Conceit (29 page)

Pegge and Sadie had been up since dawn without a crust or bone. Waiting on the west side of the Fleet, Pegge eyed the naked buttocks hanging down through the privies suspended over the eastern bank. Threads of conversation sailed across the ditch, as mundane as the oysters at the Horn Tavern and the serving-maids at the Kingshead. Was the King ill or simply in distemper? Which priest would he name as the new Dean of Paul’s? Surely no new man could sermonize like Donne?

Finally, a pair of buttocks rose and a privy emptied. Pegge stepped across the footbridge and took a seat.

Back outside, she walked the outskirts of Fleet gaol, where tenements clustered cheek by jowl. All the faces were winter-white, as if the blood had burrowed deep into the flesh. The dogs were more congenial with their country ways, nipping heels and sniffing one another’s hindquarters. A woman overtook Pegge with a peculiar gait, her strides too long for her skirts, a lump in her throat like Adam’s undigested apple.
An androgyne
, Pegge thought,
a creature complete unto itself that has no need of marrying and no desire for children.

Now an emaciated cheek, sharp beard, and hollow eye were bearing down upon Pegge, putting her in mind of her dead father. Some playful dust blew his words into her ear-
consider upon what ground you tread.
She walked a few more steps in iambic time, John foot, then Ann foot, and the voice spoke again, as quick as the living.
Every puff of wind may blow the father into the son’s eye
, the voice insisted,
or the wife into her husband’s, or his into hers, or both into their children’s, or their children’s into both. Every grain of dust that flies here is a piece of me.
His soul must be perambulating, whirling about her—undergoing metempsychosis or just stirring up trouble. She felt a breath on her neck and then a blast of hot tobacco on her cheek, and she knew she must keep vigilant, for his soul was as likely to take up residence in a neighbouring onion as in a travelling post-horse or spider.

Pegge had hoped to steal a loaf from Paul’s canons, but she found their brewery and bakehouse shut up to honour the
late Dean, so she trudged north with Sadie close behind. One of the dog’s legs was beginning to drag, and a damp weighed on the air, a suffocating wool that muffled sound. No one seemed to be at large, except a rat shuttling for cover a few yards ahead.

Past Bishopsgate, a cart drew up and a man jumped off, then pried up a cellar door. Sea-coal tumbled below ground, sending up a choking cloud. Worse than the hot stink of tar around the wharves, the coal dust hit Pegge’s empty stomach like a fist. All around her, chimneys were expelling smoke from roofs that jutted out so far they blocked the light. Now that dusk was falling, the vileness sucked up by the heat of day would be drawn down to blacken the nostrils and chill the brain. Each morning of her life, the City had been filmed in this airborne soot, a fuliginous mist that corroded even iron. This noxious fog had defiled even the sacred stones of Paul’s and coated her father’s auriculas in wintry slime.

Pegge crossed under Bedlam gate in search of water, but found the spout tied shut against interfering hands. The garden grew foodstuffs in a warmer season, but now only stinking, half-eaten cabbages were strewn about. When she was young, her brothers had brought her here to laugh at the inmates and throw a coin if their antics merited it. Now the inhabitants were being herded, coughing, snuffing, barking, spitting, back into the cottages. A keeper was cajoling a wild-man to follow him with a bun nailed to the end of a bamboo, but before long even that diversion was locked inside.

The coal-man entered the grounds looking for sport.
Seeing no entertainment to be had, he pushed near to take a look at Pegge, who was bending under the spout to collect a few drops on her tongue. How had the dark crept up so quickly? The air was brindled, a pewter fog, which no sane person should be out in. The man was so close she smelt his rotting teeth and saw the scar that joined his twisted lip directly to his ear.

He spat out a gob close to her boots. “Who are you, then? Did they forget to lock you up this night?”

“I am the daughter of the just-dead Dean of Paul’s.” She backed up towards one of the buildings for safety.

