Conceit (41 page)
The mummy was where Franny had told Pegge it would be, stuck up as high as a traitor outside Paul’s for all to mock, on a piece of scaffolding that had survived the fire. The bellman called out the hour as he rounded the Dean’s corner. It would be two hours before he came that way again.
The wind caught a bony foot and rattled it, scaring off a crow pecking on dried skin. Her father’s beard had grown several inches in his coffin, and long, curved fingernails now
dug into his thighs. The huckster had taken his ladder home with him, but Pegge climbed up the blocks by squeezing her fingers and shoes into the gaps the way she had done as a child. She was now face to face with her dead father. No life was on these lips either, only a greasy shine from penny kisses.
Holding onto the scaffold with one hand, she tried to free the skeleton, but it was bound with wire, impossible to loosen even with her knife. He wasn’t mummified after all, for only a few threads of flesh still held the bones together. Pushing her fingers into the eye sockets, she snapped off the skull, then climbed down with it in her skirt and vomited until her stomach was dry. The crows retreated, then waddled back for a closer look, squawking like hungry infants. Pegge took a plum from her pocket and ate it slowly, throwing the stone to drive the birds away, then ate another, and another, until she had driven the crows away three times.
Climbing back up, she caught hold of a foot, twisting the shin bone until the leg broke apart at the knee. She dropped the bones on the pavement, then climbed higher, twisting the thigh bone until she had forced the hip joint asunder. She wrenched the pelvis out from under the wire and threw it down, then pulled and snapped and broke the rib cage, rib by rib, until she had taken her father apart and thrown all the pieces to the ground. Then she laid him out, from big bones right down to fingers and toes, on the pavingstones outside St Paul’s.
Why was it that the bones of the dead fractured more easily than the bones of the quick? As she was straining to
see the marrow in a broken bone, a dog shot out of the dark and clamped his teeth on a rib. When she tried to tug the bone out of his jaws, he let it go, snarling and baring his teeth. Two mongrels appeared out of nowhere to fight over her father’s skull. One carried it in his teeth a few feet then dropped it, then they tugged it back and forth, until the skull had been grabbed and rolled and pushed across the churchyard. Soon a pack of scavengers converged on Pegge, darting in to steal the bones at her feet one by one, until she was left with only the thigh bone she was holding in her fist.
She chased some of the dogs into Paul’s nave, where they burrowed under the rubble to gnaw on dried flesh cleaving to the bones. Above her head, the roof was open to the stars and the cold winter moon. When she stopped, so did the dog behind her, lowering its head, lunging and snarling when she turned her back, hungering for the thigh bone but wary of the arm that brandished it. Then a rat scurried past with some half-eaten filth clamped in its jaw, and the dog chased after it.
In the choir, the December wind blew through the blackened stonework, whirling up ash and human refuse. When she looked down into the gaping bone-hole, she thought she saw something moving, perhaps a vagrant sheltering next to a corpse or a few embers. Now ruptured and overturned, the coffin of one dean looked like another’s. A great man’s grave was as mute as a poor man’s. Even the bone she held might have belonged to the thigh of another, lesser, man.
Three months before, a wind like this had caused the flames to spread, but it had been blistering hot that day in Paul’s. No dogs had braved the church, only the single frightened cat that now made its home at Clewer.
On that September day, Pegge stood in the burning choir, dodging cinders and riots of sparks. The carters she had hired were easing her father’s effigy out of its niche when some molten lead dripped on one of the men. He jumped, loosening his grip on the rope and letting the effigy crash onto the cart. The neck broke and the head rolled down the aisle into the fiery void.
In their hurry to swing the cart around, the men knocked the statue against one of the weight-bearing columns, shifting it a fraction. A jagged scar shot up the pier. They had chipped the urn this time, and sent one of the handles flying. Pegge helped them drape the canvas quickly over the statue, then one man pushed on a wheel while the other pulled on the horse’s bridle to lead it out.
Picking her way towards the altar, she collected the marble handle, then saw her father’s head grimacing just beyond the smoking choir stalls. It was too late to call back the men. Coughing from the fumes, they were already in the transept, trying to get the frightened horse through the south door. From there, it would be a torturous, slow trip using restraining ropes and blocks down the steep grade to the wharf.
Pegge could feel the cathedral tilting and settling into the ancient sand far beneath her feet. The pavingstones were moving and the blocks themselves were shifting in
the walls. As she edged towards the head, she heard the Yorkshire timbers cracking high above her in the roof. All at once, there was a blast like gunpowder igniting and she ran into the aisle, crouching against the outer wall. The timbers and stone vaulting thundered down, buckling the church floor and exposing the centuries of burials in the layer of earth between Paul’s and St-Faith’s-under-Paul’s.
Battered by the heat and violence, the lead coffins began to twist and soften, tipping and sliding towards the gaping crypt. The lids shunted sideways, revealing corpses as parched as tinder, or awash in liquid and reeking gloriously of putrefaction. As the fire attacked the insides of the coffins, a nauseating odour sickened the air, like the stench from the City’s tanneries. It took Pegge a moment to grasp that the odour came from the dead—great statesmen and churchmen all—who were roasting in the vast stone oven. Some with relief, some with vengeance, the escaping souls took to the scorching air in plumes of jubilant smoke. It was then that the thousands of books laid up in Faith’s burst into flames and charred bookpapers flew out of the crypt like rabid bats.
