Conceit (7 page)

Now, in the sickroom, tobacco fumes obscured the image of Mary Magdalen on the wall. Their father sat cross-legged
on the bed, impaling Pegge like a traitor on his steely gaze. She removed her eyes from the boil that had burst out mutinously on his nose and looked down at her tightly laced boots. Her father knew that Sadie followed those boots everywhere. Had he deduced how his old black hat, now chewed around the edges, had found its way back to its hook?

“Have it your way,” he said at last, weighing each word against the jutting of Pegge’s chin. “Your mother’s soul is
with her body in her grave.
Be that as it may. Since she enjoys her long night’s festival, let me prepare towards her now.”

“But Father,” Bridget blurted out, “I thought you wanted your soul to see the Blessed Face of God, not go with your corpse to Mother’s tomb.”

“And surely,” added George cheerfully, “you cannot be buried in St Clement’s when you are Dean of Paul’s. You must take your place with the other Deans beneath the choir floor.”

They had all seen his latest porphyry-and-marble testament to fame. He had barely been Dean a month when he had pinned the first design for his sepulchre on the library wall, to be followed by another, and another, each more grandiose than the last. Pegge had seen him studying the sketches as he took his pipe of tobacco. Then, blowing smoke through his nostrils, he would admire his image in the gilt mirror in which he appeared to hang between the two paintings—the Blessed Virgin and the Crucifixion—nailed upon the wall.

“You must fight this disease, for aiding your death is self-murder,” Jo said.

“It seems you must recover, Father,” George said slyly, handing his cold supper to him.

“Ah,” said their father, waving back the meal, “but surely self-homicide is justified if used to fly evil and seek good?”

“The taking of a life is always a sin,” said Jo, pushing the hair out of his eyes doubtfully.

“Who are a little wise the best fools be.” The Dean picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and scrutinized it, as if counting the idiots perched on the head of a pin. “Then are the martyrs sinners? What of Christ’s volition at his crucifixion? Sharpen your arguments. You might be in a pulpit soon, God help us.”

“Self-homicide is not so naturally sin that it may never be otherwise,” Jo offered.

“Source?”

“Biathanatos.”

“A
book written by Jack Donne. I suppressed it so it would not fall into the hands of lazy thinkers, but it has done so all the same. What of Samson? If you must affect his disorderly hair, then try to fathom his triumph.”

“Samson pulled the temple down on his head for the glory of God,” said George, coming to his brother’s aid. “But martyrs who seek personal glory commit a sin.”

“That is better. Now put pen to paper each of you and write me a case against self-slaughter. If you cannot convince me, I shall fast to speed my death.” He selected one of his long clay pipes, pressed in a fingerful of tobacco, and lit it with a taper. “I have no wish to live amongst philistines a day longer than Samson had to.”

Nothing was expected of Lucy, who was now so distraught she was rocking back and forth, nor of little Betty, who was spoiling a sheet with gigantic sloppy letters. The others set to work, leaning against the wall or sitting on the floor. Pegge filled her page with cyphers and twining foliage that branched into the leaves of night-blooming tobacco. She hated these exercises he set them when her brothers were home from school.

One by one, Jo, George, and Bridget rose to stammer out their cases while the judge sat with his legs crossed rigidly, unwilling to exert even a facial muscle to defend his life. After each had presented a lacklustre case, their father became apoplectic with spots, dismantled their arguments with brutal logic, and pronounced himself a step closer to his grave through the ignorance of his own children.

Pegge was almost choking from the pipe-fumes. The tobacco that Doctor Foxe had prescribed seemed to be luring her father into a fatal oriental languor. Even now, his head was stiffening into sculptor’s marble under the embroidered nightcap that was Con’s parting gift. If he could not be talked out of this bout of hypochondria, Pegge would be forced to live with Con and be subject to her tyranny.

Feeding her page to the fire, Pegge collected his things as she usually did at this hour. She seized the pipe from his hand and pushed it back into the box.

