Conceit Page 4

  The King responded, “Sweet mistress, where are you?” A noble lovesick call, though his voice was hoarse from a century spent in his damp grave at Windsor.

  Jane’s spirit was hovering a little above the earth, provoking and enticing. “Come hither, love,” she called.

  And then Pegge heard the noble response, drifting hoarsely through the night: “As the grave is your house, we two shall make our beds together in the dark.”

  Pegge leaned out the window, but something was not quite right, for the King’s aggrieved and muffled voice had not come from the lane, but through the wall-in fact, from the adjoining chamber.

  It was the father of night, her father. He was calling out in a melancholy dream, but surely not for Jane Shore? Pegge entered his bedchamber, staying away from the glowing coals. There was no need to hide, however, for he could have had thorns in his eyelids and thistles in his hose for all he knew. He was fully dressed on top of the bed, in some sort of trance, his tongue working uselessly, as if half-formed words were struggling to escape in poems. What sweet, tormenting thoughts were still inside him, what black-butter dreams?

  Her mouth against his ear, she whispered, “Come hither, love,” to entice his lips to form the words.

  At this, he jerked himself up and off the bed, snatched his hat from the hook, and stumbled down the stairs. Collecting the lamp kept near the door, he trimmed the wick. This seemed particularly clever for a man who was walking in his sleep. She waited for his hat to merge with the shadows in the lane, then followed.

  Pegge had never been out-of-doors in such a loose garment. As she rounded the Dean’s corner, where the wind always blew, a cool finger of breath lifted the neck of the purple robe and slid into her clavicle, breath marrying bone, then traversed her breastbone, and burrowed into her navel like a flea trying to get warm. Then the flea danced back out, took a bite and kissed her flesh, its hollows and mounds, assessing how much she had grown, how her hip bones jutted in the loose gown, how her nipples bristled in the cold, and how her womanhood was held like an unripe peach between her legs, the pale hairs ready to burst into a dark, vigorous clump like Con’s.

  Was this how a poem felt when it came whistling over naked parchment? Her pale hairs only awaited a poet’s call to break through the skin like new teeth in a baby’s tender gums.

  But where was that poet, her father? He had almost got away, dreaming on his feet. It was a fool’s pursuit, for by now Jane would be entertaining her royal lover with more than laughing words. Perhaps Pegge’s father was headed towards one of the taverns along Fleet street where such liaisons were rumoured to take place. But now Pegge saw where he was going. Not on some noble lovesick mission, but sailing at a good clip, like a merchantman with the wind at its back, on a voyage of his own undertaking.

  On St Lucy’s day, Pegge was awakened by her father talking loudly in the hall below. Her head aching, she leaned into the stairwell to listen.

  It seemed that Lucy’s eve was not only a night for lovers’ trysts but also a night for vandals, for the vicar of St Clement’s had come round to report that the tomb of Mrs Donne had been broken open in the night. Still bone-cold from chasing after her father, Pegge stumbled back to her chamber.

  At noon, she rose to find that the sacrilege had driven her father to bed with an angry pustulous fever. Bess was tying a bread poultice over the spots erupting on his feet. When he shouted at Bess, she tied the poultice even tighter. Then, stirring up the coals, she left him sweating in his misery. Pegge sat down beside him, feeling the warmth seep back into her flesh at last.

  By mid-afternoon, the spots had begun to march up her father’s calves. Doctor Foxe ordered that all books and tobacco be removed from the sickroom, for the patient’s humours were too volatile. At this, it took all the doctor’s powers to calm her father, who shouted that his wife’s ghost had escaped from her grave, taken up residence in a flea, and bitten his ankle in a fury. Nothing could rattle Doctor Foxe, however. He took Pegge aside and told her that the Dean was allowed one page a day, and one page only, on which to void his manifold anxieties.

  Pegge bought a stack of folio sheets from a bookseller in Paul’s churchyard, giving her father the first huge page at once. He covered it in a furious crabbed hand, then lay back in exhaustion. Touching his brow, she found it both shivery and scalding. She applied a cold flannel, but he flung it at the wall, where it left an ominous wet stain for hours. When the doctor returned the next morning, he read the page with dismay and conceded that the patient might be allowed a little tobacco, after all, to cool his heated mind.

