Conceit Page 11

  Pegge was struggling to get a heavy table out of the library, when the table lightened and Izaak Walton’s hands were on it. He had a habit of appearing and disappearing as if river-walking in his quiet shoes.

  “It will go better this way,” he said, tipping the table onto its side and guiding the front legs through the jamb.

  Pegge followed with the back legs. They carried the table up the stairs and placed it where her father wanted it, against his bed. Walton had been there since noon, sitting in Pegge’s chair beside her father to help him with his sermons. Now Walton moved his writing materials onto the table and dipped his pen into her father’s ink.

  “Here is the next passage,” her father said. “We have a winding-sheet in our mother’s womb which grows with us from conception, and we come into the world to seek a grave.”

  “A shroud on an infant?” Walton looked back and forth, his pen in the air.

  Her father ripped open the front of his bedshirt in irritation, exposing a chest as puckered on the surface as Pegge’s sleeves.

  “He means a man’s skin,” Pegge hissed at Walton. “Let me do the writing, Father. You should not have to explain everything.”

  “Mr Walton need not understand it,” her father shouted, “only write it down.”

  “I will ask no more questions, sir,” Walton said hastily. “It will go faster now, to be sure.”

  It was dusk when Walton finally cleared his throat, resting his quill in the groove of his book. “Nicholas Stone has asked for your epitaph, Dr Donne.”

  Her father rummaged through some sheets and held one out. “Remind Mr Stone I must have the Italian marble, even if he has to go to Carrara to choose the block himself. Also, tell the canons that any cathedral business must be brought to me by Saturday next, for after that day I will not mix my thoughts with any that concern the world.”

  Night was falling, and they had used up enough ink and paper for most men’s lifetimes. The bedposts at north, south, east, and west had become the four corners of her father’s world. He had not gone past these posts all day, and Bess’s mutton pie remained untouched. Perhaps men could elevate literary things above solid food. Pegge had gulped her own pie quickly, though her stomach still felt raw inside. Was this the green-sickness that Bess talked about—a gnawing appetite that could not be satisfied by food?

  “It is time for my father to rest,” Pegge said, stopping up the ink-pot and placing it on the high shelf.

  Walton’s pen scratched to the end of the line, then gave up. He looked regretfully towards the shelf, then gathered his writing materials. “I will come back in the morning, Dr Donne.”

  “Not before noon,” Pegge corrected. The room was hot and smelt disturbingly of man. She knew it was not Walton, for he smelt as fresh as he had always done. “A man need not stink until he dies, Father. If you intend to live in your bed, you will need grooming.”

  There was a long silence, long enough, she thought, for Con to come down from Barking to do the job herself.

  After Walton eased himself out the door, Pegge found the tortoise comb that King James had given to her father. She pulled it gently through his beard and, after a time, his head relaxed upon the pillow and his lips retracted to help her shape his moustache. That was enough for now. In the morning, she would shave him.

  “I have moved your close-stool beside the fire. If you are ready Father, I will help you stand.”

  He looked at the apparatus suspiciously, trying, Pegge supposed, to contrive some way to keep the body’s wastes inside. Yet there it was, the red velvet seat, offering relief in the warm firelight. He lurched into an upright position and stared at the thing. At last, his yellowed toenails descended, then recoiled from the cold planking. Pegge found some stockings to put on him and his legs descended cautiously once more.

  While he shuffled to the close-stool, she collected the condemned poems from the bed and stacked them on the table, satisfying herself that she had seen them all before. Once on the seat, he swivelled to face the blaze, calling out, “Bring me the bundle to be destroyed!”

  Soon his greatest poems were nothing but charred fragments on the grate. There was something absurd about this act of renunciation, since the poems had made the rounds of all his friends. The most complete collection was right above his head, in the chamber that her brothers shared when they were home. She was now more familiar with the verses than they were, having copied out all his love-poems for herself.

