Conceit Read online

  Now Con sat beside Pegge’s bed with her needlework. “I am making you something to wear until your hair grows back. How does it look?” She balanced the cap on her own head.

  Like a splash of flowers on a field of jet, but on Pegge’s naked skull? At least Con had not carried in the looking-glass. Eyesight blurring, Pegge pressed her face into the mattress.

  “But this would look so well on you.” Puzzled, Con turned the cap in her hands.

  “I will take your hood, Con, if you have no more use for it, for I see that you have put off black.”

  “You cannot know how tiresome it was. Even my sealing wax had to be black! Why should father insist upon full mourning?” Con spun out her hair, more glossy than the flowers she was stitching. “When you mend a dark garment, Pegge, you cannot even see to thread the needle. I am so glad you did not die, for it would have meant another year of black—” She broke off reddening.

  Pegge swung her legs over the edge of the bed, waiting for the dizziness to subside. “Did Izaak Walton get the pox?”

  “Why should he?” Con looked up in surprise. “He came once or twice to ask after me and looked quite well.”

  Ask after Con, when it was Pegge who had almost died? Pegge watched Con’s needle feathering strokes across a sun-drenched flower. “Remember the minnow of green silk I asked you to sew for him, Con? It meant nothing to you, but he still carries it everywhere.”

  “Well, he is an angler, and they are not the brightest of men.” Biting off the thread close to the cloth, Con checked her stitches in the window-light.

  “He is devoted to you, yet you spurn him. Let him marry someone else if you will not have him!”

  “You have missed more than your dinners by being in bed. He has married someone else.”

  Walton married—had Pegge heard right? The air scented with apples, the first solid food settling into her belly, cores and all, her sister sewing comfortably beside her—it was too much to keep the tears from spilling down her face.

  Mr Walton was betrothed long before Pegge got the pox, a good twelvemonth ago, Con reported, just before Mr Alleyn took sick and died. Even Con admitted this was galling for Walton, though his betrothal saved her from telling him to his face that she would not marry him.

  “He will be doing no more angling.” Con licked her finger, then knotted the end of her thread. “His new wife will not let him wander about the countryside all day, for she is Rachel Floud, the linen-draper’s daughter.”

  This explained the new mossy-green doublet with its starched collar. No wonder he had folded his clothing so neatly on the rock beside the river. Pegge curled into a shivering ball, keeping her wet face turned from Con.

  Married while the carp were spawning, perhaps even the same day he sent the fish in its bed of moss to Con. For it had been sent to her sister, there was no doubt of that now. After Pegge had bruised her ankles in swift cold streams for him, listened to his deep voice carolling the angler’s song, agreed to call their new discovery the river, to keep it secret to themselves.

  Con raised her eyes from a particularly garish flower. “At least you will be spared hearing it from his lips.”

  The sympathy was Pegge’s undoing. She uncurled and leapt out of bed, bending over at the waist and vomiting. Perhaps the doctor had been right to limit her intake of solids, for they were now staring at her from the floorboards, a horrid curdled puddle, and Con was running down the stairs for Bess.

  After they had lain like man and wife, his face daubed with clay, their hands entangled in the weedy shallows, teasing and tricking the spawning carp. She had swum as blithely into his trap as the mirror had swum into the scarlet bodice.

  Betrothed to Rachel Floud and still adoring Con. Pegge hoped he smelt of fish when he climbed into his wedding-bed. He was as oafish as Con thought him. And worse—a coward, not daring to risk contagion to tell Pegge to her ravaged face how cruelly he had deceived her.

  The scabs fell off gradually, leaving deep scores in Pegge’s cheeks, but she no longer cared. What matter that the disease had plundered her long swing of hair? No man would finger it now, and what man would she want, Izaak Walton being taken. Each night, she scrutinized the new growth angrily and trimmed the tufts close to her scalp with scissors.

