Conceit Read online

  What about me? she wanted to cry out. I have not yet had pleasures to put behind me.

  Walton’s indifference had been scorching, twice greater than the heat from the rented braziers, thrice, even four times. He had leaned over the bible as eagerly as he once leaned over Pegge when she found caterpillars and dung-beetles for live bait. Today, his long, lovely hair was spread more thinly across his collar, but when he bent his elbow to turn the page, Pegge saw a flash of wrist that hinted at the same strong arm above it. She remembered the first time he wore that mossy-green doublet. In her imaginings, it still carried the scent of that day they lay together on the heated rock along the tributary of the Darent.

  In this room, only an hour ago, she had crossed her arms and told her father she did not wish to marry because Izaak Walton was listening. In truth, she had no desire to be a virgin. That was a sham. A lot of good chastity had done her—she had got nothing from it but little Betty’s knees and elbows digging into her at night. And Pegge no longer even had that comfort, for she was sleeping in Con’s bedchamber alone. She was about to take back her words when the door was flung open and Betty herself came tumbling in.

  Betty fell on her knees before their father, a position bound to stir up his compassion. “I must be married before Pegge, Father, for I am a woman now and she is not.”

  Pegge tried to calm her sister and lead her from the room, but Betty pummelled Pegge with her fists, spilling over with rage from some mysterious source. It was then that Pegge saw that her sister’s hem was wet with blood. Betty was as good as a clock, bleeding at fourteen like Bridget and Con, though at seventeen Pegge seemed no closer to having her own monthlies.

  Each month when Pegge’s blood did not come, Bess forced tansy tea down her. She asked Pegge why meat made her queasy, whether she had left off her undergarments while running around the City, whether she had known a man, or whether she had stuffed something up herself to stop the bleeding, as if Pegge was a child who put raisins up her nose.

  And now Bess was there, comforting Betty and smoothing down her tousled hair, saying, as she had often said to Pegge, “Enough fuss and nonsense, you’ll come along with me.”

  Then Bess was turning out the flannel-room to find a soft absorbent cloth, showing Betty how to loop the ends and string this bulky padding between her legs, all in the open passage. Bridget arrived to hush Betty’s cries, though it was too late to keep the household ignorant of an event of such magnitude. Only their father was oblivious, for he walked past them towards his chamber, dragging his long winding-sheet behind him.

  Now the women were wrapping a blanket around Betty and helping her into the kitchen. Pegge slouched in the door frame, watching Bess at the fire stirring coddled milk. Bridget was boasting that their father was after Thomas Gardiner for her and Betty was wondering, between large bites of custard, whether Thomas had any younger brothers. Bridget brought out Con’s letter, full of details of the Gardiners, and sat in Pegge’s chair to read it to the others. Con was coming to nurse her father herself, Con had a new embroidery stitch to show them, Con had a new gown, Con—

  Pegge turned her back and fled.

  Why had her blood not come? Con and Bridget never tired of telling of the day and month it had caught them unawares. How had it been unawares? With Bess bustling about, whispering that they would soon be women, even Betty had started looking between her legs when she was only ten.

  A half-hour after Con arrived, she would be in the kitchen. An hour scratching Sadie behind the ears and praising Bess’s pudding, and Con would get it out of Bess: the state of all her sisters’ wombs, and who would next be married. How odd, Con would exclaim, the spoon half in, half out of her painted mouth, that Betty should so speed ahead! Perhaps Doctor Foxe should have a look at Pegge. Before long the servants would get wind of Pegge’s impairment and visitors like Izaak Walton would hear the tale, told and retold inventively by Con—or perhaps by the Dean himself—of Pegge’s childish, tardy womb.

  Blighted, like the first buds nipped by frost. If the bud did not flower, how could there be defloration? Even the stunted holly in the garden had managed to produce a crop of berries. Pegge wanted to have her fleurs like other women, to curdle milk and sour wine when her monthlies were upon her. It would be nice to have breasts like her elder sisters but, most of all, she wanted to make a man bead up with sweat, to stop his mouth with fumbling words, to dance her fingers across the floodgates of his arm, then turn his veins into a free and easy conduit of blood.

