about, thinking of those early days, when so many faked copies of Venetia’s portrait came, unlicensed, from the limners, and each copy’s copy degraded a degree, a minim too heavy in the chin, a jot too wide about the eyes, until the only thing about the portrait that was hers was the name engraved below.
His head wheeled, but his legs were carried onwards by the dance. Sweat made his blond quiff stand up like a staff.
There was a great cry and the crack and clatter of silver and glass, and Kenelm guessed the banqueting table had been turned over at the far side of the hall. It must be midnight already.
He saw a foreign ambassador run out to try to put right the damage to the banquet, and laughed at him for not knowing the midnight tradition of turning over the table. The feast was always overturned, for sport’s sake. At the crack of the table a new galliard struck up, faster and louder than before, and the crowd leaped to the music.
Venetia was revealed, strobe-lit, in the midst of it all, moving, yet not out of breath, smiling like the goddess of the dance. Behind the serene mask, her thoughts were tumbling: the child Lettice wears my dress, my Ultramarine that Edward Sackville called the colour of Jerusalem’s sky. I never gave it to her. I brought it for the Queen, not for her. Now she dances with my husband, and leads the masque as the Morning Star. She usurps and supersedes me. If this is the natural order of things, henceforth nothing in me is natural. Bring me to drink the gaudy immortal. Let me become super-natural.
The drums beat out a new tune: ‘Love Will Tear us Apart.’
Venetia was thrown opposite a young blood called Wharton, who was dressed as a shepherd, in a rich silken cape, ringlets and Arcadian sandals. His hair was bright blue. ‘Madam,’ he bowed deeply. ‘I adore your daughter Lettice.’
Kenelm stamped with the music, feeling the terrible, preordained joy of it, the heartbreak, tearing us apart.
‘Again.’
The song made him feel like a link in the endless chain of human longing, as he flicked the sweat off his blond quiff, he danced with every sinew of his body, the music animating him like a spirit-wound clockwork man.
Here she was. As he came close, he leaped and kissed Venetia once, which was all the steps would allow. The dance could not be interrupted by any one couple. The dance was bigger than the dancers. Everyone was intertwined, like a living weave. Moving back and forward, around and about, with steps their bodies knew so well their heads could forget them, and caught in the automatic bliss of repetition they turned to and fro, surging and stamping, dancing together in mutual regard and Kenelm rose, jumping, ecstatic, amongst a vast crowd of moshers, waltzers, pipers, ravers, tranceheads, and Pan himself was calling the tune.