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fountains because it was a hot day. It was hard to say which was more likely. Kenelm fancied there was an air of luxury, a whiff of licence about the place. He asked, as casually as possible, who the dark maid was. ‘Venetia Stanley,’ said Bushell brusquely. ‘My ward.’
    Later that day he finished his journey and was home again, sunburned and thirsty. He stabled Peggy, kissed his mother, and played catapult and Jack-a-rabbit with his younger brother, running together into the dead rooms of the house that had been shut up since his father’s execution. He puzzled constantly on the name of Stanley, turning it over in his mind, until, at dinner that evening, he asked his mother if she knew it. Mary Mulsho, the widow Digby, stopped with her soup spoon half-way to her face. ‘Why, Venetia? She was your playmate, your little friend. When her family were staying at the Abbey, your nurses put you together so you would sit there gabbling at one another, all nonsense, of course, and she being older than you would crawl away, but you could only lie there gurgling . . .’
    Kenelm went bright red, and told his mother please to stop, but he also felt a deep sense of calm, as if his planets had simply turned in harmonious alignment. ‘She is fallen into a rare dishonour,’ said Mary Mulsho excitedly, forgetting, for a moment, her own despised state as the widow of a Gunpowder plotter.
    ‘Venetia’s father having lost his faculties, Thomas Bushell has bought her wardship, and keeps her as one of his marvels at Enstone House, like a fountain or a fancy rock. And they say,’ she added with heavy significance, ‘that Thomas Bushell’s friend Edmund Wyld has her portrait.’ She shook her head censoriously, and if that dear brother of Kenelm’s, John Digby, had not at that moment held up triumphantly one of his milk teeth, which had just fallen out, and wanted praising as he beamed gappily at them, then Mary Mulsho would have remembered to forbid Kenelm from associating with his former playmate.
    Instead, Kenelm rose expressionless, and went calmly upstairs, until reaching his bedchamber he threw himself down on the floorboards and started performing exercises, fencing thrusts and lunges, lifting himself up by his forearms to the roof-beam, again and again. He used as weights the precious stack of books in his bedroom, the heavy volume of Ephemerides and the Hebrew Bible. He needed to build up his strength before he saw Venetia again. He worked on his learning, too, to make himself worthier of her love, and was very often lifting one book at the same time as reading another. It felt the right thing to do as he passed the unbearable time while waiting to see her. And so it was that Mary Mulsho spent the summer believing her son was riding out every day to make an antiquary’s record of the standing-stones and monuments in the district, as indeed he was. Apart from every hot day, when he went directly to Enstone House, to talk mechanics and hydraulics with Sir Thomas Bushell, and gazed discreetly, across the ponds, towards Venus in her shell.

 
     
     
‘It is believed Sir Kenelm brought edible snails from the South of France for Venetia, as these were thought to have curative properties . . . It is true that this species of snail is still occasionally found in the district.’
Stoke Goldington history society, 2013
    THE HOUSEHOLD WAS in chaos, packing for London. Upstairs, Venetia was standing at her closet.
    ‘Red shoes, red waistcoat, Bible, sal aromatica . . .’ she said, passing the items to Chater, who stood behind her in black priestly vestments, his big sad eyes bulging, the better to look over her shoulder into her closet. He loved seeing all her apparatus of womanhood, the pads which shaped, the strings which bound. It was marvellous to think how this stuff came together to create a lady.
    ‘Rosary, sweet bags, pearls to be restrung. Will you have command of bringing with us my writing things,