Conceit

by Mary Novik

  Pegge would sneak in at night to hide gifts in the children’s rooms: ebony combs, snakeskins, peacock feathers, nets for catching moths, bleached jawbones, polished stones, a chambered nautilus. Their limbs encountered rose petals between sheets at night and rosemary sprigs in morning shoes. When it rained, Pegge would take over the kitchen from Cook, who reined in his temper only so long before chasing his mistress upstairs. After Cook was appeased, Pegge pulled up the sweet plunder in her sewing basket, never used for its real purpose, and shared it with the younger children. When it was sunny and the children wandered outside to the east, west, north, and south, Pegge blew her father’s dented trumpet to call them home, upsetting William’s equilibrium.

  They disagreed about the care, the upbringing, even the number, of their children. William counted only seven, but she counted eleven: seven live and four dead. One by one, Pegge’s children outgrew her pleasures and became William’s heirs. Now it was little Franny who teetered back and forth between her parents.

  Year after year, Pegge looked for evidence of her father in her children, but found none. Would the child now growing in her belly resemble him? That morning, William had picked the twelve flowers from Pegge’s own garden—one for each day her fleurs were late—to tell her she was with child again. The bouquet might have been an apology, or only a subject for a watercolour lesson.

  Another child? Even the thought was wearying. Pegge watched Meg wet the tip of her brush, then trail it through some pea-green powder. Would Meg have a hard time in labour with her first? Meg was filling in the pencilled leaf with deft strokes, her mouth pursed. Perhaps, Pegge thought, her daughter would find some artificial way to give birth.

  Pegge asked her daughters whether they would like something warm to drink, but they did not reply, not even Cornelia who liked to turn the cocoa mill and Franny whose job it was to froth the chocolate with the paddle. Pegge picked up a few tulip petals and put them on her tongue. Turkish caps. The inside of her mouth tingled.

  “Are my lips red?” she asked Franny.

  “No, Mama, but we are not meant to talk when drawing. Aunt Constance does not care for it.”

  Franny seemed to have forgotten that her aunt had disgusted her only last week. When Franny was in the parterre holding up her gloved hands like blossoms to catch a hawkmoth, Con had sailed past, telling her to stop dawdling and come into the house. Pegge heard a hideous crunch as Con stepped on Franny’s snails and saw Franny chase after her aunt, tugging on her skirts in rage.

  “Mother, how can you eat flowers?” Emma scolded. “Why are you being tiresome? We cannot work if you are playing games.”

  “She may not be playing,” said Meg, drawing a perfectly straight line.

  Con opened her mouth like a foxglove, then snapped it shut. A widow again, Con often walked with William after dinner, but whether she was hoping to entangle him after Pegge’s sudden death from floral toxaemia, or was contriving more matches for her nieces, Pegge did not know. Canon Scott had been Con’s doing, and Pegge still hoped to bring Meg to her senses. There was a swish as Meg stepped her bloodied stockings out of her new shoes.

  “Shall I bring you a foot-bath of gentian violet, Meg?”

  “Stop fretting, Mother. You must learn to call me Margaret like everyone else.” Her head rotated on its stiff ivory column away from Pegge.

  “And I wish to be called Frances, not Franny.” The little voice was cool and prim, like her elder sister’s.

  Pegge wanted to whisk Franny into the garden, where she could pretend to be a four-o’clock-flower at dusk. She could stay out all night like an evening primrose—Hawkmoths are best caught in the dark, Pegge longed to whisper—and collect dew from the lady’s nightcap at dawn. What need did Franny have of telling time by clocks? Bees are the best timepieces, Pegge wanted to tell her, for they visit the same flowers at the same time each day. But it was too late. These daughters were no longer Pegge’s. They were grafted so firmly onto Bowles stock, it was as if they had no Donne blood left in them.

  Pegge fingered the tulips strewn across the table. “Peppery,” she told Franny. “The red tastes like pepper. Try it.” She held out some petals on her palm.

  “Your mind is a muddle,” Con said sharply. “A colour is a colour and a taste is a taste. You are always muddling.”