  Soon she heard Walton debating the text of a sermon with her father, for Walton had no better occupation now. Before long, he made some pious connection between fishing along the Itchen and casting a net in the sea of Galilee that won her father over. Finding Walton underfoot, her father discovered uses for him, small literary chores that he would no longer entrust to Pegge. One day Pegge saw Walton in the library, admiring the latest design for her father’s effigy. She was about to confront him when he took out the sextodecimo with the pike drawn on the cover. As he jotted down a scrap of information, she passed by without a sound.

  For what could she have said? Told him that other fishermen called him that crazy ankler for walking into rivers with his shoes on, and for preferring live bait to artificial lures? Accused him of marrying Rachel Floud to get her father’s shop in Fleet street? Perhaps Pegge could have listed off his wife’s lumpish features, her quivering goose-flesh and hairy forearms, for Pegge had been inspecting Mrs Walton from close and far.

  Still Pegge followed him, the slope of his back, the sweet curls of hair over his new starched collar, though he went nowhere near a river now. Perhaps, she told herself, that was punishment itself.

  On St Clement’s day, Pegge was copying out her father’s sermon from the notes she had taken down in Paul’s. He was supposed to be resting in his chair because he had an ulcerous sore throat from too much preaching, but he was pacing restlessly behind her.

  He reached out to rub her hair against the grain. “As short as a caterpillar’s fur,” he said, “and the colour of lapis lazuli.” His eyes lifted to the Virgin’s robe in the painting on the library wall.

  Pegge did not need a mirror to tell her that he saw blue hairs sticking up in tufts like mould on cheese. Bess’s attempt to lighten the gentian stains by rubbing them with chicken fat had only made Pegge’s head so greasy that her hood had taken an embarrassing tumble in the cathedral that morning.

  Now her father pulled at a tuft to see whether it was securely rooted. “It does not seem to be growing, yet even a dead man’s hair gets longer in the grave.”

  She wished he would sit down. His beard was so close that she could see the little comb-marks in it. Con had shaved him cleanly around the edges, and raked his moustache with a miniature rake.

  He turned the paper sideways to see what she had written. “I do not recall using that turn of phrase. Look up the text if you do not know it, Pegge.” The bible thudded near her elbow. “Someone with less gift for writing would do a better job. It is time to put you to other work. While Con is with us, she will teach you household skills.”

  She jerked the paper back. “I do not need to learn husbandry, for I mean to be your Margaret More.” Dipping her quill, she tapped off the excess ink and stroked out the offending phrase.

  “A man is King and men must be the scholars. I cannot change the world to suit my children. Even the daughter of Sir Thomas More did needlework.”

  He had often been of two minds about her, but since the pox he seemed to have settled upon one. “Bess will teach me what I need to know.”

  “You must spend less time with the servants and more with Con.”

  “It will do me no good until I have Con’s looks.”

  He studied her face for a moment. “I shall offer as big a dowry as is needful, but you shall be married.” He ran his finger along her scarred cheek, then plucked the paper out of her hands. “Is this your old argument that dogs have souls? You are like an elephant with your opinions.”

  “You once wrote that women did not have souls.”

  “Long before I met your mother.” This brought its own hush with it, for he seldom spoke of Ann.

  “How did my mother—”

&n
bsp; “How and why are dangerous and infectious monosyllables!” Then his face softened. “I will grant,” he conceded, “that I was as opinionated in my juvenilia as you are in yours. But it is more becoming in a man.”

  Dogmatic, she thought, but did not risk the pun. Aloud she said, “You could be equally wrong about dogs. It is not fair that Sadie is put out in the cold in winter.”

  “Enough quibbling. My text was Revelations 22, they are dogs that are without. That does not mean outside the kitchen door, but outside the Church, meaning we should not give alms to drunkards or unchristian beggars.” His voice was reaching pulpit volume. “They are dogs that are without, and the children’s bread must not be given to dogs. Matthew 15. This is not about dogs, Pegge, this is about men.”

  She wondered whether he had seen her feeding Sadie from her plate, against his orders. “Then let us talk of men, Father. Izaak Walton is idle, but you do not mind his idleness. He licks your heels like Sadie, but you do not begrudge him crumbs from your table.”

