Conceit

by Mary Novik

  He wondered how old Pegge was. After the Dean died, she married Mr Bowles of Clewer. Near Windsor, with good fishing up to Henley, but not good enough for him to visit. When his Compleat Angler came out, she wrote to praise it, diverting, at the midpoint of her letter, into a wild attack on his biography of her father. She wrote several more letters, but he was afraid of taking up with her again. An odd child, she had likely grown into an even odder woman.

  Now that he recognized the huge shape on the cart in front of them, he was sure of it. The carters blocked the wheels halfway down Paul’s hill to shift the effigy back to the middle. Walton doubted it would see the inside of St Paul’s again, for Pegge had detested it when it was no more than an artist’s sketch. In the fiery light ahead, Sir William Bowles was standing in an immense barge, his hand hovering at his sword, and Walton dropped his side of the bundle, making Pegge struggle the last few yards by herself.

  The barge took a night and a day to travel upriver because of the currents, arriving at the Bowles estate at nightfall. The men lay down their long oars in exhaustion. The servants had seen them round the bend, and were on the bank to guide the barge to shore. Even before they moored, the cat leapt out and disappeared into the long grass. Sir William ordered his servants to fetch his draught horse and block and tackle to lift the effigy out of the barge.

  As Walton scrambled up the bank, soaking his shoes and hose, a pony-cart lurched to a stop, almost knocking him back into the Thames. The driver introduced himself as Duodecimus Bowles. No more than eleven or twelve, Walton guessed, looking about for a safer way to travel.

  “Sit here, Mother,” the boy said, wrapping his arms around Pegge.

  Unless Walton wanted to stand outside all night, he would have to squeeze into the seat beside Pegge and her son. When he stepped up, a caterpillar fell out of a tree onto his shoulder. The boy picked it off and inspected the stripes, then counted the number of legs on the small creature.

  “A lovers’ knot,” said Walton. “Put that in a glass with a bit of privet and it will get you a good fish. Live bait is best, young man.”

  Something flew above them in the darkening sky. “Bats,” the boy said, smiling.

  “First the swallows come out and then the bats,” Walton corrected. He was reminded, not unpleasantly, of Pegge at the same age.

  Walton could smell the honeysuckle as soon as he entered the great house. All at once, he was back at Constance’s feet in the Deanery, fetching the pale green silk from her embroidery basket that she needed to sew the minnow’s belly. When she reached to take the spool from him, he almost fainted from the scent clinging to her body.

  Now he wandered through the rooms looking for Constance until one of the maids, a small girl with a Welsh accent, took pity and told him that Mrs Harvey had indeed been visiting. She had been called home as a result of the fire, but would return to Clewer in a day or two.

  At breakfast, he noticed an ugly fly perched on the slice of cold mutton in front of him. He tried to flick it away without being observed, but in his clumsiness knocked the dish to the floor and broke it. The Welsh maid brought him another slice of meat with an even greater fly perched on top. She stood by his side, waiting for him to lift his knife. He was becoming irritated at this game when a thought struck him. He pinched the wing and held the specimen up to his eye.

  “The gadfly or whame,” he announced, exhibiting it between thumb and finger, “commonly known as the horsefly, the females of which suck blood. It is very like.” He looked towards Pegge, who was engrossed in eating, and then to the eager maid.

  “Madam made it herself. She learnt how from the old groundsman. It takes almost a day to make each one.”

  He thought he saw a smile cross Pegge’s face, though it might have been a wave of indigestion.

  Each morning a new fly appeared on Walton’s breakfast, and the maid hovered until he identified it. The miniatures became more exquisite as each day passed, but still Constance did not return from Barking. They began to infest his shoes and stockings and alight upon his nightshirt and pillow. Each morning, outdoor clothes, decorated with a dragon-fly or pond-skater or even a daddy-long-legs, were laid ready in case he might have use of them, but each day he stayed indoors waiting for Mrs Constance Harvey.

