Conceit Page 2

  In the harrowing light, Pegge is trying to see where the fragments of the effigy have landed. She must map her route carefully, for her shawl offers little protection from the predatory heat. The wooden choir stalls are already smoking. Set free by the softening lead, wedges of glass begin to sail out of the windows and embed themselves in solid objects or shatter on the pavingstones.

  All at once, the roof splits open with a monumental crack and Pegge hurtles to safety, tasting a spurt of blood as the baby tooth punctures her tongue. Six acres of roofing-lead begin to pour into the cathedral like sauce from a demented ladle. Then the roof itself comes down, breaking through the floor that separates St Paul’s from St Faith’s in the crypt beneath. She can now see into the bone-hole where the corpses, her father’s among them, are buried in earth so dry it sparks and smoulders into flame. With another thunderous crack, the vaulting deep below gives way and the coffins begin to tilt and slide into St-Faith s-under-Paul’s. Within minutes, the books stacked up in Faith’s for safety are burning lustily.

  Creeping along the perimeter of the choir, Pegge locates the largest fragment, but can only carry it a few feet at a time. She half-carries, half-drags it through the rubble in her shawl, picking her way over the slabs of Purbeck marble which cannot, she reasons, be attacked by fire. She knows the walls are nine feet thick in places, but nothing is certain anymore, for she has seen the earth itself catch fire this day. As she looks back into the choir, the rose window buckles, the walls bulge, the façade splinters and collapses, and the massive building-stones fly out like cannon shot.

  At Paul’s wharf, Sir William Bowles, the King’s tailor, is waiting in his hired barge for Pegge. His wig askew, he is as agitated as Noah when the tide is turning and his wife is nowhere to be found.

  William has never enjoyed such mystery plays. He would much rather know where people are and what things mean. He has been waiting long enough to have gone through all shades of anger and emerged in livid fear for his wife’s safety. Pressing a kerchief to his nose to ward off the stench of burning tar, he holds his pocket-clock in his other palm like a silver heart. If they do not leave soon, the barge will be caught in tidal waters between Hammersmith and Kingston. Hideous sounds are echoing inside Paul’s, as if the walls themselves are tumbling, and flames are shooting up the tower. Why has Pegge sent a note to meet her here? She knows their baskets were to be loaded upriver, outside the City walls. Docking at Paul’s wharf is folly.

  A loaded cart appears out of the strange red light, jolting down the steep grade towards him, restrained by ropes and blocks. The cart tips, and the men stop to steady the horse and balance the load. Even draped in canvas, the shape on the cart is maddeningly familiar. Of all the valuables being swallowed by the flames, why has Pegge chosen to rescue her father’s effigy?

  William spots her now behind the cart, a petticoat of Italian silk billowing shamelessly around bare legs. He starts to climb out of the barge to help, then thinks better of it. In truth, he is relieved to see Pegge at all. It would have been like her to disappear into the smoke, for she often wanders at odd hours in the maze of streets around St Paul’s. He has seen her visiting her father’s tomb dressed like a ragged child, yet she has put on her new gown to flee the burning city. Surely she did not go to her dancing lesson on such a day?

  And is that Izaak Walton at her side, where it is William’s place to be? They are swinging a large object between them in her shawl, putting it down every few yards to rest their wrists. Although Pegge’s stockings are down around her ankles, William will ask no questions, but hasten her into the barge. He will say nothing about her father’s statue, nor her old friend Mr Walton, whose hair is stuck to his scalp in the most ungentlemanly clumps. Where did she find him in this holocaust? A wretched cat is jumping at his leg, probably because he stinks offish. It is just like Pegge to collect all the stray animals in her path.

  Crates and baskets and rounds of cheese are piled helter-skelter on the quay since there are no boats left to ferry goods across the river. The desperate have set their possessions adrift, hoping to recover them with boat-hooks when they float below the bridge. William’s hand flutters near his sword, ready to defend his ship and wife, but Pegge is at home in the milling crowd, squatting next to the burnt cat to calm it while the men ease the horse-cart through the mass of people and goods on the wharf. She must have paid the wharfinger in advance, for he attaches his hook to the bundled statue at once, lowering it with jerking motions into the barge. As the effigy settles into the stern, William feels the full weight of his father-in-law, John Donne, who has been dead for more than thirty years.

