Conceit

by Mary Novik

  But this was nonsense, for a man wanted his wife in bed right now, not after a millennium of frustration. William was full of yearning for Pegge this very minute, as they had not slept together since he had brought her back to Clewer. Even though William had returned the book he had taken, placing it inside her cabinet next to the wad of tangled hair, she still had not come to him at night. A man could not go without release for ever because his wife was too stubborn to visit his bed. And yet, and yet-sometimes he had such vivid dreams as made him almost think she had.

  The birds, assuming it was dusk, were making a racket outside, and the baby was tugging at William’s sleeve to be put down. Instead, he held her tightly to his chest, pushing the lazy cat off the sill and leaning out the window so the baby could smell the rain-freshened earth. He was glad Pegge had taken the effigy back to Paul’s. They were all better off without the dreadful thing.

  On the horizon was an odd shape. It might have been a dog, or a flapping stick-man to fend off crows. But on closer look it was a rain-soaked Duo skulking back from the piggery, carrying something draped awkwardly over his arms. When Duo had got as far as the ha-ha, William whispered, “Watch!” to the baby and turned her head with his hands. The moving shape disappeared into the ditch, then popped up a few minutes later, holding a giant pike.

  “Look! What is it,” William asked, “what is it?”

  As Duo neared the house, his grin became wider and his grip on the long fish more nonchalant.

  The baby’s eyes were fixed on Duo’s arms. “Bird. Fish. Cat,” she said, pointing to it in excitement.

  Duo carried the pike past the kitchen towards the salt house. When it was out of sight, the baby objected, squirming in William’s arms. Thrusting his hand into a bin, he pulled out a turnip for her to play with.

  When William brought Pegge back to Clewer, he had found the estate in disarray. On top of her cabinet, for all the household to peer and poke at, was a jar of blackened teeth, no doubt from some martyred relative’s jaw. Someone had broken off the hour hand on the big clock and plums were drying on his mattress as if Pegge had expected him to stay in town all winter.

  Pegge was writing flagrantly, in any room of the house, in any slatternly garment that she chose-or barely clothed at all. Once when he interrupted her, asking when all this folly was going to end, she bristled and threw her gardening clog at him. Yet sometimes she glided joyfully around him, practising her dance steps and begging for a partner. Perhaps her monthlies were at fault. They had always turned the household into pandemonium, although now she kept their ebbs and flows a secret from him.

  During Lent, he found Pegge in the conservatory, feeding her plants a red liquor. When he asked what it was, she told him it was blood, sweet and mingled with water. He watched as she cut potatoes wildly with her blade, each chunk with an eye, then carried the pail outside and plunged them deep into the earth. Why did she seek novelty in vegetables? He could not bear to think what foreign uses they might be put to.

  Each evening, he sent away his manservant. Though he dropped his shoes loudly and unbuttoned his breeches as slowly as he could, she did not enter through the connecting door. He lay alone, fearing that the lumps between his legs were growing as large and indelicate as the mad-apples on Pegge’s vine.

  He could not go through the door himself, for he had sworn not to lie with her in her old bed. Every time he slept there, he came away with flea-bites, though the fleas did not seem to bother her. But more than that. Now that he knew it was her father’s, his manhood would wither in that bed, though he could not bring himself to tell her such a humiliating fact.

  When the potato shoots pushed up through the soil, he could stand it no longer and entered her bedchamber. He found her sitting on the monstrous bed, which was draped all in summer muslin like a tent, cleaning her hair with oatmeal. She must have been outside in her shift, for he could smell the sun and wind burnt into the cotton. Ignoring him, she brushed her hair forward over her face, then tossed her head, spinning the hair out in a circle, flakes of oatmeal swirling, spiralling, wafting, until the room was filled with shards of floating light.

  Still she did not come to him in bed. Oatmeal and citrus invaded his sleep, making him toss as restlessly as he had done as a young man. He was fragrant with a need he could not fathom. Why did God make machines of men’s hearts and then, when least expected, turn them back to flesh?

