Read Online Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre - Free Book Online Page B

do as a place to water Peggy, his pony, whose real name was Pegasus, but who was definitely a Peggy. As he approached, the bells began to ring out.
    ‘What church is this?’ he asked a woman passing by.
    ‘St Kenelm’s,’ she said, and left him standing all ablaze, as Peggy cropped the grass.
    Such a feeling of special providence is always pleasant, but for a fifteen-year-old boy it was intoxicating. He had heard of the church, but had never seen it before. Well pleased with the form and shape of his church and particularly its solid tower, he surveyed it twice on foot in a circle, and lit a candle at the shrine of his namesake Saxon child-saint, before journeying further into the gold-green countryside.
    He paused to cross himself in front of the lichen-mottled megalith at the crossroads, some giant’s old plaything with flowers tucked into its pock marks, and a bowl of milk left at its foot for Robin Goodfellow. A long stately drive, unmarked, attracted his attention and he wondered if it was Neat-Enstone, famous for its pleasure park and water-grottoes, built by Thomas Bushell, seal-bearer to Sir Francis Bacon. Kenelm had heard about its marvellous fountains. He turned his pony into the drive, though he had no invitation, and with the impunity of youth, headed straight ahead at a casual rising trot.
    The trees along the drive were alternately tall then squat, so they resembled, to Kenelm’s eye, an Irish stitch. The trees barred the sun rhythmically so as he moved forwards he was dazzled by stripes of brightness, then shadow, brightness, shadow. The drive was quiet but he could hear in the distance, so he thought, a roar of water.
    He tethered Peggy and proceeded down a curved, deserted forest path. Sensing he was being watched, and feeling, as teenagers do, that this moment might be of great import for the rest of his life, he removed his hat and ran his hand through his sweat-darkened hair. When he turned the corner he saw an open garden lawn before him, fringed with trees like a stage’s curtains, and hung with a very fine mist, resting on the air. A perfect rainbow arched across it.
    Kenelm’s eyes welled at this sign of peace and forgiveness. Soon the rainbow would be dissected by Descartes, and anatomised by Newton, but from where Kenelm stood it was a symbol, mystical, allegorical. He knew, of course, that it was made of rain and sunlight and eyesight, and he knew that what he saw was an artifice, conjured out of carefully created spume. Because he had a mind that liked to understand what moved him – the type of mind that would, by degrees, create the modern age – he decided the water must have been forced through a very narrow fissure to create such a delicate spray, and he wondered how such pressure had been attained.
    He thought he heard a laugh, or the rush of water, and turned around to follow the path till he could see, some way off, an ornate dwelling, perched at an improbable angle on the hillside, with rocks below it forming a cataract and tumbling cascade.
    He followed the path onwards as it took him back into the hill, towards a fantastical grotto set into the cliff. It had been bricked all about, like a saint’s cave built into a cathedral, but it was still clear that it was nature’s work; no craftsman could obtain these molten patterns in the stone, curves and drips as from a frequently lit tallow candle. Inside the grotto it was cool and peaceful. He sang a few notes, just to hear the echo. Some of the rock-drips were protuberant, like long noses, polished by the action of water on them over hundreds of years. No doubt since the Flood. The villagers probably said a dragon had died here and these stones were formed by its blood trickling through the rock. In some ways it was a more compelling solution than ‘the sustained action of water on a particular rock’.
    Crossing a bridge he glimpsed, through the leaves of a tree, girls splashing in a pond – sunlit, laughing, dancing