by Mary Novik
Outside, the wind was blowing away the coal-dust suspended over the City, exposing a French-blue sky with lace-work clouds. In the distance, past a row of houses levelled by the fire, William could see a group of men gathering near the Si Quis door of Paul’s.
Inside the coffeehouse, he smelled chocolate and looked for a woman. Instead, he noticed a small man with a roll of draughtsman’s plans drinking down his bowl without taking time to sit. It was apparent that the man’s three-quarter coat offered no protection from the cold, for he stood as close to the dying embers as he could. As the man wiped the chocolate from his lips, William recognized Christopher Wren, the surveyor appointed by the King to assess the damage to the cathedral. When Dr Wren tried to button his coat, he discovered that the sides would not meet in front. Giving up, he went out the door, crossing the churchyard to join the gathering of men.
The buttons, William wanted to shout after him, are purely ornamental!
Soon, William thought, he would be the only gentleman in London dressed warmly, for he was determined never to wear the King’s new two-piece suit. Another gust of cold came through the door and a hawker entered, peddling broadsides. Spotting a regular customer in William, he thrust the elegies under his nose. William gave the man a sixpence. As soon as he was gone, William tossed the poems on the grate, where they gave off a satisfying heat. He had only needed to read the words Dr Donne to his Mistress to Come to Bed to know the contents. Every lewd poem by every incompetent rhymester in the City had a similar title. William could have papered Paul’s with the copies he had bought to keep them off the street.
Feeling a good deal better now that the fire was blazing up, William drank the cooled coffee, finding that it relieved the churning in his stomach. Then, hearing a commotion outside the window, he wrapped his cloak around his chest and went out to have a look. He followed the curious along Paternoster row, passing the burnt timbers of Walton’s house and thinking unkind thoughts about the owner.
Along Panier alley, a farm wagon was scraping through the rubble with the sharp ring of metal against stone. The heavy load was barely clearing the foundations on either side and people were clambering on top of the ruins to watch the spectacle. The curious bodies were soon pressing so close that the horse balked at pulling the wagon further. It stopped in front of a sugarer’s boy, pushing its nose against the boy’s stomach until he stumbled backwards and dropped his brittle loaves. As the horse lowered its lips to scoop up the sugar, William noticed that its tail was too bedraggled to even bat a fly. It was Pegge’s mare, which often liked to nudge their children backwards to make them trip at Clewer, and the woman comforting the boy was his own wife.
Now William looked more closely at the wagon. Steadying the load were his gardeners, Angus and his eldest son. On the top, scrubbed and cemented together, was the marble statue that William had last seen, languidly recumbent, in his own garden. Still connected to the soles of the Dean’s feet, the marble urn was a ludicrous appendage when he was prone, like a leg-iron that weighed down a dead felon.
Why couldn’t the man stay put in his grave? William could not seem to escape his father-in-law no matter where he went.
Grateful that he was wearing his new full-bottomed wig, which no one at Clewer had yet seen, he tugged it down over his eyebrows, then stepped back into the crowd.
27. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
Pegge picked winter plums on the day that William left for London, spitting out angry words as she stripped the branches. Holding the basket, with good as well as mummified fruit hailing down upon him, Angus finally protested that she was murdering more than her plums.
She stacked the winter-sweets on William’s bed, making them spell out his angular shape as if he were still there.
Just before William left that morning, Pegge noticed that her cabinet had been shifted. The tom might have jumped on it, but he certainly had not put the key into the wrong shoe or removed the folio of her father’s sermons that she had written in. Anyone could have come into her room and stolen it—anyone alive, or even one of her many dead.
As winter drew closer, her monthlies became erratic, and an idea began to haunt her like a half-formed child within. She would wake at night, feeling her lost children like splinters in her fingers, but when she held her hand up to the candle, only bones shone through the translucent flesh. When she lay back down, twisted phrases echoed in her bedchamber. Sometimes Con spoke, and even little Franny uttered a word or two. Perhaps it was Ann stirring things up, choking Pegge with half-digested words. No wonder Cook complained of voices in the house.