  Before Mr Harvey had left for Barking with his new wife, he had knelt in front of Pegge so she could feel how sleeping on a slanted board had reinvigorated his hair. Running her fingers across his crown, she detected a clump of baby-hairs shooting up at angles. His scalp rose into her finger-pads, delighting in her stroking. It seemed a man might be fed by such fondlings, might grow in stature by the combings, brushings, and groomings of a warm, good-tempered woman.

  But what man would let Pegge groom him? Right now she was as solitary as a monk, and her own hair was still no longer than a dog’s. The men she wanted could never be hers. All the lovely Waltons were wasted upon the daughters of the night, the Cons and Bridgets, the Bettys and the Rachel Flouds. Even gentle Samuel Harvey was tied by a stout cord to the bed he shared with Constance Donne.

  Pegge put on her father’s heavy cloak, smelling him as she dried her eyes on its sleeve. No one would notice she was gone. She drifted along the back streets towards the west, past the rag-and-bone man who was already out collecting, past the old water-carrier hefting his vessel up from the Thames, past the neat, tidy shop of R. Floud, Linen-draper, until, her nose pinched with cold, she reached the churchyard of St Clement’s. Inside the crumbling church, her feet counted the flagstones tilted up by frost until they recognized her mother’s grave. Lungs aching, she threw herself face down upon the tomb, feeling the cold rise, layer by layer, through her thick woollen skirts. Even the kind-hearted Mr Harvey could not pity her here, nor see her tears spilling through the porous cracks and running deep into the earth below. Looking straight into eyes of stone, she begged Ann’s melancholy damp to creep into her childish, reluctant womb.

  DEATH’S DUEL

  1631

  8. LIGHTEN MY DARKNESS

  Someone is treading on my grave. Now the footsteps stop and a body throws itself onto the cold pavingstones above me. Which of my children has come to mourn a mother so long dead?

  Tears drip through the cracks between the stones. Pegge is the only one who weeps like this. Perhaps she has heard me speak aloud, for anyone who presses an ear to my tomb may hear me talking and, even as an infant, Pegge had unnaturally keen hearing.

  People have been coming and going in the church above me, gossiping about John Donne’s sickness and pointing out his wife’s plain epitaph. They are saying that you preached your own funeral sermon before King Charles at Whitehall. When you were half-way through, you sank down on your knees. However, your flesh was not as weak as the onlookers supposed. Your soul had simply tired of all your hair-splitting, your gloriously pungent diction. Catching a whiff of my spirit lurking in the vault, yours shot out of your body. Getting its first taste of freedom, it spun about in the air, uncertain of the rules of navigation. I was clinging to a beam, unable to get closer for all the tobacco smoke, when your body called back your soul, and my spirit lost its chance to embrace yours.

  Two of the King’s men helped you rise, urging you to stop. However, you saw this as a God-sent illustration of your text, the duel between the body and the spirit. Gripping the pulpit, you coughed out every word, your face shining convincingly with perspiration. That was when I realized you were not dissembling, as you have done so many times before. When a man is dying, his soul begins to make forays outside his body, scouting the way ahead, and you have a most ambitious soul. It was not heading towards my grave here in St Clement’s, but upwards into the ether.

  Do you truly think I will wait out the millennium in a miserable
coffin, while you enjoy the Beatific Vision? Your ambition has become a rock under my back, growing sharper year by year. You vowed to join me in the grave upon your death. So you pledged when I first joined my flesh with yours, pelvis to pelvis-bone. And so I once believed—for surely there were faster ways to bed a woman than with poetry. Our love was such a miracle, you said, that we would be made saints for our devotion if dug up in a Catholic time.

  In this Protestant land, that is little comfort. I have had seven years to contemplate the meaning of your words—and seven years again—though it is not easy to keep track of time while underground. My thoughts ring clear now, unclouded by pain. I know I did not die a natural death. I was slain by love, at far too young an age.

  I was thirty-three, and our fortunes were just beginning to improve. I wanted to feel taffeta between my fingers again, a maid buffing my nails to a fine polish, rose-water on my skin and pins digging into my scalp. I wanted to glide across a wooden floor in Queen Anne heels and tease the appetites of men. I wished to live the life my sisters did—after all, I was equally the daughter of Sir George More.