This seemed to whet his appetite, rather than the reverse, for a crude hand gesture conveyed what he would like to do to her. Without taking his eyes off her, he leaned one grimy arm against the wall, preventing her from escaping, and groped at the buttons on his breeches. He pissed leisurely, sending out a spray with a rank odour, then grasped her wrist abruptly and pinned her against the wall. Her brothers had once pointed out a cottage where a mad gentlewoman had been confined and used by various men against her will in gruesomely contorted postures. Perhaps it was this very cottage, cold and slippery against her back. She wished her brothers were beside her, telling their stories now.

Just then a torch appeared at Bedlam gate and out of the brindle came a fond, familiar face, the sweet long nose of Parrot, her father’s mare, come to carry her to safety. But as the fog parted and the mare drew closer, Pegge saw it was only a tall man with a brown cloak wrapped round against the damp. Parrot’s sweet nose dissolved into the man’s,
although the eyes—a welcome chestnut brown—were indisputably the mare’s.

The stranger dismissed the coal-man with a curt warning that sent him running. Everything had become too loud in her head, every word a shout, like Bess’s clogs pounding on the wooden floor when Pegge was still in bed. Shaking from the vulgar encounter, she tried to brush the filthy coal-marks from her clothes.

The torch-boy held out a fragrant parcel. “The Dean’s old servant said to tell you there are six more waiting for you in her kitchen.”

Inside the cheesecloth was a fresh mutton pastry. Turning to hide her brimming tears, Pegge gulped it down, then wiped the crumbs from her lips.

“I was at the Deanery speaking to your uncle when this boy came to tell us he had seen you,” the stranger said. “Do you not remember me, Margaret Donne? I am Mr Bowles, who may be your husband hereafter. I hoped that your father had spoken to you before-” He found it too indelicate to say.

Pegge could not answer, thankful for the night fog that occluded her complexion.

“I have just learnt the terms of your father’s Will. Your uncle showed me a codicil that pertains to you.”

What if her value had fallen upon her father’s death, like currency when the monarch was dethroned? It was too much to expect Uncle Grymes to make good marriages for all three daughters. Bridget and Betty would be easier to dispose of. By the time their uncle began to negotiate for Pegge, she would be as unmarriageable as Bess.

Had Mr Bowles just said something?—she could not tell. How many hours had passed since her father died? She did not even know what day it was, or month, only that her body was stiff from sleeping on cold stones.

“I see you will not ask me for the terms,” Mr Bowles continued awkwardly, “but I must tell you just the same.
Her portion to be £750 if she weds Mr Bowles of Clewer and £20 if she of her own fantastical brain rejects him.”

Fantastical brain.
She had no doubt the words were her father’s. What choice had she now—to embrace a man, or to embrace only penury and shame? If unmarried, Pegge would be forced to live with Constance after all and be nursemaid to a brood of ill-bred children.

Pegge watched Mr Bowles fumbling with the fastener on his cloak, as if he had not yet mastered all its workings. “Can it be true you are a man of science?” she asked.

“I am William Bowles,” he admitted. “My brother George is the botanographist, the discoverer of milk-white lady’s smock.”

“I believe the Dean had in mind your brother,” she said.
The clever twin
, her father had called him.

“George is too ill to return from Venice. The physic,” he cast his eyes down, his words low, “quicksilver.”

The Venetian pox, Pegge guessed, from a night-walker. To spare Mr Bowles, she only nodded.

“No lady should be forced to marry such a man. Your father would have despised the union.”

Perhaps so, but her father’s poems provided ample evidence of his own transgressions, speaking of quicksilver sweats and sick tapers which winked when lovers
were too ill to couple. However, Mr Bowles was not the man to confide this to, for he had the look of an innocent in such matters.

“By law I must marry the man my father chose or be reduced to £20 all told. I would hardly attract a fishmonger for that sum.”

“Your uncle believes I am the Mr Bowles intended and there is no need to tell him otherwise unless you wish.” He added this sweetening to the bargain: “I am five minutes the elder. I will be Groom of the King’s Wardrobe when my father dies, and all his lands at Clewer go with me.”

