Conceit (10 page)

Giving her a sponge bath after a week, Bess pointed out the straight sparse hairs between Pegge’s legs. Only so much as a brown mallard, thought Pegge, blushing, or a speckled fowl. But at least they were not falling out like the hairs on her head, which were coming out by handfuls. Nothing could slow the ravage of the pox, not even the gentian violet painted on her scalp. First the scales on her cheeks turned into pustules, then they plumped up like mulberries and burst with a running pus. Even Con was moved to compassion, begging Pegge through the door not to scratch the sores and blight her hopes of marriage.

Fearless of contagion, Bess lay beside Pegge through the hot nights, telling her stories to drive off the persecuting dreams of food. Ill with hunger, Pegge cried out for radishes, but the doctor still insisted that the disease be starved, else it would get a foothold in her stomach. When Pegge could not eat another spoonful of bread-in-milk, Bess brought up an apron-load of the Dean’s cucumbers, cold and smelling of the country. She pared the largest, dropping the narrow green peels right on the bed, as Pegge’s eyes hungered after each long, rivering pull of the knife.

“Nothing in it but water, in case that doctor asks,” Bess
said, handing the white fruit to Pegge, and reaching for another one to peel.

At last the pox retreated, taking Pegge’s hair with it. Her head felt lightly bulbous, an angelica flower bobbing on a reedy stalk. The boils scabbed over, tightening the skin across her cheekbones. When Doctor Foxe declared the danger past, her father brought in some codlings from his tree and knelt at her bedside, thanking God that
it had not much disfigured her who had it.
Little Betty was more honest.
You look like a six-spotted moth
, she said, counting the scabs on Pegge’s cheek.

Now Con sat beside Pegge’s bed with her needlework. “I am making you something to wear until your hair grows back. How does it look?” She balanced the cap on her own head.

Like a splash of flowers on a field of jet, but on Pegge’s naked skull? At least Con had not carried in the looking-glass. Eyesight blurring, Pegge pressed her face into the mattress.

“But this would look so well on you.” Puzzled, Con turned the cap in her hands.

“I will take your hood, Con, if you have no more use for it, for I see that you have put off black.”

“You cannot know how tiresome it was. Even my sealing wax had to be black! Why should father insist upon full mourning?” Con spun out her hair, more glossy than the flowers she was stitching. “When you mend a dark garment, Pegge, you cannot even see to thread the needle.
I am so glad you did not die, for it would have meant another year of black—” She broke off reddening.

Pegge swung her legs over the edge of the bed, waiting for the dizziness to subside. “Did Izaak Walton get the pox?”

“Why should he?” Con looked up in surprise. “He came once or twice to ask after me and looked quite well.”

Ask after Con, when it was
Pegge
who had almost died? Pegge watched Con’s needle feathering strokes across a sun-drenched flower. “Remember the minnow of green silk I asked you to sew for him, Con? It meant nothing to you, but he still carries it everywhere.”

“Well, he is an angler, and they are not the brightest of men.” Biting off the thread close to the cloth, Con checked her stitches in the window-light.

“He is devoted to you, yet you spurn him. Let him marry someone else if you will not have him!”

“You have missed more than your dinners by being in bed. He
has
married someone else.”

Walton married—had Pegge heard right? The air scented with apples, the first solid food settling into her belly, cores and all, her sister sewing comfortably beside her—it was too much to keep the tears from spilling down her face.

Mr Walton was betrothed long before Pegge got the pox, a good twelvemonth ago, Con reported, just before Mr Alleyn took sick and died. Even Con admitted this was galling for Walton, though his betrothal saved her from telling him to his face that she would not marry him.

“He will be doing no more angling.” Con licked her finger, then knotted the end of her thread. “His new wife will
not let him wander about the countryside all day, for she is Rachel Floud, the linen-draper’s daughter.”

This explained the new mossy-green doublet with its starched collar. No wonder he had folded his clothing so neatly on the rock beside the river. Pegge curled into a shivering ball, keeping her wet face turned from Con.

Married while the carp were spawning, perhaps even the same day he sent the fish in its bed of moss to Con. For it had been sent to her sister, there was no doubt of that now. After Pegge had bruised her ankles in swift cold streams for him, listened to his deep voice carolling the angler’s song, agreed to call their new discovery
the river
, to keep it secret to themselves.

Con raised her eyes from a particularly garish flower. “At least you will be spared hearing it from his lips.”

The sympathy was Pegge’s undoing. She uncurled and leapt out of bed, bending over at the waist and vomiting. Perhaps the doctor had been right to limit her intake of solids, for they were now staring at her from the floorboards, a horrid curdled puddle, and Con was running down the stairs for Bess.

After they had lain like man and wife, his face daubed with clay, their hands entangled in the weedy shallows, teasing and tricking the spawning carp. She had swum as blithely into his trap as the mirror had swum into the scarlet bodice.

Betrothed to Rachel Floud and still adoring Con. Pegge hoped he smelt of fish when he climbed into his wedding-bed. He was as oafish as Con thought him. And worse—a coward, not daring to risk contagion to tell Pegge to her ravaged face how cruelly he had deceived her.

The scabs fell off gradually, leaving deep scores in Pegge’s cheeks, but she no longer cared. What matter that the disease had plundered her long swing of hair? No man would finger it now, and what man would she want, Izaak Walton being taken. Each night, she scrutinized the new growth angrily and trimmed the tufts close to her scalp with scissors.