  At last, holding a lame-fly to the light to tease out the source of its iridescence, it occurred to him that there might be a use for these flies. He asked Pegge if a servant could take him to the river to see whether there were any fish to be caught. She was so pleased that she took him herself wearing a dreary brown stuff dress. From her shoulder hung a wooden box fitted with a leather strap. On the bank, it opened to reveal fifty compartments, each with a tiny, vibrant creature. He lifted one out: a tuft of badger’s hair, the softest yellow hog down, and a white dove-feather, twisted together with white silk. It was then he recalled that he had once made a promise to build her a rod, but never kept it.

  After that, they took the pony-cart to the river each morning to read the water and the fish. Formerly, he had put live bait into the middle or bottom of the stream, but now he devised a way to buoy a horsehair line with quills so that it would float one of her flies on the surface. He dropped the fly on a crisp stretch of water, then made it dart up and land a few inches away. Pulling in the line by dibs and daps, he jumped the fly across the river, deceiving the fish into biting. Each day, he wet his line in a new and more seductive patch of water until even the tender-mouthed graylings rose for Pegge’s flies.

  On a day with a good south wind, they entered into battle with a majestic pike. Walton pulled in eighteen feet of rod hand over hand until he gripped bare line, while Pegge waded in and grappled the prize into her skirt. She came out of the water halved at the waist, brown above and black below like a Derbyshire coach-fly. When they arrived back at the estate, Pegge went straight into the kitchen to stuff the fish herself, dripping Thames water across the tiles.

  She appeared for supper in a dry gown ornamented with curious tufts of fur and speckled feathers and carrying the dressed pike on a bed of garlic. He ate the garlic with reluctance, mindful that it was said to elicit black vapours from the brain and breed unwholesome dreams. As he left the hall, the maid drew him aside and told him in her soft Welsh accents that Mrs Harvey had arrived but gone straight to her room. He went to his chamber with garlicky pike clinging to his soft mouth tissues and the promise of Constance luring him to an early breakfast. For the first time in thirty years, they were widow and widower at the same time. Perhaps, he mused, falling into a garlicky sleep, she now dreamt of a simple life with a country angler.

  He certainly did not expect her to creep into his bedchamber, but that was what she was now doing, gliding through the door and standing at the foot of his bed, her flesh gleaming against the blinding moon, her hair falling over her shoulder like a raven’s wing. Then he must have swooned, for he woke to the touch of fingers in his hair and a torturing nocturnal scent. A moral decency buttoned up his hands, but all the fibres of his being sang. This was the Constance he remembered from the Deanery, the ripe Constance of twenty-one, a scent-drunk blossom heavy with its own destruction, the Constance who, night after night, year after year, had invaded his bed, crowding out his wives-first Rachel, with her roughened fingers, and then the dear devoted Kenna who had never risen to anything that in the least resembled passion.

  “Izzy,” his night-visitor whispered, twisting it to sound like Issy. Perhaps it was Pissy-Issy, but he could forgive her even that tonight.

  He was ashamed how readily his body responded, so free now of its kinks and aches, how quickly his blood rose and expanded to fill the space between them. A thumb traced a line from his breast-bone down to his belly, a palm slipped with practised skill along his inner thigh. These were no rough linen-draper’s hands, though lurking beneath the honeysuckle was a darker, furtive scent. She began to slide her body on top of his, pinning his hands against the sheet. It could not be!—he could not believe the pressure of her lim
bs.

  “Do not move so, Constance,” he managed to choke out, “or I cannot be held responsible for what will come of it.”

  It was indeed an uncontrollable-yes, a very uncontrollable—urge in a man. In spite of what the church fathers said, it was not at all like wiggling the ears, for such uprisings could not be curbed by the power of the will.

  “My dear, you must stop, you cannot mean to be doing as you do. Your chamber must be next door, not very far—” It was easy to lose one’s way in a dark house, for all beds looked alike in the moonlight, and with such a disturbing scent as this! “My dear—oh, my dear Constance—you must not—you cannot blame me for—I cannot prevent—”

  He was late going down to breakfast the next morning. He had kept his hostess waiting and was ashamed that the maids were even now making up his bed, discovering what he knew was there to be discovered, like wax that had spilt from Psyche’s candle. His dream had been extraordinary—not just a senseless paraphrase of his waking thoughts, or of the business of the day past, or the result of over—engaged affections when he betook himself to rest, such as he had always thought dreams to be. No, he had been visited by riddling tongues of fire, the illumination of the soul in sleep, for he refused to believe that he had simply undergone an involuntary, and ungentlemanly, emission of nocturnal fluids.

