Conceit (4 page)

“Better you than Eve,” Pegge’s father said to the mare, stroking her nose and feeding her the other half.

The dog began to howl, sounding remarkably like a child who had stubbed her toe. Her father did not seem to notice Pegge, although she could not be invisible for she was almost nine years old.

Without turning his head, he said to Sadie, “You don’t even like apples,” and then to Pegge, “Remove that animal from my prize auriculas at once.”

Now that her father was Dean of Paul’s, he lived from sermon to sermon, saying as soon as he had delivered himself of one that he was
with child
with another. He would shut himself up in his library, coaxing the new sermon into shape and larding it with references. Pegge would slip in to find him practising in front of the mirror, drinking in the rhetoric as if he were drinking in tobacco smoke. Every so often, he would stop and test a grimace to judge its effect on his audience.

On the Lord’s Day, he would rise early and transport himself by whatever conveyance was at hand, whether a benefactor’s coach or his own mare. When he was preaching at St Paul’s, his children were expected to attend. The sermons were tormented by images of bodily fluids and faeces, of bones liquefying, of rotting flesh gummed down by predators and masticated into particles. He would latch on to a word and torture it. One clod
of sin
was bad enough, but what of concatenated
sins, sin
enwrapped and complicated in
sin, sin
entrenched and barricadoed, screwed up and riveted with
sin, sin
wrastling with the mercies of God? The word bloated up and burst from the pressure, like a bladder kicked about by her father’s pointed boots.

On the hard benches in Paul’s choir, the children mastered the art of daydreaming, of aping the role of listeners. They lounged about in their minds while their bodies knelt, skewered by their father’s roving gaze. The boys
looked up into the crumbling vault and took aim at pigeons with imaginary crossbows. The girls dreamt of amassing dowries to free themselves from their father’s sway.

But Pegge listened. She could hear the bodies decomposing under her feet in the privacy of tombs. Her hearing was acute, able to pick out threads of silence, like the subhuman sounds of worms extruding casts or like the silent descenders in a printer’s font.

When the sermon was finished and the children free to leave, Pegge often visited her mother’s church. Now that she could read the Latin on the gravestones, she knew there was a plague of dead Donnes inside St Clement’s. Mary and Francis, who were spirits. Nicholas, who had wasted away. The nameless baby who had killed her mother by dying inside her. And Ann-most beloved, most dear, most mourned of mothers and of wives.

ANN DONNE

1617 AUGUST 15

THIS STONE IS COMMANDED TO SPEAK THE GRIEF
OF HER HUSBAND JOHN DONNE

(BY GRIEF MADE SPEECHLESS LIKE AN INFANT)

WHO HEREBY PLEDGES HIS ASHES TO HER ASHES
IN A NEW MARRIAGE WEDDED

2. JEZEBEL DID PAINT

He was the Word that spake it
,
He took the bread and brake it.
And what that Word did make it
,
I do believe and take it.

So the Dean began the meal, the diamond ring flashing on his piously joined hands.

The sisters were sitting on the bench from youngest to eldest-Betty, Pegge, Bridget, Lucy, and Constance, who sat beside their father to help him carve and serve. Across from Pegge, who had been told to mind her tongue, was Uncle Grymes. He had brought a Mr Alleyn, a man well past his youth who had recently lost his wife. An actor in his day, he was now the Master of the King’s Bears and Bulls. Pegge had been hoping he would recite something from Christopher Marlowe, some lines that would move him to a widower’s tears, but though he wore black, he seemed determined to enjoy himself.

Pegge had just heard Uncle Grymes stutter out the
terms whereupon Edward Alleyn would marry her sister Constance. It was spoiling the taste of a well-seasoned soup. She bit down on a bone that had no business being there. Con, tipping her bowl politely, which she never bothered to do when the family ate alone, did not seem surprised by Uncle Grymes’s proposal. Nor did Bridget, who was patting her lips neatly with a little cloth.

