Conceit Page 14

  The scholars loosened the groom’s doublet, pulling out his ale-soaked shirt and unbuckling the oversized phallus he had worn throughout the ceremony. Chipped and battered, it had evidently done good service in past revels. Tipping it over, they stirred up a posset in the crude cup, sack to inflame the groom and honey to make him gentle. Sickly sweet, its real purpose, I suspected, was to make the bride easy. I could not bring myself to touch the cup, but when John Donne raised the drink to my lips, I swallowed deeply, having more need of it than he did to keep the tears and shame inside me.

  The students shoved me forward, but my hands were too unsteady to perform the next part of the annual rites. Without a blush, the kitchenmaid stepped in and unlaced the bridegroom’s hose and scarlet codpiece, ribbon by ribbon, bell by bell, until he stood as proud and naked as the risen sun. Stripped of his comic art, he was again John Donne, though I had never seen John Donne attired in so little. In the passage of York House, when I had welcomed the leg thrust between my thighs, and felt the answering rush inside, I had not thought this far ahead. A naked man is a brave sight, but not the first time a young girl sees it.

  Francis was straining to make his verses heard, and at last reached the climax of his song, “Thy virgin’s girdle now untie, and in thy nuptial bed, love’s altar, lie.”

  This was the moment I had most feared, but I had been well instructed how to act.

  “This bed is only to virginity a grave,” Francis sang out, “but to a better state, a cradle.”

  After my greenery and outer garments were removed, and many coarse jests and innuendos suffered, I was laid like a sacrifice upon the gaudy bed, certainly the most authentic maiden who had ever played the part. After the youths had shouted the last refrain, Francis held up his hands for quiet, declaring the bacchanalia over.

  “Now,” he announced, “the bride and bridegroom must soberly perform their duties.” Pushing the students out the door, he allowed himself a wink before he left us.

  Now we were truly alone, and only God could see how well we played our roles. I struggled to untie the ribbons that held my shift together. Unable to discover how Bess did it, I made impenetrable knots. In spite of the sparking fire, I was shivering, loathing the river damp and stink upon my skin.

  John Donne pinched out the candle and untied my mask, then worked loose the knots all up and down my shift. Tugging off my wet stockings, he warmed my toes in his palms. Then he removed my under-garments one by one, tenderly and with a wise affection. If he knew how to undo a lady’s garments better than she did herself, I did not accuse and he did not trouble to deny it. Each time his fingers trailed over me, in search of some lace or string that needed untangling, my body rose a little more towards him. Before long, I was warm through and through. Even my feet had happily forgotten the cold bilge in the river boat.

  Now, we were so close that there was neither shred of cloth nor grain of wheat nor breath of air between us. Our hip bones met and I was no longer afraid of what might lie ahead. I had chosen this role, and play it well I would.

  “Tonight,” my lover whispered, “put on perfection and a woman’s name.”

  12. THEY APPLY PIGEONS

  Arriving with a kettle of hot water at dawn, Pegge found Bess asleep in the chair beside her father’s bed.

  He had been speaking in mangled and mutilated tongues when Pegge came in, but now he was wide awake and shouting. “This ecstasy doth unperplex! We see by this it was not sex!”

  Bess woke with a jump and scowled at the Dean, who fell back against the old Turkish pillow. Then she stumbled past Pegge and out the door.

  The fumes of burnt poems still lingered after a week, casting an oddly tactile scent about the chamber. Pegge broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in some milk, but her fathers lips closed tight against it. His skin was taut over the cheekbones, as if God was tugging him both east and west. Perhaps he did have the wasting disease, though he would not drink the milk that Doctor Foxe had said would cure it. He would not admit to starving his body, for that would be considered self-murder, protesting instead that he was feeding his soul. More frightening to Pegge, he had given up tobacco.

  Pegge poured the water into a basin, then pulled off the bedcovers. Her father looked as flat and numb as a sole in a cold buttered pan, but when she rolled his nightshirt up to his armpits and stripped it off, he flinched.

