Conceit (11 page)

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.

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.