She ducked her head and smiled to herself. Cucumbers and turnips would suit her remarkably. By this odd turnabout, her father had provided for her better than he had for Constance.

Mrs Bowles of Clewer. The name Bowles was not what she would have picked for resonance of language. Clewer, was it? That was not so bad. On the Thames somewhat past Richmond, if her geography was right, high enough for carp and gentlemanly pike. Grander, she was sure, than Constance Harvey’s Abury Hatch, and Pegge would rather go anywhere than Barking. No sea-coal would foul the air, and there would be space for Sadie and for Bess, with her vast stores of useful salves and potions.

Pegge’s own brother George had wanted to be a pig-farmer, for he said that pig-farming had come down in their mother’s blood from her father, the squire of Loseley park. Before George boarded ship at Portsmouth, Pegge stood with him at Smithfield market, admiring the breeding stock. Yes, she would keep pigs, as her grandfather had done.

“But why should you wish to take your brother’s place?”

“The woman my father has chosen for me is not to my liking. She is too”—good breeding tied his tongue in knots but a greater fear untied it—“forward in her longings.”

Pegge imagined a rural Constance, exuding musk and crowned by tangled locks, a hairy springe to trap plain country birds. No doubt whole villages, whole boroughs, complained of the woman’s unnatural, insatiable lust.

He looked queasy at the prospect. “The match has not yet been concluded,” he said, “and with evidence of my brother’s evil-for he has foolishly spelt out his agony in letters to me—I shall persuade my father to let me marry you in his stead.”

Her very boyishness was now in her favour. She had grown small, high breasts and her hairs were indeed sprouting in her armpits and on her more quiet place below. Even now, she felt them rupturing the skin like new feathers in a fledgling eager to take flight. According to Bess, marriage would cure the green-sickness, which had turned Pegge’s voice rich and plummy, a fearsome thing, and made her breasts throb at night, provoking startling dreams. Worse, it had made her covet Con’s old undergarments, turning this way and that in front of a looking-glass, making unhappy comparisons with her sister’s ample breasts and buttocks.

Mr Bowles did not look gluttonous, but time would stimulate his appetite. Soon his will would be wholly hers by power of love and they would learn to pleasure one another, for even the gentle Mr Harvey had been able to get Con with child. Kissing and embracing were the best
philtre, the sight of naked parts stirring even ordinary husbands to extraordinary, burning lust. As for herself, she could tell by the turn of Mr Bowles’s ankle that he had a comely leg that would well suit her. And his arm—it would curve softly round her to drive away the perverse longings that had transported her at night.

At one of her father’s last sermons in Paul’s, she was taking notes when his pointed boot began to tap. As she shrank into the bench, the rhythm shot up his calf, his thigh, his torso, pulsed down his arm, and emerged in a hand quavering with the gravity of the theme. Every so often, he rose up on his toes to delay the climax, the vowels resonating in his throat, his lips in the service of a deadly grin, retracting so far to the sides she thought they would snap, until suddenly they sprang back and spat out the last few potent words like black tobacco juice.

Pegge had squirmed in horror, wondering how much longer he could keep up the performance. That was when she noticed one of the Bowles twins. His eyes fastened on the Dean’s peculiar lips, the young man was absentmindedly buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket in time to the Dean’s oratory. A periodic sentence. An absolute. A fragment for emphasis. A rhetorical question. Another button done up and undone. Now she knew which twin it had been: William Bowles, secure in his buttoning.

Sadie’s noises had drawn Mr Bowles into Bedlam garden, where the dog was devouring rotten vegetables. As he tried to coax her up, Sadie gave out a gaseous belch and sank even deeper, rivalling the cabbages in sulphurous
fumes. Unmindful of the mud, Mr Bowles took off his cloak and lay it under the dog’s head, pressing his hands along her bloated flank. Sadie snapped at him, but he did not flinch.

“Your dog is sick, Margaret Donne.”