Conceit (31 page)

William had orchid-fever, a sickness that made a child of a man and might, if it ran its course, render him unable to sire children. The swellings at his throat and between his legs heralded the illness. Soon he lay in a dark room with a compress on his groin that did nothing, Pegge knew, but press upon his pain and weigh upon his mind.

After several weeks, the swellings subsided and William paid a visit to her chamber, fraught with hesitations and meanderings. Pegge’s coaxings could not always bring him hard again, but soon that too was overcome, and William was in better appetite in bed. Pegge still had not conceived, although Bridget, who had married the same year, had just given birth to a second child by Thomas Gardiner. Even little Betty was betrothed and would no doubt soon bear triplets.

The doctor came, deliberating while taking healthy doses of Canary wine. In his opinion, the mumps could not make an Englishman sterile. He concluded that Pegge’s womb was rebellious and that William took his manhood far too seriously.

“Do not enter that race frowningly,” was his advice, as he held out his cup for refilling.

Finally Pegge conceived, with the help of powdered oats, sage juice, and sitting in a tub of scarlet dye and ashes, the sight of which brought William first to tears and then to healing laughter. Enamoured of his own lustfulness, he plunged his arms into the dye-bath and carried Pegge, lubricious with colour, all the way to her bed. Whether it was Pegge who was cured, or William made less serious, they did not bother to determine.

Once she was with child, William became confidently amorous, stroking her swollen belly and laying his ear against it at the slightest invitation. The midwife came to listen as well, pronouncing it a large and active infant. Designing voluminous garments for Pegge, William neglected the King’s Wardrobe for weeks at a time and gave up his work on a fastener to keep men’s breeches securely latched, calling it a useless trinket.

When Pegge went into labour, the midwife chased William out, told him to go outside and shoot at something instead of troubling his wife, who had enough to do. After the labour was over, and the large and active child was finally out, Pegge held and nursed her first-born, then fell asleep, exhausted.

She was awakened by a conversation outside the door—the midwife’s reassuring words, then William asserting he would go in to see his wife alone. His hose and shoes were muddy and his hair dishevelled, showing the first threads of grey. He would not look Pegge in the eye, but held up a peculiar stalk of flowers.

“A satyr flower,” Pegge said contentedly.

He brought it closer for her to examine. Each of the
seven flowers on the spike had three violet petals and, hanging at the groin, a fourth misshapen one. She was surprised to see an insect still nestled in a bloom. It became motionless, thinking to avoid detection as she drew the blossom closer. She cupped her hand to trap the bee, discovering to her delight that she had caught a brown-and-yellow petal in its masquerade.

“They are bee-orchids,” William said in a rush, “from the fens beyond the marsh, about three miles upriver. Once when I was a child I found them at this very time of year. And today—” He looked at the empty place beside her on the bed, too embarrassed to seek further.

She rescued the quivering orchids from his fist. “Your daughter is in her cradle. Go quietly and pull back the cover and you shall see a giant infant with a ruddy face. Since I have done all the work, I have named her Margaret, after me.”

The thud of Pegge’s morocco heels was muffled by the rush mats on the floor. The peacock shoes had deepened to a saturated blue, the result not of variegated dyeing but an accidental soaking in the river years before, and her old morning-gown was badly stained from eating red fruit in her bed. These were Pegge’s clothes for when she was alone, gliding like a servant through the dark.

An hour earlier, the throbbing had begun under her left ear. Then the cramps started, announcing her fleurs, and she knew she would get no sleep until the blood began.
Her holy week, she called it. This time she left her candle in her chamber. Last month a servant had found her asleep at dawn with a pool of melted wax beside her, having almost set the flannel-room on fire.

Slipping her feet out of the old shoes, she crept barefoot along the gallery to William’s study. Climbing to the top rung of the ladder, she looked for the dust streaks that told her where he had hidden the new book. At dusk the previous day, the folio had arrived wrapped in the fleur-de-lis paper used by John Marriot’s shop in Fetter lane. Finding it now, she pushed the other books together to hide the gap and climbed down to read it at William’s table.

Lighting the candle, she opened the book and discovered that her father’s face was misshapen on the frontispiece, his left eye where his right should have been. His features had been transposed by an engraver too lazy to check his work against the original. It had taken her brother Jo nine years to gather eighty sermons into one disordered, bloated volume. But there was also something else inside the folio—something that had caused William to hide the book from Pegge when it arrived—a
Life and Death of Dr Donne.

Izaak Walton’s pious fiction began with her father’s birth and schooling.
The age
, according to Walton,
had brought forth another Picus Mirandola.
After a good deal of nonsense the printer should have struck out, Walton plodded to the apex, his account of her father’s death, written as if he were right there at the bedside.
In the last hour of his last day, his body melted away and vapoured into spirit, his soul having, I verily believe, some revelation of the beatifical vision.

Walton seemed to have forgotten that he was elsewhere, still in his own bed or walking north for his morning’s fishing.
As his soul ascended, and his last breath departed from him
, Walton wrote,
he closed his own eyes and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him.
As if a dead man could reach up and close his own eyelids! Much had happened between the thrill pulsing at her father’s neck and his soul making good its escape that even Pegge could not recall in detail.

