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worn it every night in his absence. He buried his scratch-bearded face in her breasts. They smelled of almond oil, which she rubbed into them every day, to try to make amends for what time and children had done. She feebly tried to delay him from pulling off her whole nightgown.
    ‘Darling, will you make a beauty tonic?’ she asked, as he reached for her thighs. ‘A youth-cure for me to drink?’
    Kenelm considered it unsporting and feminine of her to ask him at this moment, and so he ignored her and continued with his endeavour.
    When they were both naked, she felt like Eve in the mural of the chapel at Gayhurst, round and pink and poorly painted. Her feet were cold and when she wrapped them round his warm back he cried out, laughing. He did not allow himself to notice how tense she was, as it would put him off his stride, and he closed his eyes, and he was home, and she was his one true love, and all he ever wanted, and just as she was beginning to forget herself, it was over. They had coupled only twice in three weeks since he returned. His long absence had reduced his need of her. As she lay beside him, the black squiggle was still on her mind.
    ‘What does your pouncing say?’
    ‘It is like an amulet or sigil, darling, to draw heavenly influences to my backbone, and assist me in my Work.’
    ‘But who is the little man?’
    ‘That is the alchemical sign of Mercury,’ he said slowly, on the brink of sleep. ‘Not very expertly done.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Not your name, my darling. That is on my heart.’
    ‘Oh, very prettily said,’ she scoffed, and in a few moments they were both soundly asleep.

M OONBEAMS A RE C OLD AND M OIST
‘One would think it were a folly that one could offer to wash his hands in a well-polished silver basin, wherein there is not a drop of water, yet this may be done by the reflexion of the Moon beames only. Hands, even after they are wiped, are much moister than usually.’
‘A Late Discourse by Sir Kenelm Digby in a Solemn Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpelier, Touching on the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathie’, 1664
    ALL WEEK, HE studied long and late in his laboratory. One night, when his candle guttered out after many hours, he was left in a bluish darkness to which his eyes quickly grew accustomed, and he saw it was a night as bright as day outside, and the gardens of Gayhurst were drenched in moonbeams. He stood at the open window of his laboratory, catching them in a glass bubble. He turned it wonderingly in his hand, sending two dashes of moon-juice chasing across the orb. Moonbeams are cold and moist , he noted in his ledger. They leave an acquatic and viscous glutenising sweat upon the glass.
    He tipped the moonbeams onto the back of his hand, where he saw them dissipate into a silver sheen on his skin, waxy like the belly of a snake. Could lunar rays assist in safely beautifying a complexion? He made a private note in Latin.
    The next night was cloudy.
    The night that followed, he and his wife stood out in their garden under the huge moon, two owls in flapping nightgowns. Sir Kenelm held a silver basin up to catch the moon-dew, and Venetia dipped her face into the splashing shimmers. The pores across her nose and cheeks were picked out by the light, and he angled the basin, so the light caught the places under her eyes where the skin was very thin, the veins standing out like the underside of an ivy leaf. The softness twisted across her face, like an inverse sunbeam. If men tanned by daylight, wherefore could they not be healed by night light? As above, so below. ‘It is a potent moisture,’ breathed Sir Kenelm. ‘I can see the refulgent beams at work.’ Venetia shut her eyes and inclined her face deeper inside the basin, until a cloud on the silver formed in the shape of her sigh.
    She looked up at him. The elms waved violently behind her. She was radiantly beautiful again. The cure had worked already. She was her Platonic self, ageless,