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transcendent. Or was she only softened by the moonlight? He reached out to put his arms about her, to claim and hold this sepia-tinted, black-and-silver Venus, but she was already gone, hastening back across the lawn to bed, her nightgown wind-swollen, her hair flying.
    After a week of nightly moonbaths, she could discern no improvement in her complexion, although her husband maintained there was a new, subtle, luminosity. His well-meaning comments, his encouraging tone, hurt her more than anything. She found herself commenting on his alchemical work in a sarcastic, disbelieving tone, as if her pride were a debit and credit sheet. Come, she told herself, be bigger than that, but it was not easy.
    On the Sunday morning, Kenelm lay half asleep in her bed, while she sat in front of her glass at her toilette, making ready for their private mass held by Chater in their chapel, with a few other recusants from the other side of the shire also in attendance. He asked her if she could see the good effect on her complexion. She did not answer. He suggested that he could see the blue vein on her forehead better than before, as this usually pleased her. It was one of her marks of beauty. He asked if she wanted to try the lunar cure again tonight. Silence. He looked at the stiff outline of her shoulders as she sat at her dressing table, and inferred there was trouble coming. Her voice was strange and cold: ‘I cannot go with you to court.’
    ‘Venetia, come—’
    ‘I cannot bear it. I do not know why you persist in this nonsense of moonlight – this, ha, lunacy – when there are other, better cures available, which you well know.’
    ‘Other cures? What do you mean? Have I not provided you with every safe cure I know of? Have I not imported snails into our grounds from distant climes, at some cost? And yet you will not have them for healing purposes, neither taking their slime to drink nor submitting to have them crawl upon your face.’
    She turned to look at him, and her skin was blotchy with tears.
    ‘I will not speak of those snails! I would have thought that you, a man of Physick, schooled in chemistry, would know better than to chase after village remedies.’
    Sir Kenelm leaned forward, very serious. ‘It is because I know the power of Physick that I caution you against it.’
    ‘Other ladies drink preparations.’
    ‘You have no need of other ladies’ cures. You barely have any need of a cure at all.’
    ‘You do not understand.’
    ‘I do, my love.’
    ‘And yet you do not, my darling.’
    That evening, though the moon was a bright crescent, they lay abed all night.

O F F OUNTAINS AND T HE C REATURES IN T HEM
‘At Sir Anthony Cope’s a house of Diversion is built on a small island in one of his fish ponds, where a ball is tosst by a column of water and artificial showers descend at pleasure. But the Waterworks that surpass all others of the country, are those of Enston, at the rock first discovered by Thomas Bushell Esquire.’
Dr Robert Plot, Natural History of Oxfordshire , 1677
‘ Quaesisti nugas, nugis gaudeto repertis ’ – ‘You were looking for trivial amusements – here they are, enjoy them.’
Inscription on people-squirting fountain at Augsberg, recorded by Michel de Montaigne, 1570
    WHEN KENELM WAS fifteen, and under the tuition of Bishop Laud, he was given leave to go home for the feast of Trinity, and spent a day riding slowly east across the sun-parched countryside. As he rode he felt freed, gradually, of all the stiff, correct conduct Laud enforced, and their continual, courteous conflict on matters of religion. Kenelm had smuggled a copy of The Odyssey out of Laud’s library and plodding along, sometimes half-sleeping in the saddle, his mind drifted to monsters, whirlpools and mermaids’ tails. But whence did they propagate, if they had no legs?
    In Oxfordshire, on the homeward stretch, he rode up through Pudlicote towards the River Glyme and spied a fine church tower and brook. This would