  Day after day, Pegge hovered near her father’s sickbed, fearful of his blackening mood. A cold morbidity wrapped around a hot fever, a riddling distemper-how much further could he sink? The whiskers thickened on his jaw, for he refused to call the boy to shave him. Each morning, she carried in one printer’s sheet, his box of pipes, and a soothing ounce of tobacco. Each evening, she added the new page to the feverish stack and carried out the box of pipes. There was never even a fleck of tobacco to return to the tin.

  On the thirteenth day, the spots broke through the barrier of smelly poultices around his waist and erupted above the mustard plaster on his chest. As night fell, the Dean blew his battered trumpet to call his children to him. The suffocating heat dampened their noise as they entered. Propped up against his Turkish pillow, he commanded them to their knees to pray for their mother’s soul. Then he recited the evening prayer and required them to give the answers.

  After the last faltering response and peevish correction, he announced, “You have lost a second mother in Constance and now you are about to lose a father. I am ready, I may say I am eager, to be taken by God.”

  Lucy threw her face into her dirty petticoat and wept, exposing an undarned rent in her stocking the size of a goose egg.

  “Do not sniff, Lucy,” George said, trying to make light of it. “You are a good girl, though none too clever. I am sure some foreign nunnery will have you.”

  “Oh my God, my God,” their father called out, his hands raised towards the ceiling, “you have made this sickbed your altar. Will you accept a spotted sacrifice, or do you seek only unspottedness here?”

  Bridget plucked at a loose thread in her needlework. Since Con’s marriage, Pegge had never seen Bridget without this half-embroidered bridal under-garment.

  “Father,” Bridget said, “this is a very poor time for you to be dying. Can you not put it off? I am to marry soon. You said you would arrange it.”

  “When I am dead, you will go to Constance with your sisters. Jo and George will not return to Oxford, but must take up their careers at once. I am well content to send one son to the church and another to the wars.”

  This announcement was as unwelcome to her brothers as it was to Pegge, who had no particular wish to live with Con.

  “You are not so ill that you cannot recover, Father,” Bridget complained.

  “The sickness has broken out into malignant boils!” their father shouted. “Many die of its virulence within three days.”

  “Then you have passed the worst,” Jo said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. “You have lasted thirteen.”

  “I have been fifty years in this putridness. I have no appetite for life, I cannot sleep, and I can barely sit up.”

  He looked as agile to Pegge as he had ever done, though a red spot had just erupted on his nose.

  “You are weak because you are fasting, sir,” said George, perching on the bed and filching a lump of food from the uneaten supper. “And you would feel better if you shaved.”

  “We die every day and we die all the day long.” Each word was dropping like distilled liquor from a boiling retort. “The skin over these bones is but a winding-sheet. Each bell that tolls for another hastes my own funeral. My body will soon be with your mother’s in her grave.”

  “And what will you do there?” asked little Betty in spite of Pegge’s jabbing elbow.

  “Await our joint
resurrection,” her father boomed, as if to the deaf.

  Even Betty knew of the resurrection, though she was hazy on the mechanics of getting there. Pegge saw her scratch her bottom quizzically through several layers of wool. After their mother died, their father had declared himself crucified for love, a phrase passed down in awe from the eldest to the youngest. Even now, Pegge could not drive it from her mind.

  “Since your mother’s soul was ravished into heaven, my mind has been wholly set on heavenly things.”

  “But it didn’t, did it?” said Pegge.

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Didn’t go to heaven,” she said stubbornly. “On Lucy’s eve, you seemed to think that my mother’s soul was buried with her body underground. You brought this spottedness upon yourself by roaming through the streets that night.”

  Pegge met her father’s stare, remembering the cold that had driven deep into her marrow, then rooted her feet deep into the boots that had been Bridget’s, that had been Lucy’s and, long before that, Con’s.

