Conceit Read online

  His blunt words fell upon quiet, for Pegge’s father was now staring morosely at the dismembered goose. The sauce had congealed and the turnip had assumed a vulgar shape. Pegge began to think her father might call off the meal and send his guests away. Con must have been thinking the same thing, for she began to serve the meat herself and pass the dishes quickly down the table.

  “A flea is not as innocent as you might suppose,” their father said. “It has unsavoury habits.”

  At the word flea, Mr Alleyn made a sputtering noise. “Ah, to be a flea traversing a woman’s body!” he soliloquized. Having stepped upon the stage, he did not wish to exit until he had given pleasure to the ladies. “Many lewd poems have been written on the subject. I believe your father wrote one himself as a young man.”

  “Lewd poems?” echoed the Dean.

  Mr Alleyn sniggered. “Fleas have a reputation, sir.”

  “So I am aware,” the Dean said coolly, “just as I am aware that certain poems have been maliciously laid at my door.”

  Mr Alleyn, Pegge guessed from his smirking, had read the miscellany in which a slew of authors had imitated her father’s most famous poem. So had Pegge, for her brother George had brought it home from his college to educate his sisters.

  Her father supposed them ignorant of the poem which, George explained, was in a kind of code. When the flea bit the woman, then sank its jaws into her betrothed, there was an exchange of blood that compromised her honour. Why then, the poet Jack Donne argued, should his mistress withhold the balance of her favours?

  The mistress? Without doubt, George informed them, their adolescent mother. Mr Alleyn appeared to be on the point of explaining the same thing, but was cut off by their father, the diamond blazing on his fist.

  “The appetite of fleas is not a fit subject for my daughters. Why have you brought this old cormorant to my table, Grymes?”

  Uncle Grymes did not hear the question, for at each new volley he had tilted his chair back further and swilled down more of his brother-in-law’s good sack, until he was sliding down the wall. At any rate, the question was rhetorical, for their father’s attention had not left his guest.

  “Is this all you have to say on the subject of love, Mr Alleyn?” As their father’s lips retracted, his moustache appeared to snarl.

  “Love?” Mr Alleyn asked. If the old player was acting now, Pegge saw no sign of it.

  “You have been oddly silent on this account,” accused the Dean. “Here is my poor Con, with all her hopes and fears laid bare upon the table, while you loiter as if betting on the bearbaiting. Will you deprive me of my servant below-stairs and my companion above for such a paltry sum?”

  “I fail to take your meaning, sir,” said Mr Alleyn, looking towards the row of daughters as if the Dean had an ample supply of waiting-women in reserve.

  “You are a cold-hearted lover. What price can you put upon my daughter’s love? She has offered you all her riches.”

  What riches were these? Unless Pegge had missed one of her father’s thrusts, all he had offered was a lease worth a scant £500 at Michaelmas.

  “I have matched your offer,” Mr Alleyn said, shifting his buttocks.

  He was a big man, and prolonged sitting had stiffened him, filling up his legs with blood. As he worked the pain out of his large hams, Con sprang up and grasped the bottle of sack. Pegge watched her sister lean over to pour him a measure and let her hand glide down his arm, until his neck reddened and his eyes met hers.

  “She is young enough to be your daughter,” their father persisted, doing the calculation on his bony fingers, “in fact, your granddaughter.”

  There was a skill to this that Pegge admired. Mr Alleyn was made to feel ashamed of claiming a woman forty years his junior when, at twenty-one, the bride was past the flower of marrying. Con had been losing currency for five years and even Lucy and Bridget were being discounted daily. Lucy would be bartered off next, then Bridget, then Pegge. Her father was playing the hypocrite by arranging marriages for his daughters, though he had made a famous love-match for himself.

  The Dean’s lesson in arithmetic seemed to have frightened Mr Alleyn. “I shall be most generous upon my death,” he blurted out. “My widow shall receive another £500 when I die.”

  “Much can be said in favour of an older husband,” acknowledged their father, his tone more cordial now. “I am sure that you can be persuaded to find even more love where you have found this much already. What say you to £1,300?” Without allowing time for a rebuttal, he clapped his thigh and stood, his priest’s stockings still cowering around his ankles. “Come into my library, Grymes. Let us draw up an agreement for these young lovers. Enjoy your glass at leisure, Mr Alleyn! Constance, the sack, do not begrudge the sack, our guest is thirsty.”