  “Where does it pain you, Father?”

  “I am but a volume of diseases bound up together, a dry cinder, and yet a sponge, a bottle of overflowing rheums, an aged child, a greyheaded infant, and but the ghost of mine own youth.”

  When he talked like that, she had no idea if his pain was real or philosophical. She began to lather his skin, starting with his face and soaping gently down his bony arms. As she dried each limb, she covered it with a heated blanket. Rolling him onto his belly, she scrubbed his back with a soft bristle-brush, working the soap into a foam then wiping it off with a flannel. When he was washed, she propped him up to face the window and brought another blanket from the fire to warm him.

  She took out the straight-blade and began to pare his long curled toenails, now blackened by corruption. When her blade slipped into the rotten flesh, his knees jumped up to his chest and he uttered a cry like Saint Sebastian being tortured. She calmed his legs and straightened them, the tears in his eyes telling her the pain was real and her father a long way from dead.

  “I’m sorry, Father. I will not cut your nails again.”

  “Those will take away the sting,” he said, gesturing to a basket sitting on the floor. “They came last night from Izaak Walton.”

  Pegge opened the latch. Pigeons—to lay on his feet to draw the vapours down from his head, a remedy suggested by her father himself in his Devotions.

  His feet were now nestled in the cavities of the pigeons, their necks intertwined like cooing doves.

  “I shall read your holy sonnets to you, so you can check the wording before they go to the printer.”

  She had found twelve of them, but could make no sense of their order. In one, he spoke of the soul’s black sin, in the next of it being crimsoned by Christ’s blood. But what if the first had been written after the second? As she read, his breathing grew hoarser until he fell asleep.

  She was having as much trouble ordering his love-poems in her room at night. They bespoke a fury of love, a worship so rarefied that, like angels, the lovers were no longer male and female. And yet, this love was so carnal it drove them mad, sweeping them up into a whirlwind of lust. If the poems spoke true, her parents had spent days inside a single room, hardly caring whether they ate or cleaned themselves. Their bed—this bed, Pegge reminded herself—had been the navel of the known world, their little room an everywhere, but now he wanted to cleanse himself of the taint of having loved.

  He began to mumble from deep inside, opening a vein clotted with rich, red words. She sat on the bed and stroked his hand, hoping to bleed some wisdom from him.

  “You promised that your body would lie next to my mother’s in her grave,” she prompted.

  “So I did, so I did.” A ghost of a smile elongated his lips.

  “It is not too late to cancel your great tomb in Paul’s.”

  “Do not vex a dying man with trifles.”

  This was said quite firmly for a man in sleep. Trifles!—he had sucked his fill of sin, but she had yet to taste even a drop. Love was folly and beggary love was—But Pegge did not know what love was, in truth was no closer to knowing love at seventeen than she had ever been.

  How many fathers invented words like sex? Her brothers had found it in a poem and sped off with it to school, earning the admiration of other boys, but what good was a word like sex to a girl who was forced to stay at home, then betrothed to a man she barely knew?

  In one poem, her father had canonized the two lovers, saying that he and Ann had died and risen in the mystery of love. When Pegge explained this to her brothers, Jo cast rude doubts on this conceit, pointing o
ut that every oaf in Paul’s alley knew what it meant to die in a woman’s sweaty arms. The boys delighted in finding the tricks in their father’s poems, reading the besmirched lines aloud to their sisters.

  “What starts with P and rises out of its own ashes?” Jo asked, wriggling his ears. “What palsies the body and greys the hair? What gives a man gout?”

  “Playing with his phoenix,” George responded, illustrating how it was done with quick strokes of his wrist.

