‘IS LETTICE MARRIED yet?’ asked Venetia, adding, a little too graciously, ‘I do hope they will be happy.’
She was wearing her new plain grey dress, twice as expensive as a gaudy one, and yet infinitely suitable, she thought, for someone who had gained wisdom through suffering.
Olive threw a glance at Pen, who caught it.
The cards made secret fans in their hands. Pen put down a ten and a Tib with a smack of the thumb.
‘They were married at midnight last Saturday. To preserve her estate since her father’s demise it was done withal speed,’ she said.
‘Well, I do rejoice!’ said Venetia. ‘I pray they will be happy despite everything.’
‘Despite everything . . .?’ queried Olive.
‘Oh, you understand me,’ said Venetia, and although she wanted very much to add more, she did not. She was Good now, was she not? She played a six, with an indifferent pout. ‘I wish them every earthly joy.’
‘I think your face is gaining its old sweetness,’ said Pen gently.
‘You are so much more whole,’ agreed Olive. ‘No little girls would now be affrighted by you; no, not at all.’
The story of the incident in the Queen’s garden, when the Earl of Newcastle’s tot ran crying from Venetia, had clearly been doing the rounds.
‘I thought we’d have some China Oranges,’ said Pen, changing the subject. ‘To look at, of course, not to eat. They’re such bright worlds, I fancy they dress a table.’
‘Some silly girls do be dancing and fidgeting. It is the way of children,’ said Venetia. She was becoming used to her new attitude of forbearance. If she carried on like this, she would grow almost saintly. It was only a pity that the Wine would not leave her alone. She was free from it, and had not drunk it for a month and ten days, and yet it came into her mind unbidden, moving discreetly, like a scent, or a distant memory, or a tune she could not quite hear, so stealthily that it seemed to gain admittance without knocking, until there it was, beside her, pawing her shoulder, mewing for attention.
‘And so you have me,’ said Olive, laying down a Knave, King, Queen.
Venetia paid with the last of her coin.
‘The rest of my pot has gone to the lazars at Bartholomew’s,’ she announced. ‘I think when you have won so much gold at the table as I have, you ought to think of those less fortunate, who have no arms or legs, or who have great goitres at their throats the size of, oh, at least a double fist. The last occasion I was there I saw one growing on a poor woman, fair in other wise.’
The other ladies turned slowly to look at her incredulously, as if they had never seen her before. Penelope stopped with her posset cup halfway to her lips. But Venetia did not notice. She had thought about the woman a good deal that day. She was not so very far away from going back to see if she could pay for a physician to remove the putrid growth. It would be such an easy thing to accomplish. She knew now what the lancet could do.
She had been so long concerned with being seen that she had not seen at all; she had suffered a physician to cut her, though she was sound in body. It was a miracle she had been delivered from this folly; it was a miracle that Kenelm had cherished her since he came home, without seeming to notice the small puffiness, the tiny symmetrical scars she bore.
She looked at her friends, with tears brimming.
‘Forgive me, ladies, I am grown conscionable at last!’ And she pressed her kerchief over her eyes.
‘Venetia, darling . . .’ Olive put her arms around her. ‘You lost today but you are still the best player of us all, the best I have ever encountered.’
‘Come, come,’ said Pen. ‘She is moved not by her loss but with higher thoughts. Let her have a moment with her spirit. Then we will plan our May Day tournament. We shall visit the King’s park, where there is a new pavilion for sports. Will Kenelm come?’
‘No,’ sniffed Venetia. ‘I do not like him to see me at the gaming table, it shows too much cunning in me.’
‘I’faith,’ said Pen, ‘I think he knows the cunning in you and loves you for it.’
‘We all do,’ said Olive, and they embraced across the table in a thrice-fair hug, something like the Graces, before they set about beating one another in one final, ruthless game.
‘One Small Step for Man . . .’
Kenelm was back in his library.
Clouds of inspiration scudded across the ceiling; cherries of virtue swagged the stained-glass windows, so well done it was a wonder birds did not shatter them with pecking. The door of the library locked with a willing click, and he was at last at home in his own mind. Through the windows he could glimpse his green thought-garden, where Van Dyck’s tall and prickly sunflower grew ever higher, glowing with its own fierce brightness, like a nuclear daisy.
He might read while he leaned against any shelf, or at his desk hidden in a little scriptorium at the rear of the library. He could rise from his reading with some deep question, stroll to the pertinent section, put his finger upon the book he wanted, and browse onwards from there, ranging over his shelves, like a honeybee across a wildflower meadow.
This library was his very soul made visible.
