Conceit

by Mary Novik

  If the water was too calm, he would stand rock-still facing the sun, waiting for the dark shapes to emerge from beneath the overhanging bank, for even the shadow of a pole or horsehair line would betray him to the vigilant fish. On such a day, if the fish refused to be deceived, he might lie with his head on Pegge’s lap until the clouds became dizzy, bestirring himself only to hand her a speckled feather when she asked him for it. She would have the scent of violets about her, the same scent as a young grayling fresh from a chalk river.

  She was brushing his hair over her fist to form damp curls as his own mother had done. He could feel short bursts of breath as she bent close to his nape, talking of Ann and John, how they had first set eyes upon one another, how they had sworn fealty, risked all, promised everything, even to share a single grave-the story veering further and further from known truth. Walton picked up odd words and mated them, breeding a more wholesome tale to tell himself.

  His thoughts swirled and bred in the warm waters downstream from the rock, like pockets of spooling water. There was something about Pegge’s mouth today, her hands, the swell of her breasts pushing against his back, something familiar about the curve of her thigh as it rubbed against him, about the eros gathered in her hands. It was in him to remember, almost to recall, that he had once lain with her as man and wife, but not of his own volition—no, somehow she had persuaded him—when had this been? When she had taken him to the secret tributary of the Darent? But each time Walton circled round, drumming upstream like an otter after a spawning carp, he foundered on the rock of Constance Donne. Constance who had married the Master of the King’s Bears and Bulls, Edward Alleyn. Constance who had married Samuel Harvey. Constance who would probably never, even now that she was finally free of swooning, pestering admirers, marry him, Izaak Walton.

  23. MAISON RUSTIQUE

  Pegge was in the garden, collecting leaves one by one. A meditative act, it reminded her of picking up grains of rice in the Deanery, a penance devised by her father to make her contemplate her errors. Behind her was a trail of stones weighing down piles of leaves.

  A fine red dust from the Sahara had carpeted the garden, mingling with a layer of ash from Cheapside. She had been finding scraps of books all day. Since the fire, words, phrases, paragraphs of her father’s had been coming back to her at the strangest moments. When she was sitting on her close-stool that morning, a sermon had sprung to mind with the word bladder embedded in it. And now this haunting wind, whistling the dust into her eyes and ears as if her father’s mischievous spirit were abroad again.

  From where she stood, she could see William coming up through the physic garden past the blackened statue. The stonemason had reattached the head and was now bent over the effigy, scrubbing it with a coarse brush.

  “Why is everyone acting so oddly?” William asked. “Constance arrived an hour ago and got straight into a quarrel with Izaak Walton. Even our new maid came in for some harsh words. Then Mr Walton took a horse from the stable and rode off towards the river with a very red face. I suppose that is the last we will see of him till evening.”

  Pegge hid a smile. Was it her fault that the Con who had arrived that morning was sharp-tongued and tight-lipped, far from the phantom who no doubt graced Walton’s memories of the Deanery?

  “Now Constance is reorganizing my closet on some new principle brought down from Barking. I wish you would go in and calm her, Pegge. After all, she is your sister.”

  “If you want to please me, you will send her home.”

  “If I do, will you send Mr Walton away?”

  “I think you’ll find he has already left. He will have gone north to fish before winter sets in.”

  “On my horse?” William was trying to brush the red dust from his doublet, but only succeeding in driving it further into the weave.

  Walton would be on his way to the Wye in Monmouthshire to catch young salmon. He would tie crimson ribbons on their tails and slip them back into the river. Perhaps he would write to tell her of his researches, but more likely she would not hear from him for at least a score of years.

  “What is to be done with that grotesque statue?” William asked.

  “I will train bindweed to grow around it.”

  “I refuse to have Clewer garden turned into a sepulchre.”

  She reached down to collect a few more leaves.

  “Let Angus do that.” William gestured towards the dark figure slouching off with a half-full sack of leaves. “Why do I employ a gardener when you put him to so little use?” He began to swat at the folds of his breeches, turning this way and that.

  “The bees will be gone in a minute,” Pegge said. “It is time for them to visit the star of Bethlehem.”

  He jerked his head around. “Why don’t you use your father’s pocket-clock?”

  “I gave it to Duodecimus.”

  “He will lose it, to be sure. Well, I shall get you another-one with a minute-hand like this.” He flipped open the lid of his clock. “This is the most remarkable invention, Pegge.”

  The tomcat landed at her feet with a bushtit clamped in his mouth. She pried open the cat’s jaws and the bird flew out. The last time he had shown off such a trophy, only the beak and a pair of feet had fallen to the earth.

  “Constance brought us a London Gazette with a report of the fire,” William said. “After we got away, the wind turned south and drove the flames into the Thames. Only nine people died, but thirteen thousand houses and eighty-seven churches were destroyed. Thirteen churches were saved, the same as the number of taverns.”

  Thirteen thousand homes! The City had been folded down from quarto to octavo size. Another scrap of book-paper crumbled in Pegge’s hands. “Were all the books in Paul’s crypt destroyed?”