  Uncle Grymes cast a regretful glance back at the bottle, and Con slipped into his chair to dish out Mr Alleyn’s pudding. She helped him to some syrup, as if he could not tip the jug himself. Pegge let the syrup run off her own knife and drizzle onto the table, until Con kicked her in the leg. Was this the man who had played Tamburlaine the Great, declaiming the immortal lines of Marlowe? Mr Alleyn had proved a disappointment, content to have the spittle wiped from his lips, a bitten and sorry bear.

  And what of that flea bite upon her father’s ankle? He was fond of pointing out the dangers of such minuscule things. Pins and combs and pulled hairs could gangrene and kill, he told his children, and men could laugh themselves to death. That flea bite had looked remarkably like the points of Con’s scissors to Pegge. She had often received a bite from them herself when she had provoked her sister. Her arm was pinked with Con’s anger, a row of chicken feet blooming from wrist to elbow.

  A pink was a small thing, a pale-red flower or a squinting eye. Even the small finger on which her father wore his diamond ring. But it was also, Pegge knew, a small and deadly warship.

  Pegge wanted to be the first to tell Izaak Walton about Con’s betrothal. Down on her knees in St Paul’s the next morning, Pegge ran her thumb over the initials Iz. Wa. scratched into Duke Humphrey’s tomb where, later in the day, the loiterers would play cards and drink, barely turning their backs to relieve themselves. Their wide boots made their hips thrust out like ships rolling at anchor, but Walton had an easy sway, a confidence of bone and sinew. Unlike the other youths, he smelt pleasantly of river, not tobacco. An ironmonger by trade, he now seemed to do little more than make tackle for his fellow anglers.

  The cathedral was a city unto itself. All of London took exercise in Paul’s walk and posted notices at the Si Quis door, where Walton posted his signs for tackle. Taking a shortcut from Cheapside, butchers wheeled sides of beef through the transepts and down the hill to Paul’s wharf, bickering with fishmongers pushing their loaded carts back up. When the clatter broke into his sermons, Pegge’s father strode out from the choir to reprimand the tradesmen, stretching out his arms like Christ to block the raucous thoroughfare.

  But the young idlers in the nave were worse. Only a few, like Izaak Walton, would straggle into the choir to hear her father preach. Afterwards, Walton would follow Constance into Paul’s walk, trying to discuss the sermon while she admired the Blackfriars actors walking up and down, learning their lines in their tight hose. But Constance liked toying with Walton well enough. Tormented him, in fact. He had been hanging about her for months, desiring more than laughter from her lips.

  Now, from behind Duke Humphrey’s tomb, where she had hoped to intercept Walton, Pegge saw the two of them coming down Paul’s walk. Constance stopped near a pillar, bestowing a salty kiss on his cheek, while he blushed right into the roots of his limp golden hair. Then she whispered something into his ear. Pegge knew that Con was telling him she was betrothed by the way Walton slumped like a dead-hearted grayling, a winter fish that sank to the bottom.

  Pegge watched him stagger out of Paul’s, and followed his drooping fishing rod to Tottenham. When he disappeared over the hill, she tied up her skirt and ran after the sa
d pole, her boots sticking out beneath her petticoat.

  As she fell in step, he lengthened his stride. After a while, he gave up trying to outpace her and said, “You had better go back. I am not coming home this night or two.”

  “Then I must go as well, to stop you doing yourself some injury. Unrequited love,” she explained, blowing out a plume of air.

  “This is between me and Constance and Edward Alleyn, who does not deserve her. Turn back at once, Pegge Donne.”

  Pegge fell behind, imitating his gait from a safe distance. He threw a few rocks at her to chase her off, but when one of them grazed her, he put down his pole to adjust it until he saw she was unhurt.

  “You cannot come with me. I would have your father to answer to and I have had enough pain on your sister’s account.”

  “I will marry you instead of Con,” she offered. She held out her finger to show him the iron band he had made himself. “From Con’s sewing basket. I saw her hide it after you gave it to her.”