  Walton’s idleness had got up her nose, down her arm, and out onto the paper, but her father’s wrath was closer and more dangerous. His knuckles were drumming out a dreadful rhythm. Although he had never struck her, she shifted the ink-pot between them just in case. She knew that he had a fear of spilling ink, having been punished by his tutor for staining a white shirt when he was a boy.

  “Mr Walton is a cautious, careful man,” he said.

  “His fingers are so thick they can scarcely hold a pen.”

  The ink-pot was vibrating. “He had Greek and Latin at grammar school.”

  “So did my brothers and little good it did them.” Then, more obediently, “I admit I have no Greek, but I will gladly learn it, Father.”

  “So you can translate my Greek as poorly as you do my Latin? And what of my English? Mr Walton writes what he is told to. This”—he was waving the paper, though it hardly seemed to cool him—“bears little resemblance to what I preached.”

  She moved a safe distance away to inspect the Blessed Virgin hanging from a nail. “Perhaps I will be a virgin. And a martyr. For am I not descended from the Catholic Mores, and named after Margaret More herself? Chastity will suit me admirably.”

  He smiled, an event so unusual as to strike a spark of fear in Pegge. “Margaret More was no virgin,” he said. “She married the man her father chose and had five children by him. You have too much curiosity for a virgin. I know you have been reading my love-poems, for you left my cabinet unlocked.” When she tried to speak, the diamond flashed on his hand, forbidding her. “You will marry, Pegge, so quell your opposition. I may not be here to care for you much longer. Today the canons announced my burial-place, near Dean Colet in the choir.”

  Colet’s sepulchre was noted for its grisliness. Crowned by skulls, and featuring a full reclining skeleton without even a string of flesh or shred of muscle to clothe it, the effigy had been Pegge’s favourite place to read the Anatomy of Melancholy when she was younger. Why had her father requested a burial-place so soon? She would not venture the question, unwilling to unleash complaints of swollen glands or fallen arches. With his grave-site beckoning in Paul’s, he was likely to become mired in the pit of hypochondria, where he already spent too many of his waking hours.

  “As for Mr Walton,” he said, “his brotherhood of anglers has already proved its worth, since he has found a patron for my effigy, a true supporter of the funerary arts. My monument will overshadow Colet’s, for I shall have the best Italian marble and Nicholas Stone to carve it.”

  6. A JET RING SENT

  Pegge was standing in Fleet street with a cold head, hoping for a glimpse of Izaak Walton under the sign marked R. Floud, Linen-draper. She had stopped clipping her hair, but it had lost the knack of growing on its own. Each morning she brushed the hairs until they stood like bristles, then brushed them back the other way. One way they looked flatter, and the other way they had more shine, but brushing had not made them one whit longer.

  After a while, Pegge gave up on Walton and went along to St Clement’s to visit her mother’s tomb. Through the window she noticed Con in the churchyard, dressed in black, although she had put off mourning a year before. Then a man came through the gate, a widower Pegge had often seen tending his wife’s grave. From inside the apse, teetering on the sexton’s chair, Pegge saw the widower pause as Con approached him. Coming from a grave herself, or so it appeared, Con dragged her feet in grief, a piece of stage-craft worthy of her dead husband. Pegge was sure that her sister had paced out every step beforehand.

  Greetings were exchanged at the crossing of the paths and Con faltered, clutching at the widower’s sleeve. Steadying her elbow, he led her to the honeysuckle bower, where she withdrew the lace from her bodice to dab her eyes, exposing robust curves. Sorrow, Pegge saw through the window, had cast a sheen of pearl all down her sister’s throat. Now the widower was fingering the lace, exclaiming at its dampness. Pegge imagined the foolish words that were then shared about the mingling of their tears.

  Pegge tugged her hood over her eyes just before the lovers passed beneath the window. Had they glanced up, they would have seen the sexton rubbing the dirty pane briskly with his fist, but they were intent on going through the gate, their arms linked, to share their grief along the Strand. Pegge traced their footsteps backwards to the garden, marvelling at the resilience of the human heart. The fragrance was overpowering, a thicket of wayward vines and sweet-briar. Why did midday bring out the worst in flowers? Pegge poked angrily at the foliage with a stick, poked and prodded until she determined that it was the low heliotrope, not the climbing honeysuckle, that gave off the cloying scent of honey.