  The wind had died completely and the sun was back. How long had he been staring out the window wondering whether his wife had ever loved him? William glanced at the child in his arms. The hairs had dried against her scalp in stringy clumps and she was holding the turnip with both hands like a mouse, making neat teeth marks all around it.

  Pegge had not even heard the storm come and go. The symbols were still flashing boldly between the printed lines, her hand smudging them as it pushed past. Why this unending, meaningless chore that carried her away from him? She had rejected the book he had returned, like a bird rejecting a nest that smelt of human hands, and was now writing upside down and back to front in a book of poems.

  He leaned forward, the baby cradled against his chest, feeling the warmth of Pegge’s shoulders through his loosened vest. From this angle, he could just make out some printed lines. To his horror, it was “To his Mistress Going to Bed,” the Dean’s most pirated elegy. The wet ciphers were swelling, undulating, obliterating whole lines of print. Pegge’s words-if they were words-had a queer foreign look, more frightening than if they were wholly gibberish.

  What if someone in a badly cut uniform rode up, confiscated the books, and delivered them to the Lord Keeper? At least there was no question of anyone untrained in tachygraphy understanding a syllable. Some act of twisted love, of homage to her parents-that was the most he had been able to make out in all his weeks of trying.

  He hoped she was not writing poetry. Surely not lewd Catholic poetry such as her father had written? The appetite of men for such things was insatiable. He had a horrid vision of broadsides by a female Donne being circulated around the City’s coffeehouses to fuel the dreams of vulgar men.

  Pray God these were just the inchoate scribblings of a woman. He must not provoke her into any rash behaviour. If he humoured her, she would continue to lock her writings in her father’s cabinet, by far the safest place for them. He must watch that nothing was sent by post and that no visitors arrived from London for her. His retirement began to take on a purposeful tint, a rich velvety conspiracy, as if his family’s safety-perhaps the safety of the entire realm-was now in the capable hands of the King’s tailor.

  All at once Duo was there, smacking the cleaned pike on the hearth. Taking the baby, Duo tossed her high above his head, flying her out into the garden, flapping and squawking like a baby crow.

  William had no idea that Duo was so familiar with the child. He wondered whether his son also had a gift for cookery. The potato, William had heard, was thought erotic, as was chocolate. What of pike? Most cooks baked it just as it came from the river. Pegge was the only one he knew who stuffed a pike with sweet butter and garlic and basted it with claret. But was it fit food for the little girl? He eyed the gutted fish, uncertain what to do, then carried the prize into the cool buttery. It would seem a pity to serve it plainly. On the whole, William thought, I believe I prefer my pike with garlic.

  Pegge was now asleep on the table, her face pressed against the open book. When she turned her head, William saw ciphers imprinted on her cheek. Her thumb twitched an inch from the abandoned pen. She appeared boneless, as if she had neglected to put on her stays. One foot dangled, too short to reach the floor, and the other was tucked up beneath her, filthy from going barefoot. Ladies’ shoes were much more on view now that the Queen was in short petticoats. He must send at once for some new shoes for Pegge, for it paid to be careful in such times. After all, the Duchess of Newcastle was considered mad as much because she had a beard and wore eccentric garments as because she thought herself a writer.

&
nbsp; When Pegge woke, she would slam the jacket closed and push the book aside. If she were pleased with William, she would stand on the stool and take down an old straight-blade from the high shelf-his heart slowed at the thought of her fingers near it-and finding they were out of apples, slice potatoes with the blade instead, layering them in a pie-dish with scalded milk and raisins. She would pull butter out of the well and roll cubes in cinnamon to scatter over the top. When it was cool, she would cut the sloppy pie with such wild movements of her blade that he would choke back a fear that she would stab herself. She would laugh at his cowardly face, pick up a runny slice, and feed it to him on her palm. It would taste of apples burnt by a Persian sun.

  30. FLEURS

  A violet beetle crosses the moonlit floor, headed towards the shadow beneath William’s bed. The scent of honeysuckle and jasmine drifts through the open window. On such midsummer nights as these, children will be conceived and old men die, souls will be engendered and emparadised.

