Conceit by Mary Novik Page A

Thomas Gardiner for Bridget. He is pompous enough to suit her. Betty will be easy to please when she is older.”
    “And this one? Tell your father where I caught you.” Pegge was pushed closer, but her father’s eyelids stayed gummed together. “Sneaking back into the kitchen at daybreak, it was.” A loud snort this time. “Who knows where she’s been.”
    Her father went as still as a plumb-bob, then began to undulate once more. “What do you say to one of the Bowles twins, Pegge?”
    A man she barely knew, when her father had married for love? Pegge kept her arms crossed over her chest, though it was the artist’s eyes that were straying now, not Walton’s.
    “They say that one of them will make a man of science,” her father said. “He is reckoned quite clever. You might prove useful to him.” One eye opened to gauge her reaction.
    Surely he did not expect her to believe this? He had told her that no woman was wanted for her learning, except perhaps to teach her sons.
    “As my mother proved useful to you—by dying in childbirth?” Pegge’s legs were trembling. “I shall stay as I am.”
    Now both his eyes were open. “You will go to Constance, who will see that you are married,” he ordered.
    To put Con in charge of Pegge’s fate was unthinkable, cause for the worst sort of sisterly mutiny. They both knew that.
    He turned to Bess, who had gone rather pale. “And you will go to Peckham with Bridget and Betty. After they are wed, Sir Thomas Grymes will see that you are taken care of.”
    “I have always tried, sir,” Bess said, mollified. “I’m sure that even Pegge-” She was about to blurt out something else, but the hands gestured dismissively inside the shroud.
    “See that you do something about those pock-marks on her face.”
    Pegge tested the sharpness of her baby tooth against her tongue.
    “I will use ceruse, sir. It will make her look more of a gentlewoman.”
    “That will be well.” There was an agonizing pause. “And the nose?”
    “She will grow into it.”
    Pegge bit down and tasted a spurt of blood.
    “Thank God for that,” her father said, closing his eyes. “Now, let me get on with this last work of mine.”
    Bess grasped the bellows and pumped furiously at the coals. Pegge doubted that her father would die any time soon, even if he had drawn up his Will and preached his own funeral sermon, even if the flesh was falling off his bones, not while he had a single breath left in him. After all, he had survived the French pox and the spotted fever. Even a violent falling of the uvula.
    The artist’s eyes were now flicking between Pegge and his drawing, and she went swiftly behind him to see what he was doing. On a page tacked to the coffin-lid, she saw a girl wearing little but a solid, dependable nose. Her hands were crossed over plump young breasts and her nipples protruded shamelessly between her fingers.
    Pegge pressed her boot down on his heel, and he reap-plied his nib to the Dean, sharpening the point on the beard and twirling up the sanctimonious moustache. The man had stripped the piety from her father’s face as cleverly as he had stripped and embellished Pegge’s figure. When her father died, this folly would be carved in stone and enshrined in its niche in Paul’s for a parade of Londoners to ogle.
    Walton was watching the Dean sway back and forth, swaying a little himself as he waited for direction.
    “Read,” Pegge whispered fiercely.
    Walton resumed the tale of the seven brothers. “And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? For they had all had her.” As Walton paused to let this remarkable fact sink in, theartist caught Pegge’s eye and smirked. “Jesus answered and said unto them, ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”
    Walton stopped, feeling some need