Conceit (40 page)

He closed the book and undressed for bed, aided by a manservant who stank of spirits. The man appeared to have spent the better part of the fire and its aftermath drinking his way through William’s cellar.

Since returning to London, William had been having a dream as troubling as Nebuchadnezzar’s. In the dream, the fire melted his gold and boiled his claret, then invaded the upper floor. It bore down upon him as he knelt in an uncombed wig in his bedchamber, surrounded by books which he was trying to sort into baskets by the system Pepys had described. Most of the servants had gone ahead to ferry his goods up the Thames. William was to take the baskets—and his wife—in the last barge, but Pegge had vanished. Not, he hoped, to a lesson with her dancing-master. The fire began to sizzle the back of his wig, and the horrid stench of scorched hair filled the chamber.

He tried to pull off the burning wig and awakened bolt upright, his hands clutching air instead. In fact, he was sitting on the edge of his bed with an itchy, unshaven scalp, staring at the wig on the bedpost, where his lazy manservant had hung it. His pocket-clock told him he had slept only an hour. He lay back down, determined not to think of Pegge.

As soon as his head was down, the dream resumed. This time, he was splayed upon his table, tied down securely by his hands and feet. His manservant was holding a bottle of brandy and a funnel. It was a puzzle gone horribly wrong, a blind-man’s trompe l’oeil. A doctor
sharpened his knife on a whetstone under the eye of the burnt cat, who was sitting on top of William’s lungs, squeezing out all the air. Could it be true that the lungs were but a bellows, the human heart nothing more than a mechanical pump? Pepys’s tales were swilling in William’s head and he was gripped with sudden terror that should he lose too much blood, the surgeon would try one of the new blood exchanges, turning the insolent cat into the King’s tentmaker and William into a burnt, hairless tom fastened to his wife’s ankle with a string.

William felt the brandy funnelling down his throat as the surgeon inserted the itinerarium into the mouth of his penis, then fed it down by rapid twists and jerks, then down further yet, by the same harrowing wrist-movements, into the bladder. The surgeon tested the point of his rapier against his thumb. He scored William from scrotum to anus, then plunged in his thumbs and spread the halves apart as neatly as splitting a ripe peach. A stone the size of a tennis ball popped out of William’s bladder and landed in a wash of acrid fluid on the floor.

“Three minutes,” the surgeon proclaimed, tapping William’s pocket-clock, “from the incision to the closure.”

The surgeon calculated the weight of the specimen and the amount of urine the bladder had expelled, as if presenting to the Royal Society, alluding to the possibility of impotence only as an afterthought. The manservant made a crude jest and finished off the brandy in one gulp.

William woke in his boarded-up house in Clerkenwell and called out in distress for Pegge, who was not there. The bed was rolling like a ship in heavy seas, and seasick doubts
were reeling in his head. He was in a sweat, yearning for his wife to comfort him, with only an indolent servant to inquire after his needs.

William pulled on his old cloak and walked towards a coffeehouse that had escaped the fire because it was made of brick. The landlord, who was doing a good business, took a pot off the grate, pouring William a penny-bowl. The same size had cost only a halfpenny on his last visit. Since there was no longer any competition, the landlord had not bothered to build up his fire. Even so, the coffee seared William’s tongue and he pushed it aside. There was a faint whiff about his clothes which put him out of temper. What was the point of keeping a house in town when he had to live alone, except for servants who came and went like cats?

Outside, the wind was blowing away the coal-dust suspended over the City, exposing a French-blue sky with lace-work clouds. In the distance, past a row of houses levelled by the fire, William could see a group of men gathering near the Si Quis door of Paul’s.

Inside the coffeehouse, he smelled chocolate and looked for a woman. Instead, he noticed a small man with a roll of draughtsman’s plans drinking down his bowl without taking time to sit. It was apparent that the man’s three-quarter coat offered no protection from the cold, for he stood as close to the dying embers as he could. As the man wiped the chocolate from his lips, William recognized Christopher Wren, the surveyor appointed by the
King to assess the damage to the cathedral. When Dr Wren tried to button his coat, he discovered that the sides would not meet in front. Giving up, he went out the door, crossing the churchyard to join the gathering of men.

The buttons
, William wanted to shout after him,
are purely ornamental!

Soon, William thought, he would be the only gentleman in London dressed warmly, for he was determined never to wear the King’s new two-piece suit. Another gust of cold came through the door and a hawker entered, peddling broadsides. Spotting a regular customer in William, he thrust the elegies under his nose. William gave the man a sixpence. As soon as he was gone, William tossed the poems on the grate, where they gave off a satisfying heat. He had only needed to read the words
Dr Donne to his Mistress to Come to Bed
to know the contents. Every lewd poem by every incompetent rhymester in the City had a similar title. William could have papered Paul’s with the copies he had bought to keep them off the street.

Feeling a good deal better now that the fire was blazing up, William drank the cooled coffee, finding that it relieved the churning in his stomach. Then, hearing a commotion outside the window, he wrapped his cloak around his chest and went out to have a look. He followed the curious along Paternoster row, passing the burnt timbers of Walton’s house and thinking unkind thoughts about the owner.

