Conceit

by Mary Novik

  Angus was scowling from exertion. He and his son were guiding the wheels while Pegge held Fox’s bridle to coax her forward. In front of them, William could see two stone buildings connected by a bridge, barely taller than the reclining statue. When the horse refused to duck under the bridge, Pegge unharnessed her and took her around the longer way. The gardeners lay on top of Dr Donne, propelling him through the arch with the strength of their legs, like a barge through a tunnel. As Pegge rode up on Fox on the other side, William fell back into a lane, holding his pocket-clock like a heart in his palm. It had taken five minutes to leg the great Dean through the arch.

  Now William could see why Pegge had chosen this route, for the lane sloped downwards, opening out past the burnt husks of bookstalls, then dropping like a plumb line straight to Paul’s. There was no need for the horse to pull here. In fact, it was all it could do to hold the wagon back.

  Ahead, Christopher Wren and the assembled dignitaries were emerging from the Si Quis door to assess the damage to the cathedral’s exterior, gesturing and consulting, calling out measurements, beating off stray dogs and then, hearing an ominous clatter, turning as one body to stare at the approaching colossus, reined back by rough workmen with their legs braced and led by an outlandish woman, her face streaked with dirt, riding a prancing brown mare. Behind her was a mob, which was making a loud holiday of it, and keeping pace with them was an enterprising band of meat and drink sellers, their merchandise strapped to their bodies by every kind of box and contraption. Paul’s pie-man was hailing fresh pies at two a penny though the pastries smelt, as they passed William, at least a fortnight old. William had pulled his wig almost down over his eyes so Pegge would not recognize him and call out for help—to climb atop his recumbent father-in-law and leg him through the Dean’s low doorway into Paul’s, or to ride him through the nave towards his appointed resting place.

  All at once Christopher Wren broke from the dignitaries and strode uphill to halt the wagon. As Pegge leapt down from her mare to speak to him, William sagged against a wall. His wife was going to greet the King’s surveyor, the man who was being called the new Archimedes, wearing her gardening clothes. Where her old brown skirts had ridden up, where a lady’s white stocking should have been, William saw a flash of bare and bloodied ankle.

  At something Pegge was saying, Dr Wren walked around the effigy, subjecting it to a closer look. Then he came forward to point out some technical feature of the route ahead and, as his hands flew in the air, William saw the difficulty. The slope of the churchyard, multiplied by the weight of the marble statue, would accelerate the wagon to such a pace that it would ram the horse, catapulting the effigy and its entire apparatus—wagon, woman, horse, and gardeners—against the cathedral like a maddened war-machine. In its weakened state, with the pillars already off the perpendicular, the blackened shell might be brought to its knees.

  In spite of the cold, Dr Wren was removing his new three-quarter coat and tying it over the horse’s eyes, certainly the best use William had seen for that impractical garment. Pegge took Fox’s bridle and turned the wagon around, calming the animal with some nonsense chatter. The gardeners spit on their hands, looped the guy-ropes about their waists, and braced their legs. The mob became quiet as the load rolled slowly backwards, the mare’s hooves skittering as she strained to keep her footing on the stones. Using the mare as a drag, as directed by Wren’s lively hand signals, Pegge eased the wagon down the slope, manoeuvring it all the way into the churchyard until the wheels sank deeply into the soil inside the masons’ yard.

  A bottle was passed hand to hand over the gawking heads to Pegge, who tipped it back, spilling wine over her throat and clothes as the mob cheered her on. One of the pedlars shone a piece of fruit on his filthy sleeve and tossed it to her. She caught it with a laugh, spun it in her hand, then threw it in a perfect arc, past the dignitaries now examining the colossus in their full-bottomed wigs, the sun striking brightly off their shoe buckles and gilt swords, past Angus unharnessing the mare, and back into the appreciative mob. Without thinking, William stepped forward to catch it, the largest he had ever seen. This colour should be called orange, he decided, red mixed into a rich primrose yellow. The backs of his legs tingled at the discovery.

