Conceit Read online

  While I was carrying my eighth child, you travelled to France as Sir Robert’s secretary, although I begged you to stay with me. You told me that we would be yoked together like a drawing-compass even when the legs were spread apart. Was a clever poem worth a dead child? Labouring to give birth, I sent my spirit to find you, but you did not spring back to my side like the promised compass leg.

  It was a year before you returned and moved us to Sir Robert’s estate. After eleven years of languishing in the dullness of the country, you were in London at last, where more patrons might be wooed with John Donne’s flattery. However, illness followed us to Drury cottage. When Francis and Mary sickened, you bargained with God, offering to bury your poems if he spared your children, but Francis and Mary died. After they were lowered into the cold earth, you locked your poems into the safety of your cabinet.

  Then, the post of Clerk of the Council became vacant. You borrowed a horse and rode it hard to Theobalds to beg for the seat. King James refused, saying, I know Mr Donne has the abilities of a learned divine and will prove a powerful preacher, and my desire is to prefer him that way, and in that way and no other.

  No man was less suited to being a priest, but you set about making ready. You called in your scattered verses hastily from friends, thinking to publish them while you still could. While you were out, I lit a candle in your library under the portrait of Jack Donne as a brooding lover. Rank satires and elegies were spread across your table—verses your friends had thought worth saving that I had never seen. The female body was anatomized with its ripe menstruous boils and sweaty breasts, its warts, weals, and hanging skin, its limbs strung up like sun-parched quarters on the City gates. A man’s member was likened to the mouth of a fired gun pouring hot liquid metals into a woman’s body. Who would have thought poetry to have such malice in it?

  Your puns on my name were odious. Was this all that I had meant to you, this vulgar act? Worst of all was the poem that mocked our wedding night in Lincoln’s Inn. I was only seventeen, and my pretense to womanliness was but a girl’s bravado. The stain on the white linen terrified me, but you called it our bargain of blood, the baptism of our joint soul.

  “Now none can do treason to us,” you assured me, “except one of us two.”

  That morning, as you sweetened my pain with your fingers, I thought I heard the moving spheres, only to discover it was the law students making a din outside our window. You did not mock me then, but gave me your wedding gift—a very small word, sex. So prolonged and seductive in my ear, so fresh with new meaning, I swear you had invented it that moment.

  Twelve years after that long midwinter night, you took a priest’s vows and split our soul apart. You sold yourself to God on the very day and at the very hour that Pegge fought her way out of my exhausted womb. Staggering down Drury lane like a drunken man, giddy with doctrine, you did not even look into the birthing room until morning.

  After my churching in St Clement’s, you pulled me into our bedchamber, your hands damp from the font. Pushing upwards to an aching sweetness I could not hold to, I conceived another child, but when my monthlies stopped, so did your visits to my bed. Coupling while I was great-bellied was no better than adultery according to the church fathers. Once an everywhere, our bedchamber was now too cramped for your ambition. You moved to a more spacious room, furnished with a feather bed from Lady Drury.

  Overnight, you transformed your past into an apprenticeship fitting for a royal chaplain. Deciding not to publish your poems after all, you thanked God for delivering you from the Egypt of lust and from the Egypt of domestic cares, by which you meant your numerous children and a wife who could no longer meet you in conversation. That child died in my womb, too young even to count, and soon I had conceived another. Your children had become an annual crop to you, like acorns collected in the woods each autumn.

  What sort of God boarded priests like whores, drove them faint with longing, made them pregnant with hopes of resurrection? What sort of jealous God called conjugal love a sin? By then, I had found my own god with her own commandments, and Aphrodite had no mercy for men who scorned her. Her favourite punishment was petrification. You were easy to discipline, for you had already begun to turn yourself to stone.

  I was snapping off tulip heads in the garden behind Drury cottage when you rode past me in your priest’s robe to preach at Sevenoaks.