  Pegge climbs into the barge, stepping ankle-deep in bilge. Walton swings the heavy bundle over the gunwale, then climbs in next to her. Another pair of shoes in ruins, William thinks. He cannot bear to contemplate the damage to Pegge’s gown. Grease has beaded on his doublet and his wig is shedding flakes of ash. It has been a most untidy day.

  The air is sulphurous as they set off upriver to Clewer, the shrouded sun lurking on the horizon, or perhaps it is the rising moon-he cannot read the hands on his pocket-clock even when he holds it to his eyes. Downriver, he sees an angry theatre of sky morbid reds and blacks which bleed into the rushing water, and a colour between red and yellow he does not have a name for, a discovery he would normally find intriguing. Like some sort of fruit. Not a peach. A ripe persimmon, he thinks, turning his back on the spectacle to try to read Pegge’s face. As she leans towards Izaak Walton, the garish light carves hollows deep into her cheeks.

  When Walton came aboard, William saw the man grope dazedly for Pegge, then rest a broad palm on her knee to steady himself. He still has his hand on her leg, even though the barge is under way. The old fool is not as childlike as he feigns. There is collusion in their fire-brightened eyes and their limbs are paired like the folded arms of a drawing-compass. Have they saved the effigy or stolen it? There is no knowing what is going on in Pegge’s head, if indeed anything is. As her husband, he is due an explanation, yet William cannot speak because of the power his wife holds over him, even after all these years.

  The men pull slowly at the long oars, saving themselves for the rough waters ahead. William reaches for Pegge to pull her away from the men at the bow. When he loosens her petticoat from Walton’s grip, their feet shift and expose the object they were carrying in her shawl-the grotesque head of her father, carved with uncanny likeness into stone, exact even to the hooded eyelids and the moustache drawn back around the teeth.

  William lets Pegge go, for her nose is twitching and she appears about to cry. The barge lurches as it hits turbulent water, the grimacing head escapes Pegge’s feet and rolls into the bilge, and William sits down too quickly, thumping his tailbone and startling the burnt cat under a basket.

  Now both of Mr Walton’s hands are free, and William sees both attach themselves to a skirt of watered silk.

  YEARNINGS

  1622-1631

  1. THE DEANERY

  Pegge wanted to follow Izaak Walton out to Chelsea, but was told to stay inside the Deanery. She was learning French and Latin from the tutor, and had discovered it was unwise to show her brothers up. When she recited her passage too quickly, she was sent to learn another. Now she would be lucky to catch up with Walton on his way back into London.

  At last, she was able to escape. She slipped past her brother George, who was schooling his bloodied face to the razor, past her sister Constance with her head bent over her needlework, and sidestepped their old servant Bess, who was giving little Betty an enema. Pegge told her brother Jo the tutor wanted to hear his Latin, then patted Sadducee sneaking through the open door. This drooling, warmth-seeking, self-pitying stray would sprawl on the hearthstone until Bess called out her name so slowly and with such menace that the dog would slink back out-of-doors. She would hide in the flower bed until she got up courage for a new pilgrimage back to the warmth and scraps of the hearth.

  Pegge could not take the dog alo
ng until she found some way of training her. Sadie did not have the knack of blending in. Just yesterday, the dog entered Paul’s sanctuary when Pegge’s father was performing the divine office. Misled by her nose, the dog tracked an old scent up the stairs into the choir loft and whimpered like a lost child—the sound echoing throughout the vast cathedral—eliciting smiles and bringing the Dean’s performance to a jerky, embarrassed halt.

  Outside the Deanery, Pegge plucked an apple from her father’s tree and ate it, core and all. She cut a straight line downhill from Paul’s, heel to toe, then five steps and a squared corner into Wardrobe lane, picking up speed like an Indiaman under full sail past the sign of a pie over the baked goods at Neatflyte’s. She made a dog-leg through Blackfriars, up and over Bridewell bridge, enjoying the stench of the Fleet below, then broke into a run, slowing only to note a pigeon flapping its cage up and down in a market stall.

