Conceit (27 page)

But now I remember—you are on your deathbed, and I must keep by you at all times, ready to claim your soul before God fires it straight to heaven. When you pledged yourself to God, you defied your solemn vow in Lincoln’s Inn. You were wrong, my husband, labile. It was treason to give away something that belonged to me.

On our wedding night, you wanted nothing more than to die in the act of sex and share a single grave with me. You told me we would die and rise the same, and prove mysterious by this love. I have not forgotten, though it seems to have slipped the busy mind of the high priest of St Paul’s. Did you really think that I who had given up the whole vast world for love would be content to lie alone in this narrow tomb while you went to a far more splendid grave?

True marriages are not divorced by death, nor are lovers’ vows so easily unknotted. God has not the power to curb my love, whatever violence he has done to yours. Now you
sicken in the great oak bed I loved and died in. At times, your soul rises and scouts around, checking the way ahead. Whether you are taken by flood, by fire, by fever, by plague—or more likely, I see now, by decrepitude and age—I will lay claim to what is mine. At the exact moment that your soul springs from your body, I will be there to trap it with a long, devouring kiss.

17. SALT

An unfinished conversation echoes in my skull. But where did we leave off, Ann? I mourned as much as any husband, but I was no Orpheus plunging into the underworld to save my beloved at the risk of my own soul. You had found a kind of peace, while I was forced to stumble among men and raise your children. Having betrayed Essex, it was not hard to turn my back on you.

Visitors push into the room, but I keep my eyes closed. I am marooned on an island with a festering wound, but these spectators are not driven off. Spit in my face, ye Jews, and pierce my side. Why not scoff, scourge, and crucify me too?

Someone says impatiently, “Foulness signals a quick end.” It is our son Jo, still not wearing a cassock. Does he think me deaf as well as dumb? He has been here a week going through my papers, hoping to find some manuscript to make his fortune. Constance comes in on the arm of Samuel Harvey. They hover, proud of their fecundity, hinting that they will call their first-born John. Perhaps
they will begin to appraise the plate or remove the pictures from the wall. She leans over me, her eye slipping the diamond from my finger. But Constance has been away too long, and it is Pegge I want now, at the last—Pegge and Walton, whose little notebook has finally become an asset.

They leave, not a moment too soon, for I cannot be far from death now. When Walton arrives, I will send him to the sculptor to ask whether he has purchased the marble for my effigy. Even now in the quarry, the agent might be running his knife along a block to check for suppleness and colour. It will be brought by ship and carted up the hill into Paul’s yard, where Nicholas Stone will contemplate his line into the marble. Fourteen years ago he carved your epitaph. More sought-after now, he will carve only my face and leave the shroud to his assistants. But first he will wait for my Will to be proved and the deposit to be paid.

And for that to happen, I must die. Oh, Ann, break off this last futile lament and let me speed out of the prison of my body. Your finger beckons impatiently, though you know I cannot come. It is not wrongdoing to decompose in separate tombs. Death
is
divorce. Why should husband and wife be manacled in the grave like prisoners in Fleet gaol? When I die, my soul must go ahead to chart the way, while yours lags behind to burn off its amorousness. As ashes I will come, according to my pledge, but first I must go to a far more worthy place.

Bess cares for me at night as she cared for my children, regulating the function of my organs as she regulated theirs. Now she peers into
my
chamber pot with thin lips, displeased with
my
stingy offerings. Her basins hold the ministrations of the devil. Mustard poultices for hoarseness in my chest, and purgatives to loosen my bowels. If that does not work, a greased finger will shoot up my anus, digging out a plug of stool to start the process going. Why has God seized my bowels and put this steward at them?

Bess leaves me naked as long as she can, then covers me with the itchy horsehair blanket and throws a bucket of coals on the fire. I might as well be locked in a jakes with a lusty whore. Must I share my last cell with female infidels? The most cowardly is this mongrel who sulks and wheezes beside my bed, observing every humiliating rite I am put through with wry philosophy.

“The dog has fleas.” Did I say that? No doubt I did. I have thought it more than once in these past weeks.

“No more than you.” Bess swats at the old blanket, then secures it so tightly I can scarcely breathe.

Balaam could not have been more surprised when his ass spoke than I am at hearing Bess say this. And yet Balaam’s animal was full of wisdom. Can it be possible that God has sent such gatekeepers to catechize John Donne and test his worthiness for paradise?

What has Pegge done with Thomas Mores skull? I am sure it was here, for I heard her arguing with Mr Walton when he carried it in. There it is—on the high shelf. I can just see it if I tilt my head. Much more comforting than the sight of
Bess settling herself in the chair beside me and unwrapping a hog’s pudding.

When Pegge was little, she would curl up in my lap with the skull while I worked on a sermon. I feared she would block the passages, knot and slow the tumbling phrases, but instead I wrote faster, outpacing time, fleuve and effluvium, tumescence and detumescence. When I finally wearied, her fingers were white from clutching the bony eye sockets. Once she asked me what Margaret More did with her father’s bloody head after she caught it in her lap. I said that she buried it under her tulips so that when his soul returned to collect it, he would be forced to collect his daughter too.

“Then, Father, how did the skull get
here?”
Pegge’s eyes were wide with the injustice of it.