  I came in after my lover fell asleep, his wig on a stand and his turban on his head to ward off the night chill. For some months he has been making a show of undressing himself with the connecting door open to lure me into his chamber, but I do not come and go like an ordinary wife. I saw the look on William’s face this morning when he found the baby naked on top of the table. He will need to watch me more closely now, since I may eat eggplants next or walk about unclothed, complaining of the heat.

  Called to supper, William and I found only a pile of knives and spoons. Duo had taken over the kitchen since Cook was at the village festival. After a time, Duo carried in a huge pike with a tremendous jaw. When he put the platter down, the pike almost slid off its bed of buttery garlic onto my lap. Then Franny appeared with plates, which she skimmed across the table as if serving in a tavern, while ignoring the trilling and babbling in her old bedchamber at the top of the stairs.

  “What is wrong with the baby?” William glanced at Franny, then at me. “Perhaps I should-”

  “She is just talking to herself,” I said, pressing his knee to stop him rising.

  “Like you, Mother,” Duo said wittily, through a mouthful of fish.

  William looked a little anxious at this comment. It was true that, when I picked up my pen, it was sometimes hours before I counted a minute gone. Like eating a fresh buttered pike, I could not stop until my belly cried out that it was glutted. Perhaps I did speak aloud at such times, though I saw nothing wrong in that. I was more companionable than Franny, who had barely spoken since she arrived at Clewer. At the table, she rejected all her father’s overtures at conversation, even when he inquired about fabrics currently in vogue in London, a subject she enjoys as much as he does.

  At last, disturbed by Franny’s sulking, William produced a letter from her husband, masquerading as news about St Paul’s. William read it aloud while Duo and I ate cherries and Franny pleated her bodice cruelly with her fingers. Mr Bispham said it was now so hazardous to enter Paul’s that Dr Wren proposed to take it down block by massive block or, if that work proved too dangerous, to use battering-rams and gunpowder to destroy it. In its place he will erect a cathedral to rival the Catholic monuments of Europe. There will be a special niche for John Donne’s effigy-the only one, Mr Bispham told his father-in-law, that had survived the fire.

  “Too large for Clewer garden,” William interjected, his most cheerful comment of the evening.

  The real point of Mr Bispham’s letter was at the end, where he demanded the return of his lawful wife and infant daughter. At this, an unladylike noise spurted from the nostrils of Mrs Bispham.

  “Why did you marry him, Fran, if you hate him so?” Duo spat a cherry stone past his sister’s ear and out the window.

  “There is a little more,” William said hurriedly.

  In the postscript, Mr Bispham asked William to send Franny home with some memento of Dr Donne (a grey hair or flake of skin or incisor from his jaw) as evidence of Mrs Bispham’s kinship. This makes me wonder whether he wants Franny for herself or for her bloodline. I know that he is eager for her to bear sons, though she is just seventeen. Yet, in spite of his demands, I suspect Mr Bispham cannot do without Franny for more than a few days at a time, a fact much to his credit.

  William placed the letter near Franny’s uneaten supper. As she slipped it into her bodice, I saw a softening in her chin. I do believe that Franny is with child again and has not determined how she feels about it. I will speak to her about staying with us for several weeks. That way, Mr Bispham will be forced to travel to Clewer to collect her, and she will gain the upper hand with him.

  William went to sleep on a stomach so achingly full of pike that he must have been sucked at once into a black, garlicky dream. I came to him while he was dreaming and kept him so, for no visitor is so sweet as a night-walker. My touch was light and purposeful, my purpose to arouse but not awake.

  It is not the first time I have come to him in the night. These fingerings are shorthand for a long affection. No victim of my nocturnal visits has ever complained. In the dark, there is only sensation, the dreamer adding scent and colour according to his whim. Tomorrow, when William wakes, he will find only a rumpled sheet and blame an amorous soul. Such spirits are thought to give off a violet glow and leave a trace of phosphor, or perhaps a jelly as does a fallen star.