  On the watch for Walton coming back from Chelsea, where he had gone to hear her father preach, she poked her stick into ditches, hoping to turn up the bones of a plague-victim to show him, or a pair of dogs locked in copulation such as her brother Jo boasted of seeing. The best she could do was a dead rat, though she had to drive off angry crows to secure it. Climbing to the top of a dovecot for a view, she brandished her rat at the mewling crows, fancying herself an Ariadne left behind by Theseus, her eyes filling with the pain of Ariadne’s blind, devoted love.

  Instead of Walton, she saw her father on his way back into the City, making good speed towards the Deanery on his new horse.

  Pegge ran past the King’s Wardrobe back to Neatflyte’s where the Bowles twins were now waiting for their father, the Groom and Yeoman of the King’s Tents and Pavilions. She saw that the letters on the sign had been freshly defaced by a boyish knife, leaving the word eatfly hovering over the stale baked goods, and wished she had thought of this herself. One twin was moving his lips studiously as he read a folio while his brother was licking Mr Neatflyte’s strawberries to make them look the sweeter. Helping herself to a small pie, Pegge took the Deanery corner crisply and found Sadie hiding behind the flowers with her tail wagging in full view. Pegge stepped in front of the tail at the precise moment that her father rode into the courtyard on his mare Parrot.

  Pegge watched her father dismount. He straightened his legs, danced about to get the blood flowing, then inspected the tree he was cultivating in the small garden, which no one else was allowed to touch. Parrot nuzzled at his arm, begging for a codling. The Dean selected an apple, gave it a polish on his sleeve, then held it out on his palm. Parrot bit off half the codling and worked it to the back of her jaw with her tongue. As the horse crunched down with her back teeth, the dog surfaced from her hiding place.

  “Better you than Eve,” Pegge’s father said to the mare, stroking her nose and feeding her the other half.

  The dog began to howl, sounding remarkably like a child who had stubbed her toe. Her father did not seem to notice Pegge, although she could not be invisible for she was almost nine years old.

  Without turning his head, he said to Sadie, “You don’t even like apples,” and then to Pegge, “Remove that animal from my prize auriculas at once.”

  Now that her father was Dean of Paul’s, he lived from sermon to sermon, saying as soon as he had delivered himself of one that he was with child with another. He would shut himself up in his library, coaxing the new sermon into shape and larding it with references. Pegge would slip in to find him practising in front of the mirror, drinking in the rhetoric as if he were drinking in tobacco smoke. Every so often, he would stop and test a grimace to judge its effect on his audience.

  On the Lord’s Day, he would rise early and transport himself by whatever conveyance was at hand, whether a benefactor’s coach or his own mare. When he was preaching at St Paul’s, his children were expected to attend. The sermons were tormented by images of bodily fluids and faeces, of bones liquefying, of rotting flesh gummed down by predators and masticated into particles. He would latch on to a word and torture it. One clod of sin was bad enough, but what of concatenated sins, sin enwrapped and complicated in sin, sin entrenched and barricadoed, screwed up and riveted with sin, sin wrastling with the mercies of God? The word bloated up and burst from the pressure, like a bladder kicked about by her father’s pointed boots.

  On the hard benches in Paul’s choir, the children mastered the art of daydreaming, of aping the role of listeners. They lounged about in their minds while their bodies knelt, skewered by their father’s roving gaze. The boys looked up into the crumbling vault and took aim at pigeons with imaginary crossbows. The girls dreamt of amassing dowries to free themselves from their father’s sway.

  But Pegge listened. She could hear the bodies decomposing under her feet in the privacy of tombs. Her hearing was acute, able to pick out threads of silence, like the subhuman sounds of worms extruding casts or like the silent descenders in a printer’s font.

  When the sermon was finished and the children free to leave, Pegge often visited her mother’s church. Now that she could read the Latin on the gravestones, she knew there was a plague of dead Donnes inside St Clement’s. Mary and Francis, who were spirits. Nicholas, who had wasted away. The nameless baby who had killed her mother by dying inside her. And Ann-most beloved, most dear, most mourned of mothers and of wives.