Con and Bridget had been so fidgety before the meal that Bess had declared them coming down with greensickness and offered to worm them. Flat on her belly, eye to the crack of the door, Pegge had seen her sisters taking the curling rags out of their hair and painting one another’s faces. Now, in the warm lamplight, Con’s cheeks and bosom glowed. Pegge could detect the scent of honeysuckle though it was late October.

Her father was now holding forth about the pain of losing a wife and raising seven motherless children, digging up black words, sleek with memory, that the children had heard many times before. The sack bottle had become marooned at his end of the table. When the air had been rendered completely dank and humourless, Con sent the bottle on its rounds again and asked Mr Alleyn a gay question about the bearbaiting.

Mr Alleyn began talking with bread in his mouth, like an actor of the common stage. Pegge put down her spoon and stared. His coarseness had a beauty that made her catch her breath, but she could see the veins bulging at her father’s temple.

When Mr Alleyn laughed and swallowed the wrong way, her father leapt. “God can choke you with a crumb,
with a drop, at a voluptuous feast. He can sink down the stage and the player, the bed of wantonness and the wanton actor, into the jaws of the earth, into the mouth of hell. He can surprise you even in the act of sin!”

This was too much for Mr Alleyn, who looked uneasily from side to side.

As their father carved the goose, he sailed briskly into the story of how, two years before, he had been called to attend the King and found him heartily devouring a meal of roast meats. Though their father had ridden his mount hard, he was not offered so much as a chair.

Instead, King James said, “Dr Donne, I have invited you to dinner, and though you sit not down with me, yet I will carve you a dish which I know you love well. Knowing you love London, I do therefore make you Dean of Paul’s. When I have dined, then do you take your beloved dish home to your study, say grace there to yourself, and much good may it do you.”

Their father chose this moment to sever the goose leg with a savage blow, sending a tremor along the bench to Pegge, who splashed her ale. As he was about to resume his anecdote, Con dropped something on the floor. When she bent to retrieve it, their father let out a yelp and jumped to his feet, dancing back and forth. Drawing down his hose, he clapped a greasy hand to his ankle, complaining that he had been viciously attacked.

“It was only a flea, Father,” Con said, a note of warning in her voice.

He sat down, wondering aloud whether a man might get rabies from insect bites or even, if left untreated, gangrene.
His priest’s stockings were still down around his ankles in a frightening display of slovenliness.

Mr Alleyn’s stomach rumbled and he took up his knife as a hint to his host. “A good dish of meat will settle your anxieties, sir.”

His blunt words fell upon quiet, for Pegge’s father was now staring morosely at the dismembered goose. The sauce had congealed and the turnip had assumed a vulgar shape. Pegge began to think her father might call off the meal and send his guests away. Con must have been thinking the same thing, for she began to serve the meat herself and pass the dishes quickly down the table.

“A flea is not as innocent as you might suppose,” their father said. “It has unsavoury habits.”

At the
word flea
, Mr Alleyn made a sputtering noise. “Ah, to be a flea traversing a woman’s body!” he soliloquized. Having stepped upon the stage, he did not wish to exit until he had given pleasure to the ladies. “Many lewd poems have been written on the subject. I believe your father wrote one himself as a young man.”

“Lewd poems?” echoed the Dean.

Mr Alleyn sniggered. “Fleas have a reputation, sir.”

“So I am aware,” the Dean said coolly, “just as I am aware that
certain poems
have been maliciously laid at my door.”

Mr Alleyn, Pegge guessed from his smirking, had read the miscellany in which a slew of authors had imitated her father’s most famous poem. So had Pegge, for her brother George had brought it home from his college to educate his sisters.

Her father supposed them ignorant of the poem which, George explained, was in a kind of code. When the flea bit the woman, then sank its jaws into her betrothed, there was an exchange of blood that compromised her honour. Why then, the poet Jack Donne argued, should his mistress withhold the balance of her favours?