There were, admittedly, one or two problems.
Overspill was stacked against the far wall, and in front of every section – as, Greek, French, Americas – a little pile of extras that did not fit upon the shelves was propped upon the floor. He must have been too conservative in his initial estimations; moreover, during the time it took to build the library, he had, inevitably, acquired more – bagfuls from Naples and Genoa.
The library was so over-filled that it would take twice his life to read everything it contained, and still the library was incomplete. A glaring white hole remained on the far wall: their Van Dyck painting was not yet in situ, and he felt an unanswerable need for it. That emblem of their union, of their blessed equity and love, was the very thing he wished to have presiding over his library, and yet it was absent. Having been away, he needed his props, his paintings, to tell him who he was, and how happily he was married, just as the Great Cross at Cheapside told him he was almost home again.
As a favour to Van Dyck, Kenelm had agreed to forgo his painting for a short while, allowing the artist to display it at his studio at Blackfriars, to beguile and inspire visiting patrons. They came for a solo portrait, then they saw the Digbys’ panoramic grouping, and lo, the whole family was signed up.
Van Dyck had offered him a copy, but he did not wish for a copy, only for his friend’s own work. The portrait was mightily well done, capturing such grace in his Venetia, and some sort of courage in himself, he supposed. It was a world away from the flat, stiff likenesses of his forebears, who always seemed propped against the dark. Instead, this was utterly of the moment. Their health was unsurpassed; they seemed to breathe, to sit comfortably in their chairs. Venetia’s expression had a wisdom, a glowing forbearance, to which people were much attracted.
And yet in truth she was more tense than ever since he was come home. She turned her head away from him, like a sick heliotrope. Was the taste of her lips different? Was her climacteric come early? What was the unusual heat in her kiss, and the coldness in her limbs? He wished he had the portrait, to help him to see her better.
Every gent and lady who aspired to immortality, or fashion, or merely the epithet ‘fine’, passed through the Blackfriars studio, and all of them saw the Digbys’ portrait. They came up the water-stairs and into the grand salon, where the painting commanded the light from the river. Many of the studio visitors exclaimed to see the Digbys, greeting their portrait, and babbling as they took it in.
‘But so it is, when you are born a true beauty,’ sighed Mistress Daubigny.
‘Age cannot wither her,’ said Belinda Finch, peevishly.
‘D’you think I should wear more blue?’
‘Venetia Stanley, is it?’ said the husband of the first. ‘She’s one they say is altogether’ – he whistled and drew curves in the air – ‘bona roba.’
Both ladies nudged him with embarrassment, as if the painting could hear.
‘Oh gee!’ said Andy Warhol. ‘She looks so unhappy. It really suits her. It gives her an expensive aura. I bet she folds her money lengthways. I met a Rothschild who kept her money folded in a little Scotch purse with a pom-pom . . .’
Sir Kenelm frowned at this silver-haired changeling and asked him what his business was. ‘Just teaching Van Dyck some tricks. I told him never to include a pimple in a painting, because a pimple is a temporary distraction. I shan’t stay long, though – I’m too insecure to talk to strangers.’
The editor of Vogue passed through, too, gazing at Venetia briefly, nodding dispassionate approval. This was perfect. Venetia would sell; she was a cover. Anything could have happened to her in life, too much Botox, or too much drink, or a botched lip job – none of it showed once her image was up here, tweaked and manipulated. Van Dyck could always be counted upon. Any second-rate artist could create a generic beauty. The point was to make the beauty particular – ideally, recognisable.
When Edward Sackville saw the painting of Venetia, he genuflected, or so it was reported. It became common for gentlemen Kenelm scarcely knew to say, ‘Oh sir, your wife is looking so well’, or, ‘Your beautiful Lady, what a fine pairing you make’, which gave Kenelm an instant’s confusion, before he realised these strangers had seen their portrait, and thus the familiarity they felt for him and his wife was an illusion, maintained by a trick of oil and brushwork, as one illusion begets another.
And like an abysm of mirrors, the illusions carried on, so that it was declared at court that Venetia had never looked more gracious, never commanded such noble charm. The cleverness of the portrait was that Van Dyck had not overstated his case, but given her an aura of tired elegance, a mildly enervated wanness, and – most clever of all – she looked very like the Queen. Even though the Queen was ten years younger.
Venetia’s likeness went out into the world, on billboards, on a big screen, displayed, retouched, elongated, a fantasy, a capriccio of perfection, and it barely mattered what her own self had become. The images were so much more powerful than she.
