Conceit by Mary Novik Page B

pocket, enjoying the coolness in their mouths. Pegge left the biggest one to last. Taking a bite, she gave the other half to Walton. A fine, philosophical look came over his face as he contemplated the half-eaten radish.
    “What do you most wish for, Izzy?”
    “Herbs and salads, and fish straight from the river. A man needs no more than such pleasures.”
    Nothing else? Not love? she wanted to ask.
    “Did you know that whales once swam up the Thames as far as Richmond?”
    This was a story she had not heard. “Have you seen one?”
    His head shook slowly. “The great river is now so troubled with silt and weirs that a haddock can barely squeeze through.” He quickened his steps towards the row of trees ahead. “This new stretch of river, you say that it is warm?”
    “Reedy and turbid, and even more sluggish through the grassy shallows.”
    His sigh was appreciative. “You did not say which bait to bring. What are our chances of a bream?”
    “A fearsome pike patrolled the shallows when I was last here.”
    “You say there are weeds? Pikes are bred by pickerel weeds. The pike is a gentleman, continent and chaste, that breeds but once a year, and always with his mate.”
    “Izzy, if he has a mate what need has he of weeds? You forget how you used to show me the males beating upstream with their hooked jaws and gaudy jackets. Ifgeneration required melt and spawn when I was ten, how can it now require only weeds? I hope you do not think me simple-minded at fifteen. And as for fish being continent, why every she-loach and minnow we have ever caught has been big-bellied with roe.”
    He seemed confused. “Why I do not know, for it must be when the pickerel-weed is ripe. And some eels are bred this way as well,” he added, his neck colouring.
    Why this new delicacy towards her? The rivers had not changed, nor had the fish. She fell a little behind, playing with the drawstring on her scarlet bodice and feeling her nipples rubbing underneath. That must be the reason. It was she who had changed, and Walton who had noticed. He now considered the spawning of fish unsuited to her ears. At this new thought, she hummed a tuneless song.
    “Now Pegge, do not argue,” he said, misunderstanding her cheerfulness, “for here is the river before us, with the shallows as slow-moving and grassy as promised in your letter.”
    Walton laid his pouch on the bank and walked into the river with his shoes on. Before Pegge had draped her skirt over a mulberry branch and pulled off her boots and stockings, he was up to his hips in the reeds. He was crossing well downstream, heading towards the still water past the swift on the far side.
    An eel shot out of the riverbank as she waded in. Although her father was fond of eels, she could not take him one, for he would guess at once where she had got it.She was still in the shallows when she saw Walton climbing the other bank with his rod on his shoulder.
    The swirling current was twisting her under-skirt, pulling her off balance. She dug in her feet, determined to spot the marauding pike before he did. Tipping her head, Pegge listened for the fish as he had taught her. A clump of green-life floated past with a damselfly laying her eggs in the glinting sun, and something was stirring up the mud on the bottom, sucking in the ooze and spitting it back out.
    Then a scatter of maple leaves fell on the water. Looking up, she saw Walton bending a sapling and letting it fly to get her attention. Behind her, under an overhanging rock, there was a great splashing and roiling as if several eels were fighting to get into the same hole. Walton waved her back and was soon lurching up the bank beside her with water surging out of his breeches. Unbuttoning his new doublet, he dropped it, then thought better and folded it neatly on top of a rock. Now even his shoes and hose came off, something she had never seen him do. He was rolling his sleeves up above the elbow. Above his walnut-brown hands, his arms were