Conceit
Page 21
Now she was lying belly-up on the bed, admiring the play of sunlight on the coffered ceiling and twisting her hair between her fingers, for it had grown down around her shoulders.
She had taken a liking to this chamber because it got the morning sun, and claimed it as her own. If they must occupy separate bedchambers, as William’s parents had done, and his grandparents before them, then at least her room had a servants’ door connecting it to William’s.
Even at ten o’clock she felt no urge to rise. Half-dressed, she fell back in the lazy stretch of light spilling through the window. If she stayed in bed long enough, William might come to collect her, for she had heard him arriving late the night before.
She pressed her thumb into her navel, detecting a tremor well beneath the flesh. No lover had yet protested his undying love to her in verse, no man had called her bed the world’s umbilicus, its very centre. She inspected her thumb—were there really twenty minuscule lines, one for each year? She longed for her womb to swell so that her navel would shrink and disappear entirely.
When they were first married, William’s fingers traversed her body, bringing the nerves to the skin, the skin to his lips, but of late when he arrived at Clewer he was tired and incurious, his curiosity spent on pinking, vizards, Flanders lace, and collars.
Now voices became louder in the corridor, the door opened, bolts of cloth were stacked on top of one another, steps receded. Pegge stayed motionless while William’s heels clicked across the floorboards towards her. She could feel his eyes upon her naked arms and throat.
“What are you pretending, Pegge? Are you melancholy? Your cheeks are hardly sallow. You must tell me at once if you are melancholy.”
“I am not melancholy, William. I am warming myself in the sun.”
“You must go downstairs and make something of our servants, or go out-of-doors, you have a horse to ride.”
“And suck on country pleasures childishly?”
Now he was hurt, for he had recognized her father’s words. “You cannot live inside a poem, Pegge. Am I too dull a husband? You knew I was no poet when you married me. If you must sleep in this old bed, you will need new bed-hangings, for these are mildewed.” He pulled out some lengths of cloth. “Which do you like best? This has just come from the Indies.” He smoothed out the nap, then rubbed it with his fingers. “It would be deeper if over-dyed with indigo.”
Rolling onto her belly, she tugged out a muslin so thin she could scarcely feel the weight. She draped it over her body for the sun to catch and toy with.
“That will not do for bed curtains. You will want something heavier, like velvet.” He unwound some yardage from a bolt, then from another. “What colour will you have? An umber or brown ochre? There are some fine reds and Turkey browns to be got from madder. This shade is almost as rich as your hair. That is only from Essex,” he said as she picked up a yellow swatch. “At least choose a saffron from Arabia.”
“Will you dye this muslin for me, William? I want it butter-yellow like the sun. Come and lie under it and see how light it feels.”
“It is full day. The servants may come in, even the cat is here. The steward will soon be back to carry out the bolts.”
“There will be time enough for caution when we are old. Some lovers spend whole days inside their bedchambers. Push my cabinet against the door.” She pulled at his laces teasingly. “This jacket is so dreary. Madder, is it, saddened with black? What colours shall we have in the nursery? All dark satins and brocades?”
He did not answer, but ran his fingers along her pale stocking as if working out how the silken thread was spun. She took shallow breaths until he drew his hand away.
“You were in the City a fortnight this time, William. How am I to conceive at such a rate? My belly cannot grow fat on such a diet.”
One side of his face had gone completely red, right down the sinews of his throat. “I fear I am not well.”
“Come, you are well enough for this.” She took his hand and drew it higher up her leg.
He had never undressed her or begged to be undressed himself, never slipped his hands under the back of her skirt, nor sent the maid out when she assisted Pegge at night. He had never even come to her bed with his hair mussed and his breeches already off.
William removed his hand and turned his face away. “I do not know what is ailing me. I am blue and swollen with pain.”
“With love, William. A man should swell with impatience for his wife.”