  There was no good telling them that the phoenix in the poem was the two resurrected lovers, for even the rising sun had been reduced by her brothers to a male member standing to attention at break of day. Their favourite conceit was the drawing-compass—an object Jo imbued with lewdness by driving the legs apart with his thumb and then snapping them back together. They found the compass in a poem written to convince Ann that, even when separated, their two souls were joined like stiff twin compass legs. Ann was the fixed foot left with child in England while John travelled to France, growing erect and longing to end where he began.

  Now Pegge knew the puns better than her brothers. In their imaginations, all the poems blended into one. But so they did in hers, though Ann and John’s story, as she knew it, was no longer shared by another living being, for her father had driven it into some phantom limb, then cauterized it.

  As her parents sank in poverty, his poems spoke of desperate thoughts and deeds, the man’s heart ripped beating from his chest, the woman feverish and dying. Then he turned to writing holy poems, and before long Ann was truly dead. However, Pegge had learned from his deep mumblings that her father’s weak-kneed God could be chased off by one pungent memory of Ann, one putrid whiff of decomposing female flesh.

  And now these holy poems were the only ones he wanted saved. Reading such betrayals, Pegge became her mother’s subterranean ally, their voices knitting into one. Night after night, Pegge lay with Ann in the damp cottages described by Bess, bearing a child with her every year. But Bess needed a quart of sack to be primed for storytelling, and her tales were never the ones Pegge craved. Though Bess could recall every remedy she had dispensed in the Donne household for thirty years, she could not recall the story behind a single poem that John had given Ann.

  It had fallen quiet in her father’s chamber, a heavy-lidded silence like dusk along a country lane, and Pegge was watching her father slumber, trying to decipher his twitches and contortions.

  She felt a draught and saw a shadow in the doorway. Izaak Walton in his old riverwalking shoes that did not even squelch in warning, admiring the pigeons roosting on her father’s toes. How long had he been standing there listening to Pegge and her father?

  She stopped him at the door. “Why have you come while he is sleeping?”

  Walton dismissed her anger with a cheerful wave. He was just looking in. “Now the Dean is so happy as to have nothing to do but die,” he said, leaving dull footprints behind him.

  She watched Walton’s back and legs going down the stairs. He had not lost any of his shapeliness while running errands for her father. In the absence of the Dean’s sons, Walton had set himself up in the library as a secretary. Men had been coming and going for days, talking with Walton about her father’s Will and the disposition of his manuscripts.

  However, Jo had arrived that morning and his voice was now drifting up the stairs. He had come, she heard him tell Walton, to take charge of his father’s papers, but Walton seemed reluctant to turn the library over to him. The printer John Marriot was with them and Pegge stepped into the stairwell to listen.

  Offering hard coin, the soft-spoken Marriot had come to pry as many manuscripts from the Dean’s stewards as he could. He knew that Pegge was ordering the holy poems, and Walton the sermons, but he was concerned about the fate of the Dean’s early poems. Marriot became distressed—his voice rising so sharply Pegge need not have bothered descending to the landing—when Walton announced that the Dean had destroyed some of his old papers.

  Walton was in high spirits. “His poems were loosely, God knows too loosely, scattered in his youth,” he was saying. “It is fit and right that such impieties be burned, for he wished to witness their funerals before his own.”

  Pegge heard Marriot’s indrawn breath. He wanted to print, he said, from copies written in the Dean’s own hand. Pegge knew that Marriot would have better luck with Jo, for her brother was already hemming and manoeuvring, leaving the door ajar to take the printer’s money as soon as they were out of Walton’s hearing.

  In this Pegge could be of some assistance. “Mr Walton,” she called down, “my father is waking. I believe I hear him calling out your name. Soon he will be propped up on his pillow and have some little task for you.”

  13. LOVE’S DIET

  I once said, Ann, that I would rather owner be of you one hour than all else ever.

  Chills, palsy, grey hairs—I have them all. Only my ruined fortune has repaired. My thoughts rattle in this pomegranate-skull and the dogs gather at my deathbed, smelling a cadaver as they smell sex upon a cleric’s hose. What do they know of love? What is its quality to such as them? I pay my debts with my bones, paying for the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary of my age.

