Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre Page B

was reformed now she was married and no longer infamous, and so forth, but she had always been impervious to the idea that she was scandalous in the first place. She had never been kept, never a courtesan. Her private wealth had given her outrageous freedom, that was all. There was nothing in her that knew how to apologise. She was so sure, so completely certain, as she entered any room, of her power, of her contribution to the sum of beauty in the world. And yet she had always been vulnerable too, wounded by the smallest slight, and turned into a pathetic self-doubting creature by such a nothing as a kind word left unsaid, or a sum she could not add.
    Her unpredictability was like a drug to Kenelm. He was elated by her approval and fearful of her sadness. To hide these passions of his, he had developed a steady, watchful exterior which did not betray how much he regarded her opinion in everything, how very much he wanted her to have her own way. For her to be denied was agony to him. He believed she was always right, even when she was unreasonable. She was deft and sure in all her instincts when he was blundering and over-educated and obscure. Because she was excessive, he had always to play at being reasonable; because she was volatile, he needed to pretend to be steadfast. Thus he was become a man. He reached for her hand after the paternoster.
    Kenelm’s mind moved on to his Hermetic studies, as he looked at the bright green stones mounted on the High Cross ahead of them and thought of the mounted, valiant troops of winged horsemen, invisible to the eye, which stream forth in purposive armies out of precious stones, in order to heal, improve and refine – unseen and unseeing, and yet the air is full of them, as thick as motes of dust in sunshine. This put him in mind of the missing emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which had so much goodness emanating from it, and he considered – with the small inhalation that attends a new thought – if it might be discovered buried at the spot on earth where food is most plentiful, health most abundant and people live as long as Enoch who had 350 years . . .
    Kenelm wondered where the King was. He had heard he might be here, in disguise. Charles and Queen Henrietta-Maria were good friends now, after their bad beginning. She had been stiff with jealousy of the Duke of Buckingham. Kenelm had seen it himself, when Buckingham was showing off to the King, doing some intolerable little dance for him, the Queen had walked out – furious, not looking back, taking with her a troop of ladies-in-waiting who followed one by one. But Buckingham was dead, stabbed by the ten-penny cutler’s knife of a half-mad soldier, and in his grief the King had found the Queen, and he called her ‘Mary’ and they represented themselves as Hermetic twins, as one person on all matters, except religion. The joke was even whispered at court, after it was censored from the script of Davenant’s winter masque:
    ‘The King is in love.’
    ‘With whom?’
    ‘With the Queen.’
    ‘In love with his own Wife! That’s held incest in Court.’
    Kenelm breathed deeply, as if trying to smell the royal presence. He scanned the congregation for a hooded person, a God disguised. Yes, there were a few cloaked nobles standing suspiciously together, high-ruffed and wearing hats, their heads down. Amid them, short, bow-legged, was that the King? The Fidei Defensor ? Thus concealed, he could please his wife and yet not displease his people. Ha! We live, thought Kenelm, in playful times. Be mutable, be flexible, Ken. He wondered if the nearness of the King’s body could be felt emanating through the congregation, despite his disguise. Perhaps his royal body also put forth streams of invisible noble cavalry, like a sort of human jewel.
    Deposuit potentes . . . Exaltavit humiles . . . The congregation rose as the censer swung. Chater had slipped into a back pew along with a tutor he knew, and a moody Spanish