  But instead, you begat another child on me, my twelfth, and I died from it.

  After I died, you kept a vigil beside me. When the children came to fetch you, their faces streaked with tears, you fought them off. Kneeling on the hard stones, you cried, My joys and my tears are buried here with my beloved wife. You swore you would never remarry. How light the burden of a stepmother would have been compared to that dread oath. When our children were gone, you whispered to me, As the grave is your house, we two shall make our beds together in the dark.

  Soon you discovered that the church floor did not block the smell of human decay beneath. That autumn, my stench drove the parishioners to unbend their knees and move to more fragrant aisles. I wintered here in St Clement’s, learning that wet rot and dry rot are much the same, though wet smells worse.

  Your visits grew less frequent over time. Sometimes when you spoke aloud, your ear scraped the ground, seeking an echo from these stones. In your holy writings, you painted me as your mortal enemy, but in your dreams you craved my hips and breasts, as they were when your hands first lingered on them. Once you pried up the pavingstone above me, making a dreadful clanging with an iron bar. You were about to climb into my tomb and pull the stone down over your head, dying with me as a bondsman with his queen, but that dog came whipping in and barked to warn you of the danger.

  In the grave, there is time to think. Snatches of conversation in the church above tell me of the world of men. Months and years mean nothing here, but it is false to think there is no busyness in graves. There is cold to ward off, memories to refresh, children’s names to recite for fear of forgetting even one—and there is passion, so fierce and sharp that it can never be locked up in cabinets of sense. When limbs uncoil in memory, the lust echoes on cold bone. My hair now reaches a tangled glory around my knees, and my soul has grown exceedingly amorous from all this waiting. Even a spirit craves a bit of flesh to burrow into now and then.

  You promised to lie beside me in this tomb, hip bone to hip bone and mouth to mouth, for love dwells in the lips of the beloved. And other parts should kiss in graves as well, so that the blood commingles in a rush. You told me that this was how the joint soul was conceived, in little deaths of ecstasy. To die, you taught me, was a pun. When such memories possess me, my cries rise sharply into the church, like a courtesan’s gasp at the moment of her lover’s plunge, and the old man in the pew above me recalls with sudden clarity his first attempt upon his young wife’s body.

  Now you have taken to your deathbed. When I sneaked past the vigilant dog, which has appointed itself a sentinel against me, I heard you muttering that death is a divorce and that two graves must hide thine and my corpse. This effigy of yours is not intended for St Clement’s—I do not need men gossiping overhead to tell me that. Only you could have thought up something so flamboyant as a grinning fool standing upright in a shroud. Such a monument would be out of temper with the modest tributes above me. No, this colossus is intended for the cathedral of St Paul’s. You have decided that my soul must await your pleasure—that you will come to collect me when you choose, or not at all—that death will obey you as lust did—that I, who beggared myself for love, will be content to rot in a solitary tomb.

  To spend a thousand years apart is too long even for ordinary lovers, and we are far from ordinary. I do not plan to spend the millennium alone. No, I shall not rest so peacefully, my love. I shall use such mirrors and such spies that you shall never be rid of me.

  You will find my anger has not eased with time, but has bloated and heated like manured straw that feeds and mulches roots. When I burst out, you will see a vision less than beatific. I will flower brilliantly into the light, my mouth a violent blue, my petals feathered and flamed with ire, and our embrace will be far from the quiet reunion you have dreamt of. Out of my putrefaction, I shall produce a carrion-flower so foetid that it will out-carrion decaying offal. The most delicate of flowers, the lady’s slipper, stinks of rotting fruit to draw flies to it. And so I shall set a sugar trap for you. Drawn by my perfume, you will slide into my labyrinth like a bee into an orchid. Even the most ambitious bee can be trapped at the right time of day by the right scent and colour of flower.

  I first met you in York House, where I had been sent by my father to be schooled for marriage by his sister, who had just taken a second husband, Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper.

