by Mary Novik
There in his perjuring script were the makings of a saint. He might as well have pimped for Christ at Calvary. There was no mention of your incontinence, or the poultice of flesh-eating maggots, or the loathsome flatulence you blamed on the dog beneath your bed. Every sanctimonious word you had fed him was there in his messy handwriting. The man’s fists were made for ironmongery, not penmanship. Why did you let him drudge for you when I would have run your errands blithely? Even then I guessed the answer-although I was a better secretary he was a far, far better fool.
Walton’s eyelids were shut and throbbing for some time before a doubt began to stir inside him. I suppose my boyish figure did not press against him as he imagined Con’s should do, for he spun around and stared at my matted hair and the pock-marks on my face.
Let me at least know a man’s kiss, I begged, for I have always loved you.
At that, he jumped as if I had scalded him. His words sear me in memory even now. He shoved me away and called me-oh, the sting!-Constance’s little sister.
I locked Bess’s door, throwing myself on her narrow bed and wetting it with my tears. Well before dawn, I came to your bedchamber to relieve Bess and send her to a mattress I had barely slept on.
Your death was driving me out of all patience. Why could God not claim you in a timely fashion? On the bed in front of me, you were basking in your future martyrdom. You had been given a surfeit of love and squandered it while I could not scrape up even a taste for myself. As I stood marvelling at your bony frame laid out in its smug cruciform, a hunger claimed me. In my bones and marrow, my sinews and my gathering blood, I was a woman grown. I could not wait for love to seek me out. If I was to taste love, it must be now.
I crept into my old bedchamber and stood next to the sleeping bodies of Mr and Mrs Samuel Harvey. Con was so big with child that Mr Harvey was lying on a pallet on the floor, snoring contentedly in spite of this mistreatment. On the table was what I had come for, one of Bess’s remedy jars. It was a salve for Con to use on Mr Harvey-dried honeysuckle steeped in grease to anoint a body benumbed and cold. To bring him round, I had heard Bess counsel Con, when nought else will do it.
I added some aromatic resin to the salve and began to rub your limbs, skirting bedsores and mapping subterranean knots. You lay like a corpse ready for dissection, your skin so papery it punctured as easily as Saint Sebastian’s.
You had so railed against Ann’s voluptuous spirit in your sermons that the audience sat rigid with attention, eager for more of the Dean’s sins with his dead wife. Well, I was amorous too, but I was flesh and blood, heavy with new womanhood and bruised by the deceit of men. I cursed all faithless lovers and wished them turned to stone. But you were not rock yet, and I might still get some answer from you that no other man would give me. I worked the ointment deep into your skin, watching the inky veins burst through their purple banks, for even the dying cannot ignore a kneading palm. As my fingers sank into your flesh, your pulse quickened and your skin warmed under my hand, its female cunning startling both of us. I scarcely needed to move my thumb to see its fruit. I licenced my roving hands and let them go-before, behind, between, above, below.
All at once, the ligature around your heart broke open in a glorious haemorrhaging flood and you were rampant with remembered love, bartering your immortal spirit for one more minute in a woman’s arms. My mother drove me forward, but oh! I was willing. Drawn by my perfume, I whispered, you will slide into my labyrinth like a bee into an orchid. And in that lyric rush, if I sang out my name as Ann, then thrust my tongue deep in your mouth, who was to blame, my mother or myself? Though you were a brittle ossuary with bones as porous as a bird’s, I would break bones to taste forbidden love. But at the last tumultuous moment, just as I held your pleasure in my palm—when you were about to die unconfessed and forfeit your grand sepulchre in Paul’s—some pity called me back, and instead of sucking out your soul in one last greedy kiss, I withdrew my tongue and let you hang between the utmost pleasure and the utmost pain.
You lay with one foot in the grave, another in heaven, one eye straining west and the other yearning east. I ran my tongue around my lips, tasting a slight bitterness, then drew a pin from my sleeve and pricked your tongue to jerk you back and fire you off.
Your eyeballs fell back with a smack into their sockets, and I said good-morrow to your soul as it sped past. Why not?—I had saved it from eternal death, such nocturnals as priests should never taste. As quickly as the blood had reddened your skin, it now withdrew, bleaching the flesh behind it, until all the blood had ebbed back to your heart.
I left you there for the philosophers to dissect. They would discover whether your lungs were smoky and your heart combust, and whether your soul had been made vehement by God’s fire or left behind like a jelly cooked from the finest winter plums.
William is right-I must stop sleeping in my father’s bed. It will make a good midsummer bonfire, for the oak is full of dry rot. Why has it taken me so many years to move from one bed to another? There is plenty of space in William’s bedchamber for both of us. We have lost so much time, William and I. Soon the morning star will rise, the night-flowers will close, and he will stir, his leg gliding across the sheet to discover what lies in its path. I press my fingers to his heart and feel this clock pulse, not in a case of silver, but of skin, the beats quickening whimsically at my touch. Here is a heart within my grasp. I have only to reach out in the moonlight to claim it.
