Conceit (16 page)

“I can manage on my own, Father.” They would not be able to sit so companionably on his bed if Walton were there, interfering.

“You will be needed to make fair copies of these holy poems.” He pushed some papers towards her. “Be sure to ask about any questionable lines before I die.”

“I will copy out the secular poems as well.” So far she had found only five, but she could see several likely-looking sheets closer to her father. “How shall I order them? I think by date, so they will make a kind of story. You will need to tell me when they were written.”

“Give them to me.” He clamped the five under his left knee, a stack Pegge knew was destined for the fire.

Pegge was struggling to get a heavy table out of the library, when the table lightened and Izaak Walton’s hands were on it. He had a habit of appearing and disappearing as if river-walking in his quiet shoes.

“It will go better this way,” he said, tipping the table onto its side and guiding the front legs through the jamb.

Pegge followed with the back legs. They carried the table up the stairs and placed it where her father wanted it, against his bed. Walton had been there since noon, sitting in Pegge’s chair beside her father to help him with his sermons. Now Walton moved his writing materials onto the table and dipped his pen into her father’s ink.

“Here is the next passage,” her father said. “We have a winding-sheet in our mother’s womb which grows with us from conception, and we come into the world to seek a grave.”

“A shroud on an infant?” Walton looked back and forth, his pen in the air.

Her father ripped open the front of his bedshirt in irritation, exposing a chest as puckered on the surface as Pegge’s sleeves.

“He means a man’s skin,” Pegge hissed at Walton. “Let me do the writing, Father. You should not have to explain everything.”

“Mr Walton need not understand it,” her father shouted, “only write it down.”

“I will ask no more questions, sir,” Walton said hastily. “It will go faster now, to be sure.”

It was dusk when Walton finally cleared his throat, resting his quill in the groove of his book. “Nicholas Stone has asked for your epitaph, Dr Donne.”

Her father rummaged through some sheets and held one out. “Remind Mr Stone I must have the Italian marble, even if he has to go to Carrara to choose the block himself.
Also, tell the canons that any cathedral business must be brought to me by Saturday next, for after that day I will not mix my thoughts with any that concern the world.”

Night was falling, and they had used up enough ink and paper for most men’s lifetimes. The bedposts at north, south, east, and west had become the four corners of her father’s world. He had not gone past these posts all day, and Bess’s mutton pie remained untouched. Perhaps men could elevate literary things above solid food. Pegge had gulped her own pie quickly, though her stomach still felt raw inside. Was this the green-sickness that Bess talked about—a gnawing appetite that could not be satisfied by food?

“It is time for my father to rest,” Pegge said, stopping up the ink-pot and placing it on the high shelf.

Walton’s pen scratched to the end of the line, then gave up. He looked regretfully towards the shelf, then gathered his writing materials. “I will come back in the morning, Dr Donne.”

“Not before noon,” Pegge corrected. The room was hot and smelt disturbingly of man. She knew it was not Walton, for he smelt as fresh as he had always done. “A man need not stink until he dies, Father. If you intend to live in your bed, you will need grooming.”

There was a long silence, long enough, she thought, for Con to come down from Barking to do the job herself.

After Walton eased himself out the door, Pegge found the tortoise comb that King James had given to her father. She pulled it gently through his beard and, after a time, his head relaxed upon the pillow and his lips retracted to help
her shape his moustache. That was enough for now. In the morning, she would shave him.

“I have moved your close-stool beside the fire. If you are ready Father, I will help you stand.”

He looked at the apparatus suspiciously, trying, Pegge supposed, to contrive some way to keep the body’s wastes inside. Yet there it was, the red velvet seat, offering relief in the warm firelight. He lurched into an upright position and stared at the thing. At last, his yellowed toenails descended, then recoiled from the cold planking. Pegge found some stockings to put on him and his legs descended cautiously once more.

While he shuffled to the close-stool, she collected the condemned poems from the bed and stacked them on the table, satisfying herself that she had seen them all before. Once on the seat, he swivelled to face the blaze, calling out, “Bring me the bundle to be destroyed!”

Soon his greatest poems were nothing but charred fragments on the grate. There was something absurd about this act of renunciation, since the poems had made the rounds of all his friends. The most complete collection was right above his head, in the chamber that her brothers shared when they were home. She was now more familiar with the verses than they were, having copied out all his love-poems for herself.

After her father had warmed himself sufficiently beside the embers, he hobbled back and she helped him climb into the bed. As she settled him, the sleeve of his nightshirt slid up, exposing his forearm. She gripped his arm and stared at it, wondering which valves to press to stop the blood from flowing back into his heart. The dark veins stood out in
milky flesh that might have belonged to a saint in Catholic times. Yet this arm had performed the most erotic acts, then written about them in poems passed heatedly from friend to friend.

When a man lay with a woman, did his hands support the weight of his body? Did his knees act as a fulcrum—for surely a man did not balance upon his toes? That was the woman’s part, she knew, for she had heard that a woman danced on her feet when lying underneath a man.

Even as her father was sacrificing them on the fire, the poems were being copied and recopied, read aloud to lovers and silently in beds, for no one who had read such verses would willingly destroy them. Even now, women all over England were rising in passion, having read, under cover of night, erotic poems written by her father. Yet he had betrayed his promises to Ann, and betrayed them anew that very day, burning the records of the love they had shared on this marriage-bed. Had Ann danced on her feet where he now lay? Had
this arm
curled round to give her pleasure?

What if, that day along the secret river, when Izaak Walton had crawled out on the narrow rock beside her, Pegge had twisted his legs in hers and refused to release him, twisted and tormented, danced on her feet, until she took his love from him by force, as the carp had drawn the melters to her and forced them to deliver all their melt?

