Conceit by Mary Novik

sickened as Lent approached, and starved himself for days before his sermon. He was carried to Whitehall stretched out in a coach, and carried home six hours later in the same position. If his face showed some relief, it was because he had rid himself of the tormenting anxiety of preaching before King Charles. From the notes he was clutching as she helped him down from the coach, Pegge surmised that he had also rid himself of his bloated, over-ripe harangue.

7. THE EFFIGY
    On the day after the sermon at court, Pegge was creeping back into the Deanery at dawn when Bess caught her. Pegge made things worse by standing up for herself Talking back , Bess called it. She had some notion that Pegge had stayed out all night with a man. What man? Pegge asked herself refusing to admit to Bess that she had only climbed Paul’s tower to gaze out over the City because she could not sleep.
    Bess had finally worked herself up to telling the Dean and was digging her callused fingers into Pegge’s ear, yanking her forward into the library. Pegge knew her father would be in no state to listen, for his shroud had arrived that morning in the arms of Rachel Walton. Then Walton himself appeared with a train of bearers behind him—a man with an urn under his arm, another two struggling with coal-braziers, and an artist with a coffin-lid and a box of drawing instruments.
    Pegge felt Bess’s grip on her ear slacken as they entered the library, for directly ahead of them was the Dean, standing on top of the funeral urn with his eyes closed. Dressedin the new shroud and facing smugly towards the east, he was swaying back and forth while the artist sketched him on the coffin-lid. The air was thick with coal-smoke from the rented braziers, which flamed up mightily on either side in a scene worthy of the Blackfriars theatre.
    Walton was perched awkwardly on the stool that Pegge had used as a child. As the artist’s eyes flicked between his drawing and the Dean, Walton was reading the tale of the seven brothers from the gospels. When the eldest brother died, he left his wife to the next brother, who also died, and so on, until she became the wife of the seventh brother. Pegge knew this was a trick the Sadducees were playing on Jesus, but Bess was not interested in hearing the conclusion. She tugged Pegge closer and got a footing on the Turkey carpet in front of the swaying Dean.
    “Never mind those dead brothers. What’s to be done with this daughter of yours? She’s seventeen and still going about the City like a boy. Those are breasts she’s getting under there.”
    Walton planted a finger on the verse to hold his place and looked directly at Pegge’s bodice. Pegge crossed her arms and stared right past him at the artist, who lifted his eyes from his work in amusement.
    “In the end she’ll make her peace with God like the rest of us,” her father said. “The body is but a handful of sand, so much dust, and but a peck of rubbish, so much bone.”
    “Dust and rubbish,” Bess agreed. “And what’s to be done with Bridget and Betty? They can’t all three of them go to Constance.” Her voice rose a notch. “We’ll be put out of the Deanery when you’re gone.”
    Pegge thought she saw his eyelids throb. The artist’s nib made a scritch-scritch on the wooden plank and Walton pretended to be making out a difficult word, his thick finger almost obliterating the line.
    “Speak to my executors.”
    “You can’t give your children away in your Will.”
    “They will go to Constance and to their Uncle Grymes at Peckham.”
    Bess sniffed. “A drunkard if ever I saw one.”
    “A gentleman.”
    Another sniff. “The worst kind, because they never run short of drink.”
    “He will marry them off as quick as he can, so as to have as little expense as possible,” said the Dean. “The very thing you have been urging me to do yourself.” There was a momentary tremor as he veered too far to one side and righted himself. “I have a mind to