  “They burned for a week and the booksellers are wholly in ruin, with £150,000 of stock in cinders. Pegge, are you attending? When your sister’s coach pulled up, she saw you walk off in the opposite direction with something in your hand. She said it looked like a rat.”

  “It was a dead mole that I found under the leaves. I wanted to show Duo what an odd nose it had, but he was gone.”

  “I cannot have my wife playing with dead animals. What was Constance to think?”

  “I presume she told you herself.” Pegge assessed the espaliered pear tree. While she was in London, it had been crucified with nails. She must find something else for Angus to do. His hands were like mangles and he had no idea how to prune. “I was not in the mood for her bullying. Why did you send Duodecimus back to school without telling me?”

  “Do you think you are in a fit state to mother him? What made you go into the City when the fire was raging? Cheapside was an inferno. Had you no fear of being set alight, or crushed by falling timber? I would never have learned what became of you.”

  “There was something I needed to do on my own.” He had not seen that, just as he had not seen that this was the cat that had been burnt in the fire.

  “You took that daft old Walton with you-was that alone?-and stole your father’s effigy right from the heart of Paul’s. What earthly use is that colossus? You should have let it go up in flames.” His hands fell still. “Pegge, there is a bee on my sleeve.”

  “It thinks you are a flower. Be quiet and it will go away.”

  An anxious minute passed. “I am being quiet, but it is still hovering.”

  “There it goes. You are all right now.”

  She had tied up the stalks of the white lilies and would need to lift the bulbs after the first frost. Alabaster or ivory, William called the colour, opal or pearl. He never used a plain English word like white when a foreign one would do. She felt the tom underneath her skirts, chafing her ankles, and tied it to a stake a little further off.

  “That beast is more to you than I am. Why do you torment me? You are like a cat playing with a garter. You will say nothing, tell me nothing—and yet I see you writing morning after morning in that book of yours—”

  “Let me be, William,”
she said softly. “You should have married one of my sisters instead. Either Bridget or Betty would have taken you gladly.”

  “I wanted you,” he said. He sat stiffly on the bench observing the cat tumbling in the mint, seemingly on the verge of some discovery about the animal.

  “I told you that I was John Donne’s daughter, that I was Ann Mores child, that I could never stop being what I was, but you took me all the same.”

  “You knew I wanted something beyond the ordinary—” He broke off, colouring. “Why do men have such yearnings, if they cannot be satisfied?”

  When had William become such a philosopher? “There are different kinds of wanting,” she said. “Some are like games.” She knew she had chosen the wrong word as soon as she tasted it like a tart plum in her mouth.

  “And you, Margaret, what is your sport? You must stop walking about like a madwoman, picking up feathers and scraps of fur. The stableboy tells me that you stripped most of the hairs from your mare’s tail.”

  “For the fishing line I will make for Duo. Don’t curl your lip, William. What do you expect me to do? You have sent my sons away to school and married off my daughters.” She counted them on her fingers. “Mrs Scott, Mrs Spelman, Mrs Tempest, Mrs Wight, Mrs Bispham. Their husbands will never be free of their ambition. They seem so little of my body, I am ashamed to have bred them. Even my dear little Franny.”

  “Let us not talk sadly of Franny,” William said in exasperation. “She is doing very well with Thomas Bispham.”

  “What does a girl of sixteen know?”

  “If you must have the truth, it was all Franny’s doing. I defy any father to wed his daughters to men they dislike nowadays. It cannot be done.”

  Poor William, his doublet was looking far too tight. “But he is such a tiresome man. I do not know where you and Con find them.”

  “I daresay you thought me tiresome too, though we have learnt to get along well enough. You will be lonely here with Franny and Duo gone. I wish you would be more welcoming to your sister. She was like a mother to you after your own mother died.”

  “Is that what Con told you?” Pegge ripped out some spreading pimpernel. “She has no business here now that our daughters are married. Since Walton is gone, you must send Con away as well.”

  “It is not good for you to be alone at Clewer. Come to London with me to help Franny with her baby,” William said, “or ask her to come here.”

  “Franny doesn’t want me.”

  “I think you’ll find she does.”

  “I have years of neglect to put right in this garden. I must have my fish pool to breed carp in, William.”

  “And your goose-foot paths, your serpentine tunnel—”

  “And my grassy solitude.”

  “Next you will want to build a folly for the Dean’s effigy. To think it almost cost your life-why on earth you tried to save it in that raging fire—and that cat, yes, that very cat,” he pointed to the well-groomed tom, “to pick up a filthy stray! I suppose I shall never get you back to the City again.”

  He would bluster himself out in a minute. “It must be past four o’clock,” she said, “for the bindweed is closed. The stonemason will not finish cleaning the effigy today.”

  “Even if all the flowers in Christendom nod off, I will not let you put yourself in such danger again. Are you attending, Pegge?” He raised his index finger. “You know I can be fierce when I want to.”

  “And I must have a new gardener, William. Angus is impossible. I will begin the fish pool in the new moon when the wind is from the west. Soon we will have carp biting. You must let me have all your pheasants’ tail-feathers for my flies.”