  Con would never say such a thing in front of William. Pegge’s daughters looked down, mixing pastel colours with determined brushes. Only Franny was drawn to red. Rust, scarlet, cerise, blood. Mixed with white, red became a cooler, more palatable shade—more polite, but less to Franny’s liking. Pegge saw Franny lick her brush to taste the undiluted crimson. Was there anything of John Donne in that sly darting tongue?

  Con’s bell signalled the end of painting and the start of needlework. While the girls stitched, Con read aloud from one of the books that she had brought from Barking. It suddenly struck Pegge that Con must have been reading from Walton’s Life of Donne for days, since she was bearing down triumphantly on the ending.

  “To the Dean of St Paul’s burial-place,” Con read, “some mournful friends repaired, and, as Alexander the Great did to the grave of the famous Achilles, so they strewed his with an abundance of curious and costly flowers, not ceasing till the stones that were taken up in that Church to give his body admission into the cold earth-now his bed of rest—were again by the mason’s art so levelled and firmed as they had been formerly.”

  Pegge coiled a thread around her hand until it was a tight noose cutting off the blood.

  “His aspect was cheerful,” Con continued, “and such as gave a silent testimony of a clear knowing soul, and of a conscience at peace with itself His melting eye showed that he had a soft heart, full of noble compassion.”

  Melting eye-how could Con read such a thing without wincing?

  “That body which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost is now become a small quantity of Christian dust. But I shall see it reanimated.”

  Pegge waited until Con had wrung the last drop of pity out of Izaak Walton’s words. Slip-slip, Meg’s feet stepped back into her shoes and the daughters escaped, leaving Con to congratulate herself on her father’s saintliness. A look that Pegge detested spread over her sister’s face, turning it a cracked yellow like old custard.

  “May I see the book?” Pegge asked.

  Con hesitated, then pushed it across the table. “I thought you disliked Mr Walton’s view of father.”

  Pegge opened the cover. The Life of John Donne, Dr in Divinity, and Late Dean of Saint Pauls Church London. The second impression corrected and enlarged. Hardly the trifle Walton called it in the preface, the Life had swollen to twice its former bulk.

  “And I thought you disliked Izaak Walton,” Pegge said. “You once drove him crazy with longing, spoiling him for any other woman.”

  “I suppose you mean yourself.” Con stood up, her breasts straining the florid cotton. “You were hardly a woman, Pegge, you were a stubborn, boastful child. That was years ago, and the man was a simpleton.”

  Con adjusted a loop of hair, then ran her hands over her hips. This habitual preening, this pretense of ironing out creases in her clothing—would she still be doing it in her grave?

  “A simple man is different from a simpleton, although you could never see that. But I have not seen him since father died,” Pegge admitted.

  “Nor I, although he sends me each new book, each windier than the last.” Con read out the title of an octavo. “The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, being a discourse of fish and fishing not unworthy the perusal of most anglers. Why is he writing tales of red cow’s milk and giant pikes bred by pickerel weeds?”

  Pegge flipped past the dedication to Con on the fly-leaf, past conversations with anglers and an engraving of a trout, and stopped at a recipe for dressing a yard-long pike with butter and sweet marjoram, pickled oysters and anchovies, claret and garlic that could only have come from one source.

  “Why, this is delightful, Con. I
n this book, he writes just as he talks.”

  “Since you are so pleased, why don’t you tell him so? It will save me the trouble of responding.” Con wound the silks back on the spools and collected the needles the girls had strewn across the table.

  Walton’s letter was still inside the book. It had been written to Con just after Mr Harvey’s death, from a cottage in Staffordshire where Walton was living with his second wife. His penmanship was just as clumsy as Pegge remembered it. She folded the letter and replaced it carefully. Even after all these years, she sometimes felt her hands reach up to cover Walton’s eyes, or touch his golden hair. Pegge had written to him in London several times, but never got an answer. Perhaps he had simply been in the country, fishing.

  Pegge would write to suggest some tales for a new edition. A duodecimo would fit more easily into an angler’s pocket. This octavo was too big, and one of the pages appeared to be misprinted, until Pegge studied it more closely.