  Aunt Beth had embroidered tulips on silk for the Queen, who read symbols in the flowers. The country was full of girls named in her honour—Beth, Betty, Betsy, Eliza, Lizzy, Elsbet, Isabel, Lisa, Libby, Bess. I had named the new child Betty, but for my dead aunt, not the dead Queen.

  England changed for girls after the Queen’s death, for the King did not wish to have educated women about him. King James liked to say that to make women learned was to make them cunning, but you, my husband, fancied yourself a Thomas More who educated his daughters.

  Born the year the King was crowned, Constance had no use for such lessons. Fourteen now, she was impatient to be married. I could smell her outside the door before she came bursting into rooms, a smell to bloody mirrors and drive men mad. Sour milk and stratagems—even you rushed to obey her. Bess took her aside, whispering of these and those as if I no longer cared about such things.

  Nicholas’s wooden car was going down the lane. He would not have the strength to ride it back, though Pegge, a year younger, could do it. She would push Nicholas off and propel it up the hill, leaving him to suck his fist. She had learned to walk the same month that he did. Crawling backwards one day, and passing Nicholas walking forwards, she stood up and began to run, overtaking him in seconds.

  Why were the tall nodding angelica permitted in this London garden? They were indiscriminate, attracting flesh-flies and greenbottles. My thumbnail hesitated at the neck of a yellow-and-blue parrot that was infested with greenfly. Some alchemy made the tulips break into these exotic patterns. If I let the tulip go to seed, the seeds would not be true to the parent, but if I broke off the blossom, the bulb would draw the complexion of the flower deep inside it. Only then would the daughter bulbs, which grew like offshoots from the mother’s body, inherit the same colours.

  Before I deadheaded each tulip, I studied the pattern flaming up from the pale base. The best were unique, like a baby’s footprint. Only eight of my children had lived—Constance, Jo, George, Lucy, Bridget, Nicholas, Pegge, and Betty—and Nicholas seemed to be shrinking. And now I was weighted down by a new child in my belly, my twelfth in fifteen years.

  On the day that Nicholas died, the sparrows gathered as they did every year. The pinks opened as they did each morning, just after the pimpernels. Once the bees moved on to the celandines, the sparrows began to circle the garden. First one, then a pair, then the whole flock attacked the dark centres of the pinks, stabbing them with their beaks. Hundreds of sparrows swooped in front of me, blotting out the solid form of Pegge who was squatting in the flower bed eating the bee-mint. Her hands flew up to protect her eyes. Even a child of three has that much sense.

  You found me in the garden with the blinded pinks. The sparrows had fled and Pegge was talking to herself in a hollow of muddy earth. First the tulips had been beheaded and now the pinks destroyed. I would have to be watched all the time, in the garden and in the cottage. I might behead small boys next, or peck out the eyes of little girls.

  “Mad,” you muttered, rescuing Pegge. “He is stark mad who ever says that he has been in love an hour.”

  Perhaps you thought I could no longer hear. You stood opposite me, my sweet priest, your eyes telling me how much you suffered. We had lost four children in three years. Was it any wonder I sorrowed for them?

  You stayed away from my bed until desire ulcerated you and made you raw. When the new child had so swollen my belly that I could not see my legs, you came slinking into my room like a Catholic martyr on knees of pain. But what I got was not the love I had so missed in your arms, the quickening of our joint spirit through our mingling blood, but a sou
lless act-the payment of the marital debt. You knelt beside my bed, twisting the church fathers’ words to excuse conjugation with a great-bellied wife when it would prevent a more heinous crime, the spilling of semen by the man himself.

  A woman’s body does not have the resilience of a man’s mind. When I saw that you would do the act without a spark of love, I locked my spine and protected my belly with my hands. When you withdrew, I felt a deathchill echo deep within me.

  Blinded by pinks and tulips, by feathered petals and parrot hues, I began to rot from the inside out. Pegge was the only one still climbing in and out of my great-bed. She was such a sturdy, practical creature, already capable of telling one flower from another, the only one of my daughters to breed true. Extracting her, Bess stood her on the floor and sent her scuttling, but within minutes she was back with another armful of flowers, roots and all, feeding me petals to make me well.

