Conceit (13 page)

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.”

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.

D
EATH’S
D
UEL

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.