  “Look at this, Con. It is the song we used to sing. He has put the bass part upside down and the treble right side up, so that a man and woman can sing it across an alehouse table.”

  On that day along their secret river, Pegge had barely felt the mulberries raining down upon her head because of Walton’s buckle pressing so hard against her belly. What if she had gone with him to the Frog & Pike and bought a night’s lodging with their brace of carp? They might have interlocked legs beneath a table, drinking barley wine and singing, then climbed the staircase to the bedchamber above.

  “Only his book on Father has any merit,” Con said, “and that is because he got his facts from others.”

  “Lies,” said Pegge, buffing the green calfskin with her palm. “Just lies you believe in, Con. I cannot forgive Walton for making Father into such a martyr.”

  “And you want to destroy his reputation.”

  “The truth has more need of guardians than the Dean of Paul’s.”

  “Not this old battle, Pegge! Father wanted to suppress Jack Donne, yet you persist in digging him up. He drew the veil over Mr Walton’s eyes himself.” Con let out a prevailed-upon wheeze. “Why are you always against? At least Mr Walton had the sense to bury Father’s sins.”

  “Bury Mother, you mean.” Pegge shoved the Life of Donne towards her sister and kept The Compleat Angler. “Walton says Father’s love for her was only a flattering mischief. Yet it gave rise to his finest poems, to magnificently tortured sermons! Do you really believe Ann was the remarkable error of his life?”

  “I seldom heard her speak any sense. You saw what a three-year-old sees, taking off your boots and stockings every time I turned my back. When mother was dying, I was barely fourteen, running the household with only Bess to help.”

  Had Con been only fourteen? To Pegge, she had seemed much older.

  After dinner, William offered his arms to the two sisters for a walk in the gardens, an intimacy that Pegge did not like to share with Con.

  “We shall go back to London in a few weeks,” he announced, drawing the women closer. “Cromwell has built a warship with his statue on horseback at its prow and ninety-six brass guns. This usurper must be stopped. Plans must be made to bring the new King back to England.”

  “I hear that St Paul’s has been turned into a barracks by Cromwell’s troops,” Pegge said, “and that they are baptising colts in my father’s font.”

  “Well, Paul’s is nothing to us now,” William said cheerfully. “Let the Dean’s effigy preside over her ruin.”

  “The baby is in need of country air,” Pegge said. “I will stay here with him until he is grown.”

  “Charles is four,” William said. “He is in need of school.”

  “Charles is but three, and I am with child again. We will be better here.”

  “This will be your eighth child,” Con said. “You will find more to occupy your thoughts in town.”

  “It is my twelfth, like Mother. She died with her twelfth.”

  “Now, Pegge, do not be melancholy,” William said. “I am sure that Constance will come to London to help you through your confinement.”

  Why did Con’s sons never need her help in Barking? Perhaps they wished to be rid of her and encouraged her to accept William’s invitations. “If it is a girl,” Pegge said, “I will call her Ann.”

  Con smacked away a bee investigating a yellow flower embroidered on her sleeve. “Then if it is a boy, you must call him John, after our father. Do you not agree, William?”

  At least William had the sense to say nothing. They were now passing beneath the yew where Bess had spent her final days.

  “If I have a son, I will call him Duodecimus,” Pegge said, staring up into the spreading branches. “It means twelve.”

  William began to sputter, but Pegge shook off his arm and fell behind. Just as she was turning to go into the walled garden, she saw Franny catching up to William with something in her hands.

  “Look what I found in Mother’s room,” Pegge overheard Franny saying, “on top of Grandfather’s old cabinet.”

  From the other side of the wall, Pegge heard William take a few determined steps on the gravel before he stopped. “A pipit’s nest,” he said, “there is nothing wrong with pipits’ nests. See the brown spots on the eggs, Franny?”

  “But look what is beneath them,” Franny insisted.

  “It is our mother’s,” Con ventured, after a minute. “Or perhaps it is our father’s. The strands are so matted it could be anyone’s. It is a puzzle why Pegge keeps such things.”