The scrubbed effigy lay flat in the garden, waiting for William to come back to Clewer. He had told his servants that no man was to erect it until he returned. On All Souls, when William had been gone a month, Pegge ordered the gardeners to set up the block and tackle, then led Fox straight through the physic garden, which pulled the ropes smoothly through the pulleys, tipping her father smartly up, his feet still attached to his marble urn.
Before going to bed, she wrote one satisfying line in her book: The wheel is the key to moving a great weight without men.
Martinmas came and went, without even a letter from William. Servants were clothed for winter, beef was salted and hung. Pegge lifted her lily bulbs and carried her rare plants into the conservatory. Then she dug up the potatoes, brushing off the earth and arranging them on the children’s empty beds with their eyes towards the ceiling.
That day Pegge received a letter from Franny, telling her mother that she had gone past the wreckage of St Paul’s and seen a mummy fastened to some crude scaffolding. A huckster with a ladder was charging passers-by a penny to embrace the man he called John Donne. Selling dead kisses, Franny wrote, her penstrokes sullen and disgusted.
That night, a spicy embalming scent drew Pegge to a casement left open above the garden. Outside, the gleaming statue was illuminated by a cold coral moon. She walked out in her bare feet, the spongy earth oozing between her toes, and looked at her father’s hooded eyes and vain moustache. Around the neck, where the head was cemented, there was a line like a bruise from a hangman’s noose. She knew why William so disliked the effigy, for the grin was far too lifelike.
Pegge could remember little of her father’s last moments. After all, she had been only seventeen, a child nursing a dying man. Sometimes, when she had visited the effigy in Paul’s, she thought she saw it breathing faintly, as Walton reported in his Life of Donne. But in this garden, where everything was green and changing, she could see that the grin was lifeless marble. Any life in the statue was due to the sculptor’s art.
Her father was never going to speak to her—how could he? He had become mute stone, calcined and pure from death.
A week later, Pegge left Angus with the farm wagon on the outskirts of London at dusk and rode ahead on Fox to check the route. It was the twelfth of December, St Lucy’s eve, a night so long that she could return the effigy unseen.
Three months had passed since the fire had ravaged the City. As she rode up Fleet street towards Ludgate hill, the blackened skeleton of Paul’s grew larger. She found Ludgate badly damaged, with rubble and new building bricks clogging the street. The pavingstones were heaved up haphazardly from the fire, worse than an attack from flood or ice. She would have to take the loaded wagon through another of the City’s gates.
Five crows were skating on the air currents above the battered cathedral, a sign that a wind was building, a great troubled wind out of her father’s sermons. A gust was already whistling at the Dean’s corner and a newssheet flapped past, making the mare jump sideways. Fox’s hooves were clattering, but there was no one to wake here with the noise. Only the burnt-out shells of houses now peopled the lanes. The City had never been so quiet, for even the church bells had been silenced when they had melted in the fire.
The wind was making the mare uneasy. Pegge dismounted and led Fox south to see whether her father’s apple tree had survived the fire, but where the Deanery should have
been was only a charred foundation with a few weeds taking root in the slimy black timbers. Pegge heard the old sexton dragging his lame foot as he took a shortcut through the Dean’s court. When he was gone, she coaxed Fox through the broken wall. Pegge rested until the moon began to rise, then left the horse with a bucket of water from the old well.
The mummy was where Franny had told Pegge it would be, stuck up as high as a traitor outside Paul’s for all to mock, on a piece of scaffolding that had survived the fire. The bellman called out the hour as he rounded the Dean’s corner. It would be two hours before he came that way again.
The wind caught a bony foot and rattled it, scaring off a crow pecking on dried skin. Her father’s beard had grown several inches in his coffin, and long, curved fingernails now dug into his thighs. The huckster had taken his ladder home with him, but Pegge climbed up the blocks by squeezing her fingers and shoes into the gaps the way she had done as a child. She was now face to face with her dead father. No life was on these lips either, only a greasy shine from penny kisses.