Walton had not been just a milksop and gossip-monger, a hanger-on at great men’s deathbeds. He was much more than that: a damager of reputations, a fulsome biographer who could not tell art from truth, a parasite—her mind was sparking—a writer of gross fabrications, who took the rind of great men’s lives and threw away the meat.

Pegge had read the folio in a sweat and now the moon was riding low. She wanted to smash the book against the table, the floor, the window, whatever was hard and close, but she could not risk waking the household and being accused of harbouring a dangerous melancholy.

A woman could write a fiction as well as a man. Why did men always begin their stories at the start? Closing the folio, she spun it round.

She flipped up the lid of William’s ink-pot. Her fingers greeted the quill after a long absence, relearning grip and stance. She tested ascenders and descenders, loops and angulations, her ribs draped over the table, her left ear scraping, eye pursuing nib. The ink was of good quality, thicker than water, as viscous as blood, evoking the east, intoxicant. She had learnt the quality of ink from a master,
John Donne, but it was ten years since she had toiled under his strict eye. This work would be more pleasurable. She wrote the first words boldly in the white between the lines.
Lips, legs
, and
arms:
small words that fitted into the spaces left by men.

More words quickened within her and the nib skittered across the page, explosive, blurting out syllables, quarter-words, half-words, then galloping phrases that outpaced sense. By daybreak, the pages were wet and black with William’s ink.

Pegge let the leaves flutter closed and the words smear. Tomorrow, she would get up before dawn to mix ink of her own. She was stretching her arms, interlocking her fingers above her head, when someone moved in the door frame. For an instant, she could not see who it was. Then she recognized William with their daughter close behind him, mouth caressing her thumb, eyes darting to her mother’s naked feet. A small arm cradled Pegge’s peacock shoes.

A woman might read a book, surely, if she could not sleep? And where better to find an improving book than in her husband’s study? William could not tell which folio it was, nor see her naked feet from where he stood. Of all things, this would most annoy him, even more than the frayed morning-gown he tolerated up to the hour of noon. She felt the blood begin to gather and drip along the inside of her thigh, then the familiar release as the first spots hit her feet. She willed him not to come near enough to see the spots, or the book she had defaced with ink.

An accusation began to distort his lips. Perhaps he would threaten to send her to stay with Constance, as he
had threatened once when she was wilful but had not the heart to do. He began angrily, a husband’s privilege, waving his hands in the air, but gentled his tone when he remembered the child, who was now chewing on a peacock shoe. He told Pegge to go into the breakfast room and eat a good breakfast—she had never in her life been told to eat a bad one—and then to retire and dress and find some useful task with which to occupy herself. And if she could not find a useful task, to pretend to do so for her children’s sake.

As soon as William turned his back to leave, Pegge tucked the morning-gown between her legs to soak up the blood. The little girl took the wet shoe from her mouth and held it out. This daughter seldom smiled, but sometimes she made a little out-of-tune hum that told Pegge a good deal more than words.

“Margaret, would you like to wear my shoes today?”

The child nodded solemnly.

“We will make a game of it, but first take this book to my chamber and push it underneath my old cabinet. Then come to me in the breakfast room as swiftly as you can. And do not let a single person spy you on the way.”

Pegge was in the kitchen with the children, beating eggs in a metal bowl, for today was the day of the picnic that Margaret, who was now ten, had planned. It was to go ahead in spite of the darkening sky. William had said so himself, forced into it after discovering that Pegge had
stolen eggs from the moorhens’ nests. He had made such a fuss, with such a red face, accusing her of spoiling his autumn shoot—
How many birds will hatch out now?
he’d cried in rage-that he had to agree to the picnic or else the children would have pummelled him with their fists.

Now he was at the fireplace, running his finger over the mantelpiece where the royal initials had been sanded off. “It was a day like today, a wretchedly cold day, four months ago,” he related. “They say that wombs miscarried and men swooned. I myself had palpitations of the heart. When the axe was poised, King Charles asked—I thought my ears misheard-he asked,
Is my hair well?”
William looked up at the ceiling as if it were a metaphysical question.

Margaret pressed a damp finger in the scraped sugar and sucked it. “Did he wish it better combed?”

“Why no,” William said in surprise, “he wanted it safely inside his cap, so when the head was held up as is custom—”

“What custom?” asked Will, collecting the egg-shells Pegge had tossed on the floor.

“Streaming with blood,” Margaret hissed at her brother.

Did William think this a suitable tale for children? Pegge poured the scalded milk on the eggs, stirring all the while, added a fistful of sugar, then threw the basin on the grate, attacking it with the wooden spoon. As Emma walked in, dangling her cap by its ties, Margaret’s finger dove back into the sugar.

“Soldiers carried hooks and grapples,” William continued, his back now comfortably to the fire, “in the event the King did not go willingly. Before dawn, they burst into the Wardrobe and plundered the black velvet, dragging it all
along the street, a silk velvet from Italy, the finest I have ever seen. The blood,” Margaret and Will stopped what they were doing to hear better, “fountained like a saint’s, a Prussian blue. The people dipped their handkerchiefs in it. My sleeve-”