William sat down to undo his breeches. He had invented a new catch for the waist, since a gentleman, he said, was only as secure as his front-fastener. To release it, he should only have to flick his thumb. But this one was not working as designed, for William’s thumb was bleeding.
“Let me help,” Pegge said, reaching over to squeeze the clasp. “I do not think a man’s breeches need to be quite so hard to open in his wife’s bedchamber.”
William stepped out of his breeches and shoes, then stripped off his hose, but when he got himself upon the bed, he simply lay on his back and looked up at the ceiling.
“William, this will not do. You have been in London more often than at Clewer. I know my horse better than I do my husband. And my mare, at least, has foaled.”
Mr Harvey had already given Con three sons. Pegge’s sister had brought the little boys to Clewer and displayed them on an upholstered bench. It was the baby, with his long lashes and tiny clever fingers, who had won Pegge’s heart. When she blew on his stomach, he trilled with laughter, making her ache with longing for a child.
She ran her toe along William’s leg, from heel to thigh, but still he did not curve his arm to pull her closer. Soon he was out of bed, doubled over to inspect his pain.
“Must you worry so, William? Is it worry for the King? Are his shirts the wrong colour? Are his tapestries still on the loom, his tents behindhand in the making?”
His face was lopsided in misery at this teasing. She sat beside him and tidied his hair with her fingers, but nothing came of it and soon they were obliged to rise and dress and take their dinner.
She saw that William could not enjoy his food. It stuck in a throat made drier by Pegge’s attempt to show a sympathy she did not feel. How could their love survive such dieting? All of her father’s poetry had now flown from her head, and nothing but brown meats adorned her plate. William’s complaints were not endearing, everything too tart to be endured, too rough to swallow. She filled his glass with sweet wine, but when he took a gulp to wash down the dry beef, he spat it out, proclaiming it too sour to drink, the worst he had ever tasted.
William had orchid-fever, a sickness that made a child of a man and might, if it ran its course, render him unable to sire children. The swellings at his throat and between his legs heralded the illness. Soon he lay in a dark room with a compress on his groin that did nothing, Pegge knew, but press upon his pain and weigh upon his mind.
After several weeks, the swellings subsided and William paid a visit to her chamber, fraught with hesitations and meanderings. Pegge’s coaxings could not always bring him hard again, but soon that too was overcome, and William was in better appetite in bed. Pegge still had not conceived, although Bridget, who had married the same year, had just given birth to a second child by Thomas Gardiner. Even little Betty was betrothed and would no doubt soon bear triplets.
The doctor came, deliberating while taking healthy doses of Canary wine. In his opinion, the mumps could not make an Englishman sterile. He concluded that Pegge’s womb was rebellious and that William took his manhood far too seriously.
“Do not enter that race frowningly,” was his advice, as he held out his cup for refilling.
Finally Pegge conceived, with the help of powdered oats, sage juice, and sitting in a tub of scarlet dye and ashes, the sight of which brought William first to tears and then to healing laughter. Enamoured of his own lustfulness, he plunged his arms into the dye-bath and carried Pegge, lubricious with colour, all the way to her bed. Whether
it was Pegge who was cured, or William made less serious, they did not bother to determine.
Once she was with child, William became confidently amorous, stroking her swollen belly and laying his ear against it at the slightest invitation. The midwife came to listen as well, pronouncing it a large and active infant. Designing voluminous garments for Pegge, William neglected the King’s Wardrobe for weeks at a time and gave up his work on a fastener to keep men’s breeches securely latched, calling it a useless trinket.
When Pegge went into labour, the midwife chased William out, told him to go outside and shoot at something instead of troubling his wife, who had enough to do. After the labour was over, and the large and active child was finally out, Pegge held and nursed her first-born, then fell asleep, exhausted.
She was awakened by a conversation outside the door—the midwife’s reassuring words, then William asserting he would go in to see his wife alone. His hose and shoes were muddy and his hair dishevelled, showing the first threads of grey. He would not look Pegge in the eye, but held up a peculiar stalk of flowers.