Her father had fallen asleep with his arm held straight up in the air, being subjected to a prolonged and close inspection.

“Tomorrow,” she said sternly to The Arm, “I will give you a good scrubbing.”

10. SIX THOUSAND YEARS

On the second night after I took to my deathbed, I woke to find Pegge standing on her head, her skirts tied above her knees and her eyes bulging from the pressure. I thought my soul had risen out of my body and Pegge was left clinging to the earth below. Then she began to sway, fell backwards, and saved herself only by curling and rolling across the floor, stopping at the brink of the fire and staring at it in that peculiar way she has.

It seems that Mr Harvey told Pegge that he grew hair on his scalp by lying on a slanted board at night, a practice that Constance has no doubt put a stop to since their marriage. Pegge’s hair is as short and matted as sheep’s wool. Though I told her it looks shorter when flattened on the top, she will not be dissuaded from standing on her head to make it grow.

Pegge’s headstands have improved, but I am no closer to rising above earth. Now she tends to me in the daytime and, at night, Bess plants herself beside me like a side of beef to prevent me squeezing any joy out of dying. She
insists on a sign of life every so often—a belch, a fart, any sound will do—to show that my insides are still functioning. If I do not produce it voluntarily, she will ream it out of me, knowing I fear her enemas worse than I fear hell.

In this wooden bed, consorting with these few thoughts, I lie in prison and am coffined until I die. It is not the first time I have been imprisoned for your love, Ann. Thirty years ago, I tumbled into a cell in the Fleet. When my eyes adjusted to the meagre light, I gave the man a sixpence to bring me ink and paper. I hoped I might get poems from it, but none came. Now I cannot stop the thoughts of you, though they are old and tainted by memory. Your voice is a knell from an unquiet tomb, your beckoning finger an accusation. You must wait for my ashes, love—as ashes I will join you. But first I must die. Sometimes I wonder if you have conspired to keep me here, pinned to this bed of vain desire.

Now and then, my soul takes to the air to try the way, but before it can get an arm’s length overhead, some hiccup or rumble calls it back into this prison. This is the subtle knot that makes us man, this yoking of the spirit and the flesh. When a man dies, where does his soul go? Who sees it come in or sees it go out? Nobody. Yet everybody is sure he had one, and now has none.

Pegge is shaving around my beard. As the straight-blade hovers over my throat, I hold my breath, hoping she will do me a mercy and send me straight to heaven. Then she tilts my head expertly, and scrapes at a stubborn patch beneath my chin. She only nicked me once, on the first
day. She collected the drop of blood on her fingertip and sucked it off as I watched through narrowed eyes.

Now she is kneading some life back into my hands, which have been cold for days. Licking a flannel, she scrubs at the ink on my fingers, but it refuses to come off. What cleansing ritual will she devise next? She is much more inventive than Con, who dealt with me swiftly and went on her way.

When I was a boy, I angered my mother by becoming stiff while the nurse was bathing me. That was when my mother gave me the skull of her great uncle, Sir Thomas More, and sat on my bed reading from the
Book of Martyrs.
She told me that angels watched from the hammerbeams when More was sentenced. After his head rotted for a fortnight on London bridge, it fell from its pike into the lap of Margaret, his favourite daughter. That is the sort of tale that Catholic mothers like to tell their sons, and fathers their daughters. When she was little, Pegge delighted in it, for I had named her after Margaret More.

When Pegge was older, I told her how William Roper wanted to marry one of Mores daughters for her education and bloodline, and came to the scholar to propose the match. Agreeing readily, the great man took Roper to his chamber where his daughters were sleeping on a truckle-bed and whipped off the sheet, exposing the girls. They woke, saw the stranger, and rolled over to hide their naked bellies.
I have seen both sides now
, quipped Roper, then slapped Margaret on her bottom, saying,
Thou art mine.
Such wit was all that passed for wooing between them. If Pegge agrees to have one of the Bowles twins, she will no doubt do the slapping.

I must stifle my laughter, for it is unbecoming in a dying man. George was the only one who understood my jokes. He would grin slyly and tell one of his own. Perhaps, God, you stay me in this place until I get my fill of punning. Death, here is thy sting: I am condemned to quibbling with a humourless God. A ten-fingered torturing, a masturbation of the skull—shall I never stop wallowing in my cleverness? Sooner a horse might climb a tower than John Donne’s wit be stopped by death.

Pegge finishes cleaning my fingernails and stares at my mouth. I suppose I have been talking aloud again. Sometimes when my lips move, no sense at all comes out. Perhaps I should try to move my other end. Bess blames all my sins on that orifice. If only I could let fly a constipated fart to please her. If I cannot move my bowels by tonight, Bess will evacuate them for me with her roving tube and bladder.

The bed has begun to creak the way it used to do when we were in it, Ann. It yaws, a great ship straining at anchor. Pegge is trying to move it into the morning sun to warm me—dragging it by herself rather than calling Mr Walton from the library—and that small gesture cramps my heart. This is what comes of breeding a headstrong daughter. She squats on the floor, panting, her skin glowing with a mad feverish light. Then she puts her shoulder against the bedpost and shifts it the last few feet.

But no one can be dragged back into life.

Just before you died, Ann, you stroked my hair as if I were a child. All at once, there was a crack and your head fell sharply against your heart. Why did God give you a
stillborn child you could not bear? Was it a test of your faith, or of mine?

I have done my best, Ann, with your scattered brood of motherless children. You left me with two sons to educate and five daughters to marry. I have used such stratagems and such devices as the most desperate of fathers. How else will my girls be taken care of, unless by husbands? I must make Pegge agree to a betrothal. I cannot postpone my death until a man arrives who will suit her as well as William Roper suited Margaret More.