Conceit (36 page)

Pegge’s breath was teasing the thinning hair on his crown. Was she still talking? Perhaps he had been deafened by the crashing timbers of his house. Who would want a deaf old fish-tickler? He did not know where he would live, since it was unlikely he could persuade Sir William to let him stay on at Clewer. Though Sir William had behaved with impeccable courtesy, he had avoided Walton at every opportunity.

After his wife Kenna died, Walton had wandered about the countryside. One gloomy afternoon, he filled his pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse, but while still in the shallows, not yet into deep-running waters, he caught sight of a large pike—a solitary, lachrymose, and bold fish—beating upriver like a prize bully, of a weight, he reckoned, to be exceptionally good eating. He waded swiftly to the bank, unloaded his murderous ballast, and baited his line with the first caterpillar he could find.

He could have used Pegge to run upstream that day, for he had not been fast enough to overtake the pike. Duodecimus, her youngest, was the right age to learn how to fish. If Walton stayed on at Clewer, he could make the boy a short fir-wood rod, grinding the colours into linseed oil and laying them on smoothly with a bristle brush. He could teach the boy to tickle carp in the pool Pegge wanted dug next to the spring. In him, Walton could see the faint imprint of the great Dean of St Paul’s. Certainly, the boy had the same taste for tobacco, for Walton had seen him smoking inside the piggery where the smell could not be detected.

Pegge was still brushing with that deliberate, easy motion. “Your father’s sermons will always be revered,” Walton said.

“For their cleverness, their wit, but do not look there for the man, Izzy. Such mysteries are only found in poems.”

One hundred, two hundred, three hundred strokes—when would her hand tire of the intoxicating rhythm? He knew Pegge wanted him to show Ann in a better light. But what good was it to recover the wife’s reputation at the expense of the husband’s—Ann More, who was nothing
compared to John Donne? Walton was set hard against Ann, more adamant against such passion now that his night-visitor had so rudely bolted, leaving at such an impolite hour to go back to her house at Barking.

“Love carries men as hotly into error,” he said, “as whirlwinds carry feathers.”

“But that is love’s power, don’t you see?” She twisted his hair around the brush and tugged. “I liked you better when you were less pious, Izzy. You must stop printing that biography. I cannot bear you turning my father into such a bloodless creature. You should enlarge the
Angler
instead. That is the book that Izaak Walton will be loved for.”

Perhaps she was right. As the brush untwisted, he sank into the chair, his hand toying with the minnow in his pocket, his mind drifting downstream. He had no need of notes for his book on angling. It came to him voluntarily, begging to be told, fountaining up as he walked along a river path or took refreshment in alehouses with other anglers, his ear-lobes pricking when he heard a tale worth telling.

When she was finished, he would ask Pegge to take him to the river. The day was cold but sunny, with a slight breeze that might fool a grayling into thinking that a thorn-tree fly was real. When he had rooted himself with the wind at his back, he would cast his line, the breeze carrying it out before him, and dap and dibble the bait back across the water. Pegge would sit on her cloak on the bank and open her dubbing box with its silks, wax, hooks, feathers, and little packets of dyed hair, and tie flies like those they spotted in the air about them.

If the water was too calm, he would stand rock-still facing the sun, waiting for the dark shapes to emerge from beneath the overhanging bank, for even the shadow of a pole or horsehair line would betray him to the vigilant fish. On such a day, if the fish refused to be deceived, he might lie with his head on Pegge’s lap until the clouds became dizzy, bestirring himself only to hand her a speckled feather when she asked him for it. She would have the scent of violets about her, the same scent as a young grayling fresh from a chalk river.

She was brushing his hair over her fist to form damp curls as his own mother had done. He could feel short bursts of breath as she bent close to his nape, talking of Ann and John, how they had first set eyes upon one another, how they had sworn fealty, risked all, promised everything, even to share a single grave-the story veering further and further from known truth. Walton picked up odd words and mated them, breeding a more wholesome tale to tell himself.

