Conceit (43 page)

All of a sudden, there was a crack and a blinding streak of phosphorus cut across the sky, followed by a whiff of sulphur, as if a flint had struck steel and ignited silky black grains of gunpowder, propelling a ball out of a gun’s barrel and into the thunderous air.

The wind was now an angry bawd, yanking and stretching the clouds. John Donne had preached that at death God would cleave flesh from bone, blowing the dust to the four points of the compass. Then at the last busy day, God would force each Christian soul to hunt down each speck of its anatomy-every morsel of saliva left inside a lover’s mouth, every seed sprayed out in heedless passion, every heartbeat lost in childbirth, every hair and nail trimmed, every tear cried-until every seed and hair and teardrop had been collected and the soul fleshed out to human form again.

And what then?
William asked himself, as the rain began, for England was no longer Catholic. Would lovers still contrive for their souls to meet at one another’s tombs by exchanging tokens of hair and bone? Once reunited, he supposed, they would embrace one another in the resurrected flesh, as moist and young as when they had first coupled.

But this was nonsense, for a man wanted his wife in bed right now, not after a millennium of frustration. William was full of yearning for Pegge this very minute, as they had not slept together since he had brought her back to Clewer. Even though William had returned the book he had taken, placing it inside her cabinet next to the wad of tangled hair, she still had not come to him at night. A man could not go without release for ever because his wife was too stubborn to visit his bed. And yet, and yet-sometimes he had such vivid dreams as made him almost think she had.

The birds, assuming it was dusk, were making a racket outside, and the baby was tugging at William’s sleeve to be put
down. Instead, he held her tightly to his chest, pushing the lazy cat off the sill and leaning out the window so the baby could smell the rain-freshened earth. He was glad Pegge had taken the effigy back to Paul’s. They were all better off without the dreadful thing.

On the horizon was an odd shape. It might have been a dog, or a flapping stick-man to fend off crows. But on closer look it was a rain-soaked Duo skulking back from the piggery, carrying something draped awkwardly over his arms. When Duo had got as far as the ha-ha, William whispered, “Watch!” to the baby and turned her head with his hands. The moving shape disappeared into the ditch, then popped up a few minutes later, holding a giant pike.

“Look! What is it,” William asked, “what is it?”

As Duo neared the house, his grin became wider and his grip on the long fish more nonchalant.

The baby’s eyes were fixed on Duo’s arms. “Bird. Fish. Cat,” she said, pointing to it in excitement.

Duo carried the pike past the kitchen towards the salt house. When it was out of sight, the baby objected, squirming in William’s arms. Thrusting his hand into a bin, he pulled out a turnip for her to play with.

When William brought Pegge back to Clewer, he had found the estate in disarray. On top of her cabinet, for all the household to peer and poke at, was a jar of blackened teeth, no doubt from some martyred relative’s jaw. Someone had broken off the hour hand on the big clock and plums were drying on his mattress as if Pegge had expected him to stay in town all winter.

Pegge was writing flagrantly, in any room of the house, in any slatternly garment that she chose-or barely clothed at all. Once when he interrupted her, asking when all this folly was going to end, she bristled and threw her gardening clog at him. Yet sometimes she glided joyfully around him, practising her dance steps and begging for a partner. Perhaps her monthlies were at fault. They had always turned the household into pandemonium, although now she kept their ebbs and flows a secret from him.

During Lent, he found Pegge in the conservatory, feeding her plants a red liquor. When he asked what it was, she told him it was blood, sweet and mingled with water. He watched as she cut potatoes wildly with her blade, each chunk with an eye, then carried the pail outside and plunged them deep into the earth. Why did she seek novelty in vegetables? He could not bear to think what foreign uses they might be put to.

Each evening, he sent away his manservant. Though he dropped his shoes loudly and unbuttoned his breeches as slowly as he could, she did not enter through the connecting door. He lay alone, fearing that the lumps between his legs were growing as large and indelicate as the mad-apples on Pegge’s vine.