“A satyr flower,” Pegge said contentedly.
He brought it closer for her to examine. Each of the seven flowers on the spike had three violet petals and, hanging at the groin, a fourth misshapen one. She was surprised to see an insect still nestled in a bloom. It became motionless, thinking to avoid detection as she drew the blossom closer. She cupped her hand to trap the bee, discovering to her delight that she had caught a brown-and-yellow petal in its masquerade.
“They are bee-orchids,” William said in a rush, “from the fens beyond the marsh, about three miles upriver. Once when I was a child I found them at this very time of year. And today—” He looked at the empty place beside her on the bed, too embarrassed to seek further.
She rescued the quivering orchids from his fist. “Your daughter is in her cradle. Go quietly and pull back the cover and you shall see a giant infant with a ruddy face. Since I have done all the work, I have named her Margaret, after me.”
The thud of Pegge’s morocco heels was muffled by the rush mats on the floor. The peacock shoes had deepened to a saturated blue, the result not of variegated dyeing but an accidental soaking in the river years before, and her old morning-gown was badly stained from eating red fruit in her bed. These were Pegge’s clothes for when she was alone, gliding like a servant through the dark.
An hour earlier, the throbbing had begun under her left ear. Then the cramps started, announcing her fleurs, and she knew she would get no sleep until the blood began. Her holy week, she called it. This time she left her candle in her chamber. Last month a servant had found her asleep at dawn with a pool of melted wax beside her, having almost set the flannel-room on fire.
Slipping her feet out of the old shoes, she crept barefoot along the gallery to William’s study. Climbing to the top rung of the ladder, she looked for the dust streaks that told her where he had hidden the new book. At dusk the previous day, the folio had arrived wrapped in the fleur-de-lis paper used by John Marriot’s shop in Fetter lane. Finding it now, she pushed the other books together to hide the gap and climbed down to read it at William’s table.
Lighting the candle, she opened the book and discovered that her father’s face was misshapen on the frontispiece, his left eye where his right should have been. His features had been transposed by an engraver too lazy to check his work against the original. It had taken her brother Jo nine years to gather eighty sermons into one disordered, bloated volume. But there was also something else inside the folio—something that had caused William to hide the book from Pegge when it arrived—a Life and Death of Dr Donne.
Izaak Walton’s pious fiction began with her father’s birth and schooling. The age, according to Walton, had brought forth another Picus Mirandola. After a good deal of nonsense the printer should have struck out, Walton plodded to the apex, his account of her father’s death, written as if he were right there at the bedside. In the last hour of his last day, his body melted away and vapoured into spirit, his soul having, I verily believe, some revelation of the beatifical vision.
Walton seemed to have forgotten that he was elsewhere, still in his own bed or walking north for his morning’s fishing. As his soul ascended, and his last breath departed from him, Walton wrote, he closed his own eyes and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him. As if a dead man could reach up and close his own eyelids! Much had happened between the thrill pulsing at her father’s neck and his soul making good its escape that even Pegge could not recall in detail.
Walton had not been just a milksop and gossip-monger, a hanger-on at great men’s deathbeds. He was much more than that: a damager of reputations, a fulsome biographer who could not tell art from truth, a parasite—her mind was sparking—a writer of gross fabrications, who took the rind of great men’s lives and threw away the meat.
Pegge had read the folio in a sweat and now the moon was riding low. She wanted to smash the book against the table, the floor, the window, whatever was hard and close, but she could not risk waking the household and being accused of harbouring a dangerous melancholy.
A woman could write a fiction as well as a man. Why did men always begin their stories at the start? Closing the folio, she spun it round.
