Conceit (20 page)

I shook my head and John Donne’s hands circled my waist, lifting me over the gunwale. As I stepped in, the bilge washed up and soaked my hem. Then his gilt spurs were in the bilgewater too, and his arms steadied me as I sat on the muddy bench.

When we landed at Temple stairs, we were met by a mob of noisy students. A donkey cart banged round a corner and hurtled down Temple lane towards us, almost pitching straight into the river. Seated unsteadily on the excited donkey, Francis hardly seemed to know me. He led the minstrels in a bawdy song, nearly falling off the poor beast as he thrashed his arms to keep his choristers in time. As soon as John Donne was out of the boat, a jug was thrust into his hands. When he did not drink at once, but looked towards me in embarrassment, the jug was tipped up for him and the ale spurted down his shirt.

Shame and love pulled me in two directions, backwards by river to York House or forward to my waiting lover. I was shrinking back into the miserable boat when John Donne, being led uphill by merrymakers, blew me a kiss.
Taking the boatman’s filthy hand, for no cleaner one was offered, I stepped onto the wharf The law students converged, decking me in rosemary and bay, mistletoe and ribbons, then boosted me into the hay-filled cart. Smacking the donkey’s rump, they drove it braying up the hill, with Francis clinging drunkenly to its back. I gripped the sides of the cart and stared at my cousin’s head to calm my heaving stomach as we jolted through Temple gate and up Chancery lane.

At Lincoln’s Inn we were met by John Donne’s party, as full of ale as my own muscular band. I was heaved aloft by two stout men and carried into the chapel. Decorated with torches and winter boughs, it thronged with masquers and stonefaced youths dressed up as barristers in robes and horsehair wigs. For a moment, in the flickering light, they took on the grisly shape of judges and my courage faltered. What was I doing in such a place and with such drunken men?

Wearing a long bedshirt and laurel wreath, Francis raised his hands to start the gaudy night, proclaiming it the longest night of the year, an ideal time for nuptials. This year, our Poet told us, John Donne had begged the coveted role of groom and Francis would take Donne’s usual place as Master of the Revels, reading the wedding-poem that Donne had written for the annual rites.

Francis began the
Epithalamion
with gusto. As he read out the first lewd stanza, I was carried down the crowded nave into the chancel, where I was put down and given a shove towards the vulgarly dressed groom. When I stumbled at the sight of his comic phallus, the mob surged forward,
but John Donne reached me first and raised me to my feet. Although my clothing was wet and streaked with tidal mud, John Donne was wetter and smelt like a granary of fermenting wheat.

When Francis reached the stanza’s end, the students shouted the refrain—“Today put on perfection, and a woman’s name”—then thrust their fists into the air, splashing more ale upon themselves. Francis could scarcely make his next stanza heard and I retreated, betraying my faltering resolution.

“Will you turn back now,” John Donne asked softly, “and deny our love before God and this company of men?”

The mob was pressing closer. “Are you sure God is here?” I asked.

“God is always in a chapel, even when he is being mocked.”

I hesitated on the altar steps. The mock-chaplain looked no more than a boy in his mummery of a hat, his robes too large, as if he had picked them off a peg on his way through the vestry. The drunken students were crowding in, calling out ribald encouragements to the groom. No doubt this was the audience for which Jack Donne had written his licentious poems, and I was sure it had relished every one.

“Close your ears,” my bridegroom said, “and look into my eyes. Will you go up into our night of love or down to safety? A man is waiting with the cart to take you back to York House if you choose. The kitchenmaid can play the part of wench as she did last year. She has braided her hair with flowers in a most becoming way.” He smiled, knowing how to touch me. “If you swear you do not love me, I will let you go.”

As his thigh jostled mine, my courage rekindled. Here was no threat, only a promise, a promise no kitchenmaid was going to enjoy in my stead. I stepped towards the altar as the Poet recited the next verse. The students knew it better than he, contributing rude sounds and gestures to accompany each line.