  ANN DONNE

  1617 AUGUST 15

  THIS STONE IS COMMANDED TO SPEAK THE GRIEF

  OF HER HUSBAND JOHN DONNE

  (BY GRIEF MADE SPEECHLESS LIKE AN INFANT)

  WHO HEREBY PLEDGES HIS ASHES TO HER ASHES

  IN A NEW MARRIAGE WEDDED

  2. JEZEBEL DID PAINT

  He was the Word that spake it,

  He took the bread and brake it.

  And what that Word did make it,

  I do believe and take it.

  So the Dean began the meal, the diamond ring flashing on his piously joined hands.

  The sisters were sitting on the bench from youngest to eldest-Betty, Pegge, Bridget, Lucy, and Constance, who sat beside their father to help him carve and serve. Across from Pegge, who had been told to mind her tongue, was Uncle Grymes. He had brought a Mr Alleyn, a man well past his youth who had recently lost his wife. An actor in his day, he was now the Master of the King’s Bears and Bulls. Pegge had been hoping he would recite something from Christopher Marlowe, some lines that would move him to a widower’s tears, but though he wore black, he seemed determined to enjoy himself.

  Pegge had just heard Uncle Grymes stutter out the terms whereupon Edward Alleyn would marry her sister Constance. It was spoiling the taste of a well-seasoned soup. She bit down on a bone that had no business being there. Con, tipping her bowl politely, which she never bothered to do when the family ate alone, did not seem surprised by Uncle Grymes’s proposal. Nor did Bridget, who was patting her lips neatly with a little cloth.

  Con and Bridget had been so fidgety before the meal that Bess had declared them coming down with greensickness and offered to worm them. Flat on her belly, eye to the crack of the door, Pegge had seen her sisters taking the curling rags out of their hair and painting one another’s faces. Now, in the warm lamplight, Con’s cheeks and bosom glowed. Pegge could detect the scent of honeysuckle though it was late October.

  Her father was now holding forth about the pain of losing a wife and raising seven motherless children, digging up black words, sleek with memory, that the children had heard many times before. The sack bottle had become marooned at his end of the table. When the air had been rendered completely dank and humourless, Con sent the bottle on its rounds again and asked Mr Alleyn a gay question about the bearbaiting.

  Mr Alleyn began talking with bread in his mouth, like an actor of the common stage. Pegge put down her spoon and stared. His coarseness had a beauty that made her catch her breath, but she could see the veins bulging at her father’s temple.

  When Mr Alleyn laughed and swallowed the wrong way, her father leapt. “God can choke you with a cr
umb, with a drop, at a voluptuous feast. He can sink down the stage and the player, the bed of wantonness and the wanton actor, into the jaws of the earth, into the mouth of hell. He can surprise you even in the act of sin!”

  This was too much for Mr Alleyn, who looked uneasily from side to side.

  As their father carved the goose, he sailed briskly into the story of how, two years before, he had been called to attend the King and found him heartily devouring a meal of roast meats. Though their father had ridden his mount hard, he was not offered so much as a chair.

  Instead, King James said, “Dr Donne, I have invited you to dinner, and though you sit not down with me, yet I will carve you a dish which I know you love well. Knowing you love London, I do therefore make you Dean of Paul’s. When I have dined, then do you take your beloved dish home to your study, say grace there to yourself, and much good may it do you.”

  Their father chose this moment to sever the goose leg with a savage blow, sending a tremor along the bench to Pegge, who splashed her ale. As he was about to resume his anecdote, Con dropped something on the floor. When she bent to retrieve it, their father let out a yelp and jumped to his feet, dancing back and forth. Drawing down his hose, he clapped a greasy hand to his ankle, complaining that he had been viciously attacked.

  “It was only a flea, Father,” Con said, a note of warning in her voice.

  He sat down, wondering aloud whether a man might get rabies from insect bites or even, if left untreated, gangrene. His priest’s stockings were still down around his ankles in a frightening display of slovenliness.

  Mr Alleyn’s stomach rumbled and he took up his knife as a hint to his host. “A good dish of meat will settle your anxieties, sir.”