  Dr Wren was running his hand along the statue’s flank, admiring its curves. Then he was studying the marble face and Pegge was looking straight at William. It was too late to push the orange into his pocket and slink back to Clerkenwell unseen, for Pegge was smiling to thank William, as if he had arranged for Wren’s help instead of cowering at the back of the vulgar crowd, hoping she would not see him.

  Pegge called to the pie-man, but William got to her first, smelling the mare’s sweat all over her—or was it her own? Angus, he told her, would take the horse and wagon back to Clewer. Her woollens soaked with perspiration, she had begun to shiver from the cold. He wrapped his cloak around her and peeled the orange, getting juice all over his sleeves as he fed the pieces to her.

  This madwoman would be the talk of Westminster by nightfall. It was a mercy that William had already been dismissed as the King’s tailor. At least that humiliation was past. The sky was an old green cabbage overhead and the air reeked of hot mare’s urine hitting straw, but his hands smelt pleasantly of orange. William took Pegge gently by the elbow and led her past the curious dignitaries, past the Duke of York who had just ridden up on his stallion and given William a sharp, familiar glare, past Christopher Wren’s knowing look—he had finally, William guessed, deduced exactly who Pegge was—past the scaffolding where the Dean’s mummy had been kissed by every ragtag apprentice in London but, mercifully, had been taken down before Pegge saw it. William looked at his wife’s pale smile and felt a pain behind his ribs. He dared not ask what she was thinking, for fear of the answer she would give him. He must get her warm as quickly as he could.

  As William led Pegge towards the nearby coffeehouse, a playful gust stirred up the rubble, tossing up hats and feathers and periwigs, sifting and quickening, mixing the sacred ashes from Paul’s with common playbills from the theatres. Pegge twisted in his arms and looked backwards at the dust whirling up from Bonehill in the north, where human remains were being carted from all the churches gutted by the fire.

  “They were clearing out St Clement’s as I rode past yesterday,” she said.

  Just at that moment, a strangled note sounded in the distance, no doubt a child practising on the recorder. However, Pegge’s face told him it might as well have been John Donne blowing his old trumpet to call the numberless infinities of souls back to their scattered bodies.

  With her finger, she singled out a wisp of ash spiralling purposefully upwards. “A conjugation of souls,” she said, “like a small quantity of Christian dust re-animated.”

  Smoke from a blast-furnace, he thought, unwilling to correct her.

  He uprooted her and pulled her forward to the coffeehouse. An infusion of coffee was the best remedy. It would not matter what explanation he gave her, for she would still believe her father was circumnavigating the earth collecting pieces of his body. From souls flying around in some heretic limbo, it was only a step to Papist fireballs and his wife being thrown in the Old Bailey.

  Pegge’s cheeks had quickly regained their usual ruddy health. She seemed to pull colour into her as salt pulled colour, hiding it under a drab façade. As she walked beside him, her skirts swirled around her ankles, the worn nap giving off a chocolate sheen in the morning sun. If pinks and oranges could be colours, why not chocolate and coffee? Why not lemon? He would feed her lemon cakes and coffee—an intriguing milky brown—and take her back to the country, staying with her as long as the King would let him. If he was correct, King Charles would be in no hurry to have him back.

  Now that he was no longer the royal tailor, William had no need to tend his body, stay the same height and weight as the young King, keep himself for show, immaculate. He could slouch and spread, indulging a discreet wrinkling in out-of-fashion suits.
A tentmaker could eat a baked apple when he chose. There was much to be said for tents, for they could be designed equally well in the country as in town. A tent could have a raffish elegance. A tent could be dyed to match a China orange, or even a common English pippin.

  As for Pegge’s writings—he would take the key out of her old shoe and slip the book he had removed back into her cabinet. There was no need to say anything about it. Perhaps she had not even noticed that the volume was missing. He knew, without asking, by the look on Christopher Wren’s face when she had jumped down from her horse, that she had introduced herself as Ann More, a woman dead for fifty years.