  “Be damned, Pegge, you can have the whole covey if you ask for it. Only let the servants bring the birds to you, don’t go scrambling after them yourself. You have the bad habit of frightening my birds out of laying.”

  She turned towards him and unbuttoned his doublet. “Open your chest. Breathe in the air. A deep breath, William, not a flutter. There, I saw a smile. You must work harder at being a quarrelsome husband, for you have had so little practice at it. We are a poor pair of quarrellers if we cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes at a time.”

  William watched Pegge lift up her old gardening skirts to shake them out. “Have your feet been bare this whole time? Have you no sense, woman? It’s almost Michaelmas.”

  The wind was whistling the leaves into hollows, then whirling them up and scattering them. He put a branch on Pegge’s leaves to hold them down until Angus slouched back with the empty bag. Pegge untied the cat from the stake, brushing her face against its fur and settling it into her elbow. Her other arm slipped under William’s, letting him lead her back towards the house.

  “Will you eat a freshly caught grayling, William? It will put you in better humour. You are in the country now, and must study to enjoy it.”

  “Did that fool Walton catch it?”

  “It is a tasty fish all the same.”

  “And is he truly gone? I suppose you will want some of my claret,” he said grudgingly. “I do not know why I bother to employ a cook. Grayling, you say?”

  “You know you like the way I dress it.”

  She leaned against him, a faint odour of smoke about her, as they walked past the stonemason putting away his tools.

  “I want to stay in the country, William. London is no place to be after the fire. When the King calls, you must go back to the City alone. Duo will stay here with me. Angus can row him across the river to school each day. Let me have my last child a little longer.”

  “I do not think-” He felt her finger on his lips, calming their sputtering.

  “Don’t answer now, William.”

  They had been married more than thirty years, yet he still wondered at the unfathomable brownness of her eyes. After the fright she had given him, when he was sure she had been consumed in the blazing streets around St Paul’s, he would give her anything and bear everything.

  “You will have your fish pool and your conservatory and your maison rustique. You will have everything you wish, Pegge, for you know I can deny you nothing.” Only do not die before me, for I cannot live without you.

  24. A FLATTERING MISCHIEF

  Why did he lack the courage to ask Pegge what had been disturbing her since the fire? Of all things, that was what William most wished to know. She had been walking about the house at night, tempting him to follow her into uninhabited corners, until he came to believe that she was playing with him.

  William had just been called back to London to assess the repairs needed to the King’s clothing as a result of the fire. That morning, when he went downstairs to tell Pegge, he heard her in the breakfast room, reading her book aloud to the burnt tom, telling a mad tale that only a cat would understand. As he came up behind, she shifted position so he could not see the book, her face only an inch from the page.

  “Why are you still writing, Pegge? I thought this nonsense would stop when Mr Walton left.”

  She began to say something, hesitated, then wrote a sentence.

  “This cannot go on,” he said.

  She closed the book on top of the quill.

  “Show me what you are writing.” It came out sharper than he intended.

  “You must promise you will not ask me that again.” She drew the book towards her with a pathetic gesture.

  How dare she turn him into some sort of ogre? After all these years of forbearance, of explaining her to everyone, to the servants, even to her own children! Held against her chest, the book looked absurdly fragile. He suddenly realized that it had shrunk considerably in size. What if there was more than one?

  He went upstairs and took the key from its hiding place. She had asked him never to look in her cabinet, but now, he told himself, polishing the key against his cuff, checking that it was right side up, he was fearful that she was becoming melancholy. A husband had a right to guard his wife. Had a responsibility, he corrected himself, turning the key, to protect
her.

  Her father’s old cabinet had no space for the idle curiosities of women. He found it choked with books, lopsided, at all angles, so that when he extracted one, the others tumbled onto the floor, spilling open shamelessly. Over the years, without his knowing, Pegge had collected all the posthumous works of John Donne, defacing—scribbling over and ruining—each and every one. This was not simply jotted marginalia. The pages were black with smudge, the writing abandoned, deranged, indecipherable, full of animal cunning.

  So this was where her father’s books had got to. It was Pegge who had stolen them from his study, not the parliamentary soldiers in their raids on Clewer. She had probably disordered his shelves herself to make it look as if the Roundheads had done it.

  The cat leapt onto Pegge’s old bed to get a better look. As soon as he and Pegge were betrothed, the lacquered cabinet had arrived in a wagon from the Deanery riding on top of the monstrous bed, which William had always hated. He had slept there with Pegge only the previous night, a night of joy, their last together for some time since he was going back to London on his own. The impertinent cat had watched the whole performance, inciting William to complain about the bed’s unpleasant creaking and to threaten to turn it into firewood. Afterwards, stretching out her limbs, Pegge confessed the history of the bed. Not only was it her father’s marriage-bed, she said, but he had also died in it. She would never sleep in another, so William must never speak of harming it again.

  How could he come to Pegge’s bed knowing that it was her father’s? And to tell him only now, after all these years, to confess it with such equanimity as if it were a nothing! This was a more alarming crime than stealing her father’s effigy and hiding it on William’s property.