  She walked beside him for a while, but he looked so downhearted that she returned the ring. It was too big for her anyway.

  “You are only eleven, a child who knows nothing of these things.” He dropped it into his pouch, then said more kindly, “At any rate, your father would never agree. He has set his mind against ironmongers since his father began as one.”

  “By the time he has shifted Lucy and Bridget, he will be more eager. If you don’t marry me, he will barter me off to an old mackerel like Mr Alleyn. There was a nasty stink about it, though Mr Alleyn got the worst, Con being Con.”

  “You hardly know what a wife must do. There are things that pass between husband and wife that-” He turned his eyes away.

  “I know more than you think, for I have read my father’s poem about his mistress coming to bed.” She saw his grip slacken on the fishing rod. “You needn’t be so indifferent, Izzy. I must take off everything in order. First girdle, then spangled breastplate and happy busk, then gown and coronet and shoes. It is not so hard and I shall manage quite well without Bess, for I don’t wear all those things that other women wear.”

  He tripped over his feet and struggled to get them back underneath his body. When he was properly upright he said, “I do not want you for a wife, Pegge Donne. You have spoken plainly and so must I.” He added quickly, “But with your ingenious small fingers, you will make a good angler. You may help me twist hairs into lines and catch live bait, for each fish is partial to one kind.”

  To learn to fish would be something. Perhaps he would make her a rod as long as his. It must have been all of fourteen feet. She crouched to inspect some mud pulsing alongside the path and flushed out a wintering frog, blue with fright. When she picked it up in her muddy fist, it jumped back into the ditch.

  “Why does everyone think me such a child? My father went up to Oxford at my age and I am learning French and Latin as he did.”

  “Then do not marry, for it will all be wasted. That is the fate of women, Pegge. Constance is marrying Mr Alleyn to please your father. You know the power the Dean holds over her.”

  This was too irksome. “My father is not to blame. You have never understood Con. She wants the Master of the King’s Bears and Bulls, not a simple angler.” She pointed to his head, which was well protected from the heavy mist. “What is that hat? It is hardly a lover’s. Where is your powdered hair? Your perfumed gloves? What love sonnets did you write my sister?” She could not stop herself now. “She calls you Pissy-Issy because you have a fishy smell as if you leaked all over your hose!”

  She was about to tell him she could not abide tobacco and perfume herself but he had gone as soft and grey as the lead in St Paul’s roof She was glad she had taken his gutting knife for safekeeping. Clutching his stomach, he broke off towards the river, weaving blindly through the muddy field, running then stumbling towards a grove of trees stripped of their summer greenery. Crowned by empty crows’ nests, the ebony limbs stretched up into the darkening sky.

  All at once, there was a dreadful thump and Walton fell to the ground, nursing his head. She ran towards him, mucking her petticoat with so much filth there would be no sneaking it past Bess. He had taken a jagged gash to his temple and she wiped the blood off with her hem. As the stink of manure drifted over from a cottager’s field, the rain began to pelt in earnest. A hedgehog darted out of a bush and scurried off. The sky would soon be bereft of light. Just before the clouds blacked it out, the dying sun shot out a squib of gold and the wind parted Izaak Walton’s hair like barley sheaves laid up for winter.

  “Come, I’ll help you to the nearest tavern,” she said, resting his pole on her own shoulder. “It was only a low branch, not a fatal blow from Aphrodite.”

  3. ST LUCY’S EVE

  The red spot on her father’s ankle did not go away, but seemed to swell and shrink according to his moods, and he was as morose as Izaak Walton, who had become an open, festering sore.

  Perhaps it was the fault of the book that Mr Alleyn gave her father, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The bulging quarto would depress anyone’s spirits, Pegge reasoned, carrying it to her own chamber and opening it cheerfully. Choler, she read by candlelight, made a man furious, short-tempered, and subject to apparitions. Melancholy sank him in low spirits, making him think himself bewitched or even dead.

  Melancholy could reside in the liver, heart, womb, or hem-rods. It could come from overexciting the fancy, agitating the passions, or eating red meats. Most likely her father had scholarly melancholy, or perhaps only a windy hypochondria that would require evacuation with one of Bess’s enemas.

