Conceit (33 page)

“Or Pegge, after you, although I hate it.”

Hearing these martyred words, Pegge dove into the horsetails once again. Surely some female wisdom should have warned her? After all, it was the seventh time she had become with child. With each birth, William had shown the same delight as with the first, whether Pegge had bestowed on him a daughter or a son. Only one had slipped out dead, a tiny perfect son.

Since Will had no great love of pigs, Pegge hoped for her own sake to bear a second boy-a son who would always stay with her at Clewer. Charles would be a good name, she thought, after the beheaded King.

21. TULIPS

Pegge was watching her daughters paint the flowers William had arranged in an ivory jar. The well-bred flowers included only a single tulip, a white with vermilion feathering.

Meg had grown slender and elegant like a fleur-de-lis. Today, because she was sixteen, William gave her a new pair of shoes and took her off to discuss her dowry. Meg returned, limping but smug, saying that Peter Scott had spoken for her. Pegge had no liking for the man, though he was rector of Sunning-hill and canon of Windsor, for he was far too staid.

The five girls were sitting with straight backs, their drawings propped rigidly on wooden frames, while their Aunt Constance circled them, securing the sheets with pegs.
They need to be schooled in the arts
, William had said, writing to Con to invite her to Clewer in spite of Pegge’s objections. He meant the useful arts, the things that Pegge disliked. When Pegge asked to keep little Franny to herself another year, William refused. He took Franny by the hand
that very minute and began her education by showing her how to tell time by the hall clock.

Pegge brought in some tulips from the garden for her daughters to paint as well. Although the tulips were now splayed over the green baize, the girls’ brushes danced by preference over the pale lilies, irises, gladioli, and narcissi. Pegge was sorry now that she had pulled up the tulip bulbs. She had wanted her daughters to draw the whole plant, even down to the rich clumps of clinging earth, but only Franny was drudging away at the vibrant tulips, one foot bare, the other dangling in a garden clog. Pegge saw Franny rub her paper so many times the brilliant paint ran, turning the sky a weepy carnation. Pegge bit her lip, waiting for Con to swoop, for William to make peace, offering to design a pair of shoes for Franny as he had done for Meg.

The girls had the fair skin and hair that was à la mode in Europe. It must have come down from Pegge’s mother, for both William and Pegge had dark hair. William liked to sketch them painting or doing needlework, sharing his hopes with them for the return of the King’s son to England. His nib elongated their necks and legs, clothed them in French gowns, and paired them with gallants in wide breeches. With a few swift pen-strokes, he made the alterations they asked for, teaching them how width and length were proportionally related.

Pegge was the only one who found plain English wool, even Puritan black, to her liking. When she was a child, she hid under woollens matted and softened by her elder sisters. Now she embraced the inky black of childhood, greyed by the country sun. Sometimes when she sat
writing next to the window, she heard the gentle
switching
of William’s nib trying to capture her on paper.

Six years had passed since the King was beheaded and the Royal Wardrobe turned into an orphanage. Even now, taking refuge in the country, William sometimes came into Pegge’s room at night, waking her to describe his dreams of merchantmen with cargoes of mysterious printed cottons from the east. In the light of day, she would see him crumple drawing after drawing, unable to decipher the secret of the indiennes.

Now Con was at the window-ledge, writing to her sons, and William sat beside his daughters, guiding their choice of colours. From time to time, he leaned forward to convey a morsel of information.

“India yellow,” he said, pushing the paint towards Emma when she started on the narcissus, “from turmeric, or perhaps only fragrant Indian corn.”

Meg’s brush hesitated over a row of dark colours.

“Those are for shading,” advised William. “Of grey, there are several: slate, bat-wing, and plumb. That is crow-black and this—tending to brown—raven. Black is never pure, Meg. The best black, used for mourning, has a purple sheen. Here are liver-drab, London smoke, and Paris mud. This tiny cake is mummy-brown,” he paused to make sure that five flaxen heads were turned his way, “from mummified Egyptians.”

“Which is your favourite colour, Father?” asked Meg.

But William could not answer. His eye flitted from colour to colour, unable to decide among them. Finally, he
turned to the vase, fingering a plain yellow flower tucked behind the others. “This is woad, so detested by Queen Elizabeth she forbade it near her palaces. Its leaves give up a deep blue dye that heathen women once used to stain their bodies.”

Pegge stared at him in astonishment, and Franny poked Cornelia, giggling. When Con walked over to the table to see what she had missed, William made some excuse and left the room, crimsoning from his own boldness.

Pegge did not like to sit for long in the salon, favouring the trapdoors and narrow passages that circumnavigated the house. She crept up the servants’ stairs in bare feet and walked backwards into the family bedchambers so that, when her children discovered her, she could pretend she had come up by the proper staircase. When they slipped their hands over her eyes, she would guess
Meg-Will-Emma-Isabel-Cornelia-Franny-Charles
, all run together to make them laugh.

Pegge would sneak in at night to hide gifts in the children’s rooms: ebony combs, snakeskins, peacock feathers, nets for catching moths, bleached jawbones, polished stones, a chambered nautilus. Their limbs encountered rose petals between sheets at night and rosemary sprigs in morning shoes. When it rained, Pegge would take over the kitchen from Cook, who reined in his temper only so long before chasing his mistress upstairs. After Cook was appeased, Pegge pulled up the sweet plunder in her sewing basket, never used for its real purpose, and shared it with
the younger children. When it was sunny and the children wandered outside to the east, west, north, and south, Pegge blew her father’s dented trumpet to call them home, upsetting William’s equilibrium.