Which sculptor could make a King’s likeness without ever looking on him? Better to ask which working sculptor could not do such a thing. Images are made of reputation; likeness follows scurrying after. Bernini kept a Van Dyck study of Charles I in his studio, then sent a marble bust in its image over from Rome. It was widely agreed that the bust captured perfectly the King’s divine soul and earthly physiognomy. The court viewed the bust as more wondrous because of its tele-production. It was said that as the King turned to Catholicism, the hairline cracks in the marble forked and spread.
In churches all over England, paintings were coming into bloom. Under Archbishop Laud, icons and statues and carvings were permitted again, brought out from their safe-houses, unwrapped and dusted down. Steeple-crosses, bench-ends, misericords: all the symbolic prettinesses of a church appeared, and the Puritans shut their eyes to these distractions, these superstitions; and when they could not shut their eyes they shook their heads, inwardly revolted, their silence building up, with mounting pressure, against the wrongful tyranny of the screen, the stage, the lie of painting.
Kenelm did not mind that his own hairline, according to their portrait, appeared to have receded a little, shewing a glint of shiny scalp. He believed, with Dr Fludd, that baldness was a sign of astuteness, and a subtle mind. Van Dyck knew this, or else he would have given him more hair. He was not only a great artist; he also knew how to please.
It was pleasant for Kenelm to hear, several times a day, how beautiful his wife was looking. He could not help but believe it, by repetition. And yet a part of him knew that since he came back from Naples she was somehow changed, scarred and distorted, and he wondered if his eyesight had declined of late, and when he was at work reading a small script or reedy cipher in his private library he used spectacles – but he would never have worn these to read his wife’s face. That would have been cruel. He was more careful of her than that.
It saddened him to feel her detail slipping from him, as a fern, which he loved to regard in its furled intricacy, might become a curved prow of green; the Natural Philosopher in him longed to perceive her through a magnifying glass. But the Alchemical Philosopher in him knew that now his sight of her was softened, he was closer to perceiving her as she was in his heart. If the Stone were in a different guise or obscured with clouds of Sulphurick vapour, he was yet nearer to the truth of the Stone, by understanding its qualities rather than its appearance. One does not see only with the eyes.
He never liked to riddle thus about Venetia; his tendency towards her had always been instinctive, sure and true, not thought, or scrupled, like a scholar’s disputation. But now he felt as if he could not quite reach her. And so he decided not to put his mind to it, but to go and kiss her. He trod the stairs with vigour, a husband on the tarmac, in the taxi, on the doorstep.
Perhaps after they had been good lovers to one another he would give her the Naples pearls, which he had bought for her in a fit of homesickness, but now doubted, and had not given to her yet out of some little embarrassment. What if she asked how much they cost?
He found her door was locked, and he had to pause outside while she moved around the room, begging his patience in a high, guilty voice. What was she performing? One of those arcane female procedures, about which he did not wish to ask. He waited, counting the lines on the palm of his left hand.
On the other side of the door she took a final, decisive gulp, and hid and locked the empty vial in her closet. Well, what of it? She could do what she liked. She was now Good. She visited Bartholomew’s, and gave her money to the poor, and she did not drink the Viper Wine any more, so what harm could it do to sup one last time? She had forgotten what it tasted like. She was Saved.
Then the messenger boy had come before her with a May Day basket. She had received several of these already, from friends and neighbours, but this one looked different. It was set with snakeweed and little scarlet pimpernels, and shaped so she dared to hope it might contain a vial, and as she unfolded the wrapper she saw her heart’s wish, red and shameless, cloudy like a sandstorm, and just as heavy as a vial of Viper Wine should be. Across the inside wrapper in his sinuous writing, Choice expressed a few carefully chosen words of obsequious address, and wished her a ‘fair and beauty-filled’ first of May.
She nearly sent it back directly, but all the messengers of her house were busy, and she hid it in her closet instead. There it throbbed and tick-tocked the whole day through, pulsing like a living heart. She tried to close her ears to its noise, but even when she was upstairs, with the boys, or looking at the new editions of A Mirrour for a Modest Wife, or talking with the cook about their May Day dinner, she heard it. At some point in the afternoon it became clear to her that there was one easy, elegant solution to the Wine’s disquieting presence in her closet.
The taste of it was stronger than she remembered: bitter as witch’s spittle. She swallowed the first half and lay on her back, laughing, dizzy. She began to cough, throatily. Choking, she tried to sit up, but carefully: at all costs she must not spill the second half of the draught. She was gazing into the vial’s red whirlpool, trying to decide whether she should drink the rest now or tomorrow, when she heard Kenelm’s knock at her door.