  After her father had warmed himself sufficiently beside the embers, he hobbled back and she helped him climb into the bed. As she settled him, the sleeve of his nightshirt slid up, exposing his forearm. She gripped his arm and stared at it, wondering which valves to press to stop the blood from flowing back into his heart. The dark veins stood out in milky flesh that might have belonged to a saint in Catholic times. Yet this arm had performed the most erotic acts, then written about them in poems passed heatedly from friend to friend.

  When a man lay with a woman, did his hands support the weight of his body? Did his knees act as a fulcrum—for surely a man did not balance upon his toes? That was the woman’s part, she knew, for she had heard that a woman danced on her feet when lying underneath a man.

  Even as her father was sacrificing them on the fire, the poems were being copied and recopied, read aloud to lovers and silently in beds, for no one who had read such verses would willingly destroy them. Even now, women all over England were rising in passion, having read, under cover of night, erotic poems written by her father. Yet he had betrayed his promises to Ann, and betrayed them anew that very day, burning the records of the love they had shared on this marriage-bed. Had Ann danced on her feet where he now lay? Had this arm curled round to give her pleasure?

  What if, that day along the secret river, when Izaak Walton had crawled out on the narrow rock beside her, Pegge had twisted his legs in hers and refused to release him, twisted and tormented, danced on her feet, until she took his love from him by force, as the carp had drawn the melters to her and forced them to deliver all their melt?

  Her father had fallen asleep with his arm held straight up in the air, being subjected to a prolonged and close inspection.

  “Tomorrow,” she said sternly to The Arm, “I will give you a good scrubbing.”

  10. SIX THOUSAND YEARS

  On the second night after I took to my deathbed, I woke to find Pegge standing on her head, her skirts tied above her knees and her eyes bulging from the pressure. I thought my soul had risen out of my body and Pegge was left clinging to the earth below. Then she began to sway, fell backwards, and saved herself only by curling and rolling across the floor, stopping at the brink of the fire and staring at it in that peculiar way she has.

  It seems that Mr Harvey told Pegge that he grew hair on his scalp by lying on a slanted board at night, a practice that Constance has no doubt put a stop to since their marriage. Pegge’s hair is as short and matted as sheep’s wool. Though I told her it looks shorter when flattened on the top, she will not be dissuaded from standing on her head to make it grow.

  Pegge’s headstands have improved, but I am no closer to rising above earth. Now she tends to me in the daytime and, at night, Bess plants herself beside me like a side of beef to prevent me squeezing any joy out of dying. She insists on a sign of life every so often—a belch, a fart, any sound will do—to show that my insides are still functioning. If I do not produce it voluntarily, she will ream it out of me, knowing I fear her enemas worse than I fear hell.

  In this wooden bed, consorting with these few thoughts, I lie in prison and am coffined until I die. It is not the first time I have been imprisoned for your love, Ann. Thirty years ago, I tumbled into a cell in the Fleet. When my eyes adjusted to the meagre light, I gave the man a sixpence to bring me ink and paper. I hoped I might get poems from it, but none came. Now I cannot stop the thoughts of you, though they are old and tainted by memory. Your voice is a knell from an unquiet tomb, your beckoning finger an accusation.
You must wait for my ashes, love—as ashes I will join you. But first I must die. Sometimes I wonder if you have conspired to keep me here, pinned to this bed of vain desire.

  Now and then, my soul takes to the air to try the way, but before it can get an arm’s length overhead, some hiccup or rumble calls it back into this prison. This is the subtle knot that makes us man, this yoking of the spirit and the flesh. When a man dies, where does his soul go? Who sees it come in or sees it go out? Nobody. Yet everybody is sure he had one, and now has none.

  Pegge is shaving around my beard. As the straight-blade hovers over my throat, I hold my breath, hoping she will do me a mercy and send me straight to heaven. Then she tilts my head expertly, and scrapes at a stubborn patch beneath my chin. She only nicked me once, on the first day. She collected the drop of blood on her fingertip and sucked it off as I watched through narrowed eyes.

  Now she is kneading some life back into my hands, which have been cold for days. Licking a flannel, she scrubs at the ink on my fingers, but it refuses to come off. What cleansing ritual will she devise next? She is much more inventive than Con, who dealt with me swiftly and went on her way.