  On Lucy’s eve, a fortnight before, Pegge had followed her father along Fleet street past the Cock and Key and the Boar’s Head. By the time he was abreast of the Star and Ram, she was sorry she was wearing the loose purple gown. Once he passed the Queen’s Head, she knew where he was going.

  He entered St Clement’s just ahead of her, then disappeared. She was huddling behind a screen when she heard the sexton’s crowbar scraping all along the nave. Wielding the iron clumsily, her father finally got it wedged deep enough to shift a pavingstone to one side. Then he knelt on the cold floor, speaking lover’s gibberish to the underworld while she wished herself back under her old blanket. One of his poems had hinted at an unsavoury graveside reunion, amusing when read by candlelight in her warm bed but lacking in all humour in the draughty church in which her father’s cries now echoed.

  “I have come to keep my promise, Ann.” He threw the crowbar into the gaping chasm with a horrid ringing. “We two shall make our beds together in the dark.” Dropping nimbly over the edge, he landed in the bone-hole.

  What about us? Pegge thought. My scattered flock of wretched children, as he liked to call them when chatting to the bishop. How much more scattered and wretched they would be if he pulled the flagstone down on top of his head for good.

  Just then Sadie hurtled in, her coat as frizzled as if she had been running for an hour after the wrong scent. Going straight to the Dean’s discarded hat, she worried it with her teeth. Then, paying no attention to Pegge, who guessed she was too cold by then to have a scent, the dog sniffed around the gaping hole-which was filled now with the thud of iron against lead, now a cracking like a rib cage being fractured, and now a terrifying stream of cryptic poetry. Her ears outraged but her loyalty unswerving, Sadie sat on her hindquarters and howled to call her Orpheus back from the underworld. In this she was at once successful, for Pegge’s father broke off his unwholesome tryst and scrambled out of the bone-hole, dragging the crowbar with him. He took out his striking clock and shook it, unable to believe until it chimed that it was really midnight. He looked about the church, then at the dog wagging her tail at his feet. Flinging the crowbar across the aisle in anger, he chased the yelping animal into the night.

  As the yelps and curses faded down the Strand, Pegge squatted next to the chipped flagstone and felt a rush of foetid air escape her mother’s tomb. It was certainly the darkest night of the year, though so far she had seen little to do with love. The fallen lamp cast dreadful shadows and the mustiness crept down her throat and into her lungs like pleurisy.

  Was her father trying to bed her mother right there in Clement’s, or was he digging out poems he had rashly buried with her corpse? The horrid thudding had told Pegge he had pried the coffin open. What did he feel when he stuck his hand into the clammy void-parchment verses or papery dried flesh? Perhaps the corpse hadn’t yet turned to mummy, dry and brittle with age, but was like the slimy pigs’ jelly that Bess sometimes made Pegge eat. Her mother’s corpse might still be in the liquefaction, the colliquation, the melting of the bowels that her father said took place in the dead. It was impossible to tell from this angle, and Pegge was beginning to think she would rather not see. The fallen lamp had begun to flicker like Jane Shore’s ghostly taper, and a thin reedy sound was coming from the bone-hole. Was that Jane’s penitential sigh or Ann’s trapped soul she heard?

  Pegge did not wait to hear it a second time. She picked up her father’s hat and bolted from the church, counting off the taverns as she ran down Fleet street—the Queen’s Head, the Devil, the Hand, the Falcon, the Star and Ram, the Bolt-in-Tun, the Boar’s Head, the Cock and Key—running up Ludgate hill and darting south through the narrow passage to the Deanery, holding her breath past Jane Shore’s trysting spot in fear of lingering spirits, and—quietly, quietly now, her heart jumping like a captive frog—creeping up the stairs to her new bedchamber. She had just crawled under the blanket with her boots on, counting her breaths to slow them down, when Sadie shot into the room, too witless to bark, and slid underneath the bed with such momentum that she smacked against the wall. Pegge’s father banged in next, lathered and shaking in a fury. The bed rattled as he tried to pry out the dog, but she would not come, gripping, Pegge had no doubt, the bed frame with her paws. When her father thumped down on the bed, coughing in violent spasms, Pegge heard Sadie skitter out and slide bonelessly down the stairs.