  On the breakfast table stood a great slab of country cheese topped by a spectacularly engorged and vulgar bluebottle. Half—eaten crusts and sticky honey trails littered the table, and Pegge was not inclined to conversation. The Welsh maid confided in her soft voice that Mrs Harvey had left in haste at dawn, without any explanation. She had not even had the time (or charity! decency! Walton screamed inwardly) to write a note excusing her departure.

  He did not like the dark circling Pegge’s eyes, or the cloying scent of honeysuckle on her breath, as if she had devoured a hundredweight of those delicate, nocturnal flowers. Her drab gown had taken on a gaudy, blood—red glow. She was still eating, and appeared to have been doing so for hours, for honey was spilt all down her bodice. Her lips tinged with tell-tale yellow, she was enlarging before his eyes, like an elephantine hawkmoth he had once seen glutting itself on a ridiculously small bloom. All at once, she lunged across the table and gripped his wrist with her sticky fingers. If not for the glimmer in her eyes, he might have thought her gone completely mad.

  “You are looking particularly unkempt this morning, Izzy,” she said. “We really must do something about the tangles in your hair.”

  Pegge washed Walton’s hair clean of soot, then stained it with saffron to bring back the colour. Now he was sitting on a stool in her bedchamber listening to her skirts rustling from the cat that hid underneath, rubbing at her legs. Never far from her, it had become sleeker and more cunning in the fortnight since the fire. He leaned back against Pegge as she untangled the strands with her fingers.

  “Like gold to airy thinness beat,” she said.

  She had not lost that disturbing knack of plucking her father’s lines from memory. As she dipped her tortoise comb into the bowl, he thought of the tortoise in its natural element of water. The sun was cascading through the window, turning the liquid a shimmering turquoise. Every few minutes, Pegge would set down the comb, dip her fingers in oil, and rub at a lump of tar until the heat of her hands dissolved it. Sometimes she tugged at his scalp so hard that tears came to his eyes. The worst knots had to be cut out with scissors.

  “It is better than shaving your head,” she said. “I cannot forgive William for sacrificing his beautiful long hair just because the King cut his.”

  Now Pegge began to brush Walton’s hair. She had a good casting hand, steady and quiet. His head followed the brush into her hand, moving towards her warmth with each stroke, a maternal rhythm perfected on her children. Every so often, she ran the comb through the brush, then pushed the strands into an enamelled hair-tidy. This must be where she got the hair for her flies. Dyed the colour of grass and marigolds and autumn leaves, the small bundles were displayed on her cabinet next to her ear-drops and crystal rings.

  Pegge no longer had any children to groom, for her daughters were young women of fashion with their own maids to comb them. Walton had seen their portraits in the hall, observing to Pegge that women, with their patches and paint, were like trout, most fresh when first taken from the river with all their maiden spots and colours. Pegge’s own hair still had the deep burnishing of its youth, and the same curious dimples spotted her cheeks, like sun dappling her skin through mulberry leaves.

  He reached towards a shank of matted hair on the cabinet, but she tugged at his temple with the brush to bring him back to her. Oddly familiar, a straw-colour gone to grey, it might have been Ann Mores hair, for the cabinet was unmistakably John Donne’s. Some curls were being pressed in a duodecimo that was badly discoloured from blotting up dye. His heart quickened when he saw it was the second edition of his Compleat Angler. Had she liked it, thought it worthy? Suddenly, her opinion mattered more than anybody’s.

  “I added pictures of the ruff-fish and roach, so they are not so subject to confusion,” he prompted, “and this edition is printed smaller, as you suggested.”

  “It is lovely, much lovelier than your biography of Father.”

  Giving with one hand and taking away with the other, as she had always done, unlike her sister, by far the sweeter of the two. Constance would never have forgiven him if he wrote ill of her father. “Constance liked the Life of Donne,” he said, though in truth she had only written an indifferent line on the back of his own letter.