  I arrived in time to see my cousin Francis wed. Too young to consummate the match, he was sent back to Oxford while my aunt taught his wife, Mary, the useful arts. I was to keep Mary company, but my visit only made her regret the freedom she had lost by marrying.

  Instead of dancing the courante at court, as I had hoped, I found myself breathing the stale air of the withdrawing-room with my aunt and her daughter-in-law. It was worse than the matronly pavane, a step I could do just as well in the country. According to Aunt Beth, I had much to learn before she could present me to the Queen. Most of it my aunt was teaching me herself, but Sir Thomas’s secretary, John Donne, had agreed to teach me Spanish.

  I was embroidering a jasmine bush on a green background, a sad imitation of the garden I had left behind at Loseley park, when I observed Mr Donne striding along the passage in a fashionable hat and doublet. I punched my needle through the backing-cloth and stabbed my finger. After a few more painful stitches, I saw my aunt’s eyelids close. Mary stopped tugging on her silk and leaned towards me.

  “Francis says he is a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays, and a great writer of conceited verses, but you know that already, Ann, for I heard you asking Francis about him.”

  As my cousin was leaving for Oxford, he had given me some verses by a Jack Donne, telling me that the bishops were burning obscene poems and begging me to hide them for him. They were in my chest, under a stack of folded garments, and I had spent several hours trying to make out what the poet meant by them.

  “Francis is a little boy with his erotica,” Mary whispered. “I do not think my husband knows a thing about love.”

  At this, Aunt Beth propped herself upright and retrieved her stitching-hoop. “Only people of the meaner sort marry for love, Mary. You must not sour Ann on matrimony. I have found it an agreeable state myself.”

  At this Mary made a low, unpleasant noise. When my aunt frowned, Mary said, “I have just seen the most foolish hat go down the passage. I am not sure such brash feathers are lawful for commoners. And velvet certainly is not.” Mary winked at me, for we both knew my aunt would be drawn in.

  “A man’s station in life may be read from his clothing,” Aunt Beth said. “Beware of a comely man. His breeding, not his looks, should recommend him.” A twist, a pull, and a new thread was knotted in her needle. Then she looked up. “What sort of feather, Mary?”

  “Ostrich, I believe, most likely Andalusian.”

  If Mary kept this up, my aunt would soon guess
who had walked past. While Aunt Beth checked her pattern, Mary rubbed the nap of her sleeve suggestively, then flapped her hands, our signal for a jumped-up tradesman. I would not be able to get a closer look at John Donne’s doublet until our needlework was finished. If it was really velvet, the man had truly lost his wits.

  “Do you think it wise for Ann to learn Spanish, Lady Egerton? I am not sure it will endear her to the Queen, for it is the language of the Jesuits. Was it Mr Donne’s idea to teach her, or your own?”

  I bent my head so close to my work that I could see just how poor my last hour’s stitches were. And why were there so few of them? I decided I had better count them to keep my eyes away from Mary’s.

  I began practising my aunt’s teaching on Mr Donne in our first lesson. His pose had something of the lawyer in it, and something of the brooding lover. His doublet was not exactly velvet, I learned when I got near enough to inspect it, but had a dangerous resemblance to that fabric. His sword was too long, but its insolent hang told me its purpose was not wholly ornamental.

  He began by reciting the numbers in Spanish, holding up his fingers as if I were a child. Soon we moved on to the days of the week, and outdoors into the garden alongside the Thames, where he could make a better show when he strode up and down.

  Before long, I suspected that my tutor was leaving me secret gifts. I walked past the first one several times without noticing it. And then, studying my reflection in the passage windows, with some idea of contriving my hair differently now that I was in London, I saw that something had been scrawled in the grime. I twisted my head and brought it against the pane: temptatious.

  It was a made-up word, a play on temptation, no doubt an unflattering reference to Eve. I knew where it had come from, for who else cared about words in that house? And it would have taken a Jack Donne to get into the east wing, where the women of the household lay. He seemed to go everywhere, even to court with Sir Thomas, although when I asked him to describe the dancing he shrugged as if it meant nothing to him. Instead, he used it as an excuse to teach me body parts, pointing to his ankles and mouthing the Spanish word in a mocking fashion.