  Now, in the sickroom, tobacco fumes obscured the image of Mary Magdalen on the wall. Their father sat cross-legged on the bed, impaling Pegge like a traitor on his steely gaze. She removed her eyes from the boil that had burst out mutinously on his nose and looked down at her tightly laced boots. Her father knew that Sadie followed those boots everywhere. Had he deduced how his old black hat, now chewed around the edges, had found its way back to its hook?

  “Have it your way,” he said at last, weighing each word against the jutting of Pegge’s chin. “Your mother’s soul is with her body in her grave. Be that as it may. Since she enjoys her long night’s festival, let me prepare towards her now.”

  “But Father,” Bridget blurted out, “I thought you wanted your soul to see the Blessed Face of God, not go with your corpse to Mother’s tomb.”

  “And surely,” added George cheerfully, “you cannot be buried in St Clement’s when you are Dean of Paul’s. You must take your place with the other Deans beneath the choir floor.”

  They had all seen his latest porphyry-and-marble testament to fame. He had barely been Dean a month when he had pinned the first design for his sepulchre on the library wall, to be followed by another, and another, each more grandiose than the last. Pegge had seen him studying the sketches as he took his pipe of tobacco. Then, blowing smoke through his nostrils, he would admire his image in the gilt mirror in which he appeared to hang between the two paintings—the Blessed Virgin and the Crucifixion—nailed upon the wall.

  “You must fight this disease, for aiding your death is self-murder,” Jo said.

  “It seems you must recover, Father,” George said slyly, handing his cold supper to him.

  “Ah,” said their father, waving back the meal, “but surely self-homicide is justified if used to fly evil and seek good?”

  “The taking of a life is always a sin,” said Jo, pushing the hair out of his eyes doubtfully.

  “Who are a little wise the best fools be.” The Dean picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and scrutinized it, as if counting the idiots perched on the head of a pin. “Then are the martyrs sinners? What of Christ’s volition at his crucifixion? Sharpen your arguments. You might be in a pulpit soon, God help us.”

  “Self-homicide is not so naturally sin that it may never be otherwise,” Jo offered.

  “Source?”

  “Biathanatos.”

  “A book written by Jack Donne. I suppressed it so it would not fall into the hands of lazy thinkers, but it has done so all the same. What of Samson? If you must affect his disorderly hair, then try to fat
hom his triumph.”

  “Samson pulled the temple down on his head for the glory of God,” said George, coming to his brother’s aid. “But martyrs who seek personal glory commit a sin.”

  “That is better. Now put pen to paper each of you and write me a case against self-slaughter. If you cannot convince me, I shall fast to speed my death.” He selected one of his long clay pipes, pressed in a fingerful of tobacco, and lit it with a taper. “I have no wish to live amongst philistines a day longer than Samson had to.”

  Nothing was expected of Lucy, who was now so distraught she was rocking back and forth, nor of little Betty, who was spoiling a sheet with gigantic sloppy letters. The others set to work, leaning against the wall or sitting on the floor. Pegge filled her page with cyphers and twining foliage that branched into the leaves of night-blooming tobacco. She hated these exercises he set them when her brothers were home from school.

  One by one, Jo, George, and Bridget rose to stammer out their cases while the judge sat with his legs crossed rigidly, unwilling to exert even a facial muscle to defend his life. After each had presented a lacklustre case, their father became apoplectic with spots, dismantled their arguments with brutal logic, and pronounced himself a step closer to his grave through the ignorance of his own children.

  Pegge was almost choking from the pipe-fumes. The tobacco that Doctor Foxe had prescribed seemed to be luring her father into a fatal oriental languor. Even now, his head was stiffening into sculptor’s marble under the embroidered nightcap that was Con’s parting gift. If he could not be talked out of this bout of hypochondria, Pegge would be forced to live with Con and be subject to her tyranny.

  Feeding her page to the fire, Pegge collected his things as she usually did at this hour. She seized the pipe from his hand and pushed it back into the box.