  At summer’s end, you were called out of a sermon to witness the birth of your twelfth child, as cold and hard as stone.

  There is some comfort in the grave, for there is freedom to do as one wishes without regard for husband or for children. There are no pregnancies and painful birthings. Yet there is excruciating loneliness and far too much time to think. At first you would come to tell me about your grief and my poor motherless children, but once you became Dean of Paul’s I seldom heard your footsteps on the pavingstones above my head.

  Why did you stop visiting me? A conversation between lovers should never end. My amorous soul lives for its outings, my visitations upon your body. What once was pleasure has become addiction.

  Memory, my accomplice, prickles your skin when you least expect it. Your body rouses and claims your attention at the most unfitting times. An erotic memory assails you as you choose a text for a new diatribe from the pulpit. First your pupils darken, your penfingers twitching, dipping, and stroking across the paper in a drowsing rhythm as you lose track of thought. A rude pun slips into your sermon, a labial knot in a knot-garden of prose. You strike it out with a swift line of ink, but it is never quite erased. It is always there, half blotted in your mind.

  As you are preaching, you stumble over the word sin and your mouth becomes dry. The notes blur on the sheet before you. Your voice gets louder, your arms gesticulate, and your parishioners think this sudden passion meant for them. You extemporize, trying to drive the word sin further from your mind, but it insinuates itself into every sentence, concatenating and proliferating, enwrapping and complicating, animating the sermon into a paean to lust. In the audience, attention creeps out on its belly serpent-like, seeking lush gardens with illicit fruit. Ears redden, and blushes climb pruriently up cheeks. Later that night, husbands greet wives with unexpected joy, wives respond ardently in kind, and another of Donne’s sermons becomes legendary.

  But now I remember—you are on your deathbed, and I must keep by you at all times, ready to claim your soul before God fires it straight to heaven. When you pledged yourself to God, you defied your solemn vow in Lincoln’s Inn. You were wrong, my husband, labile. It was treason to give away something that belonged to me.

  On our wedding night, you wanted nothing more than to die in the act of sex and share a single grave with me. You told me we would die and rise the same, and prove mysterious by this love. I have not forgotten, though it seems to have slipped the busy mind of the high priest of St Paul’s. Did you really think that I who had given up the whole vast world for love would be content to lie alone in this narrow tomb while you went to a far more splendid grave?

  True marriages are not divorced by death, nor are lovers’ vows so easily unknotted. God has not the power to curb my love, whatever violence he has done to yours. Now you sicken in the great oak bed I loved and died in. At times, your soul rises and scouts around, checking the way ahead. Whether you are taken by flood, by fire, by fever, by plague—or more likely, I see now, by decrepitude and age—I will lay claim to what is mine. At the exact moment that your soul springs from your body, I will be there to trap it with a long, devouring kiss.

  17. SALT

  An unfinished conversation echoes in my skull. But where did we leave off, Ann? I mourned as much as any husband, but I was no Orpheus plunging into the underworld to save my beloved at the risk of my own soul. You had found a kind of peace, while I was forced to stumble among men and raise your children. Having betrayed Essex, it was not hard to turn my back on you.

  Visitors push into the room, but I keep my eyes closed. I am marooned on an island with a festering wound, but these spectators are not driven off. Spit in my face, ye Jews, and pierce my side. Why not scoff, scourge, and crucify me too?

  Someone says impatiently, “Foulness signals a quick end.” It is our son Jo, still not wearing a cassock. Does he think me deaf as well as dumb? He has been here a week going through my papers, hoping to find some manuscript to make his fortune. Constance comes in on the arm of Samuel Harvey. They hover, proud of their fecundity, hinting that they will call their first-born John. Perhaps they will begin to appraise the plate or remove the pictures from the wall. She leans over me, her eye slipping the diamond from my finger. But Constance has been away too long, and it is Pegge I want now, at the last—Pegge and Walton, whose little notebook has finally become an asset.

