[Venetia] had a face luscious enough to make her most banal remark seem profound, and she had grace and pride besides, a self-sameness, which was hers and only hers: a haeccitas in Latin—a “thisness”. Venetia Anastasia was noble born, of course, and yet she would not walk stiffly, like so many ladies, but loose and smooth, and all her hair and flesh was hers, not stuck with patches or white-faced with fard or sewn with horsehair. She was warm and live and there was carnality in the slowness of her blink.

…the shades of blue [Venetia] wore grew stronger. She was seen in a shocking new draper’s hue that flashed like a kingfisher’s wing, a very Papistical blue, unreliable, continental, the ne plus ultra of blues. It was made from a pigment of lapis lazuli—it would have been cheaper to buy a dress of beaten gold—and when she wore it in the sun she seethed like one of Kenelm’s alchemical mithridates. The new blue was called “Ultramarine,” a word that rolled about country folks’ mouths too much, so they called it “Venetia’s Blue” instead.

Sip sip, she thought, sip sip, as she rustled upstairs carrying her delivery, a small crate marked STRAWBERRIES and sealed with the fat worm-like viper seal of Lancelot Choice. The crate was neither light nor heavy, but just so. Sip sip. We raise the transforming wine-cup to our lip. She locked her closet door and used her paperknife to split the seal. Inside, under straw, seethed seven vials of purplish red liquor that had separated into bands, vermillion at the top, clotted black below. So every day would be a serpent’s Sunday: seven days’ supply of pagan sacrament. Should she drink it?

It was easier for Doktor Faustus, she thought, because he knew the price of his pleasure. No woman would complain about a bargain she had struck herself, with her eyes open, but Faustus had raved regretfully about it for three hours. If we, like Faustus, knew the price of our desire, life would be easy. Desire is dangerous because one never knows its price, nor its cost. Thus Chater preaches against desire.

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 and 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.

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?

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 a 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!

The windows, being the eyes of a building, must not let too much brightness into this place without contemplation, nor must they keep it unduly dark. It was ideally to be somewhat like a gentle forest dell, wherein new thoughts might grow and weedy distractions wither… The windows were to be painted with scenes that appeared Emblematicall, though they were sweetly personal to him and Venetia, depicting moments from their courtship. Two fat cherubim, playing together; the lion with the thorn in its paw, in remembrance of how he once took a thistle out of the heel of Venetia’s hand; the Laurel of constancy, the Mulberry of patience, the Cherry of Virtue, the Maple of her suitors’ rotten hearts. In the final window, there appeared the Fig-Tree of deliciousness.