If I move, William will learn I am no disembodied spirit. Perhaps-it would give him such delight-I will let him find me here this time, a great star fallen in the dark from some accident or change of heart. My morning-gown lies crumpled on the floor. This once I do not feel like writing, as is my habit, in the hours before the house awakes.
How hard it is to have a wife who loves the smell of ink and paper! How much William would rather I did needlework like other women. However, I will not subject him to more torment than a gentleman can bear. At the end of each book I have written: If I die first, do not publish it and do not burn it and between these, do what you will with it.
I have not been very observant about William lately. His arms may be pale, but they are well muscled from lifting bolts of cloth, and his hands are brown from being in the country. I rub my cheek against his chest, picking up the garlicky scent of pike, a bold, manly fish that pounds upriver lustfully but, once it is there, breeds only with its mate. I hear a lost river thrumming beneath William’s skin, with floodgates longing to be opened. How easy to caress his aging thigh with scented palm, to turn his veins into a conduit of blood, to command him to rise and fall and do my bidding, for this man is already waking to my touch.
Come, William, I see Venus rising like a pink nipple on the plump horizon. Shall we make that clock of yours run faster? Let us bed down together in this new dawn and weave a silken tent of arms. Such feats are not reserved for extraordinary lovers, and my love for you has grown over the years to marvellous proportions. Let us die together in the act of love, so death cannot divorce us. When our grave is broken open, our souls shall take flight together, assuming limbs of flesh, and lips, ears, loins, and brows. But first let us speed darkening time and savour this long night of love.
The London Evening Post
2 JANUARY 1765
About ten days ago a large pike was caught in the River Ouse, which weighed upwards of twenty-eight pounds, and was sold to a gentleman in the neighbourhood for a guinea. As the cook-maid was gutting the fish, she found to her great astonishment a watch with a black ribbon, and two steel seals annexed, in the body of the pike; the gentleman’s butler, upon opening the watch, found the owner’s initials, J.D. Upon a strict enquiry, it appears that the said watch had been owned by a descendent of the old Dean of St Paul’s, John Donne, and was sold to a gentleman’s servant, who was unfortunately drowned about six weeks ago, on his way to Cambridge, between this place and South Ferry. The watch is still in the possession of Mr John Roberts at the Cross Keys, in L
ittleport, for the inspection of the public.
VALEDICTION
Warmest thanks to my husband, Orest, and to my writing partners June Hutton and Jen Sookfong Lee for their generous critiquing and encouragement over many years. Thanks also to Thomas Wharton, Cynthia Flood, Paul Headrick, Keir Novik, Karen Novik, and Lynne Neufeld for careful readings, to Langara College and Booming Ground for their support, to N.P. Kennedy for his wit, and to Alexander Novik for being a source of wonder and delight.
While writing this novel, I read seventeenth-century writers for inspiration, particularly John Donne, Izaak Walton, Samuel Pepys, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Anne Clifford, Robert Burton, John Evelyn, Margaret Cavendish, and John Aubrey. I have consulted the usual scholars and biographers but, after all is said and done, this is my seventeenth century and I have invented joyfully and freely. The characters entered fully into the spirit of it, contributing in surprising ways to their own fictionalization, John Donne most liberally of all. Perhaps this is fitting, for he confided to a friend, long after becoming a priest, “I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.”
I would like to thank my agents Dean Cooke and Suzanne Brandreth and the enthusiastic team at Doubleday Canada, especially Maya Mavjee, Kristin Cochrane, Martha Kanya-Forstner, and Scott Richardson. Above all, I would like to acknowledge the guidance and encouragement of my editor, Lara Hinchberger, who has been Conceit’s champion from the beginning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARY NOVIK was born in Victoria, British Columbia. She grew up in a large family in Victoria and Surrey, and now lives with her husband in Vancouver, where she is at work on a new novel. Conceit was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was a Quill & Quire Book of the Year, a Globe and Mail Best Book, and won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Mary Novik’s website can be found at www.marynovik.com A reader’s guide is available at www.bookclubs.ca
Copyright © 2007 Mary Novik
Anchor Canada edition 2008
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Novik, Mary, 1945-
Conceit / Mary Novik.—Anchor Canada ed.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37338-0
1. Donne, Margaret, b. 1615—Fiction. 2. Donne, John, 1572-1631—Family—Fiction. I. Title.
PS8627.O9245C65 2008 C813’.6 C2008-901156-2
Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca
v3.0
Other Titles by Mary Novik:
Muse
(coming in August 2013)
“A cross between Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale…. The sensational twists and turns of Novik 's plot, the rapid changes of scene, and the piling on of horrors, all compete to give this story a wide appeal. ”
BC BookWorld
Muse is the story of the charismatic woman who was the inspiration behind Petrarch's sublime love poetry. Solange LeBlanc begins life in the tempestuous streets of 14th century Avignon, a city of men dominated by the Pope and his palace. When her mother, a harlot, dies in childbirth, Solange is raised by Benedictines who believe she has the gift of clairvoyance. Trained as a scribe, but troubled by disturbing visions and tempted by a more carnal life, she escapes to Avignon, where she becomes entangled in a love triangle with the poet Petrarch, becoming not only his muse but also his lover.