He could not go through the door himself, for he had sworn not to lie with her in her old bed. Every time he slept there, he came away with flea-bites, though the fleas did not seem to bother her. But more than that. Now that he knew it was her father’s, his manhood would wither in that bed, though he could not bring himself to tell her such a humiliating fact.

When the potato shoots pushed up through the soil, he could stand it no longer and entered her bedchamber. He found her sitting on the monstrous bed, which was draped all in summer muslin like a tent, cleaning her hair with oatmeal. She must have been outside in her shift, for he could smell the sun and wind burnt into the cotton. Ignoring him, she brushed her hair forward over her face, then tossed her head, spinning the hair out in a circle, flakes of oatmeal swirling, spiralling, wafting, until the room was filled with shards of floating light.

Still she did not come to him in bed. Oatmeal and citrus invaded his sleep, making him toss as restlessly as he had done as a young man. He was fragrant with a need he could not fathom. Why did God make machines of men’s hearts and then, when least expected, turn them back to flesh?

The wind had died completely and the sun was back. How long had he been staring out the window wondering whether his wife had ever loved him? William glanced at the child in his arms. The hairs had dried against her scalp in stringy clumps and she was holding the turnip with both hands like a mouse, making neat teeth marks all around it.

Pegge had not even heard the storm come and go. The symbols were still flashing boldly between the printed lines, her hand smudging them as it pushed past. Why this unending, meaningless chore that carried her away from him? She had rejected the book he had returned, like a bird rejecting a nest that smelt of human hands,
and was now writing upside down and back to front in a book of poems.

He leaned forward, the baby cradled against his chest, feeling the warmth of Pegge’s shoulders through his loosened vest. From this angle, he could just make out some printed lines. To his horror, it was “To his Mistress Going to Bed,” the Dean’s most pirated elegy. The wet ciphers were swelling, undulating, obliterating whole lines of print. Pegge’s words-if they
were
words-had a queer foreign look, more frightening than if they were wholly gibberish.

What if someone in a badly cut uniform rode up, confiscated the books, and delivered them to the Lord Keeper? At least there was no question of anyone untrained in tachygraphy understanding a syllable. Some act of twisted love, of homage to her parents-that was the most he had been able to make out in all his weeks of trying.

He hoped she was not writing poetry. Surely not lewd Catholic poetry such as her father had written? The appetite of men for such things was insatiable. He had a horrid vision of broadsides by a female Donne being circulated around the City’s coffeehouses to fuel the dreams of vulgar men.

Pray God these were just the inchoate scribblings of a woman. He must not provoke her into any rash behaviour. If he humoured her, she would continue to lock her writings in her father’s cabinet, by far the safest place for them. He must watch that nothing was sent by post and that no visitors arrived from London for her. His retirement began to take on a purposeful tint, a rich velvety conspiracy, as if
his family’s safety-perhaps the safety of the entire realm-was now in the capable hands of the King’s tailor.

All at once Duo was there, smacking the cleaned pike on the hearth. Taking the baby, Duo tossed her high above his head, flying her out into the garden, flapping and squawking like a baby crow.

William had no idea that Duo was so familiar with the child. He wondered whether his son also had a gift for cookery. The potato, William had heard, was thought erotic, as was chocolate. What of pike? Most cooks baked it just as it came from the river. Pegge was the only one he knew who stuffed a pike with sweet butter and garlic and basted it with claret. But was it fit food for the little girl? He eyed the gutted fish, uncertain what to do, then carried the prize into the cool buttery. It would seem a pity to serve it plainly.
On the whole
, William thought,
I believe I prefer my pike with garlic.

Pegge was now asleep on the table, her face pressed against the open book. When she turned her head, William saw ciphers imprinted on her cheek. Her thumb twitched an inch from the abandoned pen. She appeared boneless, as if she had neglected to put on her stays. One foot dangled, too short to reach the floor, and the other was tucked up beneath her, filthy from going barefoot. Ladies’ shoes were much more on view now that the Queen was in short petticoats. He must send at once for some new shoes for Pegge, for it paid to be careful in such times. After all, the Duchess of Newcastle was considered mad as much because she had a beard and wore eccentric garments as because she thought herself a writer.