  When I was a boy, I angered my mother by becoming stiff while the nurse was bathing me. That was when my mother gave me the skull of her great uncle, Sir Thomas More, and sat on my bed reading from the Book of Martyrs. She told me that angels watched from the hammerbeams when More was sentenced. After his head rotted for a fortnight on London bridge, it fell from its pike into the lap of Margaret, his favourite daughter. That is the sort of tale that Catholic mothers like to tell their sons, and fathers their daughters. When she was little, Pegge delighted in it, for I had named her after Margaret More.

  When Pegge was older, I told her how William Roper wanted to marry one of Mores daughters for her education and bloodline, and came to the scholar to propose the match. Agreeing readily, the great man took Roper to his chamber where his daughters were sleeping on a truckle-bed and whipped off the sheet, exposing the girls. They woke, saw the stranger, and rolled over to hide their naked bellies. I have seen both sides now, quipped Roper, then slapped Margaret on her bottom, saying, Thou art mine. Such wit was all that passed for wooing between them. If Pegge agrees to have one of the Bowles twins, she will no doubt do the slapping.

  I must stifle my laughter, for it is unbecoming in a dying man. George was the only one who understood my jokes. He would grin slyly and tell one of his own. Perhaps, God, you stay me in this place until I get my fill of punning. Death, here is thy sting: I am condemned to quibbling with a humourless God. A ten-fingered torturing, a masturbation of the skull—shall I never stop wallowing in my cleverness? Sooner a horse might climb a tower than John Donne’s wit be stopped by death.

  Pegge finishes cleaning my fingernails and stares at my mouth. I suppose I have been talking aloud again. Sometimes when my lips move, no sense at all comes out. Perhaps I should try to move my other end. Bess blames all my sins on that orifice. If only I could let fly a constipated fart to please her. If I cannot move my bowels by tonight, Bess will evacuate them for me with her roving tube and bladder.

  The bed has begun to creak the way it used to do when we were in it, Ann. It yaws, a great ship straining at anchor. Pegge is trying to move it into the morning sun to warm me—dragging it by herself rather than calling Mr Walton from the library—and that small gesture cramps my heart. This is what comes of breeding a headstrong daughter. She squats on the floor, panting, her skin glowing with a mad feverish light. Then she puts her shoulder against the bedpost and shifts it the last few feet.

  But no one can be dragged back into life.

  Just before you died, Ann, you stroked my hair as if I were a child. All at once, there was a crack and your head fell sharply against your heart. Why did God give you a stillborn child you could not bear? Was it a test of your faith, or of mine?

  I have done my best, Ann, with your scattered brood of motherless children. You left me with two sons to educate and five daughters to marry. I have used such stratagems and such devices as the most desperate of fathers. How else will my girls be taken care of, unless by husbands? I must make Pegge agree to a betrothal. I cannot postpone my death until a man arrives who will suit her as well as William Roper suited Margaret More.

  A familiar bell calls me back from my wanderings. Lincoln’s Inn. I must send Pegge to find out who has died.

  Lucy is dead, but better a cold grave than a spinster’s bed, for Lucy was not made for marriage. Perhaps George will die before me also. Of all my children, he is the least likely to seek martyrdom, but it may find him all the same. When we give our children to the grave, they do not disappoint. They are there when we come to look for them at the last.

  My own brother died of gaol-fever in Newgate where he had been sent for harbouring a Catholic priest. My mother told me that when the priest was cut down from Tyburn gibbet, he sprang back to life, forcing the hangman to disembowel and quarter him. It was one of my mother’s bedtime tales. Meditating on such lessons made for hard sleeping when I no longer had my brother at my side.

  That bell was our prize from Cadiz, where George is a hostage now. When last I passed Lincoln’s Inn, I met a face in the street that looked like George. He would put on that face whenever he wanted something. Once he challenged me to a game for a handful of tobacco, then dealt falsely, playing with more cards than are known to the deck. When I found him out, he erupted in laughter and stuffed his pipe with my tobacco anyway.

