Conceit (39 page)

“A Frenchman still in Paris, but I fear that source is drying up.”

“This ship came with a vicious cargo,” Pepys said, squashing a louse between his fingers.

“Have your man powder it well and the nits will come out in the comb.”

“You will always have a job in the Navy if you know how to get rid of lice,” Pepys said. “Now here’s a frigate anchoring in your port.”

The girl was at William’s elbow. When he held up his tankard for refilling, his arm brushed against hers—accidentally, he hoped, burying his nose back in his drink.

Pepys hit his fist against his palm. “You will never make junior officer if you seize her as tamely as that. When she docks again, you must hook your thumbs under her gunwales. Now here’s how it’s done.”

As the girl returned with their suppers, Pepys clapped her on the breech and steered her into harbour. The two locked arms and sang a verse of “She Cannot Keep her Legs Together.” William had never been so foxed with drink. He fiddled with his pocket-clock, scarcely able to read the dial until the girl sailed off.

“You seem a man of science,” Pepys said. “You must join our society of virtuosos.”

Over a venison pasty, Pepys reported on the experiment at the last meeting of the Royal Society in which the blood of one dog was transferred to another. The first dog died on the table, but the second did very well, Pepys said. The success of this experiment gave rise to jests about the blood of a Quaker being let into an Archbishop, with many coarse asides, leading the members to speculate whether blood could be let into the mummified corpse which had miraculously survived the fire in St Paul’s crypt.

This mummy, Pepys told William, was rumoured to be the great Dr Donne, whose marble statue had vanished mysteriously in the fire. An enterprising man had wired Donne’s remains to the wreckage of the cathedral, to the amusement of passers-by, who declared it uncorrupted both by time and flame. The most daring paid a penny to climb up the man’s ladder to kiss the mummy’s stiffened lips.

Some said this incorruptibility was proof that Donne should be made a saint, but others jested that—given the lewdness of the man’s elegies—they should bring in a whore to work a different kind of art. Pepys told this tale rather too gaily, as if he had kissed the mummy on the lips himself.

The bench was digging into William’s thighs. This was certainly not the time to divulge that he was John Donne’s son-in-law, a fact he had shared with few acquaintances. The effigy grinning in Paul’s choir had been public show enough. Izaak Walton had stirred up the dust with his biography of Donne, and there was no need for greater fools to canonize him. William hoped he could keep the
news of this uncorrupted mummy from reaching Pegge in the country.

William saw Mr Batelier approaching their table, a welcome diversion. Batelier had come to report that he could get no more French wine for Mr Pepys because of the King’s ban on importing goods.

“No more French fabric either, Sir William,” Batelier declared. “All garments must henceforth be made of English cloth.”

Even corpses, William learned, must now be dressed in loyal wool and under-garments made of itchy homegrown stuff. The ban had angered the King of France, who was mocking King Charles’s new fashion by putting his menservants into two-piece suits like the ones the English lords were wearing.

“What an ingenious affront for one King to make upon another,” Pepys said admiringly.

William was well out of it. He would make the new pavilion out of plain Suffolk-cloth, for he had advanced the King £2,000 since his return to England. What need for eunuchs to crush exotic produce underfoot? English beetroot would do just as well for a King who did not pay his debts. Fixed with alum, it would dye the royal tent the same shade as would eastern pomegranates.

Made merry by Batelier’s tale about the French, Pepys was whispering to the serving-maid that he would have her both devante and backwards, which she would find a bon plazer. It seemed there was no law against importing foreign words. Pepys was forward with women, but there was no denying that the King had entrusted an entire navy to
the man. Since the sinking of the unsinkable
Double Bum
, that nonsensical double-bottomed ship, had not soured Pepys’s reputation, all his talk of gizmos and mamelles was not likely to scuttle him.

William stood up to go, feeling unseaworthy himself from all the drink. As he struggled to get his legs over to the door, he heard Pepys call out, “Sir William, your folio!” and saw it travelling towards him on top of the wooden box which held Pepys’s kidney-stone.