They disagreed about the care, the upbringing, even the number, of their children. William counted only seven, but she counted eleven: seven live and four dead. One by one, Pegge’s children outgrew her pleasures and became William’s heirs. Now it was little Franny who teetered back and forth between her parents.

Year after year, Pegge looked for evidence of her father in her children, but found none. Would the child now growing in her belly resemble him? That morning, William had picked the twelve flowers from Pegge’s own garden—one for each day her fleurs were late—to tell her she was with child again. The bouquet might have been an apology, or only a subject for a watercolour lesson.

Another child? Even the thought was wearying. Pegge watched Meg wet the tip of her brush, then trail it through some pea-green powder. Would Meg have a hard time in labour with her first? Meg was filling in the pencilled leaf with deft strokes, her mouth pursed. Perhaps, Pegge thought, her daughter would find some artificial way to give birth.

Pegge asked her daughters whether they would like something warm to drink, but they did not reply, not even Cornelia who liked to turn the cocoa mill and Franny whose job it was to froth the chocolate with the paddle. Pegge picked up a few tulip petals and put them on her tongue. Turkish caps. The inside of her mouth tingled.

“Are my lips red?” she asked Franny.

“No, Mama, but we are not meant to talk when drawing. Aunt Constance does not care for it.”

Franny seemed to have forgotten that her aunt had disgusted her only last week. When Franny was in the parterre holding up her gloved hands like blossoms to catch a hawkmoth, Con had sailed past, telling her to
stop dawdling and come into the house.
Pegge heard a hideous crunch as Con stepped on Franny’s snails and saw Franny chase after her aunt, tugging on her skirts in rage.

“Mother, how can you eat flowers?” Emma scolded. “Why are you being tiresome? We cannot work if you are playing games.”

“She may not be playing,” said Meg, drawing a perfectly straight line.

Con opened her mouth like a foxglove, then snapped it shut. A widow again, Con often walked with William after dinner, but whether she was hoping to entangle him after Pegge’s sudden death from floral toxaemia, or was contriving more matches for her nieces, Pegge did not know. Canon Scott had been Con’s doing, and Pegge still hoped to bring Meg to her senses. There was a
swish
as Meg stepped her bloodied stockings out of her new shoes.

“Shall I bring you a foot-bath of gentian violet, Meg?”

“Stop fretting, Mother. You must learn to call me Margaret like everyone else.” Her head rotated on its stiff ivory column away from Pegge.

“And I wish to be called Frances, not Franny.” The little voice was cool and prim, like her elder sister’s.

Pegge wanted to whisk Franny into the garden, where she could pretend to be a four-o’clock-flower at dusk. She could
stay out all night like an evening primrose—
Hawkmoths are best caught in the dark
, Pegge longed to whisper—and collect dew from the lady’s nightcap at dawn. What need did Franny have of telling time by clocks?
Bees are the best timepieces
, Pegge wanted to tell her,
for they visit the same flowers at the same time each day.
But it was too late. These daughters were no longer Pegge’s. They were grafted so firmly onto Bowles stock, it was as if they had no Donne blood left in them.

Pegge fingered the tulips strewn across the table. “Peppery,” she told Franny. “The red tastes like pepper. Try it.” She held out some petals on her palm.

“Your mind is a muddle,” Con said sharply. “A colour is a colour and a taste is a taste. You are always
muddling.”

Con would never say such a thing in front of William. Pegge’s daughters looked down, mixing pastel colours with determined brushes. Only Franny was drawn to red. Rust, scarlet, cerise, blood. Mixed with white, red became a cooler, more palatable shade—more polite, but less to Franny’s liking. Pegge saw Franny lick her brush to taste the undiluted crimson. Was there anything of John Donne in that sly darting tongue?

Con’s bell signalled the end of painting and the start of needlework. While the girls stitched, Con read aloud from one of the books that she had brought from Barking. It suddenly struck Pegge that Con must have been reading from Walton’s
Life of Donne
for days, since she was bearing down triumphantly on the ending.

“To the Dean of St Paul’s burial-place,”
Con read,
“some mournful friends repaired, and, as Alexander the Great did to the grave of the famous Achilles, so they strewed his with an abundance of curious and costly flowers, not ceasing till the stones that were taken up in that Church to give his body admission into the cold earth-now his bed of rest—were again by the mason’s art so levelled and firmed as they had been formerly.”

Pegge coiled a thread around her hand until it was a tight noose cutting off the blood.

“His aspect was cheerful,”
Con continued,
“and such as gave a silent testimony of a clear knowing soul, and of a conscience at peace with itself His melting eye showed that he had a soft heart, full of noble compassion.”

Melting eye
-how could Con read such a thing without wincing?

“That body which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost is now become a small quantity of Christian dust. But I shall see it reanimated.”

Pegge waited until Con had wrung the last drop of pity out of Izaak Walton’s words.
Slip-slip
, Meg’s feet stepped back into her shoes and the daughters escaped, leaving Con to congratulate herself on her father’s saintliness. A look that Pegge detested spread over her sister’s face, turning it a cracked yellow like old custard.