  They leave, not a moment too soon, for I cannot be far from death now. When Walton arrives, I will send him to the sculptor to ask whether he has purchased the marble for my effigy. Even now in the quarry, the agent might be running his knife along a block to check for suppleness and colour. It will be brought by ship and carted up the hill into Paul’s yard, where Nicholas Stone will contemplate his line into the marble. Fourteen years ago he carved your epitaph. More sought-after now, he will carve only my face and leave the shroud to his assistants. But first he will wait for my Will to be proved and the deposit to be paid.

  And for that to happen, I must die. Oh, Ann, break off this last futile lament and let me speed out of the prison of my body. Your finger beckons impatiently, though you know I cannot come. It is not wrongdoing to decompose in separate tombs. Death is divorce. Why should husband and wife be manacled in the grave like prisoners in Fleet gaol? When I die, my soul must go ahead to chart the way, while yours lags behind to burn off its amorousness. As ashes I will come, according to my pledge, but first I must go to a far more worthy place.

  Bess cares for me at night as she cared for my children, regulating the function of my organs as she regulated theirs. Now she peers into my chamber pot with thin lips, displeased with my stingy offerings. Her basins hold the ministrations of the devil. Mustard poultices for hoarseness in my chest, and purgatives to loosen my bowels. If that does not work, a greased finger will shoot up my anus, digging out a plug of stool to start the process going. Why has God seized my bowels and put this steward at them?

  Bess leaves me naked as long as she can, then covers me with the itchy horsehair blanket and throws a bucket of coals on the fire. I might as well be locked in a jakes with a lusty whore. Must I share my last cell with female infidels? The most cowardly is this mongrel who sulks and wheezes beside my bed, observing every humiliating rite I am put through with wry philosophy.

  “The dog has fleas.” Did I say that? No doubt I did. I have thought it more than once in these past weeks.

  “No more than you.” Bess swats at the old blanket, then secures it so tightly I can scarcely breathe.

  Balaam could not have been more surprised when his ass spoke than I am at hearing Bess say this. And yet Balaam’s animal was full of wisdom. Can it be possible that God has sent such gatekeepers to catechize John Donne and test his worthiness for paradise?

  What has Pegge done with Thomas Mores skull? I am sure it was here, for I heard her arguing with Mr Walton when he carried it in. There it is—on the high shelf. I can just see it if I tilt my head. Much more comforting than the sight of Bess settling herself in the chair beside me and unwrapping a hog’s pudding.

  When Pegge was little, s
he would curl up in my lap with the skull while I worked on a sermon. I feared she would block the passages, knot and slow the tumbling phrases, but instead I wrote faster, outpacing time, fleuve and effluvium, tumescence and detumescence. When I finally wearied, her fingers were white from clutching the bony eye sockets. Once she asked me what Margaret More did with her father’s bloody head after she caught it in her lap. I said that she buried it under her tulips so that when his soul returned to collect it, he would be forced to collect his daughter too.

  “Then, Father, how did the skull get here?” Pegge’s eyes were wide with the injustice of it.

  I had only been trying to console her, for no man can hunt down the bones of all his children, especially when he has fathered twelve, as I have done. In truth, it was my old fear of burial in a shallow grave, dressed up by Mores skull and a few tulips to make a tale for Pegge. In my nightmare, a dog would dig me up, chewing off my face and dragging my skull as far as Bedlam gate.

  Pegge liked to play in my library, fingers eager for my nib, her small body squirming as she watched me write. Once I found miniature words wedged into the white spaces of a sermon. The paper was ruined, so I gave it to her. Soon it was covered with minuscules and majuscules, the spurts and blottings she called stories. As she grew older, her penwork became more vain, the letters petulant, the words indelible and rude. Wedged in the fair copies she made of my sermons, I would find digressions I had never preached.

  Sometimes they had a kind of brilliance to them.

  Now here is Pegge, bumping and rustling, pushing Bess out the door. She snuffs out the candle and opens the draperies, quoting my own poetry at me. “Busy old fool, unruly sun, why dost thou thus, through windows and through curtains call on us?”