As they left the tavern, a lurking dog fell in behind them. Pepys swore and kicked it away halfheartedly then admitted that it was his wife’s pet come to fetch him. Its behaviour was odd, Pepys said, for up to now there had been no love lost between them.

A breeding experiment gone wrong
, William thought, bending to inspect the dog through the intelligence of drink. “A toy, bred as a lapdog like the King’s spaniels,” he announced, “but it came from working animals. Train it to the leash and it will heed you well enough. Take my advice, Mr Pepys,” he yelled at his parting friend, “and train her to the leash!”

25. VIRTUOSO

Samuel Pepys stumbled home in the vertiginous shadows, following his wife’s spaniel through streets bereaved by fire, unable to discern the truth of the shapes weaving around him in the dark.

Inside his house, he went straight to his library. Closing his eyes, he called up the size of the book he was looking for, then opened the correct bookcase and put his hand on it at once. Walton’s
Life of Donne
, not the first edition with the sermons, but a smaller second one. He was convinced that shelving books by size was the most logical method and could not understand why no one else adopted it.

He found his wife sitting up in bed wearing the loose morning-gown he called her kingdom for the ease and content she had in the wearing of it. The spaniel was already on top of her blanket, chin down, eyeing Pepys with new respect—or was it mutiny? On their walk home together, Pepys had warned the animal that if it snarled at him again, he would throw it out the window.

Now he leaned back in a chair, his eyes closed, as Elizabeth picked out the passages in the biography that interested her, a habit that annoyed him. As she read aloud, he drifted, worrying about the ache in his cods and thinking of what he would record in his diary before climbing into his own bed.
Strange
, he might write,
with what freedom and quantity I pissed this night, which I know not what to impute to but my oysters …

But soon he was listening, for Elizabeth was reading from the year 1612 when John Donne left his wife with child in England to travel to the continent. In Paris, he suffered a dreadful vision in which Ann passed before his eyes, her hair down about her shoulders, carrying her dead infant in her arms. Days later, as Walton related the story, Donne discovered that his wife had indeed given birth to a stillborn child on that very day.

“This is a relation that will beget some wonder, and it well may, for most of our world are at present possessed with an opinion that visions and miracles are ceased,”
Elizabeth read.
“And, though it is most certain that two lutes, being both strung and tuned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other will, like an echo to a trumpet, warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune, yet many will not believe there is any such thing as a sympathy of souls.”

Elizabeth’s voice caught and she laid the book aside. “Is it possible for such a thing to pass between two lovers, Samuel?”

Pepys shifted, cleared his throat, made a show of picking up the book to read it for himself, although his sight was blurry.

Elizabeth took his hand and drew it over her body, sliding it beneath her kingdom. This act was so intimate, this coolness of his hand on the warmth of his wife’s belly, that he was ashamed, as he had never been ashamed with all his mistresses in all his acts of unfaithfulness. He tried to withdraw his hand, but she put hers on top and pressed down, wanting him to feel the riches growing there. He did not wish to think about this child. It could not be discussed lightly, shared with drinking companions in taverns. In desperation, he recalled their former housemaid and tried to feel wronged because Elizabeth had forced him to give up the girl, but he could not summon any righteousness. Instead, his eyes began to water.

“Do you feel it?” Elizabeth asked.

He could almost feel a small heartbeat below his wife’s unsteady, excited one. It was a palpitation, a small miracle. Perhaps this
was
a sympathy of souls, for Elizabeth could not be with child. He thought of the sage water and holland-drawers and all the other schemes she had tried in order to conceive. He knew that long ago she had added barrenness to her list of shortcomings, along with her tin ear and untidiness and her lack of skill at drawing, letter-writing, and household economy. He had grown to accept his fate, for even a king might wed a barren queen.

Sometimes, in the theatre, Pepys heard wind-music so sweet that it ravished him and wrapped up his soul so that he felt truly sick, just as he had when first in love with his wife and ravished by her youth and beauty. Elizabeth Le Marchant de St Michel had been but fourteen, with sideways glances and
dark hair à la négligence. He had been so desperate to have her that he took her without a dowry. Forced to sell his lute for forty shillings, he had not felt the poorer. Since they could not pay a servant, she had carried in coals and carried out his chamber pot and washed his foul clothes, all with her young soft hands.

