Conceit (24 page)

Though I went down the perilous, dark stairs each night, I found no more letters, and the cold ashes in the grate did not reveal what verbal thrusts and parries now took place.

It had been four months since I had lain with John Donne, and four months since Sophie had been bred. In spite of Bess’s eavesdropping, I could not discover whether the High Commission had annulled my marriage. Perhaps I no longer had a husband. I knew now what it meant to swear
I will die if I cannot have you
, what it meant to cry
tears pregnant of thee.

In the daytime, I worked on the tapestry I had begun at York House. Now I could survey the garden I was stitching. Over the months, I had added small figures—the steward with his loaded harquebus, Nellie feeding her pullets, and the bent form of my father shuffling to the pig house to feed acorns to Sophie, who was almost ready to farrow. Sometimes he looked up and saw me at my needlework. Perhaps good manners would one day inspire him to touch his hat, as King Henry had done to his imprisoned daughter Elizabeth.

For a week, four birds sat calling on the garden wall. I stitched them into my work, along with the cat lurking below them. I wanted to tell it that an archbishop was allowed six blackbirds to a pie, a bishop four, but commoners and tomcats none. This was no shroud for past love that I was making. I wanted my commoner in my bed. Each morning, I put a cross-stitch for a night we spent apart. It was now past Lady Day and I had one hundred and fifteen.

I was stitching a rose-bush when Bess entered, dangling a raw chicken by its feet. By its stench, I guessed the innards had been rotting for a fortnight. Apparently my father’s blow had bruised her sense of smell.

“Take it back to the kitchen, Bess.” Selecting a pale red skein, I made a French knot for a rose.

“That I will do, madam, when you have had a closer look.”

“There are flies on it,” I said, annoyed that she had begun to call me madam. “Is that close enough? I hope it is not intended for my supper.”

Nellie arrived next, looking for Bess. “Give me back my poultry. I know what you are up to and it’s no kindness to Mistress Ann.”

“What do you mean, Nellie?” I asked.

“My sister thought she was stuffed by that pample-mousse who got between her legs, but now that she’s not, she’s trying to find out if you’ve got a bellyful.”

This took a moment to work out, but John Donne’s conceits had given me good training. Nellie had likely got this idea from stuffed carriage seats or cooking hens.

“What happens to a woman with child when she sees a chicken, Nellie?”

“It’s more the smell, mistress. It’s a vomit, anybody knows that.”

I would have to take better notice of such things in future. I had not known that Bess and Nellie were sisters either, though I could see the resemblance now that it had been pointed out. Certainly they shared the same coarse speech.

“Look at Bess, her neck is like beetroot,” said Nellie, pleased.

“Would you care to tell me about this … this
Frenchman
, Bess?”

“You know Jakes well enough, that fast-fingered weasel. You set him to pluck me, with his sweet wines and his foreign talk.”

“What sort of name is that?” Nellie hooted. “Did you plant your buttocks on this jakes, Bessie?”

Jacques, of course—John Donne’s servant. On the night of our wedding in Lincoln’s Inn, Jacques had been told to take Bess to a tavern, feed her copiously, and keep her plied with strong drink. That he had done, for she had come home reeking. But it seemed he had gone further on his own initiative. I waved Nellie out of the chamber.

“Have you heard from him, Bess? Did he ask if you might be carrying?”

She wiped the back of her hand across her nose and sniffed. “What difference would that make?”

“You might have married him,” I said gently.

“A Frenchman?” she snorted. “A polecat that greases his fingers to put them who-knows-where? And then weasels off to France in his master’s best suit? As if I’d be tricked by such a one. I’d never have gone,” she said righteously. “I promised your mother on her deathbed to care for you.”

There was that upward thrust of the jaw, that bluster. With Bess, it was hard to know how much was true, but this sworn bond was not good news. She would never budge from my side now.