When she let him in, the Wine and his hot blond kisses acted together, like a love-charm. She was giddy with longing. As Kenelm touched her and she closed her lids, she saw before her eyes pink worms dissolving into burnished gold, turning into the forked tails of the ribbons on the Maypole on the Strand, flying into the red-dark depths of the stained glass in Oxford. But she had not been to Oxford these ten years. She giggled aloud, and Kenelm thought it was because he was tickling her, and he tried to tickle her more. She gasped, because she felt his fingertips brush her scarring. She turned her face away.
They were usually gentle lovers to one another, unlike Olive and Endymion and their chilli-pepper pleasures. Yet this time she felt a will to bite, to pinch, to punish him for being so kind to her, so blind. She did not like the foolish happiness in his smile. She showed him her back, inviting him to mount her like a jade in a stable, arching her back, putting her tail in the air, knowing he would be thinking of the Skyrian horses in the Aeneid, waiting for Zephyros, the West Wind, to fill them with foals that would run fast as the wind. He was so quick she had only a brief, blood-pumping pleasure in it, and as they embraced afterwards she put her back to him again, flinching and removing his hand when he tried to stroke her cheek.
Yearning to be understood, she asked him if he ever wished for his youth again.
‘Oh, plenty times, my darling. To put all one’s strength and urgency into games of mud, and hunts for birds’ nests. To shoot the cannon of dried peas. To be admiral of a toy boat. To see the world in a hazelnut shell, a squirrel’s goblet . . .’
She let the wind whistle through the gulf in their understanding of one another, as he talked of Gayhurst and childhood, and for the hundredth time he said she broke his toy horse when they played together as toddlers, and she replied she did no such thing. She put on her nightcap to preserve her curls and before they fell asleep, she asked him for a story: how when he was a lad of eleven he was taken by cart across the county to meet Shakespeare, and Shakespeare bid him – what was it? But Kenelm was already twitching with the first jerks of sleep and he said he would tell her the whole story in the morning, with the boys.
The cries of the second watch of the night woke Kenelm, and he left Venetia where she was sleeping and trod gently to the window. He had been dreaming, as to his shame he sometimes did, of other women, dildo-toting drabs with unlaced gaiters, and he exhaled with happiness and relief to wake and find her sleeping next to him. From lust and madness she was his salvation, his best beloved. He wished she would take less of the bedclothes. She could be selfish in this respect. He groped for the cold ceramic pot and urinated into it – or nearby, it was all one – staring beyond the half-drawn curtain into the midnight empyrean, the soundless indigo. A dog barked, but no friendly dawn showed yet, and all of London seemed abed, only a strange visitation streaked across the darkness: a most curious cloud.
Kenelm moved towards the window.
The cloud, like a pale apparition, stretched out across the sky in a shining, shifting drift, which glowed yellow-pink. As Kenelm looked closer, he saw the cloud had a nacreous quality, pearlescent and particoloured, like the inside of an oyster shell.
It seemed to glow of its own sweetness. Kenelm could see no braziers or beacons flaming in the city beneath – the cloud, he judged, was not the reflection of light but the source of it.
‘A noctilucent cloud,’ said Kenelm, trying the words out.
It reminded him of the Philosopher’s Stone, when, cradled in its aludel, it developed its rainbow sheen, after the third crisis of the Great Work had passed, and the hermetic corpse began its exquisite putrefaction.
He pulled the window-drapes apart and hastened to wake Venetia. The bed and its white hangings were changed by the coloured light, dimming from saffron to sulphur, and thence to palest green. Green was the colour of the lion in alchemy, corrosive and devouring.
‘Look,’ he said, excited as a child to show her his discovery, ‘a shining night-cloud . . .’
But she was sound asleep, and would not stir, though the cloud was softly breaking into new colours. Was this sorcery or merely radiation? Was it light pollution from an undiscovered country? Or the gorgeous smoke-puff of a future disaster, drifting silently through his mind like a ghost ship through the sea?
Was this the long-awaited Satellite of Love?
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he sang gently.
He sought to rouse Venetia but she would not let go of the coverlet.
‘Come, come,’ he coaxed her, trying to pull it out of her hands, though they would not give. ‘Of what does this cloud foretell, darling? What does it signify? Every portent has its meaning.’
Venetia lay pale and inert.
He knew the cloud was warning him of something, but he did not know what, and his ever-postulating mind went straight to the political, foretelling the revolt of Parliament, or the failure of the Exchequer, or a sickness in the body politic. Perhaps they would be drawn into the war on the Continent. Or perhaps the Godly ones would have no more of Papistry, and rise to drive them out. Tomorrow was the first of May; perhaps the cloud was a May Day token, come to wake him to bring in the spring.
