Conceit by Mary Novik

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 enoughto 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