Conceit (37 page)

“Franny doesn’t want me.”

“I think you’ll find she does.”

“I have years of neglect to put right in this garden. I must have my fish pool to breed carp in, William.”

“And your goose-foot paths, your serpentine tunnel—”

“And my grassy solitude.”

“Next you will want to build a folly for the Dean’s effigy. To think it almost cost your life-why on earth you tried to save it in that raging fire—and that cat, yes, that very cat,” he pointed to the well-groomed tom, “to pick up a filthy stray! I suppose I shall never get you back to the City again.”

He would bluster himself out in a minute. “It must be past four o’clock,” she said, “for the bindweed is closed. The stonemason will not finish cleaning the effigy today.”

“Even if all the flowers in Christendom nod off, I will not let you put yourself in such danger again. Are you attending, Pegge?” He raised his index finger. “You know I can be fierce when I want to.”

“And I must have a new gardener, William. Angus is impossible. I will begin the fish pool in the new moon when the wind is from the west. Soon we will have carp biting. You must let me have all your pheasants’ tail-feathers for my flies.”

“Be damned, Pegge, you can have the whole covey if you ask for it. Only let the servants bring the birds to you, don’t go scrambling after them yourself. You have the bad habit of frightening my birds out of laying.”

She turned towards him and unbuttoned his doublet. “Open your chest. Breathe in the air. A deep breath, William, not a flutter. There, I saw a smile. You must work harder at being a quarrelsome husband, for you have had so little practice at it. We are a poor pair of quarrellers if we cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes at a time.”

William watched Pegge lift up her old gardening skirts to shake them out. “Have your feet been bare this whole time? Have you no sense, woman? It’s almost Michaelmas.”

The wind was whistling the leaves into hollows, then whirling them up and scattering them. He put a branch on Pegge’s leaves to hold them down until Angus slouched back with the empty bag. Pegge untied the cat from the stake, brushing her face against its fur and settling it into her elbow. Her other arm slipped under William’s, letting him lead her back towards the house.

“Will you eat a freshly caught grayling, William? It will put you in better humour. You are in the country now, and must study to enjoy it.”

“Did that fool Walton catch it?”

“It is a tasty fish all the same.”

“And is he truly gone? I suppose you will want some of my claret,” he said grudgingly. “I do not know why I bother to employ a cook. Grayling, you say?”

“You know you like the way I dress it.”

She leaned against him, a faint odour of smoke about her, as they walked past the stonemason putting away his tools.

“I want to stay in the country, William. London is no place to be after the fire. When the King calls, you must go back to the City alone. Duo will stay here with me. Angus can row him across the river to school each day. Let me have my last child a little longer.”

“I do not think-” He felt her finger on his lips, calming their sputtering.

“Don’t answer now, William.”

They had been married more than thirty years, yet he still wondered at the unfathomable brownness of her eyes. After the fright she had given him, when he was sure she had been consumed in the blazing streets around St Paul’s, he would give her anything and bear everything.

“You will have your fish pool and your conservatory and your maison rustique. You will have everything you wish, Pegge, for you know I can deny you nothing.”
Only do not die before me, for I cannot live without you.

24. A FLATTERING MISCHIEF

Why did he lack the courage to ask Pegge what had been disturbing her since the fire? Of all things, that was what William most wished to know. She had been walking about the house at night, tempting him to follow her into uninhabited corners, until he came to believe that she was playing with him.

William had just been called back to London to assess the repairs needed to the King’s clothing as a result of the fire. That morning, when he went downstairs to tell Pegge, he heard her in the breakfast room, reading her book aloud to the burnt tom, telling a mad tale that only a cat would understand. As he came up behind, she shifted position so he could not see the book, her face only an inch from the page.

“Why are you still writing, Pegge? I thought this nonsense would stop when Mr Walton left.”

She began to say something, hesitated, then wrote a sentence.

“This cannot go on,” he said.

She closed the book on top of the quill.

“Show me what you are writing.” It came out sharper than he intended.

“You must promise you will not ask me that again.” She drew the book towards her with a pathetic gesture.

How dare she turn him into some sort of ogre? After all these years of forbearance, of explaining her to everyone, to the servants, even to her own children! Held against her chest, the book looked absurdly fragile. He suddenly realized that it had shrunk considerably in size. What if there was more than one?

He went upstairs and took the key from its hiding place. She had asked him never to look in her cabinet, but now, he told himself, polishing the key against his cuff, checking that it was right side up, he was fearful that she was becoming melancholy. A husband had a right to guard his wife. Had a
responsibility
, he corrected himself, turning the key, to protect her.

Her father’s old cabinet had no space for the idle curiosities of women. He found it choked with books, lopsided, at all angles, so that when he extracted one, the others tumbled onto the floor, spilling open shamelessly. Over the years, without his knowing, Pegge had collected all the posthumous works of John Donne, defacing—scribbling over and ruining—each and every one. This was not simply jotted marginalia. The pages were black with smudge, the writing abandoned, deranged, indecipherable, full of animal cunning.

So
this
was where her father’s books had got to. It was Pegge who had stolen them from his study, not the parliamentary soldiers in their raids on Clewer. She had
probably disordered his shelves herself to make it look as if the Roundheads had done it.

The cat leapt onto Pegge’s old bed to get a better look. As soon as he and Pegge were betrothed, the lacquered cabinet had arrived in a wagon from the Deanery riding on top of the monstrous bed, which William had always hated. He had slept there with Pegge only the previous night, a night of joy, their last together for some time since he was going back to London on his own. The impertinent cat had watched the whole performance, inciting William to complain about the bed’s unpleasant creaking and to threaten to turn it into firewood. Afterwards, stretching out her limbs, Pegge confessed the history of the bed. Not only was it her father’s marriage-bed, she said, but he had also died in it. She would never sleep in another, so William must never speak of harming it again.