His thoughts swirled and bred in the warm waters downstream from the rock, like pockets of spooling water. There was something about Pegge’s mouth today, her hands, the swell of her breasts pushing against his back, something familiar about the curve of her thigh as it rubbed against him, about the eros gathered in her hands. It was in him to remember, almost to recall, that he had once lain with her as man and wife, but not of his own volition—no, somehow she had persuaded him—when had this been? When she had taken him to the secret tributary of the Darent? But each time Walton circled round,
drumming upstream like an otter after a spawning carp, he foundered on the rock of Constance Donne. Constance who had married the Master of the King’s Bears and Bulls, Edward Alleyn. Constance who had married Samuel Harvey. Constance who would probably never, even now that she was finally free of swooning, pestering admirers, marry him, Izaak Walton.

23. MAISON RUSTIQUE

Pegge was in the garden, collecting leaves one by one. A meditative act, it reminded her of picking up grains of rice in the Deanery, a penance devised by her father to make her contemplate her errors. Behind her was a trail of stones weighing down piles of leaves.

A fine red dust from the Sahara had carpeted the garden, mingling with a layer of ash from Cheapside. She had been finding scraps of books all day. Since the fire, words, phrases, paragraphs of her father’s had been coming back to her at the strangest moments. When she was sitting on her close-stool that morning, a sermon had sprung to mind with the word
bladder
embedded in it. And now this haunting wind, whistling the dust into her eyes and ears as if her father’s mischievous spirit were abroad again.

From where she stood, she could see William coming up through the physic garden past the blackened statue. The stonemason had reattached the head and was now bent over the effigy, scrubbing it with a coarse brush.

“Why is everyone acting so oddly?” William asked. “Constance arrived an hour ago and got straight into a quarrel with Izaak Walton. Even our new maid came in for some harsh words. Then Mr Walton took a horse from the stable and rode off towards the river with a very red face. I suppose that is the last we will see of him till evening.”

Pegge hid a smile. Was it her fault that the Con who had arrived that morning was sharp-tongued and tight-lipped, far from the phantom who no doubt graced Walton’s memories of the Deanery?

“Now Constance is reorganizing my closet on some new principle brought down from Barking. I wish you would go in and calm her, Pegge. After all, she is your sister.”

“If you want to please me, you will send her home.”

“If I do, will you send Mr Walton away?”

“I think you’ll find he has already left. He will have gone north to fish before winter sets in.”

“On
my
horse?” William was trying to brush the red dust from his doublet, but only succeeding in driving it further into the weave.

Walton would be on his way to the Wye in Monmouthshire to catch young salmon. He would tie crimson ribbons on their tails and slip them back into the river. Perhaps he would write to tell her of his researches, but more likely she would not hear from him for at least a score of years.

“What is to be done with that grotesque statue?” William asked.

“I will train bindweed to grow around it.”

“I refuse to have Clewer garden turned into a sepulchre.”

She reached down to collect a few more leaves.

“Let Angus do that.” William gestured towards the dark figure slouching off with a half-full sack of leaves. “Why do I employ a gardener when you put him to so little use?” He began to swat at the folds of his breeches, turning this way and that.

“The bees will be gone in a minute,” Pegge said. “It is time for them to visit the star of Bethlehem.”

He jerked his head around. “Why don’t you use your father’s pocket-clock?”

“I gave it to Duodecimus.”

“He will lose it, to be sure. Well, I shall get you another-one with a minute-hand like this.” He flipped open the lid of his clock. “This is the most remarkable invention, Pegge.”

The tomcat landed at her feet with a bushtit clamped in his mouth. She pried open the cat’s jaws and the bird flew out. The last time he had shown off such a trophy, only the beak and a pair of feet had fallen to the earth.

“Constance brought us a
London Gazette
with a report of the fire,” William said. “After we got away, the wind turned south and drove the flames into the Thames. Only nine people died, but thirteen thousand houses and eighty-seven churches were destroyed. Thirteen churches were saved, the same as the number of taverns.”

Thirteen thousand homes! The City had been folded down from quarto to octavo size. Another scrap of book-paper crumbled in Pegge’s hands. “Were all the books in Paul’s crypt destroyed?”

