Conceit Read online

  If his corpse was turned over to the philosophers when he died, what would they find when they cut him up? His lungs, she guessed, would be tobacco-black and his heart combust, but what of his spirit—would it be a pious white or vehemently roasted by love’s fire? From what she had heard from him in his bedchamber at night, riddled with doubt about the state of his soul, he did not seem to know himself.

  Pegge was not as interested in the soul as in another organ. For some time now, she had made the human heart her study. She would open William Harvey’s treatise to the diagram of the labourer’s arm with its large veins, labelled B, C, D, etcetera in a scholarly pen. A lady’s hand with a lace cuff pressed on valves H and O, demonstrating the curious fact that the blood did not flow outward from the heart, but along the veins back to that centre.

  William Harvey likened these valves to the floodgates of a river, and it was only a leap from this to the River Darent, with its springs near Sevenoaks, its tributaries and distributaries, its weirs, pumps, and sluices, and from thence to the secret river teeming with spawning carp. In a single bound, Pegge found herself staring at the strong white forearm of Izaak Walton and it was her fingers that were stepping across the flesh, pressing on the valves and bidding the arm to do her pleasure.

  For days she could not go anywhere without The Arm, plainly labelled, and plainly a labourer’s arm. It accompanied her to bed at night, as close as butter to cheese, so that when little Betty curled up next to Pegge, then threw her arm across her sister, the arm that touched Pegge was plainly Walton’s arm. In the daytime, The Arm lay around Pegge’s waist, clearly marked in scholarly ink, should anyone debate its purpose, and her hand danced, yea danced, in the labourer’s hand as she ran the twenty-five miles to the Darent valley.

  But one night when Betty’s arm thudded across her, Pegge sat up with a start, struck by the plain fact that The Arm might at that very moment be fondling Rachel Floud. Several dark nights were spent upon this problem, before a knock from Betty’s elbow woke Pegge to the new fact that another arm might give her equal pleasure, for there were more men in her great City than the oafish Izaak Walton. And this was such a diverting thought that she fell into another dream, her fingers on the valves marked H and O, marvelling that she could command a man’s blood to rise and fall and do her bidding.

  On midsummer’s day, Constance Donne married Samuel Harvey and went off to live with him at Abury Hatch, near Barking. Pegge was glad to see the back of Con and to be spared her needlework and household arts. Ill at the thought of losing his eldest daughter, their father followed her to Barking, but returned in worsened spirits.

  Back in the Deanery, their father wrote out his Will laboriously. He was attacked by tooth-ache, deafness, sore-throat, vapours from the spleen, and such damps and flashings that made him too feverish to go forth, a round of ailments as frequent as the feast-days of the Roman church.

  He could not summon up the strength to preach all winter, complaining of the ticklishness of the London pulpits. Paul’s was the worst, for he saw disobedience everywhere in the cathedral, dogs at one another’s throats, sheriffs refusing to kneel in divine service, and children laughing as they played at bowls. Candlemas passed by without his customary sermon. Perhaps it was just as well, for Pegge, who inspected his notes, saw in them an excruciating lecture on the hour-by-hour putrefaction of the corpse.

  But there was one pulpit he could scarcely avoid, and that was the King’s. Her father sickened as Lent approached, and starved himself for days before his sermon. He was carried to Whitehall stretched out in a coach, and carried home six hours later in the same position. If his face showed some relief, it was because he had rid himself of the tormenting anxiety of preaching before King Charles. From the notes he was clutching as she helped him down from the coach, Pegge surmised that he had also rid himself of his bloated, over-ripe harangue.

  7. THE EFFIGY

  On the day after the sermon at court, Pegge was creeping back into the Deanery at dawn when Bess caught her. Pegge made things worse by standing up for herself Talking back, Bess called it. She had some notion that Pegge had stayed out all night with a man. What man? Pegge asked herself refusing to admit to Bess that she had only climbed Paul’s tower to gaze out over the City because she could not sleep.