  Of all the types Burton listed, most curious was love melancholy. The philosophers had once cut up a man who had died for love. His heart was found to be combust, his liver smoky, his lungs dried up, and his soul roasted from the vehemency of love’s fire. Beauty was a cause of love, and beauty, Burton said, could be made vehement by artifice. Certainly Con had employed a wealth of Bess’s ointments in the service of love. Or was it lust? Of woman’s unnatural, insatiable lust, Burton wrote, what country, what village does not complain? This curious fact went a long way towards explaining Con’s hold over Mr Alleyn and Walton, who was acting as if he had been disembowelled.

  Burton’s cures for lovesickness included stuffing camphor down the suitor’s breeches to stifle his urges and hiding his beloved’s excrement under his pillow. Neither remedy was within Pegge’s grasp. Camphor was as costly as saffron, and though Con was as regular as their father’s striking clock, she was fastidious about disposing of her movements.

  More promising was the idea that the suitor could be made gluttonous with two mistresses, the second spoiling his appetite for the first. Perhaps, Pegge hoped, Walton could be made to fall in love with her. She scraped his dried blood off her petticoat, then poised his knife above her thigh to draw her own blood for a love-potion. But what, she brooded, if she carved too deep and bled to death, or if the wound gangrened and killed her? What good was a love that moved the sun and stars if she was underground with maggots?

  Pegge turned her attention back to her father, unwilling to let him succumb to his ill-humour. Soon it was Martinmas, the time for slaughtering animals, and a dozen chickens arrived from a parishioner. Carving up a capon for Pegge and her sisters, their father announced that he had put Con’s wedding forward, so that if he died-such was his frame of mind at losing his eldest daughter-Mr Alleyn could not renegotiate the terms. Even Con looked dispirited, since she would have little time to sew her wedding garments. Pegge was the only sanguine one, welcoming the day she would slide closer to her father along the bench of daughters. She had already talked him into giving her Con’s bedchamber, a roomy one which butted up against his own.

  Pegge inspected her new chamber on the eve of her sister’s wedding. Sitting on the window-sill in the dark, Con was hugging a pot of heart’s ease that had withered from cold blasts near the pane. Pegge squeezed beside Con and surveyed the room, twice as large as the one s
he shared with Betty. Con was warm and drowsy and her robe swung loosely in the moonlight, the colour of ripe summer plums, revealing the roundness of her breasts and belly.

  Con’s face was flattened against the glass. “I wanted to marry on St Lucy’s eve, when father himself married, for it is the longest night of the year, a night for lovers.”

  “What are you looking at, Con?”

  Con pointed to the shadowy lane below the window. “Jane Shore’s meeting place.”

  Jane had been one of King Edward’s mistresses, Con said, the one Thomas More had called the merriest harlot in the realm. As far as Pegge could see, this was the only information Con had ever retained from a book. According to More, Jane coupled with William Shore before she was well ripe. Soon her old husband was impotent, and Jane was in full appetite. With her pretty foot and pleasing tongue, she made the King her thrall, then bewitched his stepson and his chamberlain. Forced to do penance for her lust, she carried her taper to Paul’s Cross dressed only in her kirtle, which made the gawking onlookers her slaves as well.

  Pegge touched her sister’s arm. “Which man did she love best, Con?”

  “Thomas More did not say, but I am sure it was the King.”

  On Lucy’s eve, Pegge was awakened by the sound of laughter outside the window of her new chamber and knew at once that the ghost of Jane Shore was abroad.

  Sadie was hiccuping under the bed, having got herself into the Deanery and up the stairs by stealth. The dog had been sneaking in ever since Con had gone off to live with Mr Alleyn, leaving the household to stew in its moroseness. Pegge hoped Sadie would not pine away and die of grief, as melancholy dogs were known to do.

  Pegge pulled on her boots and the old purple gown, soft with washings, that Con had left behind along with her wilted plant. Pegge was sure that Jane Shore would not pass up such a night as this. Peering out the glass, she tried to spot Jane’s flickering taper in the lane. Pegge was ready to follow, to see where Jane took her lover and what she did to keep him so in thrall. Pegge was dozing against the window when she heard Jane’s merry, cajoling spirit coaxing her lover through the December fog and cold with her laughter.