  Voices squabbling over my manuscripts. Mr Walton ushering great men in and out. Our eldest son arriving. Pigeons bound to my feet to draw the vapours away from my head. The hands of our daughter preparing my skin for death. Every so often, she hesitates, frowning at Mary Magdalen swinging on a loose nail above my head.

  For fourteen years, you have pursued me from your grave. Let me go now, to face my God alone. I must die in the first person and rise omniscient. I will collect you when the time is right, for Time cannot weary you where you lie now. When you are six thousand years old, you will have not one wrinkle of age or one sob of weariness in your lungs.

  The body of a woman but the reasoning of a girl—what a drug was there! You were barely fifteen when I met you in York House.

  Each day I studied the perfection of your limbs, ripening into womanhood. In my chamber at night I wrote poem after poem. Not all my verses were pure of heart. I thirsted after you, claiming you with my words. I warned you to take heed of loving me, for I was insatiable. My love expanded to such cumbersome unwieldiness and burdenous corpulence that it had to be dieted, fed with only one sigh and one tear.

  Years later, I became a priest and this youthful play at dieting became sour truth. When did you begin to collect your sweet salt tears—when I began to thirst for God, not you? Before I took orders, I found you crying in our chamber, your hand supporting your back, for your womb was full of Pegge. You reached to tidy the wisps of hair at your neck, a gesture I had not seen in years, but now your hair was grey. So was mine, but I did not tug it out by the handful. I took you by the arm and led you to Bess, who found some way to calm you. I had no choice but to become a royal chaplain. King James refused to prefer me to any other post, and eleven years in the country eating salads and onions was enough.

  Pegge fought her way out of you with such ferocity that you did not have the strength to name her. Called the baby, she slept in a box beside your bed for months, a stout, robust infant. As a priest, I could not come to your bed on fast days and feast days, I could not come when you were bleeding, or suckling, or with child, or even when you had given birth but not yet been churched. Such dieting sat ill with both of us, making your belly ripe with another hastily sown child.

  When you were churched after Betty was born, I could not wait for night. I unlaced your gown and all your undergarments for you. In the afternoon sun, your flesh breathed in and out like a live sponge. I laid you on the bed and was quickly finished. My fingers left holes that would not close, for the blood had oozed out and gone elsewhere. You were a map of veins, a spongy hydroptic cushion. The image tempted, but I could not get a poem from it, no matter how many pages I blotted in my library.

  You announced you were with child for the twelfth time while Bess was carrying a spotted-dog to the
table. She raised the pudding high enough to throw it at me, then slammed it down and cut it with a knife. The children quarrelled over the squares, arguing over who should get the biggest. They poked their fingers into the pieces and poured cream into the holes. Then they sucked out the cream as rudely as they could. Bess refilled the jug to keep them quiet, but Pegge would not hush. She had just learnt a new word, maggot. Hearing it, the older children stopped their sucking and looked at you. Another birth, they knew, might mean another death. The cream from your pudding dripped over your chin and spotted an already unclean bodice.

  Bedridden for weeks, you let the children make a playhouse of your bed. I told Bess to chase them out, but she said they did you less harm than Dr Donne, who had made your belly a house of death. Afraid of night, the children slept with one another, leaving beds empty elsewhere in the cottage. Sometimes I woke to find that Pegge had crawled under my blanket and curled into a ball behind my knees.

  As the birth neared, the doctor eased your bloating by making pinpricks up and down your legs. The children stared at the morbid fluid weeping from you until Bess finally took them out. After a day and night of labour, the doctor warned me you were too weak to deliver. A small foot emerged and I baptised the infant while it still had a soul to save. Your eyes opened as my lips closed. I will never forget that look. You brought forth that twisted child more in anger than in pain. Your reason escaped in a single tear, though your body wept three days longer.