How could he come to Pegge’s bed knowing that it was her father’s? And to tell him only now, after all these years, to confess it with such equanimity as if it were a nothing! This was a more alarming crime than stealing her father’s effigy and hiding it on William’s property.

William was no poet, but he knew that something was amiss. He was on the verge of telling Pegge he was tired of John Donne and his notorious passion, but the cat was staring rudely, as if it were William who was doing something wrong.

At any moment, Pegge might come upstairs. What if the books had been in some nonsensical order and she could tell they had been tampered with? He could not risk sparking an argument with her in her current state. Fitting the
books into the cabinet as best he could, he replaced the wad of matted hair—surely it was not Izaak Walton’s?—and returned the key to her old shoe. Then he jostled the cabinet, knocking the ornaments off the top, as if the cat had done it.

William waited in the hall, his eyes fixed on his new pocket-clock. The minute-hand was making a most satisfactory haste to the top of the hour and his baskets sat ready for the coachman. At ten o’clock, the coach pulled up to take him back to the King’s service. As he walked to the door, his cloak held firmly over the book underneath, he could hear Pegge at the top of the stairs, upbraiding the cat in the gentlest possible tones.

In London, all talk was of the fire. William learned that a young French watchmaker, Monsieur Hubert, had been condemned at the Old Bailey for starting the blaze. Escaping from the drudgery of his father’s clockworks at Rouen was no crime. Nor was turning his back on Catholic France. Hubert’s mistake, William concluded, was to head towards Protestant England, since he was accused of hurling a Papist fireball through the window of Thomas Farrinor’s bakery in Pudding lane,
devilishly, feloniously, voluntarily and of his own malice aforethought
, though it was more likely he had enjoyed the flames from a ship moored in the Thames.

Now troublemakers were thirsting for exotic blood. William heard stories of Papists, Hollanders, and Frenchmen left in the streets for dead, and strangers attacked for no greater offense than speaking butchered
English. Even the Catholic Duke of York was accused of being an incendiary for seeming too gay upon his stallion as he fought against the flames. Pegge’s dancing-master, de la Valière, had been chased back to France and Monsieur Belland, the King’s firework-maker, had hidden under the King’s own nose in Whitehall, trusting his life to Charles’s fondness for French wine, dances, clothes-and fireworks.

However, William knew that the royal taste could change, just as the royal locks had greyed and William had been forced to shave his head and don a wig of human hair. Before the fire, the King wore his breeches slung low on the hips like his cousin the French King’s, but now public feeling was against it and Charles prudently declared that he was giving up all things French. Since vast sums were needed to rebuild the City, he would teach the nobility thrift by wearing only simple English vests, swearing to be in the fashion within the week.

William had to cut quickly. The King’s Wardrobe had burnt to the ground, so he was working out of Hatton Garden. He found a length of velvet in a new blush colour that had been purchased for a lady’s chair and draped it over his shoulder in front of the mirror. He cut freehand, shaping as he went, until he had cut and basted together a long flared cassock in the Eastern manner. Ruffling the breeches over the thighs, he trimmed the white stockings with ribbons and the high-heeled shoes with bows.

The King declared that he liked William’s new fashion so much he would never be out of it. The royal mistresses admired the King’s new colour, calling it
pink
after the flower of the same name. However, Lord St Albans said
that the royal thighs were puffed up like pigeon’s legs, and pointed out that the coat flapped when the King walked, wagering that the King would soon abandon his
skirts.

“Look,” St Albans said loudly to the ladies, “His Majesty blushes like his suit.”

The King had no choice but to laugh and enter the betting at a hundred to one.

William was in court two days later when Lord St Albans strode in wearing a strikingly plain black cassock and a justaucorps with buttons in a strict row from collar to hem. The breeches were tight and clean, without a ruffle or a ribbon. The whole effect, William saw with misgiving, was frankly masculine. The King was outraged, accusing William of dressing him like a capon or, worse, a Persian eunuch. He commanded William to pay the £100 he had lost on the wager and sent at once for St Albans’s tailor.

William was now back making tents. On his table was the box of drawing tools inherited from his father, who had been the Groom and Yeoman of Tents, Toiles, Hayes, and Pavilions for Queen Elizabeth, King James, and Charles I, dying just after that monarch was beheaded.

William’s compass bit into the paper, inscribing a circle the diameter of a pomegranate. In front of him was the six-sided fruit that Pegge had grown in her garden at Clewer. The bumpy peel conjured up extravagant textures and fringes for the pavilion he was designing for the King’s next ball. The rich colour would make it fit to hold a harem of royal mistresses. He imagined Blackamoor eunuchs crushing pomegranates with their feet to extract the dye for nine
hundred yards of Egypt cotton. From the leftover fabric William would make a smaller tent for Clewer garden with a poufed top and tasselled corners, into which he would entice Pegge to take the shade with him in summer.

Why did Pegge so love red fruit?—crunchy unripe persimmons, mulberries, red apples and pears, gooseberry fool, stewed winter plums. He recalled the flash of white ankle as she placed the pomegranate on his palm the night before he had left Clewer. She had neglected to put on her stockings again—done it to tease him, he was sure, so she would have less clothing to take off when they lay together.

William had fallen in love with that boyish calf thirty-five years earlier in St Paul’s. He had hardly attended to the Dean’s sermon, for he had just discovered that his new doublet buttoned right over left, not left over right like a man’s, which lessened the pleasure of the garment. Afterwards, he went into Paul’s walk, stopping beside Duke Humphrey’s tomb to note the cut and stuff of the fashions that passed by, especially the women’s, for he was of an age to marry.