She flipped up the lid of William’s ink-pot. Her fingers greeted the quill after a long absence, relearning grip and stance. She tested ascenders and descenders, loops and angulations, her ribs draped over the table, her left ear scraping, eye pursuing nib. The ink was of good quality, thicker than water, as viscous as blood, evoking the east, intoxicant. She had learnt the quality of ink from a master, John Donne, but it was ten years since she had toiled under his strict eye. This work would be more pleasurable. She wrote the first words boldly in the white between the lines. Lips, legs, and arms: small words that fitted into the spaces left by men.
More words quickened within her and the nib skittered across the page, explosive, blurting out syllables, quarter-words, half-words, then galloping phrases that outpaced sense. By daybreak, the pages were wet and black with William’s ink.
Pegge let the leaves flutter closed and the words smear. Tomorrow, she would get up before dawn to mix ink of her own. She was stretching her arms, interlocking her fingers above her head, when someone moved in the door frame. For an instant, she could not see who it was. Then she recognized William with their daughter close behind him, mouth caressing her thumb, eyes darting to her mother’s naked feet. A small arm cradled Pegge’s peacock shoes.
A woman might read a book, surely, if she could not sleep? And where better to find an improving book than in her husband’s study? William could not tell which folio it was, nor see her naked feet from where he stood. Of all things, this would most annoy him, even more than the frayed morning-gown he tolerated up to the hour of noon. She felt the blood begin to gather and drip along the inside of her thigh, then the familiar release as the first spots hit her feet. She willed him not to come near enough to see the spots, or the book she had defaced with ink.
An accusation began to distort his lips. Perhaps he would threaten to send her to stay with Constance, as he had threatened once when she was wilful but had not the heart to do. He began angrily, a husband’s privilege, waving his hands in the air, but gentled his tone when he remembered the child, who was now chewing on a peacock shoe. He told Pegge to go into the breakfast room and eat a good breakfast—she had never in her life been told to eat a bad one—and then to retire and dress and find some useful task with which to occupy herself. And if she could not find a useful task, to pretend to do so for her children’s sake.
As soon as William turned his back to leave, Pegge tucked the morning-gown between her legs to soak up the blood. The little girl took the wet shoe from her mouth and held it out. This daughter seldom smiled, but sometimes she made a little out-of-tune hum that told Pegge a good deal more than words.
“Margaret
, would you like to wear my shoes today?”
The child nodded solemnly.
“We will make a game of it, but first take this book to my chamber and push it underneath my old cabinet. Then come to me in the breakfast room as swiftly as you can. And do not let a single person spy you on the way.”
Pegge was in the kitchen with the children, beating eggs in a metal bowl, for today was the day of the picnic that Margaret, who was now ten, had planned. It was to go ahead in spite of the darkening sky. William had said so himself, forced into it after discovering that Pegge had stolen eggs from the moorhens’ nests. He had made such a fuss, with such a red face, accusing her of spoiling his autumn shoot—How many birds will hatch out now? he’d cried in rage-that he had to agree to the picnic or else the children would have pummelled him with their fists.
Now he was at the fireplace, running his finger over the mantelpiece where the royal initials had been sanded off. “It was a day like today, a wretchedly cold day, four months ago,” he related. “They say that wombs miscarried and men swooned. I myself had palpitations of the heart. When the axe was poised, King Charles asked—I thought my ears misheard-he asked, Is my hair well?” William looked up at the ceiling as if it were a metaphysical question.
Margaret pressed a damp finger in the scraped sugar and sucked it. “Did he wish it better combed?”
“Why no,” William said in surprise, “he wanted it safely inside his cap, so when the head was held up as is custom—”
“What custom?” asked Will, collecting the egg-shells Pegge had tossed on the floor.
“Streaming with blood,” Margaret hissed at her brother.
Did William think this a suitable tale for children? Pegge poured the scalded milk on the eggs, stirring all the while, added a fistful of sugar, then threw the basin on the grate, attacking it with the wooden spoon. As Emma walked in, dangling her cap by its ties, Margaret’s finger dove back into the sugar.