Despite the rotting chicken, I was managing to keep my meat and drink down. I picked up my needle in relief. I had not known how to tell whether I was carrying and had
refused to beg Bess for the information. It was a mercy that the only female who would produce a litter at Loseley park was Sophie.

“We should both be thankful we are not with child,” I said, hoping to make an end of it.

“Not exactly madam.” She jiggled the chicken back and forth a little.

I stabbed the needle into the tapestry. “Why are you so exasperating, Bess?”

“Sir George wouldn’t be asking half of London to stop the marriage if you were great-bellied, would he? Then any blockhead could see you’d been rightly bedded.” She swung the chicken a little more freely now. “Surprised you didn’t think of that yourself, madam, you being so close with poets and all.”

A little upholstery pillow, stuffed under my bodice like dressing in a roasting hen, bought my release from my father’s cloister. He was easy to gull because he had refused to look at me for weeks. I approached the pig sty from the upwind side while he was showing a suckling pig to his chaplain, my hands clasped discreetly over my well-upholstered belly, my eyes downcast, docile.

The Right Worshipful Sir George More, Knight, of Loseley Park, Surrey
, wasted no time writing to
J. Donne, Esq., in his lodging by the Savoy
, to come to collect
Mrs Donne
at once. After showing me the page, my father held out the quill so I could add an encouraging postscript.

Within a day of receiving the letter, my husband rode up on a rented horse in his second-best suit of clothes. No French servant danced attendance, but in his hand he
clasped a permit that had taken him four months and £20 to procure. It had the seal of the Archbishop of Canterbury and declared the marriage
of Ann Donne alias More
and
John Donne
legitimate and sound in English law.

15. FLAT MAPS

When she could no longer bear the stink of the rotting pigeons, Pegge made Izaak Walton carry them out by their slimy legs. He returned with a jar in which white grubs were feeding on a woodmouse, a treasure collected on a stroll. Scooping out a handful, he arranged the maggots on top of her father’s blackened toes, then cocooned the feet in moss and secured the moss with gauze.

Each morning, Pegge picked off the maggots glutted with dead flesh and put on hungry ones. There was an endless supply, Walton assured her, delighting in his role of purveyor of services to the dying.

Now Walton sat in Pegge’s chair beside her father, their hair mingling in an irritating way. She was standing at the window watching the bedsheet dry on the bare limbs of the apple tree when she noticed a papery growth under the eaves. The first three cells of a wasp’s nest, though there was little sign of spring.

Inside the room the talk was of the sorts, species, and genders of worms, a subject dear to both men, worms of
the dunghill, basilisks or blind worms, scarabs or silk worms, squirrel-tails and brandlings—found in cow-dung or hog’s-dung rather than horse-dung, for the last was too hot and dry, Walton was adamant on that point—and of the abundance of flies which adorned and beautified the riverbanks and meadows and whose breeding was so various and wonderful that Walton was swallowed up in the excitement of the telling, until her father steered him on to flies hastening the decay of a carcass, and whether maggots were bred in dead flesh or were drawn there after birth to feed, and whether buried flesh could bring forth grass.

Pegge was pulling the frozen bedsheet off the tree when she heard the clatter of wheels on the pavingstones. Soon Mr Harvey was helping his wife out of their carriage, which righted itself with a jolt as she stepped down. Con had gained weight, and all of it protruded out the front. As Con approached, Pegge shook out the sheet so that the ice flew sharply across the courtyard. Pegge carried the sheet in a lump into the kitchen and hung it near the fire, where it began to give off a fragrant steam.

In the passage, Con was playing with Sadie, who rolled over to be scratched on her belly, forgiving Con’s desertion in an instant after pining the whole winter. Walton was coming down the stairs, his eyes fixed on Con, as if he had never laid eyes on a woman with child before. Con stood up slowly, her hands coyly supporting her back, and Walton began to stammer, unable to say two good words in a row. Although she was almost thirty, Con’s hair was still a glossy black.