The aurora borealis, which men called streamers, petty dancers, or goat-dancers, had burned so brightly red under Tiberius that people believed it presaged fire.
Tycho Brahe believed the streamers brought on infectious diseases.
Elizabeth I saw the firedog playing with fire, and called John Dee to explain its portent.
He gazed at the cloud, as Venetia’s calm body lay beside him, and he tuned into twenty-first-century voices arguing in his head about ‘the recent phenomena only just observed in the sky, which scientists have agreed to call “acid clouds”. They are made up of tiny reflective acid crystals, so they shine like mother-of-pearl, but their source and their significance is still a mystery. Some say they are a sign of global warming.’ They were a tenuous phenomenon, vaguely understood, but thought to be symptoms of – the voice grew ominous – ‘climate change’. The voice brightened. ‘Now for the shipping forecast,’ and the signal faded out, as the cloud drifted gently over the horizon, and the first light of day showed in the sky.
He tiptoed out of the bedroom, and in the grey dawn he consulted his books on shadows and eclipses, and his tracts on heavenly bodies, hoping that he would find amongst them some recognition or explanation, until, still turning the pages in his mind, he fell asleep in his hammock.
‘When the shrill and baleful voice expressing her heavy plight strook my eares . . . in an instant my fansie ranne over more space than is between heaven and earth. I presently grew as senseless almost as the body that I had in my armes. Amazement, upon such occasions, for a while supplieth the room of sorrow.’
Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to his brother John, 1633
May Day morning, 1633, and the city was up early, excited, noisy. The great Maypole on the Strand was already strung with ribbons and in imitation every city green was raising its own with shouts and heave-hoes. At Charterhouse crowds had gathered to see the boy singers of Sutton’s Hospital performing from the church tower like so many skylarks and warblers, their little mouths wide with song. A soloist was chosen, though he was one of the youngest, and in his nerves he reached an even higher peak of clarity, and his song carried through the green town square and beyond, mingling with the shouts of the men setting up archery butts, and rolling beer kegs, and building bonfires, so that the pious men and women who had come to hear the choir’s singing threw stalks and leaves at them and shouted down the noise-makers in an angry chorus.
Kenelm was roused from his hammock by a frantic pounding at his study door. The birds in the green garden outside his window did not cease their singing as he ran upstairs, following the screaming of Mistress Elizabeth, who was on the threshold of Venetia’s chamber. The sun smiled through the bed-drapes, and on the serene image of Venetia, lying in her bed, elegantly pale, at rest, and yet more profoundly at rest than she should be, so that her body lay too immobile upon the pillows, and her dark head hung backwards, like a heavy flower on a broken stalk, as he grabbed her to his chest.
Cries of joy echoed up from the street across the Digbys’ garden as the maidens came a-maying, to take their places on the green, and the ladies in the crowd waved their ribbons and flowers, and boys hawking posies shouted ‘Meadowsweet and sage! Hyssop and clary-wort!’ as Sir Kenelm uncurled Venetia’s cold white fingertips, gracefully curved, and stiffening with every moment. The May maidens called to one another and waved their ribbons. Sir Kenelm shook her, and like a lovely dancer, she moved willingly in his arms. He wailed to heaven, as in the street outside a hurdy-gurdy struck up a May Day jig.
He found her scrying mirror, slipped it from its velvet drawstring, and held its polished surface to her lips, her nose. The mirror stayed inert as steel, with no kind bloom upon it. Even its most sensitive wet-black screen could not find a trace of presence, a ghost of breath. He cursed the mirror for telling him the truth. The crowd outside cheered as a man already drunk and abusive was ear-yanked away by the aldermen’s men. A girl who was too young to be in the procession cried, and those who were glad were innocently so, without knowing their good fortune, and buds bloomed, and magpies cackled, while at the corner of the canvas, unnoticed by the ploughman pushing his oxen across his cliff-top field, Icarus fell out of the clouds like a sycamore seed, spinning, and plunged into the drown-deep sea. Only a farmhand gaped at the boy streaking through the sky.
In catacombs, in mortuaries, in pits barely covered by seed-grass, the bodies of those who died of plague were quickly laid, too distempered to touch, too putrid to look upon. Death had undone them, so they were unrecognisable, yet Venetia was pallid-perfect so it seemed, like Juliet, she might wake at any moment. Kenelm, kneeling before her staring, tried to fix in his mind every line, every dear pigment.