  Bess had finally worked herself up to telling the Dean and was digging her callused fingers into Pegge’s ear, yanking her forward into the library. Pegge knew her father would be in no state to listen, for his shroud had arrived that morning in the arms of Rachel Walton. Then Walton himself appeared with a train of bearers behind him—a man with an urn under his arm, another two struggling with coal-braziers, and an artist with a coffin-lid and a box of drawing instruments.

  Pegge felt Bess’s grip on her ear slacken as they entered the library, for directly ahead of them was the Dean, standing on top of the funeral urn with his eyes closed. Dressed in the new shroud and facing smugly towards the east, he was swaying back and forth while the artist sketched him on the coffin-lid. The air was thick with coal-smoke from the rented braziers, which flamed up mightily on either side in a scene worthy of the Blackfriars theatre.

  Walton was perched awkwardly on the stool that Pegge had used as a child. As the artist’s eyes flicked between his drawing and the Dean, Walton was reading the tale of the seven brothers from the gospels. When the eldest brother died, he left his wife to the next brother, who also died, and so on, until she became the wife of the seventh brother. Pegge knew this was a trick the Sadducees were playing on Jesus, but Bess was not interested in hearing the conclusion. She tugged Pegge closer and got a footing on the Turkey carpet in front of the swaying Dean.

  “Never mind those dead brothers. What’s to be done with this daughter of yours? She’s seventeen and still going about the City like a boy. Those are breasts she’s getting under there.”

  Walton planted a finger on the verse to hold his place and looked directly at Pegge’s bodice. Pegge crossed her arms and stared right past him at the artist, who lifted his eyes from his work in amusement.

  “In the end she’ll make her peace with God like the rest of us,” her father said. “The body is but a handful of sand, so much dust, and but a peck of rubbish, so much bone.”

  “Dust and rubbish,” Bess agreed. “And what’s to be done with Bridget and Betty? They can’t all three of them go to Constance.” Her voice rose a notch. “We’ll be put out of the Deanery when you’re gone.”

  Pegge thought she saw his eyelids throb. The artist’s nib made a scritch-scritch on the wooden plank and Walton pretended to be making out a difficult word, his thick finger almost obliterating the line.

  “Speak to my executors.”

  “You can’t give your children away in your Will.”

  “They will go to Constance and to their Uncle Grymes at Peckham.”

  Bess sniffed. “A drunkard if ever I saw one.”

  “A gentleman.”

  Another sniff. “The worst kind, because they never run short of drink.”

  “He will marry them off as quick as he can, so as to have as little expense as possible,” said the Dean. “The very thing you have been urging me to do yourself.” There was a momentary tremor as he veered too far to one side and righted himself. “I have a mind to Thomas Gardiner for Bridget. He is pompous enough to suit her. Betty will be easy to please when she is older.”

  “And this one? Tell your father where I caught you.” Pegge was pushed closer, but her father’s eyelids stayed gummed together. “Sneaking back into the kitchen at daybreak, it was.” A loud snort this time. “Who knows where she’s been.”

  Her father went as still as a plumb-bob, then began to undulate once more. “What do you say to one of the Bowles twins, Pegge?”

  A man she barely knew, when her father had married for love? Pegge kept her arms crossed over her chest, though it was the artist’s eyes that were straying now, not Walton’s.

  “They say that one of them will make a m
an of science,” her father said. “He is reckoned quite clever. You might prove useful to him.” One eye opened to gauge her reaction.

  Surely he did not expect her to believe this? He had told her that no woman was wanted for her learning, except perhaps to teach her sons.

  “As my mother proved useful to you—by dying in childbirth?” Pegge’s legs were trembling. “I shall stay as I am.”

  Now both his eyes were open. “You will go to Constance, who will see that you are married,” he ordered.

  To put Con in charge of Pegge’s fate was unthinkable, cause for the worst sort of sisterly mutiny. They both knew that.

  He turned to Bess, who had gone rather pale. “And you will go to Peckham with Bridget and Betty. After they are wed, Sir Thomas Grymes will see that you are taken care of.”