“There is some tobacco left,” he protested, gripping the air a moment too late.

“You must stop smoking, Father, for tobacco is a cure and you say you wish to die. Of course,” she offered, turning
back towards him with the box of pipes, “if you prefer to be cured and serve your King and God as Dean of Paul’s—”

His hand was still feeling the air, hoping for the pipe to reappear. “Your argument has surpassing merit,” he conceded. “Ergo, I shall continue to smoke tobacco as a cure. I will not fast. I will cheerfully await God’s leisure till he calls, but not,” he pointed his finger at George, who was smiling openly now, “so overcheerfully as to be loath to go when he commands me.”

Wooden clogs pounded up the stairs towards the bedchamber and Bess entered, carrying a cloth in a large basin.

The Dean quickly uncrossed his legs as Bess thrust the steaming basin at him. “My sickbed is a rack and my spots malignant and pestilential.” His voice was muffled by the hot wet cloth, which Bess was swathing around his face.

“I’ll sweat this nonsense out of him. Throw some coals on that fire, one of you,” Bess called to the children, who were fleeing from the room. Plucking the ornate nightcap from his head, she fished a knife out of her pocket that looked like the one she used for paring turnips. “You haven’t been shaved since Constance left. I’m here to scrape every blessed hair off you myself. Pegge, take away that box of pipes and fetch my boiling kettle from the kitchen.”

4. ANGLING

Pegge’s father produced twenty-three devotions—one sheet a day for twenty-three days. Then he rose from his mattress as slickly as Lazarus, cleanly shaved and brimming with new sermons. Out of his illness came a poem written in a code to God. To celebrate the Dean’s recovery, the choristers of Paul’s set the new hymn to music and sang it with gusto. Pegge knelt on aching legs, enduring the puns on her parents’ names and wishing her father back in his sickbed. Why did his love for her mother—the love he had
wallowed in a score
—require such public penance?

From Mr Margrave, who kept an angling shop in Paul’s churchyard, Pegge learned that Walton had not been acting rashly because of Constance after all. Instead, Mr Margrave suspected Walton was after a new fish that had come into England at the same time as the turkey. The monks had kept these carp to eat during Lent, but when the monasteries were destroyed, they escaped from the fishponds and bred wild.

Pegge began to follow Walton again, singing Mr Margrave’s tune.

Hops and turkeys, carps and beer
,
Came into England all in one year.

Walton did no useful work that she could see and was happiest setting one foot ahead of the other, preferably along a river path. On the bank of the River Lea, Pegge watched him lose himself in conversation with other anglers, casting his line and recasting. When he was alone, he let Pegge help him with his bait and tackle, finding more and more uses for her clever fingers.

He showed her how to put moss into a bottle, then tend bait for him in this little garden. Once she found a bright caterpillar beside the river. They knelt down to take stock of his excellent features: yellow lips, purple forehead, grassy underparts, red spots in an X across his shoulders, and fourteen handsome feet. She gave him a twig of privet to gnaw at like a bone, and took him out to show Walton every hour.

Walton’s rod kept growing, for the longer the rod, the further he could get across the river. It grew to fifteen, sixteen, seventeen feet, then broke into two for easier carrying. Pegge plucked strands from horses’ tails along the path and twisted them into supple lines while Walton fished, skeins of love-language taking shape within her head. Soon her own hair would be as long as a horsetail, and he would beg to use it for his rods.

Before long, Pegge calculated, she would be old enough
to marry, for at fourteen women sprouted hairs and yearned for a male. Perhaps her father could be made to change his mind about having an ironmonger for a son-in-law. Though of a watery slow humour, Walton had an inquiring mind and gentle character. Pegge hinted to her father that Walton might do for one of his other daughters.