When Dr Donne prepared for death, he had charcoal fires lit in his room, and a carpenter come to build him a wooden urn and resting board, and he rose from his sickbed, wrapped himself in his winding sheet, and stood inside the urn, wherein there was room for his feet withal, and in this pose of eternity he had a sculptor take his living portrait, for his death’s monument. His shroud was knotted top and bottom, and peeping through was his lean and death-like face, eyes closed, and turned to the east, towards the Second Coming of our Saviour.
Sir Kenelm gasped with inspiration. Van Dyck should come and paint Venetia. He reached for the telephone, but it was not there. He grasped for a text, a keyboard, pager, telegram. Pay-as-you-go. Hologram. Loudspeaker. He found a piece of paper and quill at her bedside, and scribbled words upon it, as fast and clear as he was able, through his distorting tears. When the letter reached Van Dyck at Blackfriars, where he was at his easel, he fell upon his knees and crossed himself, and it was only afterwards that he marvelled at how the letter had reached him, even though his name and lodgings were written in backwards mirror-writing.
News of her death was spreading abroad, called out by the crier to the May Day revellers, above the din of ‘Ninny-heigh No’ and the thunk of arrows into the butts, and there was a compelling fitness to the salt of tragedy on that sweet May morning, so that talk formed on hasty lips between sips of ale.
‘Dead by a mystery no man can answer.’
‘Dead by her own good heart – she was tending the lazars at Bartholomew’s lately.’
‘Dead by an ague come up from the marshes.’
‘Brought to bed early of a babe, no doubt.’
‘The best do always fly the fastest off.’
And tastiest of all, confidentially, between bites of crumble pie and sweet-pud:
‘Her husband was forever mixing potent drugs and pharmacies, which he did give her to drink, nightly.’
When Mistress Elizabeth came into the room, Kenelm turned to look guiltily at her, as if she had surprised him in a covert act. He was leaning over the body, holding Venetia’s weighty head upon one side, as he fixed an earring to her still-perfect ear. It was a huge pearl, and he opened his hand so that he might show Mistress Elizabeth the other pearl, which he had yet to fasten. Mistress Elizabeth averted her gaze with her usual deference, but she wondered if he was losing his senses. His face was coursed with tears and snot, which he wiped upon the cuff of his shirt. ‘Oh, that’s fine, my darling!’ he said appreciatively, looking at how the pearls suited Venetia. ‘That’s fine indeed!’
Mistress Elizabeth bid the King’s physician, Sir Theodore de Mayerne, come into the bedroom – his boy was made to wait downstairs, with the weeping Chater, Olive and Pen. Sir Theodore had been summoned from a patron’s house, where he was about to eat a May Day marchpane pie, and under his cloak he still had his napkin tucked into his doublet, and a hungry look about him.
‘My darling,’ said Kenelm to his inobservant wife, ‘I should have given these to you before – presents which I brought for you from Naples.’ He spoke almost flirtatiously, tucking his blond hair behind his ears.
Theodore de Mayerne recognised this behaviour. He had been in attendance in 1612 when Prince Henry, England’s golden hope, died aged eighteen of a fever. He had shaken King James to stop him babbling like a brook. He knew grief; oh yes.
‘Come, sir, step aside and let me see her,’ he said firmly.
‘LEAVE US BE,’ roared Kenelm, pushing Mayerne away. ‘You are dressed to go a-maying, I can see your gaudy doublet. And you have forgot your muckender, which is still tucked under your fat French chin.’
Mayerne had heard it all before. Scurvied children tried to bite him and women cried shit and damnation on his head during their childbirths. He bore Kenelm no ill will; besides, he liked his own stately girth. ‘An evil soul rarely dwells in a fat body,’ was his habitual remark.
Kenelm turned his back on Mayerne and tenderly fastened the rope of pearls around Venetia’s neck. ‘She shall have her present for a May morning. There, how lovely she is.’
Kenelm remembered how he had spoken to his boys in their mother’s womb as they kicked and quickened; how he laid his hand upon them and felt their souls a-bud. Talking to Venetia now was similar. There was the trace of her, the shape of her, just beyond his reach. He could not think of the word purgatory. He would rather sing her an old song of their courtship, marking time upon her counterpane with his fingers: ‘Under the greenwood and round again.’
Or perhaps – ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
When Mayerne splashed cold water in his face, Kenelm came to his senses, and stood aside to let Mayerne make his examination. Kenelm could not bear to watch the indignity of it, and after telling Mayerne to leave her face and hands unmarked, he left her bedroom, and stepped into a new world of grief; the familiar hall, the dining room and library, all the same, yet changed beyond measure, so it felt like an empty simulacrum of the house in which he used to live.
