Free Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre

whirlygirls. Three of them were playing catch, the water dragging their dresses as they leaped about. They were of different ages – sisters, maybe. Two more girls were lying talking together on a rock shaped like a lily-pad. He did not like this attitude of being a peeping Tom, so he walked boldly towards the nymphs.
‘One cannot imagine Kenelm Digby being, at any age, not a man of the world.’
E. W. Bligh, Sir Kenelm Digby and his Venetia , 1932

    Kenelm aged sixteen
    They did not stop to notice him, and he saw that in the middle of the pool, there was an island, and on the island, inside an oversized, open oyster shell, lay a girl.
    She was on her back looking bored, with her heels kicking at the shell’s point, and her arms stretched slothfully behind her head. She wore a nymph’s silk gathered dress, which was – Kenelm swallowed – wet through. She did not appear to have noticed Kenelm; in fact, her eyes were closed, but he felt sure she knew he was there. She was the apotheosis of this pleasure ground, the spirit of the place. She was part of the display, exuding sensual luxury and extravagance from all her parts, in her dark tumbling hair, in her amused smiling mouth, in her curved cheek, in her breasts, rising and falling as she breathed. Lucky air, to penetrate her body. He could bear it no longer. Approach her, his instinct told him, accost her! He reached out to do what only a boy would do when confronted with this apogee of beauty – to splash her with pondwater.
    But before he could do it, a shaft of water bounced onto the path in front of him, as if aimed by a cannon. And the next second, cold and unexplained, another shaft hit him in the face, slapping him back. The indignity of it! The water techniques that delighted him had now been used against him for a sportive soaking. This was a very trivial garden indeed.
    From the house there came a catcall of triumph and a smattering of applause. Kenelm had no sooner regained his composure than another squirt got him in the chest. He fell backwards on his bottom like a toddler, and heard the girl in the shell laughing at him. Her laugh sounded like sunlight on the sea. Would he have a chance to tell her this? They looked at each other in the eye for the first time, and he felt her look echoing into his past and future, through all the caverns of his soul.
    For her part, she saw in that one glance that change was possible. Her life need not be spent idly lying in a shell, a job that any plasterwork nymph could do. She became instantly conscious of the dubious nature of her current situation, and decided she must do something about it.
    In other words, they noticed one another.
    But the people in the house were laughing, and Kenelm saw he was now part of the entertainment, punished as any trespasser would be for enjoying the private pleasure gardens, like a churl in a morality tale who reaches for another man’s wife and finds her shrivel to a hag in his arms. Kenelm would fight the operator of this pleasureground, Sir Thomas Bushell, for this nymph’s honour, any day, with any weapon.
    Smiling so as not to betray his feelings, he raised his hat and bowed, offering a graceful surrender and apology. They could see by his bearing and his dress that he was no lout or roaring boy. Soon the host, Bushell, came down to speak to him. After establishing his family and his nobility, which interested Bushell but little, Kenelm asked him many intelligent questions about the manipulation of the water, the contents of a rainbow, and so forth, and Bushell was only too happy to describe the hydraulics, showing him the various water cocks that were turned behind the scenes, and the tricks that could be thrown up by fountains, and the highest they could shoot, and soon the pair were conversing very like equals.
    All the while Kenelm was thinking of the nymphs, and wondering if they were kept by Bushell as his secret harem or if they were Ladies disporting themselves in the