  Pegge will miss George if he dies, but Jo will miss his brother even more. He could never get the best of George. They would fight over a meat pie until I ordered one of them to cut it into halves and the other to choose. George would measure the line so precisely that Jo could not profit by his choice. Never has a boy been so unfit for a holy calling as Jo, and yet he will be John Donne hereafter.

  George would be safer in his grave than in Catholic hands. Thirty-five years ago I sailed into Cadiz with Essex at the helm of the Repulse. Ever rash, Essex entered the outer harbour ahead of the fleet. When the cathedral bell rang out at two in the morning to warn the city, we had no choice but to attack. We went in at dawn and the running sea defeated us. It is not easy to walk on water wearing armour, especially in the Protestant cause. The Spaniards planted our dead upright at the tidemark. When the tide turned, the flotilla of bodies sailed out past our ships, shining in the moonlight like the Catholic heads I had seen as a boy on London bridge. In several hours, the flowing tide would carry the corpses past us in the opposite direction. We could hear the dogs fighting for position on the beach.

  We did not stay to see the feast, but stormed the inner harbour, driving their galleons aground. The Spaniards swarmed like rats, leaping into the sea to extinguish their flaming clothes. Smelling a second meal, this time of Spanish meat, the dogs began to bark.

  I was with the band of English volunteers in gold lace and plumes who took the plaza that day with Essex. Why was I, a crypto-Catholic, breaching a holy city in Spain? I had no wish to become a martyr like so many of my family. I had renounced my faith for a Protestant Queen, and hoped by such bravery to find employment in her service.

  Although our flesh boiled in our armour, the city and its bell were ours by dawn. Today, that bell tolls in the chapel at Lincoln’s Inn, telling me I shall be next to die.

  We are all Time’s slaves. The Earl of Essex’s head was taken off cleanly with Toledo steel in England, not in Spain. He had come back from Cadiz a hero, his glamour running before him like the incoming tide. On the return voyage, we trained our beards to grow like his. When he left for Ireland, the people walked for miles to set him on his way.

  I stayed behind as secretary for Sir Thomas Egerton, the Queen’s Lord Keeper, in York House. It was there that I met you, Ann, and there that Essex told me his story. In Ireland, he lost twelve thousand of the Queen’s men. Desperate to tell the Queen before she heard it from her messenger, he disembarked at Chester, then rode for four day
s across England. Saddle-mad, his spurs befouled with mud, he arrived at Nonesuch unpardonably early and took the stairs two at a time. He strode through the presence chamber, the privy chamber, the withdrawing-room, and burst unannounced into the royal bedchamber. The Queen waved her women behind her and faced the intruder head-on.

  What comfort it was, Essex told me, to find her in her old bed-gown with some tokens of his affection laid tenderly upon her table. He fell on his knees and called her My Prince, throwing himself upon her mercy and thanking God that though he had suffered trouble and storms abroad, he had found a sweet calm at home. When he finished pleading, she asked him to withdraw so that her ladies could dress her.

  Only then, he told me, did he notice that she had no brows. Her skin was unpainted and her teeth black. One of her ladies was combing something on a stand. It was the Queen’s wig, impaled like a traitor on a pike. For the first time since entering the room, he focused upon Elizabeth’s head—pale, blue-veined, and utterly devoid of hair—and saw his fate reflected in her eyes.

  Essex was quartered in the Lord Keeper’s own chamber. You hardly knew he was there, Ann. You were no more aware of influence and rank than the air you breathed, but they were as natural and as necessary to you. Essex meant nothing to you, but I was his channel to the outer world. Even in his close prison, infected equally with despair and pox, he never sullied the Queen’s honour. She had refused to see him, but it was not in her power, he told me, to make him love her less.

  I wrote his letters in my best hand for him. The most pitiful he wrote for himself. Each night, back in my chamber, I copied out his words from memory for the Lord Keeper. Soon Essex was in court, planted upright in the stand, about to be torn apart by dogs. I can remember the exact moment—I was handing Sir Thomas a deposition in the case against the Earl—that Essex’s eyes turned towards me, dark with accusation.