  29. UNBUTTONING

  Franny had arrived at Clewer that morning in a great hurry, putting the baby down on the floor and leaving her with Pegge. William followed Franny’s heels up the stairs to her old chamber. He meant to ask whether it was wise to leave the little girl with her grandmother, but instead found himself asking why Franny had run away from her husband.

  “What do you know?” Franny burst out at him. “You are a husband too.”

  Yet Mr Bispham had been Franny’s choice, not his. Perhaps, after all, it was unwise to allow daughters to choose their husbands. When Franny’s crying finally drove him out-of-doors, William wandered musing in the shade. Soon afterwards, Cook came out of the house and walked smartly past.

  When William called after him, he replied sourly, “Madam is in my kitchen again.”

  He did not bother to end the sentence with sir, just slapped his jerkin on top of the hedge as he went down the path. Now William was standing in the kitchen garden trying to puzzle out what was wrong with everybody.

  It is a very hot day, he decided, wondering if that had anything to do with it. The mad-apple was splayed against the bricks of the house, its fruit like purple goose eggs, indelicate in the extreme. He was not sure it was the sort of vegetable a gentleman should have on his estate. Had Pegge been rash enough to eat it? She had begun to cultivate unusual plants from the New World. Now that he was retired from public life, it was unfair she had so little time for him. For all the attention she paid him, he might as well have remained in London.

  At least in the summer Pegge would not poke up the fires in a slapdash way or drop a lit candle on the stairs. All winter, his stomach had cramped with fear that she would set the house aflame. He tied a rope to an upper window so they could climb down in case of fire. Sometimes, in dreams, he heard the sound of breaking glass and saw a swinging rope of chestnut hair disappearing out the window. He would wake perplexed, wondering why Pegge had gone into the holocaust in Paul’s. Had she been in the choir when the timbers gave way and the stone vaulting came crashing down? The thought was like a blowfly that laid eggs. Nothing could stop the larvae growing and taking flight.

  Everybody else seemed to be going somewhere. Duodecimus was just now tramping across the grounds. He disappeared-as if he had dropped off the edge of the earth-into the ha-ha that kept the deer out of Pegge’s garden. Three minutes later by William’s pocket-clock, Duo sprang up a furlong ahead, making towards the piggery. He must have crawled inside the ditch until he thought he was out of William’s view. This was what came of letting the boy stay at home and cross the river to school each day as Pegge had wished. But then, why had his mother haunted the Fleet? Two separate streams, pure at their source, had converged into that filthy London ditch.

  William went into the buttery, leaning against the damp stone wall to cool himself. When he opened his eyes, he could see Franny’s naked baby on top of the great kitchen table, looking like an apricot made shiny by the heat. Her legs did not seem to have ankles, just feet protruding at the end. As William watched, she pushed herself up and walked across the table until she stood with her toes curled over the edge, trying to see what was underneath. He almost leapt out of the buttery to catch her, but held back when he heard Pegge’s voice.

  Pegge was placing raspberries in a row across the table. The little girl sat down to watch the line grow longer, testing a berry by squashing it with her thumb. She did not appear to have wrists either, William noted, just hands coming straight out of arms. When the last berry was in place, the baby shoved the first one into her mouth, then pinched the second between finger and thumb. She held it close to her eye before swallowing it, then reached for the next berry in the row. William could not comprehend why she did not eat them all at once.

  “That does not seem safe,” William said, stepping out. “I thought you were looking after the child for Franny.”

  “I am.” Pegge lifted the baby off the table and set her on the floor.

  Below the table was an upside-down bowl weighted by a rock. The little girl saw it at once, crawling underneath the table to push off the rock. The bowl jumped up and out came a mouse, a little disoriented, wobbling back and forth. With a terrible whoosh, Pegge’s cat leapt from the window-ledge straight onto the groggy mouse. Surely, William thought, this is not a suitable game for a child.

  Pegge got out her quill and ink bottle, settling down at the table with her book. “What kind of death do you wish, William?”

  He spun around, alarmed.

  “Slow and easy, or quick and painful?”

  Was this a Catholic question involving martyrdom? The kitchen was unbearably close. Through the window, he could see a summer storm blowing in, with shades of grey from smoke to gun-metal. “Where were you when the vaulting fell in Paul’s?”