Along Panier alley, a farm wagon was scraping through the rubble with the sharp ring of metal against stone. The heavy load was barely clearing the foundations on either side and people were clambering on top of the ruins to
watch the spectacle. The curious bodies were soon pressing so close that the horse balked at pulling the wagon further. It stopped in front of a sugarer’s boy, pushing its nose against the boy’s stomach until he stumbled backwards and dropped his brittle loaves. As the horse lowered its lips to scoop up the sugar, William noticed that its tail was too bedraggled to even bat a fly. It was Pegge’s mare, which often liked to nudge their children backwards to make them trip at Clewer, and the woman comforting the boy was his own wife.

Now William looked more closely at the wagon. Steadying the load were his gardeners, Angus and his eldest son. On the top, scrubbed and cemented together, was the marble statue that William had last seen, languidly recumbent, in his own garden. Still connected to the soles of the Dean’s feet, the marble urn was a ludicrous appendage when he was prone, like a leg-iron that weighed down a dead felon.

Why couldn’t the man stay put in his grave? William could not seem to escape his father-in-law no matter where he went.

Grateful that he was wearing his new full-bottomed wig, which no one at Clewer had yet seen, he tugged it down over his eyebrows, then stepped back into the crowd.

27. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

Pegge picked winter plums on the day that William left for London, spitting out angry words as she stripped the branches. Holding the basket, with good as well as mummified fruit hailing down upon him, Angus finally protested that she was murdering more than her plums.

She stacked the winter-sweets on William’s bed, making them spell out his angular shape as if he were still there.

Just before William left that morning, Pegge noticed that her cabinet had been shifted. The tom might have jumped on it, but he certainly had not put the key into the wrong shoe or removed the folio of her father’s sermons that she had written in. Anyone could have come into her room and stolen it—anyone alive, or even one of her many dead.

As winter drew closer, her monthlies became erratic, and an idea began to haunt her like a half-formed child within. She would wake at night, feeling her lost children like splinters in her fingers, but when she held her hand up to the candle, only bones shone through the translucent flesh. When she lay back down, twisted phrases echoed in
her bedchamber. Sometimes Con spoke, and even little Franny uttered a word or two. Perhaps it was Ann stirring things up, choking Pegge with half-digested words. No wonder Cook complained of voices in the house.

The scrubbed effigy lay flat in the garden, waiting for William to come back to Clewer. He had told his servants that no man was to erect it until he returned. On All Souls, when William had been gone a month, Pegge ordered the gardeners to set up the block and tackle, then led Fox straight through the physic garden, which pulled the ropes smoothly through the pulleys, tipping her father smartly up, his feet still attached to his marble urn.

Before going to bed, she wrote one satisfying line in her book:
The wheel is the key to moving a great weight without men.

Martinmas came and went, without even a letter from William. Servants were clothed for winter, beef was salted and hung. Pegge lifted her lily bulbs and carried her rare plants into the conservatory. Then she dug up the potatoes, brushing off the earth and arranging them on the children’s empty beds with their eyes towards the ceiling.

That day Pegge received a letter from Franny, telling her mother that she had gone past the wreckage of St Paul’s and seen a mummy fastened to some crude scaffolding. A huckster with a ladder was charging passers-by a penny to embrace the man he called John Donne.
Selling dead kisses
, Franny wrote, her penstrokes sullen and disgusted.

That night, a spicy embalming scent drew Pegge to a casement left open above the garden. Outside, the gleaming statue was illuminated by a cold coral moon. She walked
out in her bare feet, the spongy earth oozing between her toes, and looked at her father’s hooded eyes and vain moustache. Around the neck, where the head was cemented, there was a line like a bruise from a hangman’s noose. She knew why William so disliked the effigy, for the grin was far too lifelike.

Pegge could remember little of her father’s last moments. After all, she had been only seventeen, a child nursing a dying man. Sometimes, when she had visited the effigy in Paul’s, she thought she saw it breathing faintly, as Walton reported in his
Life of Donne.
But in this garden, where everything was green and changing, she could see that the grin was lifeless marble. Any life in the statue was due to the sculptor’s art.

Her father was never going to speak to her—how could he? He had become mute stone, calcined and pure from death.

A week later, Pegge left Angus with the farm wagon on the outskirts of London at dusk and rode ahead on Fox to check the route. It was the twelfth of December, St Lucy’s eve, a night so long that she could return the effigy unseen.

Three months had passed since the fire had ravaged the City. As she rode up Fleet street towards Ludgate hill, the blackened skeleton of Paul’s grew larger. She found Ludgate badly damaged, with rubble and new building bricks clogging the street. The pavingstones were heaved up haphazardly from the fire, worse than an attack from
flood or ice. She would have to take the loaded wagon through another of the City’s gates.

Five crows were skating on the air currents above the battered cathedral, a sign that a wind was building, a great troubled wind out of her father’s sermons. A gust was already whistling at the Dean’s corner and a newssheet flapped past, making the mare jump sideways. Fox’s hooves were clattering, but there was no one to wake here with the noise. Only the burnt-out shells of houses now peopled the lanes. The City had never been so quiet, for even the church bells had been silenced when they had melted in the fire.

The wind was making the mare uneasy. Pegge dismounted and led Fox south to see whether her father’s apple tree had survived the fire, but where the Deanery should have been was only a charred foundation with a few weeds taking root in the slimy black timbers. Pegge heard the old sexton dragging his lame foot as he took a shortcut through the Dean’s court. When he was gone, she coaxed Fox through the broken wall. Pegge rested until the moon began to rise, then left the horse with a bucket of water from the old well.