Holding onto the scaffold with one hand, she tried to free the skeleton, but it was bound with wire, impossible to loosen even with her knife. He wasn’t mummified after all, for only a few threads of flesh still held the bones together. Pushing her fingers into the eye sockets, she snapped off the skull, then climbed down with it in her skirt and vomited until her stomach was dry. The crows retreated, then waddled back for a closer look, squawking like hungry infants. Pegge took a plum from her pocket and ate it slowly, throwing the stone to drive the birds away, then ate another, and another, until she had driven the crows away three times.
Climbing back up, she caught hold of a foot, twisting the shin bone until the leg broke apart at the knee. She dropped the bones on the pavement, then climbed higher, twisting the thigh bone until she had forced the hip joint asunder. She wrenched the pelvis out from under the wire and threw it down, then pulled and snapped and broke the rib cage, rib by rib, until she had taken her father apart and thrown all the pieces to the ground. Then she laid him out, from big bones right down to fingers and toes, on the pavingstones outside St Paul’s.
Why was it that the bones of the dead fractured more easily than the bones of the quick? As she was straining to see the marrow in a broken bone, a dog shot out of the dark and clamped his teeth on a rib. When she tried to tug the bone out of his jaws, he let it go, snarling and baring his teeth. Two mongrels appeared out of nowhere to fight over her father’s skull. One carried it in his teeth a few feet then dropped it, then they tugged it back and forth, until the skull had been grabbed and rolled and pushed across the churchyard. Soon a pack of scavengers converged on Pegge, darting in to steal the bones at her feet one by one, until she was left with only the thigh bone she was holding in her fist.
She chased some of the dogs into Paul’s nave, where they burrowed under the rubble to gnaw on dried flesh cleaving to the bones. Above her head, the roof was open to the stars and the cold winter moon. When she stopped, so did the dog behind her, lowering its head, lunging and snarling when she turned her back, hungering for the thigh bone but wary of the arm that brandished it. Then a rat scurried past with some half-eaten filth clamped in its jaw, and the dog chased after it.
In the choir, the December wind blew through the blackened stonework, whirling up ash and human refuse. When she looked down into the gaping bone-hole, she thought she saw something moving, perhaps a vagrant sheltering next to a corpse or a few embers. Now ruptured and overturned, the coffin of one dean looked like another’s. A great man’s grave was as mute as a poor man’s. Even the bone she held might have belonged to the thigh of another, lesser, man.
Three months before, a wind like this had caused the flames to spread, but it had been blistering hot that day in Paul’s. No dogs had braved the church, only the single frightened cat that now made its home at Clewer.
On that September day, Pegge stood in the burning choir, dodging cinders and riots of sparks. The carters she had hired were easing her father’s effigy out of its niche when some molten lead dripped on one of the men. He jumped, loosening his grip on the rope and letting the effigy crash onto the cart. The neck broke and the head rolled down the aisle into the fiery void.
In their hurry to swing the cart around, the men knocked the statue against one of the weight-bearing columns, shifting it a fraction. A jagged scar shot up the pier. They had chipped the urn this time, and sent one of the handles flying. Pegge helped them drape the canvas quickly over the statue, then one man pushed on a wheel while the other pulled on the horse’s bridle to lead it out.
Picking her way towards the altar, she collected the marble handle, then saw her father’s head grimacing just beyond the smoking choir stalls. It was too late to call back the men. Coughing from the fumes, they were already in the transept, trying to get the frightened horse through the south door. From there, it would be a torturous, slow trip using restraining ropes and blocks down the steep grade to the wharf.
Pegge could feel the cathedral tilting and settling into the ancient sand far beneath her feet. The pavingstones were moving and the blocks themselves were shifting in the walls. As she edged towards the head, she heard the Yorkshire timbers cracking high above her in the roof. All at once, there was a blast like gunpowder igniting and she ran into the aisle, crouching against the outer wall. The timbers and stone vaulting thundered down, buckling the church floor and exposing the centuries of burials in the layer of earth between Paul’s and St-Faith’s-under-Paul’s.