After we had exchanged our solemn vows as bride and groom, the great bell from Cadiz was struck and hoots and jeers rang out. More jugs of ale appeared and baskets of pies soon offered nothing more than crumbs. Dancers filled the nave, and minstrels attacked a battery of pots and pans. When we had been so toasted and so made merry that we were damp with ale, both inside and out, my two stout scholars heaved me up and followed Francis, who was reciting another stanza of the wedding song. A noisy band came after, illustrating by uplifted fists—as if the groom needed repeated instruction—the vulgar act he would soon be called upon to perform.

The wedding bower was decked out with vanities from all the chambers of the Inns of Court. Every student had contributed some frippery, from tattered garters to farthingales of yellowed bone. John Donne carried me the last few yards, like plunder from a captive merchant ship. My dowry gold shone round my neck, a bridal ransom, too showy to be thought real by anyone except my lover. Looking a little wistful, the kitchenmaid with her love-plaits turned down the bed in readiness. We were showered with grain and made to kiss, the first time since we had been declared mock man and wife. Surely, I hoped, the worst would soon be over and they would leave us quietly to ourselves.

The scholars loosened the groom’s doublet, pulling out his ale-soaked shirt and unbuckling the oversized phallus he had worn throughout the ceremony. Chipped and battered, it had evidently done good service in past revels. Tipping it over, they stirred up a posset in the crude cup, sack to inflame the groom and honey to make him gentle. Sickly sweet, its real purpose, I suspected, was to make the bride easy. I could not bring myself to touch the cup, but when John Donne raised the drink to my lips, I swallowed deeply, having more need of it than he did to keep the tears and shame inside me.

The students shoved me forward, but my hands were too unsteady to perform the next part of the annual rites. Without a blush, the kitchenmaid stepped in and unlaced the bridegroom’s hose and scarlet codpiece, ribbon by ribbon, bell by bell, until he stood as proud and naked as the risen sun. Stripped of his comic art, he was again John Donne, though I had never seen John Donne attired in so little. In the passage of York House, when I had welcomed the leg thrust between my thighs, and felt the answering rush inside, I had not thought this far ahead. A naked man is a brave sight, but not the first time a young girl sees it.

Francis was straining to make his verses heard, and at last reached the climax of his song, “Thy virgin’s girdle now untie, and in thy nuptial bed, love’s altar, lie.”

This was the moment I had most feared, but I had been well instructed how to act.

“This bed is only to virginity a grave,” Francis sang out, “but to a better state, a cradle.”

After my greenery and outer garments were removed, and many coarse jests and innuendos suffered, I was laid like a sacrifice upon the gaudy bed, certainly the most authentic maiden who had ever played the part. After the youths had shouted the last refrain, Francis held up his hands for quiet, declaring the bacchanalia over.

“Now,” he announced, “the bride and bridegroom must soberly perform their duties.” Pushing the students out the door, he allowed himself a wink before he left us.

Now we were truly alone, and only God could see how well we played our roles. I struggled to untie the ribbons that held my shift together. Unable to discover how Bess did it, I made impenetrable knots. In spite of the sparking fire, I was shivering, loathing the river damp and stink upon my skin.

John Donne pinched out the candle and untied my mask, then worked loose the knots all up and down my shift. Tugging off my wet stockings, he warmed my toes in his palms. Then he removed my under-garments one by one, tenderly and with a wise affection. If he knew how to undo a lady’s garments better than she did herself, I did not accuse and he did not trouble to deny it. Each time his fingers trailed over me, in search of some lace or string that needed untangling, my body rose a little more towards him. Before long, I was warm through and through. Even my feet had happily forgotten the cold bilge in the river boat.

Now, we were so close that there was neither shred of cloth nor grain of wheat nor breath of air between us. Our
hip bones met and I was no longer afraid of what might lie ahead. I had chosen this role, and play it well I would.

“Tonight,” my lover whispered, “put on perfection and a woman’s name.”

12. THEY APPLY PIGEONS

Arriving with a kettle of hot water at dawn, Pegge found Bess asleep in the chair beside her father’s bed.

He had been speaking in mangled and mutilated tongues when Pegge came in, but now he was wide awake and shouting. “This ecstasy doth unperplex! We see by this it was not sex!”