  “In the barge heading upriver with you. Where else should I have been? You are too fretful, William. Loosen your vest.”

  The baby stopped playing with the bowl. “Vest?” she asked, pointing at William.

  How had the child learned to speak? Was it possible that, in spite of a sobbing ninny for a mother and Pegge for a grandmother, the little girl might yet amount to something? He scrutinized her sober round face for anything of Thomas More or John Donne in it. Where was William to find her a suitable husband? It could not be left up to her foolish parents.

  The gathering tempest was driving Pegge into a passion. Plucking the quill out of the ink, she began to write before it had stopped dripping.

  Why did she fancy herself an author? John Donne’s other children had no such ambition. William hoped she would not make a spectacle of herself like the Duchess of Newcastle, who thought herself a writer, though a woman. It was a very inconvenient business. William surveyed the kitchen and saw no signs of a meal. He had not seen a kitchenmaid all day.

  “Why have the servants all run off?” he asked.

  “It is a feast day in the village. Let me get this down, William, or I shall go quite mad.”

  Perhaps it was best to let her write. “What shall I do with Franny’s child? Is she hungry? Should she not have her clothes put on?”

  Pegge did not answer, so he reached for the little bodice and under-things and tried to figure out which should go on first. At the sight of the knitted drawers in his hands, the baby ran away. He caught her, laid her down flat, and pulled on the drawers, but when he tried to pull on her stockings, she stiffened her legs. Giving up on the stockings, he squeezed her head through the neck of the shift. Why were children dressed like miniature adults? He laced up the baby’s stays, but after he had lowered the stiff embroidered bodice over her head, he found he could not do up the tiny buttons.

  “You’ve put it on backwards,” Pegge said, without looking up.

  “Many a man is a wonder to the world whose wife sees nothing remarkable in him.” He whispered to the little girl, “Montaigne said that. These are silly garments. I shall make you a country suit with buttons you can undo yourself. You must help me draw the pattern.”

  The child climbed into his arms, her hands clinging damply to his neck. Why had husbands so little to do with children when they were so much better at it than wives?

  “I am sure she understands every word I am saying, Pegge. I don’t remember Franny being half so clever.”

  As he turned to look at Pegge, bent over her book, h
is heart knotted in fear, for her head was bathed in a Prussian blue. Then her body shifted and he saw that the light was coming from the window behind her. He had seen this once before when he was a child. An ignis fatuus-light clinging to the village spire just visible between distant thunderclouds.

  He carried the little girl to the window to show her. “What do you suppose God is thinking?” he asked.

  The sky was now as matte as the blackcloth worn by priests. One cloud crossed over another until there was layer upon layer of moving clouds, as if strong black arms were pressing wood blocks into dye and then onto cotton, this way and that way, cobalt and scarlet and amber, one on top of the other, pattern upon pattern, into a layered richness of shape and texture-the secret that had long escaped him, William realized, blinking back an eyeful of English monochrome, of the oriental print, the indienne.

  All of a sudden, there was a crack and a blinding streak of phosphorus cut across the sky, followed by a whiff of sulphur, as if a flint had struck steel and ignited silky black grains of gunpowder, propelling a ball out of a gun’s barrel and into the thunderous air.

  The wind was now an angry bawd, yanking and stretching the clouds. John Donne had preached that at death God would cleave flesh from bone, blowing the dust to the four points of the compass. Then at the last busy day, God would force each Christian soul to hunt down each speck of its anatomy-every morsel of saliva left inside a lover’s mouth, every seed sprayed out in heedless passion, every heartbeat lost in childbirth, every hair and nail trimmed, every tear cried-until every seed and hair and teardrop had been collected and the soul fleshed out to human form again.

  And what then? William asked himself, as the rain began, for England was no longer Catholic. Would lovers still contrive for their souls to meet at one another’s tombs by exchanging tokens of hair and bone? Once reunited, he supposed, they would embrace one another in the resurrected flesh, as moist and young as when they had first coupled.