Read an Excerpt of Hermione Eyre's 'Viper Wine'

by Awl Sponsors

Presented by Penguin Random House. Purchase Viper Wine here.

— — 
Venetia stayed late abed that morning.

This was uncharacteristic, but she found she could not rise.

Perhaps she was still angry about the spoiling of the apples. Mistress Elizabeth had not directed the farmhands to it and three barrels at least had been left to mulch. She shouted at her, and then she went to her room and cried. For what? For mouldered apples?

Yesterday she was in her knot garden at the front of the house, clipping the box-hedges using her dainty silver shears — play-gardening, as Kenelm called it — when a youth in the livery of the Earl of Dorset arrived. She put down her basket and smiled her famous smile at the livery boy, the smile Ben Jonson had written a sonnet about, and Peter Oliver painted; the smile that was so much in demand that a royal writ was put out to send any unlicensed copyist to prison, and still copies came. She stood there, her hip askew, so confident, the breeze in her flowing hair, her loose country dress full and soft. “Madam,” said the boy, bowing like a silly sapling, then looking her full in the face. “Could you tell me where to find her most gracious beauty Venetia, Lady Digby?”

He was holding a tall fair lily — a gallant reference, she supposed, to the single fleur-de-lis on Kenelm’s coat of arms — and aflame with nerves and excitement, he glanced back and forth at the house, as if he thought the great dame herself might at any moment appear in a cloud of golden light.

Venetia laughed it off and said, “Why, that lady is before you.” And as the youth looked at her with disbelief, and as his face turned from disappointment to, yes, repulsion, she remembered, as she had to keep remembering, that she was no longer herself. Her teeth were going, though they were always so good, and she had not yet learned to smile without showing them. She saw, in the mirror of his face, as the young boy’s pupils shrank, how much she had changed. And still he did not present her with the lily. Did he think she was a presuming and ironical chambermaid, testing him?

Edward Sackville must have talked up her beauty to his livery boy. It was his way. Since he became an earl his talk carried more weight. The boy had been expecting a treat: to see the woman with the smallest waist in London. Once that had been almost true. Now . . . “Have you no mouth to keep your tongue in, or do you stand there like a dimmock?” she snapped. As she heard herself speak, she felt ashamed. This is what it is, she realised, to become bitter, to spit out rude gall because your bones are
turned to brittleness. She turned and took off her embroidered gardening gloves, while her rage subdued, and then she reached out and took the boy’s hand, as if it belonged to her.

“Forgive me,” she said, leading him inside the house to her drawing room, intending, by allowing him into her feminine bower, and by spending a short time asking him questions about his life and opinions, to make him adore her for ever. But after their spiced cup arrived, and she had poured it, she went upstairs to fetch her fan, and while she was looking for the fan, she found an old keepsake from Sir Kenelm, and soon she became unaccountably sleepy. It was already dark when she awoke, remembering
the boy downstairs, who had vanished, leaving that long, drooping lily beside her cold cup of spiced wine.

Venetia was surprised at herself. She knew she was voluble and impatient, and many men found her too bold — except Sir Kenelm, who loved her strength — but she was not usually careless enough to abandon a young boy so thoughtlessly. But sometimes carelessness is a way of getting out of what we cannot do. She had always thrived on company. Now she was beginning to conceive a dread of daylight.

No wonder she went out veiled these days. It was a necessary precaution. She wiggled her toes in the cambric bed-sheet, to check she was still alive. “The rising sun / Which once I saw / Is now high in the heaven.” She often made up madrigals about nothing at all, just to make her thoughts musical. She really ought to rise. Chater must have led matins without her. She would tell him she had been at private prayer.

What was it Dr. Donne preached, which had so affected her? They went to so many funerals she could not remember whose it was where Donne had looked so thin and shrunken standing in the pulpit, his voice so slow that as he began a new sentence, one feared he might not live to finish it. And yet the light and dark began to mingle in his speaking, and promise answered question, so that questions died away, and on the flow of his speech he carried them, speaking so kindly, so privately to the very heart of each of them, until all were moved to glad wet tears, and the inverse of the doctor’s face, black-skulled, with bone-white burning holes for eyes, remained imprinted on her mind’s eye even now.

Her pillow book was buried in the covers beside her, and she turned to the page where she had copied down that delicious passage: “That which we call life is but Hebdomada Mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, dying seven times over. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and so forth, until age dies and determines all.”

Ripeness, she thought, is but the first sign of rot; there is no rest to be had anywhere on this planet. Since it turns, and turns, how can we ever be still? Sir Kenelm had the blame for that. He was the first to tell her that the earth was a hazelnut tossed in the air.

She could feel a new coarsening in her hair, which Kenelm had always stroked and made her laugh by telling her that the Greeks said a soft-haired creature was a soft-hearted one. Throwing back her blankets, like pulling off a plaister, Venetia considered her famous feet, once described by one of James I’s Scots poets as “wingèd dreams, each toe a wish,” splayed out fat and graceless on the counterpane. In private she sometimes made horrid faces in the glass, and wobbled her puckered thighs, deliberately tormenting herself. This morning she could not be bothered even to do that.

Ageing is imperceptible. It happens as gradually as a stone staircase wears, or a fan kept in sunlight fades. But to Venetia it had happened slowly and then suddenly, like a huge stock of water drains for a long time, hardly depleted, till the last swills vanish quickly.

I can bear it, she thought, because my husband bears it. He sees beyond the skin. He has deeper vision than most men. Why else would he love me, spoiled as I am? Each day we remain here together, before we go to town, we become more like a family, and he and I grow close again. We kiss each other every night; we wake together every morning. To my love, my husband, I am like a tree he sits beneath; he does not perceive my leaves a-turning.

Every day, the lowing cows in the valley told her it was almost noon, and every day their lowing seemed to come round faster. She rang for Mistress Elizabeth, and set about the business of dressing, unfastening and fastening, and refreshing her curls, thinking of her boys and her husband and preparing her face for the day’s duties of smiling, as Elizabeth tied her stays and fixed her overskirts, and once apparelled in all the fine and starchy fabrics of her station, Venetia felt more like herself. But as the cows bellowed across the far fields, she caught a view of herself in the glass, and screamed a silent scream.

Presented by Penguin Random House. Purchase Viper Wine here.