Bess woke with a jump and scowled at the Dean, who fell back against the old Turkish pillow. Then she stumbled past Pegge and out the door.

The fumes of burnt poems still lingered after a week, casting an oddly tactile scent about the chamber. Pegge broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in some milk, but her fathers lips closed tight against it. His skin was taut over the cheekbones, as if God was tugging him both east and west. Perhaps he did have the wasting disease, though he would not drink the milk that Doctor Foxe had said would cure it. He would not admit to starving his body, for that would be considered self-murder, protesting instead that he was feeding his soul. More frightening to Pegge, he had given up tobacco.

Pegge poured the water into a basin, then pulled off the bedcovers. Her father looked as flat and numb as a sole in a cold buttered pan, but when she rolled his nightshirt up to his armpits and stripped it off, he flinched.

“Where does it pain you, Father?”

“I am but a volume of diseases bound up together, a dry cinder, and yet a sponge, a bottle of overflowing rheums, an aged child, a greyheaded infant, and but the ghost of mine own youth.”

When he talked like that, she had no idea if his pain was real or philosophical. She began to lather his skin, starting with his face and soaping gently down his bony arms. As she dried each limb, she covered it with a heated blanket. Rolling him onto his belly, she scrubbed his back with a soft bristle-brush, working the soap into a foam then wiping it off with a flannel. When he was washed, she propped him up to face the window and brought another blanket from the fire to warm him.

She took out the straight-blade and began to pare his long curled toenails, now blackened by corruption. When her blade slipped into the rotten flesh, his knees jumped up to his chest and he uttered a cry like Saint Sebastian being tortured. She calmed his legs and straightened them, the tears in his eyes telling her the pain was real and her father a long way from dead.

“I’m sorry, Father. I will not cut your nails again.”

“Those will take away the sting,” he said, gesturing to a basket sitting on the floor. “They came last night from Izaak Walton.”

Pegge opened the latch. Pigeons—to lay on his feet to
draw the vapours down from his head, a remedy suggested by her father himself in his
Devotions.

His feet were now nestled in the cavities of the pigeons, their necks intertwined like cooing doves.

“I shall read your holy sonnets to you, so you can check the wording before they go to the printer.”

She had found twelve of them, but could make no sense of their order. In one, he spoke of the soul’s black sin, in the next of it being crimsoned by Christ’s blood. But what if the first had been written after the second? As she read, his breathing grew hoarser until he fell asleep.

She was having as much trouble ordering his love-poems in her room at night. They bespoke a fury of love, a worship so rarefied that, like angels, the lovers were no longer male and female. And yet, this love was so carnal it drove them mad, sweeping them up into a whirlwind of lust. If the poems spoke true, her parents had spent days inside a single room, hardly caring whether they ate or cleaned themselves. Their bed—
this bed
, Pegge reminded herself—had been the navel of the known world, their little room an
everywhere
, but now he wanted to cleanse himself of the taint of having loved.

He began to mumble from deep inside, opening a vein clotted with rich, red words. She sat on the bed and stroked his hand, hoping to bleed some wisdom from him.

“You promised that your body would lie next to my mother’s in her grave,” she prompted.

“So I did, so I did.” A ghost of a smile elongated his lips.

“It is not too late to cancel your great tomb in Paul’s.”

“Do not vex a dying man with trifles.”

This was said quite firmly for a man in sleep.
Trifles!
—he had sucked his fill of sin, but she had yet to taste even a drop. Love was folly and beggary love was—But Pegge did not
know
what love was, in truth was no closer to knowing love at seventeen than she had ever been.

How many fathers invented words like
sex?
Her brothers had found it in a poem and sped off with it to school, earning the admiration of other boys, but what good was a word like
sex
to a girl who was forced to stay at home, then betrothed to a man she barely knew?

In one poem, her father had canonized the two lovers, saying that he and Ann had died and risen in the mystery of love. When Pegge explained this to her brothers, Jo cast rude doubts on this conceit, pointing out that every oaf in Paul’s alley knew what it meant to
die
in a woman’s sweaty arms. The boys delighted in finding the tricks in their father’s poems, reading the besmirched lines aloud to their sisters.