For three years Pegge waited for Izaak Walton, for three years Walton waited for Constance Alleyn, and for three years Edward Alleyn’s heart beat on. Lucy died while visiting Con in some mysterious way that Con could not bear to relate, King James died and King Charles took the throne, the City was brought low by plague and recovered health again. Then, just as Pegge became fourteen, the news arrived that Mr Alleyn’s heart had given out, freeing Constance to seek the embrace of a younger, more virile suitor.

Con was once more at the Deanery, sleeping in her old bedchamber. She served their father his meat at table, and Pegge was shuffled back along the row. Pegge perched on the wooden bench like a nun in a brothel, listening to her sisters’ idle talk of marriage. At night, in the narrow bed Pegge shared with her, Betty was expressing an annoying curiosity about the subject.

Pegge was waiting at the Frog & Pike when she saw Izaak Walton coming towards her, his newest rod balanced on his shoulder and his lips sweetly curved in welcome. Pegge had sent a letter asking him to meet her near her father’s
parish of Sevenoaks. This summer her father had taken her to assist him with his writing for the week because he had strained his wrist.

Walton must have started out at daybreak to walk the twenty-five miles south from London, unable to resist the new stream she had described flowing into the River Darent. As they walked along the path clinging to the river, he told her how the inn came by its name. A tremendous pike had been floating sleepily when a frog leapt from the riverbank onto its head. The frog held fast in malice, biting and tormenting the fish until it sank to the bottom. And that was why, Walton said, there were so few pike left in the Darent.

It was an artless tale, and Pegge did not bother to correct it. When he had told her the same story along the River Lea, the frog had stuck fast to the head of a salmon and so killed that noble fish and all its unborn progeny.

The August heat had sucked the Darent dangerously low. Walton pointed out dry patches of riverbed and the obstructions, built by ignorant men, that slowed the trout on their journey upstream.

“The river rises in the pure springs of the Greensand,” he said, “but the mills have broken its back—” A bird’s cry interrupted him.

“A bittern, over there in the snipe bog.”

“By the grace of God there are some marshes left. Where is our stream?”

Pegge gestured to the row of trees, just visible in the summer haze, which grew along the healthy tributary she had found.

Walton made a good figure in a new mossy-green doublet and breeches the colour of the woodcock scrambling past. Although he had cast off his old leather jerkin, he had still taken care to blend in with the undergrowth. She could not say that of herself for she was wearing Con’s scarlet bodice. On the morning Pegge left for Sevenoaks, she found her sister sprawled asleep in bed, wantonly uncovered, and took the bodice without asking. In any case, Con was supposed to be in mourning. Now Pegge tugged the bodice lower in the front and let her dark rope of hair swing back and forth across her breastbone as she walked.

Walton took a sideways look. “How old are you, Pegge?”

“Almost fifteen.” She lifted her bare throat to the sun’s heat.

“I am twice your age.” He turned his head back. “Are you sure there are no gates and mill-dams on your stream?”

“Not twice. You are ten years older, the same as Constance.”

His eyes were fixed on the row of trees ahead. “How she has suffered at the death of Mr Alleyn.”

Pegge wished she had not mentioned Con. Soon he would be pressing her for details with a preposterous eagerness on his face. Why did men always pity Con? Pegge pitied Mr Alleyn, sure that Con had hastened his death with sweet syllabubs and jugs of sack. What else had been done to the poor man in the privacy of his marriage-bed?

Pegge stopped to examine a lump the size of a pudding-stone that was buzzing on the path, then broke off a corner of the cow-turd and gave it to Walton.

“A dung-beetle,” he said, merry once more, “and one that sings in better tune than you.”

As they walked, they ate radishes from her pocket, enjoying the coolness in their mouths. Pegge left the biggest one to last. Taking a bite, she gave the other half to Walton. A fine, philosophical look came over his face as he contemplated the half-eaten radish.

“What do you most wish for, Izzy?”

“Herbs and salads, and fish straight from the river. A man needs no more than such pleasures.”