“Like a raven’s wing,” Walton whispered, possibly to Pegge, who was too annoyed with both of them to answer.

As if he could tell a raven from a rook or crow Egg white and some secret powder—gunpowder, black bile?—had given Con’s hair that avian sheen. Even in March, the scent of honeysuckle drifted from her, though no man had ever questioned its unseasonable source.

Con should have stayed in Barking to tend to her own husband, who appeared to have lost weight under her regime. Mr Harvey’s scalp was sallow and unloved, and his whiskers were ragged around the edges as if she had little time to lavish on them.

“Why have you come?” Pegge asked her sister.

Con’s eyes rounded. “To care for Father, of course. You know how eager he is to die. He has written of nothing else in his letters.”

“Nothing else,” echoed the gentle Mr Harvey, shifting his eyes away from Pegge’s. “A most pious man, most pious indeed …” His voice trailed out the door.

Would no one talk sense except herself? “If Father dies, it will be because he has taken it into his head to let his soul feed off his body.”

“Then why so downhearted, Pegge?” Con asked. “I am sure his soul is merry. We must arrange everything most becomingly, as befits his stature.”

“He wishes to be buried in a private manner.”

“But in that place assigned to him in Paul’s,” Walton added, looking uneasily from sister to sister.

“Englishmen are usually buried with their wives,” Pegge said.

Con tilted her head, a bird alerted to an insect stirring underground. “Surely you did not think he would be buried with our mother?”

“He made a promise to her.”

“Years ago—and in a poem! Can you not let go of that poor fable? There will be no mention of that marriage in the funeral in the cathedral. I will speak to Jo about arrangements tomorrow. And to you, of course, Mr Walton, for your letters have told me how useful you have been. He is past speaking for himself, so we must speak for him.”

The boy came in at one end of Con’s box, with Mr Harvey labouring at the other. As Mr Harvey rested beneath the picture called
The Skeleton
, working up courage for the flight of stairs ahead, the kitchenmaid stuck her head into the passage and asked what was to be done with the Dean’s cold dish of soup. Should she heat it up or throw it out?

“I’ll take it in to him,” Con offered.

Walton held her jacket as she slipped out of it. “I’ll come with you,” he said.

Mr Harvey looked at his wife as if he had only just noticed how full and soft her lips were. Con swept her palm across her neck, preening in the heat of Walton’s gaze. There was an unseemly incandescence about her skin, like a pale worm flushed out into the street by rain.

“No,” Pegge said to Con, “he will want me, not you. He likes me to hold the bowl while he sips. As for other visitors,” she said to Walton, “you know he has no use for you at this hour.”

“I meant,” Walton stammered, “only that I would read to Dr Donne while Mrs Harvey fed him. I have transcribed another of his sermons.”

Pegge gripped the bowl. “If you want him to hold this down, you’ll both stay out. He needs help using the close-stool now. I doubt you would care to do that, Con.” Then, assessing her sister’s face, “You may see him in the morning when he is rested. You must be tired yourself after the long coach ride.”

Luxuriously big-bellied, bathed in male attention as pungent as musk, Con had never looked less weary to her younger sister.

“I will come in early to shave him,” Con said.

“His skin is more tender now. No, I think you had better leave such things to me.” Pegge hoped Mr Harvey would take his wife straight up to bed and out of Walton’s addled sight. “I am sure Mrs Walton is expecting you home for fried eels,” Pegge said as she pushed past him with the lukewarm soup.

When Pegge saw her father lying flat on his back, she knew he would not take even a sip of broth. A drop of Christ’s blood would have been more to his liking. She put the bowl down on the hearth for Sadie.

The dog was baking her fleas next to the glowing coals, her sleep full of yelps and apprehensions, as if ghosts were paying irksome visitations. As old for a dog as the Dean was for a man, Sadie no longer harrowed Hounds-ditch or
even ventured outside the City walls. Now it was as much as Sadie could do to sneak into the death-room to keep vigil with Pegge beside her father.