  “I have always tried, sir,” Bess said, mollified. “I’m sure that even Pegge-” She was about to blurt out something else, but the hands gestured dismissively inside the shroud.

  “See that you do something about those pock-marks on her face.”

  Pegge tested the sharpness of her baby tooth against her tongue.

  “I will use ceruse, sir. It will make her look more of a gentlewoman.”

  “That will be well.” There was an agonizing pause. “And the nose?”

  “She will grow into it.”

  Pegge bit down and tasted a spurt of blood.

  “Thank God for that,” her father said, closing his eyes. “Now, let me get on with this last work of mine.”

  Bess grasped the bellows and pumped furiously at the coals. Pegge doubted that her father would die any time soon, even if he had drawn up his Will and preached his own funeral sermon, even if the flesh was falling off his bones, not while he had a single breath left in him. After all, he had survived the French pox and the spotted fever. Even a violent falling of the uvula.

  The artist’s eyes were now flicking between Pegge and his drawing, and she went swiftly behind him to see what he was doing. On a page tacked to the coffin-lid, she saw a girl wearing little but a solid, dependable nose. Her hands were crossed over plump young breasts and her nipples protruded shamelessly between her fingers.

  Pegge pressed her boot down on his heel, and he reap-plied his nib to the Dean, sharpening the point on the beard and twirling up the sanctimonious moustache. The man had stripped the piety from her father’s face as cleverly as he had stripped and embellished Pegge’s figure. When her father died, this folly would be carved in stone and enshrined in its niche in Paul’s for a parade of Londoners to ogle.

  Walton was watching the Dean sway back and forth, swaying a little himself as he waited for direction.

  “Read,” Pegge whispered fiercely.

  Walton resumed the tale of the seven brothers. “And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? For they had all had her.” As Walton paused to let this remarkable fact sink in, the artist caught Pegge’s eye and smirked. “Jesus answered and said unto them, ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”

  Walton stopped, feeling some need to comment. “A husband,” he ventured hesitantly, “will be glad to be rid of his wife when he enters the gates of paradise.”

  It was an odd sentiment, Pegge thought, for a man so recently married. Her father seemed to think so also, for the idea that there would be no marriages in heaven struck a sour note. The Dean snapped open his eyes and stepped off his funeral urn more nimbly than a dying man had any right to. He hobbled in his shroud towards Walton, declaring that Christ had only meant that there would be no new marriages in heaven, and that the old ones would go on exactly as before.

  But Walton was determined to rid himself of his spouse at the resurrection. He rose from his stool too abruptly, knocking the bible to the floor. Pegge had never seen him so impassioned. Even as her father neared, Walton stood his ground.

  “I have never heard the verse interpreted in such a light, even in one of your own sermons,” Walton protested. “What of your daughter Constance, who has already had two husbands and is young enough to have a third?”

  At this, her father’s arm burst out of the shroud and beat the air, causing the fabric to gape immodestly. Released from his grip, the drapery now tumbled in a heap about his ankles, exposing the full mortality of his white, cadaverous frame.

  Pegge stared at her father, his wondrous dangling folds, his drapery of skin. Two arms, two legs, and all the matter of a man between. He had once been a shapely fleshed-out man, but now was sadly wasted. The artist tacked up another sheet of paper, making quick studies of his model’s torso. Walton tried to gather up the shroud and fasten it around the Dean, but was waved back to his infant-stool.

  “Do not look to death to break your marriage bond,” her father shouted. “I shall rejoin my wife in the resurrection as surely as I stand here in this mortified flesh. And so shall you. Resurrected love is not fornication. The only fornicator is the soul that turns its back on God!”

  Bess was resurrecting the fires with her poker, trying to wake Pegge’s father to his senses. Even over the rattling coals, the Dean’s voice was loud enough to outshout all the church fathers down the bleak expanse of Christian time. He was still sputtering out his wrath when the nauseating thought hit Pegge that her father must have been the priest who had married Rachel Floud and Izaak Walton.

