Conceit (44 page)

William went to sleep on a stomach so achingly full of pike that he must have been sucked at once into a black, garlicky
dream. I came to him while he was dreaming and kept him so, for no visitor is so sweet as a night-walker. My touch was light and purposeful, my purpose to arouse but not awake.

It is not the first time I have come to him in the night. These fingerings are shorthand for a long affection. No victim of my nocturnal visits has ever complained. In the dark, there is only sensation, the dreamer adding scent and colour according to his whim. Tomorrow, when William wakes, he will find only a rumpled sheet and blame an amorous soul. Such spirits are thought to give off a violet glow and leave a trace of phosphor, or perhaps a jelly as does a fallen star.

But this time, instead of enjoying my lover, I have been watching him sleep. William is no longer young, and I have begun to worry about him. When his head turns, his turban shifts, exposing the grey stubble on his scalp. It must have been itchy under his wig all day, since his manservant went off with the others to the fête. William would be astonished if I offered to shave him myself, but I once was fairly good at grooming men.

Now I am jostled by another night-creature, her feet going step by step up the ladder of my leg. Not yet weaned, my grandchild nuzzles at my breast, puckering her lips like a hawkmoth searching for a bud. I tug her higher, making a buzz in her ear so she will buzz me back in mine. She pushes me away and reaches for William, but I pull her back so she will not wake him. There is no room in a love-bed for a child. When I was about her age, I also had to learn that nothing should come between two lovers but their skin.

I once lay next to you like this. I had been present at my own conception-
why
should I be absent from your further acts of love? Crawling up from the foot of the bed, I pushed myself between you and Ann, earning your confused and drowsy fumblings. Reaching past me, you cupped your hands around her breasts and lay your face into the hollow of her neck. Soon we were both exiled from her bed, for Ann was dying.

You buried my mother in St Clement’s with her five dead children. We all knew what the Latin said above her tomb, but you had not been made speechless like an infant. Far from it. To avoid Betty, who had come back from the wet nurse with sharp baby teeth and scratchy toenails, I crawled into your bed and curled up at the back of your knees, fingering the dark rivering veins that led upwards to your heart. At any moment, your body might begin to jerk. You would sit upright, gesticulate as you did in the pulpit, and hold forth-poem or sermon, I was too young to tell. Then you would look about wildly for a woman and find only a shivering child.
Ann
, you would cry, and I would answer,
Yes.

This wraith beside me now is cool to the touch but far from innocent. When she is told she must not sleep with William, she will kick and complain, as I did when Bess took me from your bed.
Too old to sleep with a man
, Bess said, putting me back into the smelly cot with Betty. Even Bess with her broken nose could see the problem.
Not again
, she scolded, taking Betty off for a cleaning and another suit of clothes.

I hear a dull reminding chime. Surely William has not brought his clock to bed? But no, it is in the baby’s fist. When I pry it from her, I see it lacks a minute-hand. She must have wandered into Duo’s chamber and found your old striking clock. It is a wonder Duo has not lost it, for he has little regard for anything that does not bark or swim. I press my lips to the top of her head, breathing in the baby moistness, then I tell her she must take it back to Duo. She slides off the bed, naked except for the clock dangling from her fingers.

Tonight memory washes over me like a benediction, a sudden jasmine on the night air. My fleurs did not come this month and I am fierce with longing. At supper, when I realized that Franny was with child, I was gripped by an envy as sharp as childbirth pain, then by relief. What woman wishes to be made a mother when she is a grandmother? These past months, I sometimes thought I was carrying William’s child inside me, my blood flowing one month then not the next, but now I know that my womb is as infertile as a girl’s again.

I was older than Franny is now when my fleurs finally began. I became hydroptic with the gathering blood while keeping a vigil at your deathbed.

Week after week, I ministered to your decomposing flesh, wondering how such a body had performed such feats of love. Death was to be your crowning achievement, the news your many friends awaited. You faced towards the east, dreaming no doubt of your grand effigy in Paul’s.
What became of your vow to die in the act of love and share a single grave with Ann? I read through your poems once again, counting your unkept promises to her. I had taken her part for so long, I hardly knew which was my mother or myself

Once you bragged of being canonized by love, but now you hankered for real sainthood. You even had an acolyte who was copying out your sermons for posterity. But Izaak Walton was doing more than that. He was copying down the case for your beatification from your own canny lips. You told him story after story, each destined for the
Life of Donne
, a plan I did not grasp until, years later, I set eyes upon that fiction.

On the evening before your death, I heard you tell Walton,
I were miserable if I might not die.
He made a notation in his little book, splashing ink in his haste to get it down. When he went into your library, I crept up behind him and covered his eyes with my hands. Rooted by the hope it might be Constance, he dared not move, his eyelids sucking heat out of my palms. Pushing my small breasts against his back, I leaned over to read the book still quivering in his hand.

There in his perjuring script were the makings of a saint. He might as well have pimped for Christ at Calvary. There was no mention of your incontinence, or the poultice of flesh-eating maggots, or the loathsome flatulence you blamed on the dog beneath your bed. Every sanctimonious word you had fed him was there in his messy handwriting. The man’s fists were made for ironmongery, not penmanship. Why did you let him
drudge for you when I would have run your errands blithely? Even then I guessed the answer-although I was a better secretary he was a far, far better fool.

Walton’s eyelids were shut and throbbing for some time before a doubt began to stir inside him. I suppose my boyish figure did not press against him as he imagined Con’s should do, for he spun around and stared at my matted hair and the pock-marks on my face.

Let me at least know a man’s kiss
, I begged,
for I have always loved you.

At that, he jumped as if I had scalded him. His words sear me in memory even now. He shoved me away and called me-oh, the sting!-
Constance’s little sister.