The boys were still in their nightshirts, much distressed, with cold little feet, which Kenelm rubbed as he spoke to them. They could not see their mother, no, but their granddam was a great good lady, and she would care for them while the house was all unresting, until their mother was well again—
They peered at their father’s wretched head, as he turned away and sobbed violently, having told a lie that none of them believed. The boys rattled into the country with their nurses sitting at the rear of their coach and their bags of treasures badly packed and flung together. The godly would not let them pass through Highgate, as they were protecting the village, keeping it pure from May Day celebrations, and after a detour, their coach passed at last into open country, where they saw whole villages out a-maying, waving blossom boughs and singing and raising tankards at their coach, and calling them ‘cuckoo’, and being children, they called ‘cuckoo’ back, and waved, and laughed.
In years to come the memory of this would grieve them, and they each kept it secret from the other, ashamed and questioning: why did no one help them to be better?
At three, Kenelm tried to pull the bell out of their clock in the hall so that it might not ring any more, because time should not go on so blithely without her. He went into his study expecting it to be destroyed, and all his bottles broken and notebooks burned, but it was as neat and familiar as when he left it, only the blankets on his hammock were disarrayed, where he had left them when he first heard the terrible pounding on his door. He decreed they should never be folded but always left in that stricken attitude. He was comforted by this, and drank a little Rhenish wine which he was given, although he could not eat. When he went back into his study, the maid had already folded the blankets away.
He felt betrayed by his clock, and the fountain in the town square, and the spigot in the stable-yard, because all of them flowed, and had not stopped at the moment of calamity. But when he drew the curtain to his study, he saw that the great sunflower’s head was newly drooped at an angle of despair, as if the world had gone to darkness, and there was no bright sun to turn its head to follow. This gave him comfort: this most Sympatheticall of plants.
‘Scientists have discovered that sunflowers can pull radioactive contaminants out of the soil. Researchers cleaning up the Fukushima site in Japan are putting the flowers to the test.’
Japan Today, 2011
‘We plant sunflowers, field mustard, amaranthus and cockscomb, which are all believed to absorb radiation,’ said the monk Koyu Abe. ‘So far we have grown at least 200,000 and at least eight million sunflowers blooming in Fukushima originated from here.’
Reuters, 2011
And yet Sir Kenelm knew, with the heavy physical knowledge that accompanies heartbreak, that the sunflowers planted in Fukushima were proven not to be effective in dissipating radiation, reducing caesium in the topsoil by a negligible amount. Even their famous heliotropism was misconceived. Sunflower buds revolve with the sun. The mature flowers are only east-facing, like any others. Sir Kenelm looked at the grizzled plant, its tortured optimism, its petals rendered in a thick impasto. It had not saved Van Gogh either. Poor flower. It was condemned to brightness, though about itself, it was thoroughly disillusioned: that he recognised.
‘It’s a kind of dance of death. But it’s her life force I was responding to. I hope to put a little bit of life into charcoal. Whether [the work] is of someone dead or alive is irrelevant.’
Artist Maggi Hambling on drawing a series of deathbed sketches of her lover Henrietta Moraes, 2002
‘When we came in, we found her almost cold and stiffe; yet the blood was not so settled but that our rubbing of her face brought a little seeming colour into her pale cheeks, which Sir Anthony Van Dyck hath expressed excellently well in his picture . . . A rose lying upon the heme of the sheet, whose leaves being pulled from the stalk in the full beauty of it and seeming to wither apace even whiles you look upon it, is a fit emblem to expresse the state her body then was in.’
Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby, 1633
BY CANDLELIGHT, AND dawn, and daylight, as it filtered through the bed-drapes, Van Dyck worked constantly. The sorrow all around him, the sobbing in the hall where Chater held vigil, the distracted presence of Kenelm coming and going from her bedside, and the disorder in the household, did not seem to penetrate him; his lean moustaches were fixed in a placid expression of concentration, as he painted, so any common observer might think he was unmoved, when in fact all the sensitivities of his soul, and his precise brush, were working to transmute Grief into Comfort.
Tin-lead yellow, Bismuth white, orpiment. By continuous circulation they may be sublimed and fixed together and lastly by coagulation, become immutable. Thus is the painter like the alchemist. This vision of cruelty and despair, this horrid, unwonted scene, this death’s head, about to putrefy, sighing as its cavities gave up their air – he would, by his Art, render this into a vision of serenity and calm; his most Intimate work, tender and careful. Her pale form, enclosed by dark blue drapes, like a pearl in a velvet setting. Her nightdress and cap, clean and shining white; her face, set in an attitude of sleepy contentment; her eyes, caught between opening and closing.