  Within a few months, Mr Harvey appeared at the Deanery, his clothes damp with excitement, asking Pegge for an audience with her father. While he waited, she brought him red wine to calm him and sat to keep him company. Soon his lips were purpled from the drink, and he was staring at Pegge’s skull. She knew what he was seeing, hair as short and brown as Sadie’s.

  “The scars will fade in time,” he said. Then, in a spurt of words, “I believe hair can be brushed to health again.”

  “It has not lengthened an inch, although I brush it vigorously.”

  A kind-hearted man, too kind for Con. Pegge was sorry for his fate at her sister’s hands. However, Samuel Harvey had no one to blame but himself for, as it now spilled out, he claimed some knowledge of the heart, prime mover of the body, being kin to William Harvey, physician extraordinary to the King and author of the newly published Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus 1628. In the art of greeting fathers he had been well coached by Con, for this was the little book he had brought wrapped up in stationer’s paper for the Dean.

  “Look,” he said, tearing off the wrapper and thumbing to a diagram. “The blood is propelled through the body by the action of the heart. If you stand on your head, hairs will gush like water from a pump.”

  At Mr Harvey’s urging, Pegge struggled through the Latin. First the title, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, then the passage in which the heart was compared to the machine inside a firearm which, when the trigger was pulled, dropped the flint, struck the steel, elicited the spark, and ignited the gunpowder, thus forcing the flame into the barrel and propelling the ball to hit the mark.

  If the heart was a firearm, Pegge wondered, what was love? The lethal ball that ripped open the chest and quickened the demise? And what was lust—the flint, the trigger, or the spark?

  Samuel Harvey might have been in love, but he was far from melancholy. He was mildly discomfited after the Dean interrogated him in the library, but still sanguine, merry and red in the face and short of breath. If not for meeting Con, he might have been spared love’s pain and met a slower, kinder fate.

  But hungry dogs would eat dirty puddings and soon Con was swooping down the passage towards him, wearing her cap of yellow flowers. There was a flash of jet upon her finger, a gift from Mr Harvey which their father
must have just approved. She had done something to her hair, dressed it with oil so that it swished as darkly as a raven’s wing. As her sister passed, Pegge caught a whiff of something feral, like a drag left by a fox. Perhaps Con had milked the scent ducts of otter or stoat.

  Soon Bridget and little Betty came down to delight in Mr Harvey’s charms. Pegge could hear Con praising her betrothed as a learned man, the cousin of the King’s physician. Then Sadie arrived to sniff him and declare herself quite willing to be petted.

  Their father emerged from the library, waving the agreement to dry the ink and calling out to Bess, who was hovering nearby. “Fetch two bottles of my best sack from below-stairs and the large round of cheese, the one sent down from Hertfordshire. Come, Mr Harvey,” their father put his arm around that poor man’s shoulders, “let us drink a cup to seal the bargain.”

  As midsummer’s day approached, the household grew in agitation. The impending marriage set them all adrift, Bridget and Betty quarrelling over who had better ankles and Con talking endlessly about her wedding garments. Pegge could not bear five minutes with any of her sisters. Even the servants had splintered into factions. The Deanery was either too hot or too cold. Someone opened windows and someone closed them. Caught by the Dean unlatching a casement on the landing, Bess was thrown off balance and tumbled down the stairs. When Pegge reached her, she found a human pincushion. Blood was dripping out of tiny perforations from Bess’s elbow to her shoulder. All the pins Bess had collected on her sleeve throughout the day had stabbed her in the arm.

  Night in the Deanery was full of noises. As her wedding loomed, Con’s dreams became more vocal and their father was assailed by bouts of night-sickness. Awakened by his sounds, Pegge would stand inside his bedchamber, wondering whether going closer would comfort him or put him in a deeper fright, for his appeals to God to ravish him sounded more like agonized love-cries than holy prayers.