She could not recognize her father’s casket in the sinister light. No longer in a cool repository for deans and bishops, he would be hotter than a minor canon relegated to a parish churchyard. In minutes, the pavingstones would be too hot for her to walk upon. John Donne would have to take his chances with the others, lurching and tossing on the selfsame sea of fiery rot.
As Pegge rolled the marble head into her shawl, a vengeful spirit shrieked behind the altar. A form leapt out and
fled towards the nave-not one of her father’s books come hellishly alive, but one of Paul’s cats driven mad by the scalding wind. She stumbled after it, carrying the head as far as she could, then dragging it in the shawl behind her.
That was when she found Izaak Walton huddled under the smouldering portico, his hair stuck bleakly to his scalp as he watched his house burn to the ground.
Now, three months later, a cold wind tore through Paul’s, uprooting charred timbers and sending them clattering.
By some miracle, her father’s corpse had survived the inferno in its corner of the bone-hole, only to be hauled out and desecrated by the huckster. The great tower had also withstood the force of fire. Gripping the thigh bone, Pegge climbed the stairway to the top and looked down over the skeleton of Paul’s. The spine of the vast roof was broken, and only a few ribs of vaulting protruded here and there. As a girl, she had surveyed all of London from this height, trying to spot blood on the pinnacle where a man had plummeted while hauling up the weathercock. Now there was no pinnacle for a man to spear himself on, nor even a scrap of lead where a girl could scratch her name.
To the west past Ludgate, Pegge could make out a swinging lantern as Angus led the farm wagon towards their meeting place at the conduit. They would need to circle the wall to the north and enter the City through Aldersgate. At Bladder corner, instead of turning towards Cheapside past St Michael’s, which bulged out into the
street, she would squeeze the wagon through Panier alley. From there, it would be downhill all the way and easier on the mare, but she would have to take the risk of being seen, for it would be dawn by the time she got the wagon safely to Paul’s churchyard.
Far below, near the scaffolding where her father’s corpse had hung, she saw a violet flash. The dogs were fighting over his bones again and the crows, still hungry and awake, were making sallies towards them, mimicking their peevish snarls. Pegge threw her father’s thigh bone as far as she could into the square. It splintered as it landed, driving away the dogs and scattering the crows in a cloud of violet-black feathers. Soon they were back to collect the slivers and waddle off to shelter. At first light, they would lurch off to deposit them on rooftops, where they could pry at them at leisure, far from the scavenging dogs. Before noon, her father’s remains would be dispersed and mingled with the dust of every dunghill and swallowed in every puddle and pond.
28. PASSIVE VALOUR
When the muzzle coated in white sugar had lifted, William found himself looking straight into the brazen eyes of his wife’s horse. For once, he found himself agreeing with John Donne, for he was never more sure that animals lacked souls.
Pegge looked as if she had been sleeping with the wagon. She must have carted the effigy all the way from Clewer by road, not trusting it a second time to the currents of the Thames. No doubt she had worn out his servants and his draught horse, reserving the showy finish, where the streets narrowed through the City, to her high-strung mare.
Angus was scowling from exertion. He and his son were guiding the wheels while Pegge held Fox’s bridle to coax her forward. In front of them, William could see two stone buildings connected by a bridge, barely taller than the reclining statue. When the horse refused to duck under the bridge, Pegge unharnessed her and took her around the longer way. The gardeners lay on top of Dr Donne,
propelling him through the arch with the strength of their legs, like a barge through a tunnel. As Pegge rode up on Fox on the other side, William fell back into a lane, holding his pocket-clock like a heart in his palm. It had taken five minutes to leg the great Dean through the arch.
Now William could see why Pegge had chosen this route, for the lane sloped downwards, opening out past the burnt husks of bookstalls, then dropping like a plumb line straight to Paul’s. There was no need for the horse to pull here. In fact, it was all it could do to hold the wagon back.
Ahead, Christopher Wren and the assembled dignitaries were emerging from the Si Quis door to assess the damage to the cathedral’s exterior, gesturing and consulting, calling out measurements, beating off stray dogs and then, hearing an ominous clatter, turning as one body to stare at the approaching colossus, reined back by rough workmen with their legs braced and led by an outlandish woman, her face streaked with dirt, riding a prancing brown mare. Behind her was a mob, which was making a loud holiday of it, and keeping pace with them was an enterprising band of meat and drink sellers, their merchandise strapped to their bodies by every kind of box and contraption. Paul’s pie-man was hailing fresh pies at two a penny though the pastries smelt, as they passed William, at least a fortnight old. William had pulled his wig almost down over his eyes so Pegge would not recognize him and call out for help—to climb atop his recumbent father-in-law and leg him through the Dean’s low doorway into Paul’s, or to ride him through the nave towards his appointed resting place.
All at once Christopher Wren broke from the dignitaries and strode uphill to halt the wagon. As Pegge leapt down from her mare to speak to him, William sagged against a wall. His wife was going to greet the King’s surveyor, the man who was being called the new Archimedes, wearing her gardening clothes. Where her old brown skirts had ridden up, where a lady’s white stocking should have been, William saw a flash of bare and bloodied ankle.
At something Pegge was saying, Dr Wren walked around the effigy, subjecting it to a closer look. Then he came forward to point out some technical feature of the route ahead and, as his hands flew in the air, William saw the difficulty. The slope of the churchyard, multiplied by the weight of the marble statue, would accelerate the wagon to such a pace that it would ram the horse, catapulting the effigy and its entire apparatus—wagon, woman, horse, and gardeners—against the cathedral like a maddened war-machine. In its weakened state, with the pillars already off the perpendicular, the blackened shell might be brought to its knees.