  Bess signalled with the poker to hurry Pegge from the room, but Pegge had a word or two to say to Walton before she left. He was tilting his little stool, trying to reach the bible on the floor without drawing the Dean’s eye again. Walton did not seem to know what he had done to provoke the outburst. But then, he still did not understand that he had teased and tricked Pegge into giving him her love, then run off with a woman twice her age and size to get her thriving draper’s shop. And Walton had not yet weaned himself of Constance, for it was clear that he now hoped to have her in the resurrection.

  Pegge’s father was trying to free his ankles and pull the winding-sheet back up. No doubt he had forgotten that she was in the library. She often came in while he was at work, gliding silently about on errands of her own, though she had long outgrown the silly infant-stool. Pegge trailed her hand over the haphazard shelves of books, grazed Sir Thomas Mores yellowed skull, straightened her father’s portrait on the wall and sounded out its Latin inscription. Illumina teneb. nostras Domina. Lighten our darkness, mistress. Who was this Domina? Was it her mother, or one of the women in his erotica, the poems he kept locked inside his cabinet? Only a youth at the time, he had posed in the style of a brooding lover, with pale, delicate fingers, black hat, and a soft dark eye.

  Even the blazing sea-coal could not heat her father, who was shuddering from an inner coldness, his teeth chattering in his slack old jaw. The artist was now helping him to pull up the shroud and knot it at his head and heels. Leaning on the man’s shoulder, her father climbed stiffly onto the urn, straightened his spine against the wall, and closed his eyes.

  “Build up the fires, Bess,” he ordered, a grisly smugness curtaining his features.

  Pegge could see Walton’s thumb in the gospels, riffling the pages to find his place. As Bess lugged the loaded coalscuttle across the room, Pegge manoeuvred herself into Walton’s line of vision. She waited until the artist’s head was lowered over his drawing and the coals were clattering into the grate, then made her lips as soft and round as the she-carp that Walton had tricked so mercilessly.

  “How dare you marry Rachel Floud?” she mouthed. “You know you were meant for me.”

  The coals stopped tumbling and Bess turned around to glare at Pegge, a black cloud rising from the empty scuttle. Had Walton even noticed Pegge’s lips moving? If he had, he certainly did not show it.

  He ran his thick finger down the Sadducees and began again. “For they had all had her,” he read, leaning over the verses an
d savouring, caressing the words.

  Pegge heard a bleat on the trumpet and found her father slumped in his chair in the library, his legs tucked up beneath him, his shroud collapsed around his shrunken body. Walton and the artist had gone, leaving the braziers behind to cool. The library walls were sweating and everything was filmed with coal-dust, as if a great wind from the wilderness had crushed her father’s feast-house. He might as well have been sitting in the coals like Job. Or was it ashes? Pegge had never cared much for the Book of Job.

  Propped up beside him was his new mortification—the coffin-lid with his death portrait. Pegge stood back to look at it: the shroud tied into roses at his head and feet, the sharpened beard, the stiff unpleasant grin.

  She put her hand on his arm. “You must get dressed now, Father.”

  “I have never had good temper, nor good pulse, nor good appetite, nor good sleep. I am not alive, but God will not kill me.”

  He could no longer even summon up a grimace. No man could be more eager to do God’s bidding and sixty, as he often said, was a good age for a man. After all, dogs and horses did not live nearly so long.

  Pegge suddenly remembered Con’s fondness for his mare. “May I have Parrot if you die, Father?”

  “Why ask,” he said morosely, “when you have already wooed her from me with schemes and sweetmeats?”

  “Father, this cannot go on all night. Shall I help you up to bed?”

  “Not yet, stay by me a little longer.” He grasped her hand. “I am not as I was, for when I kneel to pray, my prayers are troubled by the noise of a fly, the rattling of a coach, the creaking of a stair, a straw in my eye, a chimera in my brain. Worst of all, they are troubled by yesterday’s pleasures.”