“They burned for a week and the booksellers are wholly in ruin, with £150,000 of stock in cinders. Pegge, are you attending? When your sister’s coach pulled up, she saw you walk off in the opposite direction with something in your hand. She said it looked like a rat.”

“It was a dead mole that I found under the leaves. I wanted to show Duo what an odd nose it had, but he was gone.”

“I cannot have my wife playing with dead animals. What was Constance to think?”

“I presume she told you herself.” Pegge assessed the espaliered pear tree. While she was in London, it had been crucified with nails. She must find something else for Angus to do. His hands were like mangles and he had no idea how to prune. “I was not in the mood for her bullying. Why did you send Duodecimus back to school without telling me?”

“Do you think you are in a fit state to mother him? What made you go into the City when the fire was raging? Cheapside was an inferno. Had you no fear of being set alight, or crushed by falling timber? I would never have learned what became of you.”

“There was something I needed to do on my own.” He had not seen that, just as he had not seen that this was the cat that had been burnt in the fire.

“You took that daft old Walton with you-was that
alone?
-and stole your father’s effigy right from the heart of Paul’s. What earthly use is that colossus? You should have let it go up in flames.” His hands fell still. “Pegge, there is a bee on my sleeve.”

“It thinks you are a flower. Be quiet and it will go away.”

An anxious minute passed. “I am being quiet, but it is still hovering.”

“There it goes. You are all right now.”

She had tied up the stalks of the white lilies and would need to lift the bulbs after the first frost.
Alabaster
or
ivory
, William called the colour,
opal
or
pearl.
He never used a plain English word like
white
when a foreign one would do. She felt the tom underneath her skirts, chafing her ankles, and tied it to a stake a little further off.

“That beast is more to you than I am. Why do you torment me? You are like a cat playing with a garter. You will say nothing, tell me nothing—and yet I see you writing morning after morning in that book of yours—”

“Let me be, William,” she said softly. “You should have married one of my sisters instead. Either Bridget or Betty would have taken you gladly.”

“I wanted
you,”
he said. He sat stiffly on the bench observing the cat tumbling in the mint, seemingly on the verge of some discovery about the animal.

“I told you that I was John Donne’s daughter, that I was Ann Mores child, that I could never stop being what I was, but you took me all the same.”

“You knew I wanted something beyond the ordinary—” He broke off, colouring. “Why do men have such yearnings, if they cannot be satisfied?”

When had William become such a philosopher? “There are different kinds of wanting,” she said. “Some are like games.” She knew she had chosen the wrong word as soon as she tasted it like a tart plum in her mouth.

“And you, Margaret, what is your sport? You must stop walking about like a madwoman, picking up feathers and scraps of fur. The stableboy tells me that you stripped most of the hairs from your mare’s tail.”

“For the fishing line I will make for Duo. Don’t curl your lip, William. What do you expect me to do? You have sent my sons away to school and married off my daughters.” She counted them on her fingers. “Mrs Scott, Mrs Spelman, Mrs Tempest, Mrs Wight, Mrs Bispham. Their husbands will never be free of their ambition. They seem so little of my body, I am ashamed to have bred them. Even my dear little Franny.”

“Let us not talk sadly of Franny,” William said in exasperation. “She is doing very well with Thomas Bispham.”

“What does a girl of sixteen know?”

“If you must have the truth, it was all Franny’s doing. I defy any father to wed his daughters to men they dislike nowadays. It cannot be done.”

Poor William, his doublet was looking far too tight. “But he is such a tiresome man. I do not know where you and Con find them.”

“I daresay you thought me tiresome too, though we have learnt to get along well enough. You will be lonely here with Franny and Duo gone. I wish you would be more welcoming to your sister. She was like a mother to you after your own mother died.”

“Is that what Con told you?” Pegge ripped out some spreading pimpernel. “She has no business here now that our daughters are married. Since Walton is gone, you must send Con away as well.”

“It is not good for you to be alone at Clewer. Come to London with me to help Franny with her baby,” William said, “or ask her to come here.”