Van Dyck almost smiled as he worked. It was a beautiful sight, if you but had the fortitude to see it so, and did not let the fear of your own demise cloud your vision. His art could transmute the awful question, the why that howled above her head, into a serene certainty: we all must come to this long sleep. Tin-lead, smalt blue, azurite. By his manipulation these base metals and tinctures would become Higher. This brief interlude between death and decay would, by his painter’s alchemy, become lasting. Van Dyck always hesitated to use the word eternal, even in his private thoughts; he was not to know it would be carved upon his own tomb by his English admirers.
‘The pearls are not very lucid,’ said Sir Kenelm, standing at Van Dyck’s shoulder, looking at his work in progress.
Van Dyck wanted to shout at Kenelm, but remained silent.
The body in front of them let forth a noise, which sounded like a plaintive snore, and startled Kenelm, so he ran to her body, and clasped it in his arms, desperate to take the noise as a sign of life.
Van Dyck was about to call out to Kenelm to bid him stop deranging his sitter – she would take some putting right – but he contained himself, breathed, and continued painting. There was not much time left.
He had painted posthumous portraits before. In Antwerp, his tutor Rubens sent for him in the middle of the night, and Van Dyck found him kneeling over his wife Isabella in her open coffin. Now that was a task to paint. No sleep, all night; the children wailing, the bell tolling and the priest imploring them to go to church to bury her. And Rubens, weeping, and ordering him about at the same time – suggesting a better light, a more dramatic composition, and so forth. All he produced was a poor copy of Rubens’ style – a stiff tableau of death. But that was seven years ago, and since then he had gained so much in confidence, that he now worked within his own preoccupations. Every day, he painted portraits capturing his sitters’ steady, living breath, and this was very like, except this portrait caught the final whisper of breath that a body exhaled.
That breath was deemed precious, because it contained the essence of the spirit departing the body. Vasari related that Francis I was present at the moment of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, clasping him in his arms as he died, sucking from his lips his last exhalation, to make it his own inspiration.
Sir Kenelm clutched the counterpane, imagining he could feel Venetia’s breath upon his cheek. He hovered closer, searching for the phantom of her sleep-sigh, her departing pneuma. He wished he could have caught and captured it. A glass bulb would have sufficed to catch her spirit in, the filament crackling with her presence.
Kenelm – whose mind was then unmoored and skittering through time – remembered that when Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was captured in a test tube by his son Charles, kneeling at his bedside. Edison’s great admirer, Henry Ford, the alchemist of speed and metal, displayed that empty test tube at the Ford Museum, outside Detroit, where on a small plinth the glass performed the high service of making the invisible visible. The inventor of the light bulb’s breath was a worthy catch, but how much sweeter, how much more useful for his Great Work, would his own wife’s breath have been?
But though he dragged a net through the heavens, he would never find any of her vitality. He shuddered as he felt the flames that would, in 1666, consume their double tomb, raging around their grave like a furnace, blowing the windows of Christ Church Newgate, blackening her gilt memorial, and turning their ashes loose across the smoking rubble so they mixed together in the wind.
The calcium of bones, the keratin of eyelashes, the exhalations of our bodies – all these are reconstituted as carbon atoms, used to make the world anew: the earth, the lilies of the field, the ink of this book. What is can never cease to be. Kenelm found comfort in these alchemists’ precepts, touching them again and again like rosary beads. We are all stars, and to the stars we return.
Tin, lead-white, bismuth. Van Dyck’s brush moved with gentle care. His portrait listened so closely to Venetia; all the closer, because she would never now have anything more to say. In life, a portrait of this intimacy, with the sitter in her nightgown, framed by bed-drapes, would have been outrageous. But she was safe, now, from any ill remark, scandal or unwonted action. She had become a monument. She had always sought to preserve herself so that on future occasions she would not be found wanting, but now, at last, she was ready.
The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Sylvia Plath,
from ‘Edge’, 1963
Van Dyck finished this painting himself, without delegation. He applied the final white gleam to her pearls, her one, half-open eye. One eye symbolised occult knowledge: there was no accident in Van Dyck’s art. He worked softly, stealthily, so that nothing might jar the peacefulness of his creation, and all the murmurs that he had ever heard resonated through his brush. He saw her with the artist’s double vision. And if, onto the dark expanse of her counterpane, he threw a snake, twisting first into the form of a blanket’s gold-enamelled hem, and then into the guise of a viper’s scaly back, it was only because artists cannot help themselves.