Soon she heard Walton debating the text of a sermon with her father, for Walton had no better occupation now. Before long, he made some pious connection between fishing along the Itchen and casting a net in the sea of Galilee that won her father over. Finding Walton underfoot, her father discovered uses for him, small literary chores that he would no longer entrust to Pegge. One day Pegge saw Walton in the library, admiring the latest design for her father’s effigy. She was about to confront him when he took out the sextodecimo with the pike drawn on the cover. As he jotted down a scrap of information, she passed by without a sound.

For what could she have said? Told him that other fishermen called him
that crazy ankler
for walking into rivers with his shoes on, and for preferring live bait to artificial lures? Accused him of marrying Rachel Floud to get her father’s shop in Fleet street? Perhaps Pegge could have listed off his wife’s lumpish features, her quivering goose-flesh and hairy forearms, for Pegge had been inspecting Mrs Walton from close and far.

Still Pegge followed him, the slope of his back, the sweet curls of hair over his new starched collar, though he went
nowhere near a river now. Perhaps, she told herself, that was punishment itself.

On St Clement’s day, Pegge was copying out her father’s sermon from the notes she had taken down in Paul’s. He was supposed to be resting in his chair because he had an ulcerous sore throat from too much preaching, but he was pacing restlessly behind her.

He reached out to rub her hair against the grain. “As short as a caterpillar’s fur,” he said, “and the colour of lapis lazuli.” His eyes lifted to the Virgin’s robe in the painting on the library wall.

Pegge did not need a mirror to tell her that he saw blue hairs sticking up in tufts like mould on cheese. Bess’s attempt to lighten the gentian stains by rubbing them with chicken fat had only made Pegge’s head so greasy that her hood had taken an embarrassing tumble in the cathedral that morning.

Now her father pulled at a tuft to see whether it was securely rooted. “It does not seem to be growing, yet even a dead man’s hair gets longer in the grave.”

She wished he would sit down. His beard was so close that she could see the little comb-marks in it. Con had shaved him cleanly around the edges, and raked his moustache with a miniature rake.

He turned the paper sideways to see what she had written. “I do not recall using that turn of phrase. Look up the text if you do not know it, Pegge.” The bible thudded near her elbow. “Someone with less gift for writing would do a better job. It is time to put you to other work. While Con is with us, she will teach you household skills.”

She jerked the paper back. “I do not need to learn husbandry, for I mean to be your Margaret More.” Dipping her quill, she tapped off the excess ink and stroked out the offending phrase.

“A man is King and men must be the scholars. I cannot change the world to suit my children. Even the daughter of Sir Thomas More did needlework.”

He had often been of two minds about her, but since the pox he seemed to have settled upon one. “Bess will teach me what I need to know.”

“You must spend less time with the servants and more with Con.”

“It will do me no good until I have Con’s looks.”

He studied her face for a moment. “I shall offer as big a dowry as is needful, but you shall be married.” He ran his finger along her scarred cheek, then plucked the paper out of her hands. “Is this your old argument that dogs have souls? You are like an elephant with your opinions.”

“You once wrote that
women
did not have souls.”

“Long before I met your mother.” This brought its own hush with it, for he seldom spoke of Ann.

“How did my mother—”

“How
and
why
are dangerous and infectious monosyllables!” Then his face softened. “I will grant,” he conceded, “that I was as opinionated in my juvenilia as you are in yours. But it is more becoming in a man.”

Dogmatic
, she thought, but did not risk the pun. Aloud she said, “You could be equally wrong about dogs. It is not fair that Sadie is put out in the cold in winter.”

“Enough quibbling. My text was Revelations 22, they
are dogs that are without. That does not mean outside the kitchen door, but
outside the Church
, meaning we should not give alms to drunkards or unchristian beggars.” His voice was reaching pulpit volume. “They are dogs that are without, and the children’s bread must not be given to dogs. Matthew 15. This is not about dogs, Pegge, this is about men.”

She wondered whether he had seen her feeding Sadie from her plate, against his orders. “Then let us talk of men, Father. Izaak Walton is idle, but you do not mind his idleness. He licks your heels like Sadie, but you do not begrudge him crumbs from your table.”

Walton’s idleness had got up her nose, down her arm, and out onto the paper, but her father’s wrath was closer and more dangerous. His knuckles were drumming out a dreadful rhythm. Although he had never struck her, she shifted the ink-pot between them just in case. She knew that he had a fear of spilling ink, having been punished by his tutor for staining a white shirt when he was a boy.

“Mr Walton is a cautious, careful man,” he said.

“His fingers are so thick they can scarcely hold a pen.”

The ink-pot was vibrating. “He had Greek and Latin at grammar school.”

“So did my brothers and little good it did them.” Then, more obediently, “I admit I have no Greek, but I will gladly learn it, Father.”

“So you can translate my Greek as poorly as you do my Latin? And what of my English? Mr Walton writes what he is told to. This”—he was waving the paper, though it hardly seemed to cool him—“bears little resemblance to what I preached.”

She moved a safe distance away to inspect the Blessed Virgin hanging from a nail. “Perhaps I will be a virgin. And a martyr. For am I not descended from the Catholic Mores, and named after Margaret More herself? Chastity will suit me admirably.”