  “Or one of her dead children’s,” said William, his voice doubtful. “You must put it back at once, Franny. She might be on her way to the house. And the nest too, be quick about it.”

  As Franny ran back down the gravel path, Pegge extricated a rose that had been throttled by lemon balm, then yanked up the wayward balm. She must talk to the gardener about cleaning the beds and pruning the vines. The thyme had gone all woody and brown.

  “This is what comes of letting her keep country ways,” William said to Con. “No doubt she will want to ride her mare even though she is with child. She has twice miscarried since Charles was born.” His voice broke, as if Con had taken his arm, pressing herself against him, encouraging his tears. More steps on the gravel, more comforting and consoling. “She will be safer by my side in London. You will come with us, won’t you, Constance? You are much better than Pegge at managing the servants.”

  “You know she has never been fond of me. She would sooner have me back in Barking.”

  “I am sure she doesn’t think it. She is completely guileless.”

  “She is completely absorbed by guile!” Con exclaimed. “Pegge is always acting a part. As a child, she was given to mimicry. When my father preached, we would sometimes hear an infant mewling in the choir loft, but nobody could ever find it. The poor dog was always blamed.”

  “Perhaps-”

  “There is no perhaps about it, William. She is full of practice. One of Paul’s canons heard Jane Shore laughing night after night outside his window. He lamed his foot by chasing after the laughter in the dark. It finally drove the poor man mad.” A deep urgent breath. “After Father died, Pegge took to mimicking our mother’s voice and giving out the name Ann More to strangers.”

  Con was a goose. Why did she disturb William with such tales? She was worse than lemon balm for straying where she was not wanted.

  On this side of the wall, everything was thrusting up, demanding Pegge’s attention. She uprooted a loose stake and drove it hard into the soil, bruising her hand. She looked into the open throat of a clary, then pinched the bloom and extracted a bee, subjecting it to a keen examination. By its looks, she suspected that it was the kind of bee that stung its victims more than once.

  22. THE RIDDLE

  Izaak Walton was standing under the portico of St Paul’s, watching his house in Paternoster row burn to the ground. The flames were attacking the cathedral from three sides. Only the west, where he now stood, was safe, though
where the sun was nobody could see, for the fire had eclipsed it. It could be night or day for all that anybody knew.

  Six years before, when the Rump Parliament fell, the churches rang a jubilee and rumps of meat turned on spits on open fires. Butchers’ knives flashed, cutting off penny slices, and street boys ran up and down, calling out kiss my rump instead of their customary kiss my arse. Men drank to the King’s health openly for the first time, toasting the end of the bloody rebellion of nearly twenty years. Walton had climbed to the top of Paul’s that night and counted hundreds of bonfires cooking rumps both inside and outside the City walls.

  It was hotter now than on the day of the rumps, and it was the house he had just leased that was being roasted. The fire had burned for two days in a westerly direction along the river, then the wind had shifted, driving the flames up Paul’s hill towards his house. When he ran out to hire a carter, he found the streets already blocked by people hauling goods. Returning to carry his papers to safety in his arms, he was waved back by his neighbours, who stood in Paternoster row with rags held to their noses. As he watched, the fire jumped over his doorstep and sped into the house, making a meal of all his manuscripts.

  Now the roof was collapsing onto the lower storeys. He had stood there in a daze for so long that the wooden ceiling of the portico was smouldering above his head and the refugees taking shelter with him had scattered to find sanctuary elsewhere. He woke to harrowing sounds ringing in the cathedral at his back and saw someone dancing out of Paul’s walk towards him, dragging a heavy bundle along the pavingstones. It looked, until Walton rubbed the smoke out of his eyes, like John Donne dressed up in a skirt. Walton grappled the apparition, netted it, laid it on the riverbank: Pegge Donne, whom he had not seen for more than thirty years.

  A stray cat, smelling the fish on his hose, leapt onto his leg, digging in its claws. Before he knew it, he was cradling the wretched animal and looking for somewhere to put it, so he could grasp the end of the shawl Pegge was pushing at him. Soon they were swinging the bundle between them down to Paul’s wharf, with the burnt cat following close behind.