Battered by the heat and violence, the lead coffins began to twist and soften, tipping and sliding towards the gaping crypt. The lids shunted sideways, revealing corpses as parched as tinder, or awash in liquid and reeking gloriously of putrefaction. As the fire attacked the insides of the coffins, a nauseating odour sickened the air, like the stench from the City’s tanneries. It took Pegge a moment to grasp that the odour came from the dead—great statesmen and churchmen all—who were roasting in the vast stone oven. Some with relief, some with vengeance, the escaping souls took to the scorching air in plumes of jubilant smoke. It was then that the thousands of books laid up in Faith’s burst into flames and charred bookpapers flew out of the crypt like rabid bats.
She could not recognize her father’s casket in the sinister light. No longer in a cool repository for deans and bishops, he would be hotter than a minor canon relegated to a parish churchyard. In minutes, the pavingstones would be too hot for her to walk upon. John Donne would have to take his chances with the others, lurching and tossing on the selfsame sea of fiery rot.
As Pegge rolled the marble head into her shawl, a vengeful spirit shrieked behind the altar. A form leapt out and fled towards the nave-not one of her father’s books come hellishly alive, but one of Paul’s cats driven mad by the scalding wind. She stumbled after it, carrying the head as far as she could, then dragging it in the shawl behind her.
That was when she found Izaak Walton huddled under the smouldering portico, his hair stuck bleakly to his scalp as he watched his house burn to the ground.
Now, three months later, a cold wind tore through Paul’s, uprooting charred timbers and sending them clattering.
By some miracle, her father’s corpse had survived the inferno in its corner of the bone-hole, only to be hauled out and desecrated by the huckster. The great tower had also withstood the force of fire. Gripping the thigh bone, Pegge climbed the stairway to the top and looked down over the skeleton of Paul’s. The spine of the vast roof was broken, and only a few ribs of vaulting protruded here and there. As a girl, she had surveyed all of London from this height, trying to spot blood on the pinnacle where a man had plummeted while hauling up the weathercock. Now there was no pinnacle for a man to spear himself on, nor even a scrap of lead where a girl could scratch her name.
To the west past Ludgate, Pegge could make out a swinging lantern as Angus led the farm wagon towards their meeting place at the conduit. They would need to circle the wall to the nor
th and enter the City through Aldersgate. At Bladder corner, instead of turning towards Cheapside past St Michael’s, which bulged out into the street, she would squeeze the wagon through Panier alley. From there, it would be downhill all the way and easier on the mare, but she would have to take the risk of being seen, for it would be dawn by the time she got the wagon safely to Paul’s churchyard.
Far below, near the scaffolding where her father’s corpse had hung, she saw a violet flash. The dogs were fighting over his bones again and the crows, still hungry and awake, were making sallies towards them, mimicking their peevish snarls. Pegge threw her father’s thigh bone as far as she could into the square. It splintered as it landed, driving away the dogs and scattering the crows in a cloud of violet-black feathers. Soon they were back to collect the slivers and waddle off to shelter. At first light, they would lurch off to deposit them on rooftops, where they could pry at them at leisure, far from the scavenging dogs. Before noon, her father’s remains would be dispersed and mingled with the dust of every dunghill and swallowed in every puddle and pond.
28. PASSIVE VALOUR
When the muzzle coated in white sugar had lifted, William found himself looking straight into the brazen eyes of his wife’s horse. For once, he found himself agreeing with John Donne, for he was never more sure that animals lacked souls.
Pegge looked as if she had been sleeping with the wagon. She must have carted the effigy all the way from Clewer by road, not trusting it a second time to the currents of the Thames. No doubt she had worn out his servants and his draught horse, reserving the showy finish, where the streets narrowed through the City, to her high-strung mare.