I had only been trying to console her, for no man can hunt down the bones of all his children, especially when he has fathered twelve, as I have done. In truth, it was my old fear of burial in a shallow grave, dressed up by Mores skull and a few tulips to make a tale for Pegge. In my nightmare, a dog would dig me up, chewing off my face and dragging my skull as far as Bedlam gate.

Pegge liked to play in my library, fingers eager for my nib, her small body squirming as she watched me write. Once I found miniature words wedged into the white spaces of a sermon. The paper was ruined, so I gave it to her. Soon it was covered with minuscules and majuscules, the spurts and blottings she called stories. As she grew older, her penwork became more vain, the letters petulant, the words indelible and rude. Wedged in the fair copies
she made of my sermons, I would find digressions I had never preached.

Sometimes they had a kind of brilliance to them.

Now here is Pegge, bumping and rustling, pushing Bess out the door. She snuffs out the candle and opens the draperies, quoting my own poetry at me. “Busy old fool, unruly sun, why dost thou thus, through windows and through curtains call on us?”

I do not return her smile, for the warmth coming through the glass might now be fatal. Last night, Bess’s snorting ensured my wakefulness but now sleep, death’s vanguard, launches his attack.

I want to die awake, not die asleep, for I will risk falling into Death’s yawning pit before my soul is able to escape. If I relax now, I will slump down past reverie, past sleep, into the boiling vat which melts the flesh off bones, swilling with pigs’ feet and cat-skins until the fat has cooled and coagulated and the bones are extracted and laid in the tomb, where centuries will mulch them into earth. That death might do for a commoner, but not for the Dean of Paul’s, whose soul must speed at once to heaven.

“Quick, Pegge, a lemon.”

She looks startled. This is the price I pay for speaking in metaphor all my life, talking what Bess calls
stuff and nonsense.
I cannot possibly mean what I say. Or perhaps Pegge is surprised I can still talk.

“Salt,” I cry.

This time she understands and clatters out the door, the mongrel at her heels so bursting-full of morning piss that
she can barely waddle. This morning the dog’s reeking breath is a foretaste of hellmouth. Yet this bitter hound has mastered metaphysics, saving my soul more than once by coughing and wheezing just as I was about to fall into a mortal sleep.

Pegge is back with a straight-blade, a lemon, and a bowl of salt. She halves the lemon, almost slicing off her finger, and squeezes it into the salt. Then she rubs the coarse mixture on my feet, just sparing my toes, grinding the cold salt under my arches, over my heels, past my ankles, twisting out hairs mercilessly as she scours up my calves, like a kitchenmaid attacking a soot-blackened pot.

The citrus stings my nostrils and makes my eyes smart, and I am as happy as a martyr in a hairshirt. Then my Magdalen dries my bleached, hairless legs and props me up on my pillow facing east. Cleaned and trussed, confessed and ready, I am a joint of meat salted and put down for winter. And so we begin another day of waiting for my God.

Visitors have come and gone, and the curtains are open to the night sky. Bess is sprawling across the chair with her eyes closed.
Keeping watch
, she calls it.

When will you speak in your loud voice, God, bidding me to take up my bed and walk? I must not drift off now. A man must be alert, not lax, at the moment of death. How many have evacuated their bowels? Become, against their will, aroused?

Batter my heart three person’d God, for I—except you enthrall me—never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. My body will fall down without pushing, but my soul will not go up without your pulling. I hold my breath as it rises a little and hovers above my head.

Bess rasps through her broken nose and I return to my body with a thud. How can my soul rise with such braying down below? It might as well be the arch-fiend snorting at my side. Can a man not die without a woman’s body taking centre stage? I feel like a supernumerary at my own funeral, a wad of excrescence travelling down an intestinal pipe guarded by Beelzebub herself.

It is nearly dawn and I am in despair that God has been chased off once more. Pegge must think me comatose, for she is an inch away, scrutinizing me like an upturned bug and prodding me with a finger.

Now she plunges her hands into some salve and rubs it briskly on my skin. The scent is provoking—I hope it is not myrrh. My lips move to tell her I am in no danger of sleep now, but no sounds come out. Instead, the lines of a poem jump neatly into my head.

When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
      And my friends’ curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,
Then they shall find your picture in my heart.

Made thus to think of you, Ann, I am transported to your bed of sin, the root and fuel of all my sickness. I am laid on
a pile of fagots. Desire becomes the bellows, and memory the embers and hot coals.

My fingers itch with remembered pleasure, and that which God would have me remember with shame I remember with delight, imperiling my divine spirit. I am charged with lust, my buttocks flattened against the mattress, hairs rising on my scrotum like grasses fanned by an exotic breeze, my member like a compass leg, leaning and hearkening and growing erect as it draws closer to its mate.

All at once, the sun whips round the courtyard, blazes over the Deanery wall, and spears me through the window. I exult as God begins to split my body and soul apart—two married hemispheres divorcing, a two-sided coin, two hands cemented with a fast balm, two prisoners manacled face to face about to be rent splendidly asunder. Just as I am working out the exact metaphor, for my God is a metaphorical God, and I am an exultant poet composing my own death-song, I apprehend it is not the face of God I see crowned by this blinding aura, but the triumphant face of you, my vengeful wife. God has not
done
, and there is
more
—