I locked Bess’s door, throwing myself on her narrow bed and wetting it with my tears. Well before dawn, I came to your bedchamber to relieve Bess and send her to a mattress I had barely slept on.

Your death was driving me out of all patience. Why could God not claim you in a timely fashion? On the bed in front of me, you were basking in your future martyrdom. You had been given a surfeit of love and squandered it while I could not scrape up even a taste for myself. As I stood marvelling at your bony frame laid out in its smug cruciform, a hunger claimed me. In my bones and marrow, my sinews and my gathering blood, I was a woman grown. I could not wait for love to seek me out. If I was to taste love, it must be now.

I crept into my old bedchamber and stood next to the sleeping bodies of Mr and Mrs Samuel Harvey. Con was so
big with child that Mr Harvey was lying on a pallet on the floor, snoring contentedly in spite of this mistreatment. On the table was what I had come for, one of Bess’s remedy jars. It was a salve for Con to use on Mr Harvey-dried honeysuckle steeped in grease to anoint a body benumbed and cold.
To bring him round
, I had heard Bess counsel Con,
when nought else will do it.

I added some aromatic resin to the salve and began to rub your limbs, skirting bedsores and mapping subterranean knots. You lay like a corpse ready for dissection, your skin so papery it punctured as easily as Saint Sebastian’s.

You had so railed against Ann’s voluptuous spirit in your sermons that the audience sat rigid with attention, eager for more of the Dean’s sins with his dead wife. Well, I was amorous too, but I was flesh and blood, heavy with new womanhood and bruised by the deceit of men. I cursed all faithless lovers and wished them turned to stone. But you were not rock yet, and I might still get some answer from you that no other man would give me. I worked the ointment deep into your skin, watching the inky veins burst through their purple banks, for even the dying cannot ignore a kneading palm. As my fingers sank into your flesh, your pulse quickened and your skin warmed under my hand, its female cunning startling both of us. I scarcely needed to move my thumb to see its fruit. I licenced my roving hands and let them go-before, behind, between, above, below.

All at once, the ligature around your heart broke open in a glorious haemorrhaging flood and you were rampant with remembered love, bartering your immortal spirit for one
more minute in a woman’s arms. My mother drove me forward, but oh! I was willing.
Drawn by my perfume
, I whispered,
you will slide into my labyrinth like a bee into an orchid.
And in that lyric rush, if I sang out my name as Ann, then thrust my tongue deep in your mouth, who was to blame, my mother or myself? Though you were a brittle ossuary with bones as porous as a bird’s, I would break bones to taste forbidden love. But at the last tumultuous moment, just as I held your pleasure in my palm—when you were about to die unconfessed and forfeit your grand sepulchre in Paul’s—some pity called me back, and instead of sucking out your soul in one last greedy kiss, I withdrew my tongue and let you hang between the utmost pleasure and the utmost pain.

You lay with one foot in the grave, another in heaven, one eye straining west and the other yearning east. I ran my tongue around my lips, tasting a slight bitterness, then drew a pin from my sleeve and pricked your tongue to jerk you back and fire you off.

Your eyeballs fell back with a
smack
into their sockets, and I said good-morrow to your soul as it sped past. Why not?—I had saved it from eternal death, such nocturnals as priests should never taste. As quickly as the blood had reddened your skin, it now withdrew, bleaching the flesh behind it, until all the blood had ebbed back to your heart.

I left you there for the philosophers to dissect. They would discover whether your lungs were smoky and your heart combust, and whether your soul had been made vehement by God’s fire or left behind like a jelly cooked from the finest winter plums.

William is right-I must stop sleeping in my father’s bed. It will make a good midsummer bonfire, for the oak is full of dry rot. Why has it taken me so many years to move from one bed to another? There is plenty of space in William’s bedchamber for both of us. We have lost so much time, William and I. Soon the morning star will rise, the night-flowers will close, and he will stir, his leg gliding across the sheet to discover what lies in its path. I press my fingers to his heart and feel this clock pulse, not in a case of silver, but of skin, the beats quickening whimsically at my touch. Here is a heart within my grasp. I have only to reach out in the moonlight to claim it.

If I move, William will learn I am no disembodied spirit. Perhaps-it would give him such delight-I will let him find me here this time, a great star fallen in the dark from some accident or change of heart. My morning-gown lies crumpled on the floor. This once I do not feel like writing, as is my habit, in the hours before the house awakes.

How hard it is to have a wife who loves the smell of ink and paper! How much William would rather I did needlework like other women. However, I will not subject him to more torment than a gentleman can bear. At the end of each book I have written:
If I die first, do not publish it and do not burn it and between these, do what you will with it.

I have not been very observant about William lately. His arms may be pale, but they are well muscled from lifting bolts of cloth, and his hands are brown from being in the country. I rub my cheek against his chest, picking up the
garlicky scent of pike, a bold, manly fish that pounds upriver lustfully but, once it is there, breeds only with its mate. I hear a lost river thrumming beneath William’s skin, with floodgates longing to be opened. How easy to caress his aging thigh with scented palm, to turn his veins into a conduit of blood, to command him to rise and fall and do my bidding, for this man is already waking to my touch.

Come, William, I see Venus rising like a pink nipple on the plump horizon. Shall we make that clock of yours run faster? Let us bed down together in this new dawn and weave a silken tent of arms. Such feats are not reserved for extraordinary lovers, and my love for you has grown over the years to marvellous proportions. Let us die together in the act of love, so death cannot divorce us. When our grave is broken open, our souls shall take flight together, assuming limbs of flesh, and lips, ears, loins, and brows. But first let us speed darkening time and savour this long night of love.