Conceit by Mary Novik Page A

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’sparish 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