  “You painted him with a white brush, you know you did,” Pegge scolded. “You made a plaster saint of him. You’re an old fool, Izzy. My father used you just as surely as Con used you with her kisses in Paul’s walk. He might as well have kissed you on the mouth himself.”

  How did Pegge know such things? At any rate, Paul’s was now destroyed and so was his own home in Paternoster row. The image of the flaming house swam up before him, his eyes watering as the smoke from the fire stung them anew. He saw the windows of his study burst outwards, showering the street with glass, and the flames devouring all his papers for a new edition of the Life. He had been collecting John Donne’s words for years—begging letters to patrons, flattering epistles to great ladies, anything Walton could get out of the hands of others and into his own study. He was not after the fish itself, but the vibration of the fish in the water, a quiet pooling shape which rippled outward year by year, gradually embracing conversations, letters, hearsay, scraps of half-heard tales and verse.

  Pegge’s breath was teasing the thinning hair on his crown. Was she still talking? Perhaps he had been deafened by the crashing timbers of his house. Who would want a deaf old fish-tickler? He did not know where he would live, since it was unlikely he could persuade Sir William to let him stay on at Clewer. Though Sir William had behaved with impeccable courtesy, he had avoided Walton at every opportunity.

  After his wife Kenna died, Walton had wandered about the countryside. One gloomy afternoon, he filled his pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse, but while still in the shallows, not yet into deep-running waters, he caught sight of a large pike—a solitary, lachrymose, and bold fish—beating upriver like a prize bully, of a weight, he reckoned, to be exceptionally good eating. He waded swiftly to the bank, unloaded his murderous ballast, and baited his line with the first caterpillar he could find.

  He could have used Pegge to run upstream that day, for he had not been fast enough to overtake the pike. Duodecimus, her youngest, was the right age to learn how to fish. If Walton stayed on at Clewer, he could make the boy a short fir-wood rod, grinding the colours into linseed oil and laying them on smoothly with a bristle brush. He could teach the boy to tickle carp in the pool Pegge wanted dug next to the spring. In him, Walton could see the faint imprint of the great Dean of St Paul’s. Certainly, the boy had the same taste for tobacco, for Walton had seen him smoking inside the piggery where the smell could not
be detected.

  Pegge was still brushing with that deliberate, easy motion. “Your father’s sermons will always be revered,” Walton said.

  “For their cleverness, their wit, but do not look there for the man, Izzy. Such mysteries are only found in poems.”

  One hundred, two hundred, three hundred strokes—when would her hand tire of the intoxicating rhythm? He knew Pegge wanted him to show Ann in a better light. But what good was it to recover the wife’s reputation at the expense of the husband’s—Ann More, who was nothing compared to John Donne? Walton was set hard against Ann, more adamant against such passion now that his night-visitor had so rudely bolted, leaving at such an impolite hour to go back to her house at Barking.

  “Love carries men as hotly into error,” he said, “as whirlwinds carry feathers.”

  “But that is love’s power, don’t you see?” She twisted his hair around the brush and tugged. “I liked you better when you were less pious, Izzy. You must stop printing that biography. I cannot bear you turning my father into such a bloodless creature. You should enlarge the Angler instead. That is the book that Izaak Walton will be loved for.”

  Perhaps she was right. As the brush untwisted, he sank into the chair, his hand toying with the minnow in his pocket, his mind drifting downstream. He had no need of notes for his book on angling. It came to him voluntarily, begging to be told, fountaining up as he walked along a river path or took refreshment in alehouses with other anglers, his ear-lobes pricking when he heard a tale worth telling.

  When she was finished, he would ask Pegge to take him to the river. The day was cold but sunny, with a slight breeze that might fool a grayling into thinking that a thorn-tree fly was real. When he had rooted himself with the wind at his back, he would cast his line, the breeze carrying it out before him, and dap and dibble the bait back across the water. Pegge would sit on her cloak on the bank and open her dubbing box with its silks, wax, hooks, feathers, and little packets of dyed hair, and tie flies like those they spotted in the air about them.