The mistress? Without doubt, George informed them, their adolescent mother. Mr Alleyn appeared to be on the point of explaining the same thing, but was cut off by their father, the diamond blazing on his fist.

“The appetite of fleas is not a fit subject for my daughters. Why have you brought this old cormorant to my table, Grymes?”

Uncle Grymes did not hear the question, for at each new volley he had tilted his chair back further and swilled down more of his brother-in-law’s good sack, until he was sliding down the wall. At any rate, the question was rhetorical, for their father’s attention had not left his guest.

“Is this all you have to say on the subject of love, Mr Alleyn?” As their father’s lips retracted, his moustache appeared to snarl.

“Love?” Mr Alleyn asked. If the old player was acting now, Pegge saw no sign of it.

“You have been oddly silent on this account,” accused the Dean. “Here is my poor Con, with all her hopes and fears laid bare upon the table, while you loiter as if betting on the bearbaiting. Will you deprive me of my servant below-stairs and my companion above for such a paltry sum?”

“I fail to take your meaning, sir,” said Mr Alleyn, looking towards the row of daughters as if the Dean had an ample supply of waiting-women in reserve.

“You are a cold-hearted lover. What price can you put upon my daughter’s love? She has offered you all her riches.”

What riches were these? Unless Pegge had missed one of her father’s thrusts, all he had offered was a lease worth a scant £500 at Michaelmas.

“I have matched your offer,” Mr Alleyn said, shifting his buttocks.

He was a big man, and prolonged sitting had stiffened him, filling up his legs with blood. As he worked the pain out of his large hams, Con sprang up and grasped the bottle of sack. Pegge watched her sister lean over to pour him a measure and let her hand glide down his arm, until his neck reddened and his eyes met hers.

“She is young enough to be your daughter,” their father persisted, doing the calculation on his bony fingers, “in fact, your granddaughter.”

There was a skill to this that Pegge admired. Mr Alleyn was made to feel ashamed of claiming a woman forty years his junior when, at twenty-one, the bride was past the flower of marrying. Con had been losing currency for five years and even Lucy and Bridget were being discounted daily. Lucy would be bartered off next, then Bridget, then Pegge. Her father was playing the hypocrite by arranging marriages for his daughters, though he had made a famous love-match for himself.

The Dean’s lesson in arithmetic seemed to have frightened Mr Alleyn. “I shall be most generous upon my death,”
he blurted out. “My widow shall receive another £500 when I die.”

“Much can be said in favour of an older husband,” acknowledged their father, his tone more cordial now. “I am sure that you can be persuaded to find even more love where you have found this much already. What say you to £1,300?” Without allowing time for a rebuttal, he clapped his thigh and stood, his priest’s stockings still cowering around his ankles. “Come into my library, Grymes. Let us draw up an agreement for these young lovers. Enjoy your glass at leisure, Mr Alleyn! Constance, the sack, do not begrudge the sack, our guest is thirsty.”

Uncle Grymes cast a regretful glance back at the bottle, and Con slipped into his chair to dish out Mr Alleyn’s pudding. She helped him to some syrup, as if he could not tip the jug himself. Pegge let the syrup run off her own knife and drizzle onto the table, until Con kicked her in the leg. Was this the man who had played Tamburlaine the Great, declaiming the immortal lines of Marlowe? Mr Alleyn had proved a disappointment, content to have the spittle wiped from his lips, a bitten and sorry bear.

And what of that flea bite upon her father’s ankle? He was fond of pointing out the dangers of such minuscule things. Pins and combs and pulled hairs could gangrene and kill, he told his children, and men could laugh themselves to death. That flea bite had looked remarkably like the points of Con’s scissors to Pegge. She had often received a bite from them herself when she had provoked her sister. Her arm was pinked with Con’s anger, a row of chicken feet blooming from wrist to elbow.

A pink was a small thing, a pale-red flower or a squinting eye. Even the small finger on which her father wore his diamond ring. But it was also, Pegge knew, a small and deadly warship.