  But this time, instead of enjoying my lover, I have been watching him sleep. William is no longer young, and I have begun to worry about him. When his head turns, his turban shifts, exposing the grey stubble on his scalp. It must have been itchy under his wig all day, since his manservant went off with the others to the fête. William would be astonished if I offered to shave him myself, but I once was fairly good at grooming men.

  Now I am jostled by another night-creature, her feet going step by step up the ladder of my leg. Not yet weaned, my grandchild nuzzles at my breast, puckering her lips like a hawkmoth searching for a bud. I tug her higher, making a buzz in her ear so she will buzz me back in mine. She pushes me away and reaches for William, but I pull her back so she will not wake him. There is no room in a love-bed for a child. When I was about her age, I also had to learn that nothing should come between two lovers but their skin.

  I once lay next to you like this. I had been present at my own conception-why should I be absent from your further acts of love? Crawling up from the foot of the bed, I pushed myself between you and Ann, earning your confused and drowsy fumblings. Reaching past me, you cupped your hands around her breasts and lay your face into the hollow of her neck. Soon we were both exiled from her bed, for Ann was dying.

  You buried my mother in St Clement’s with her five dead children. We all knew what the Latin said above her tomb, but you had not been made speechless like an infant. Far from it. To avoid Betty, who had come back from the wet nurse with sharp baby teeth and scratchy toenails, I crawled into your bed and curled up at the back of your knees, fingering the dark rivering veins that led upwards to your heart. At any moment, your body might begin to jerk. You would sit upright, gesticulate as you did in the pulpit, and hold forth-poem or sermon, I was too young to tell. Then you would look about wildly for a woman and find only a shivering child. Ann, you would cry, and I would answer, Yes.

  This wraith beside me now is cool to the touch but far from innocent. When she is told she must not sleep with William, she will kick and complain, as I did when Bess took me from your bed. Too old to sleep with a man, Bess said, putting me back into the smelly cot with Betty. Even Bess with her broken nose could see the problem. Not again, she scolded, taking Betty off for a cleaning and another suit of clothes.

  I hear a dull reminding chime. Surely William has not brought his clock to bed? But no, it is in the baby’s fist. When I pry it from her, I see it lacks a minute-hand. She must have wandered into Duo’s chamber and found your old striking clock. It is a wonder Duo has not lost it, for he has little regard for anything that does not bark or swim. I press my lips to the top of her head, breathing in
the baby moistness, then I tell her she must take it back to Duo. She slides off the bed, naked except for the clock dangling from her fingers.

  Tonight memory washes over me like a benediction, a sudden jasmine on the night air. My fleurs did not come this month and I am fierce with longing. At supper, when I realized that Franny was with child, I was gripped by an envy as sharp as childbirth pain, then by relief. What woman wishes to be made a mother when she is a grandmother? These past months, I sometimes thought I was carrying William’s child inside me, my blood flowing one month then not the next, but now I know that my womb is as infertile as a girl’s again.

  I was older than Franny is now when my fleurs finally began. I became hydroptic with the gathering blood while keeping a vigil at your deathbed.

  Week after week, I ministered to your decomposing flesh, wondering how such a body had performed such feats of love. Death was to be your crowning achievement, the news your many friends awaited. You faced towards the east, dreaming no doubt of your grand effigy in Paul’s. What became of your vow to die in the act of love and share a single grave with Ann? I read through your poems once again, counting your unkept promises to her. I had taken her part for so long, I hardly knew which was my mother or myself

  Once you bragged of being canonized by love, but now you hankered for real sainthood. You even had an acolyte who was copying out your sermons for posterity. But Izaak Walton was doing more than that. He was copying down the case for your beatification from your own canny lips. You told him story after story, each destined for the Life of Donne, a plan I did not grasp until, years later, I set eyes upon that fiction.

  On the evening before your death, I heard you tell Walton, I were miserable if I might not die. He made a notation in his little book, splashing ink in his haste to get it down. When he went into your library, I crept up behind him and covered his eyes with my hands. Rooted by the hope it might be Constance, he dared not move, his eyelids sucking heat out of my palms. Pushing my small breasts against his back, I leaned over to read the book still quivering in his hand.