That had been ten years ago, when her beauty had tempered her wilfulness. But after the fire, Elizabeth had taken umbrage at the odious verses circulating about the Papists and at the arrest of Monsieur Hubert, who was French like herself. She took Hubert’s martyrdom upon her head, and worked herself into such a rage that her hair began to fall out. Much as Pepys tried to convince her that Hubert was a known madman, and that it was foolhardy to take up his cause, Elizabeth was resolute. He feared that at any moment she might fly into a fit and cry out that she was Catholic in front of the servants, which would be as good as slipping a noose around both their necks.

In the weeks after the fire, the pain in what she called her
chose
worsened, and her eyes darkened when they lay together. Even though he told her that the wife must feel pleasure in order to conceive, she lay stiff and afraid beneath him. After supper one night, when the maid was combing his hair and he believed his wife was asleep in her bed, Elizabeth suddenly reappeared and found him with his hand under the maid’s petticoat and, indeed, with his hand on her cunny. Though he endeavoured to put it off lightly, Elizabeth was not pacified. She flew into a tantrum, threatening to slit the maid’s nose and squeeze his cods with the hot fire-tongs.

For twenty days Elizabeth rose in the morning to comb and dress him with her own sweet hands, so that the maid would not need to do it. The grooming would begin tenderly, but would soon shift into a witchhunt for lice. At last, he was forced to send the maid away, and on that night slept with great content with his wife, writing in his diary,
I must here remember that I have lain with my moher as a husband more times since this falling-out than in I believe twelve months before, and with more pleasure to her than I think in all the time of our marriage.
Within a week he could record that his home was in
a tolerable peace full of pretty kind words
and that he
did hazer con ella to her content
when they lay together, imploring God
to give me the grace more and more every day to fear Him, and to be true to my poor wife.

And now, since she had felt such pleasure, Elizabeth thought herself with child and he was once again an exile from her bed. For several days she had stayed in her chamber, enjoying the luxury of maternity, although she was only a week late with her fleurs.

His hand still rested on her drowsing belly. If he withdrew it, she would wake, and he could not bear the joy he would see on her face. He knew now that the maid was only a passing fancy, and that this profound ache he felt for Elizabeth had driven it away. In all of his dalliances, he had never fathered a child, and in spite of her music, drawing, and dancing-masters, and all the other eager voluntaries who had come her way, including Lord Sandwich, Elizabeth had never been unfaithful. For if she had, Pepys knew she would have conceived. And all of this Elizabeth knew too, but some faint hope, some aberration of the female character,
had caused her to believe, once more, as she had early in their marriage, that they might conceive together after all. And so she slumbered in her lavish kingdom, dreaming of carrying the son and heir to Samuel Pepys.

And this thought—that she had indeed felt the sympathy of souls, like a lute-string reverberating in her womb—must sustain him while he endured, as he knew he must endure (since her fleurs would bloom again), her tears and barren heartbreak.

26. GOING TO BED

William was at the table beside his bed in Clerkenwell, making notes by lamplight in a neat secretary hand. Working from the key that had arrived from Samuel Pepys—a tachygraphy book from Pepys’s own library—he was discovering that Pegge had muddled the system by introducing symbols of her own. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, fearful of discovering foreign words such as Pepys used when three sheets in the wind.

William was making poor headway, but he could not face returning to Clewer until he knew what Pegge had written. Her angry smuts almost obliterated the print in Walton’s
Life of Donne.
Surely it was not some amorous dialogue with that peculiar man?

While Walton was at Clewer, William had come upon Pegge leaning out an open window with him, their hair touching, Walton’s a surprisingly youthful yellow. When William crept up behind them, they began to talk about the chances of good weather and a favourable breeze—perhaps a code of some kind that they shared? Soon
afterwards, Walton had ridden off on William’s horse, but a horse, William had since concluded, was a small price to pay to get Walton away from Pegge.