When Pegge woke, she would slam the jacket closed and push the book aside. If she were pleased with William, she would stand on the stool and take down an old straight-blade from the high shelf-his heart slowed at the thought of her fingers near it-and finding they were out of apples, slice potatoes with the blade instead, layering them in a pie-dish with scalded milk and raisins. She would pull butter out of the well and roll cubes in cinnamon to scatter over the top. When it was cool, she would cut the sloppy pie with such wild movements of her blade that he would choke back a fear that she would stab herself. She would laugh at his cowardly face, pick up a runny slice, and feed it to him on her palm. It would taste of apples burnt by a Persian sun.

30. FLEURS

A violet beetle crosses the moonlit floor, headed towards the shadow beneath William’s bed. The scent of honeysuckle and jasmine drifts through the open window. On such midsummer nights as these, children will be conceived and old men die, souls will be engendered and emparadised.

I came in after my lover fell asleep, his wig on a stand and his turban on his head to ward off the night chill. For some months he has been making a show of undressing himself with the connecting door open to lure me into his chamber, but I do not come and go like an ordinary wife. I saw the look on William’s face this morning when he found the baby naked on top of the table. He will need to watch me more closely now, since I may eat eggplants next or walk about unclothed, complaining of the heat.

Called to supper, William and I found only a pile of knives and spoons. Duo had taken over the kitchen since Cook was at the village festival. After a time, Duo carried in a huge pike with a tremendous jaw. When he put the
platter down, the pike almost slid off its bed of buttery garlic onto my lap. Then Franny appeared with plates, which she skimmed across the table as if serving in a tavern, while ignoring the trilling and babbling in her old bedchamber at the top of the stairs.

“What is wrong with the baby?” William glanced at Franny, then at me. “Perhaps I should-”

“She is just talking to herself,” I said, pressing his knee to stop him rising.

“Like you, Mother,” Duo said wittily, through a mouthful of fish.

William looked a little anxious at this comment. It was true that, when I picked up my pen, it was sometimes hours before I counted a minute gone. Like eating a fresh buttered pike, I could not stop until my belly cried out that it was glutted. Perhaps I did speak aloud at such times, though I saw nothing wrong in that. I was more companionable than Franny, who had barely spoken since she arrived at Clewer. At the table, she rejected all her father’s overtures at conversation, even when he inquired about fabrics currently in vogue in London, a subject she enjoys as much as he does.

At last, disturbed by Franny’s sulking, William produced a letter from her husband, masquerading as news about St Paul’s. William read it aloud while Duo and I ate cherries and Franny pleated her bodice cruelly with her fingers. Mr Bispham said it was now so hazardous to enter Paul’s that Dr Wren proposed to take it down block by massive block or, if that work proved too dangerous, to use battering-rams and gunpowder to destroy it. In its place he will erect a cathedral to rival the Catholic monuments of Europe. There will
be a special niche for John Donne’s effigy-the only one, Mr Bispham told his father-in-law, that had survived the fire.

“Too large for Clewer garden,” William interjected, his most cheerful comment of the evening.

The real point of Mr Bispham’s letter was at the end, where he demanded the return of his lawful wife and infant daughter. At this, an unladylike noise spurted from the nostrils of Mrs Bispham.

“Why did you marry him, Fran, if you hate him so?” Duo spat a cherry stone past his sister’s ear and out the window.

“There is a little more,” William said hurriedly.

In the postscript, Mr Bispham asked William to send Franny home with
some memento of Dr Donne (a grey hair or flake of skin or incisor from his jaw) as evidence of Mrs Bispham’s kinship.
This makes me wonder whether he wants Franny for herself or for her bloodline. I know that he is eager for her to bear sons, though she is just seventeen. Yet, in spite of his demands, I suspect Mr Bispham cannot do without Franny for more than a few days at a time, a fact much to his credit.

William placed the letter near Franny’s uneaten supper. As she slipped it into her bodice, I saw a softening in her chin. I do believe that Franny is with child again and has not determined how she feels about it. I will speak to her about staying with us for several weeks. That way, Mr Bispham will be forced to travel to Clewer to collect her, and she will gain the upper hand with him.