Conceit by Mary Novik Page B

to comment. “A husband,” he ventured hesitantly, “will be glad to be rid of his wife when he enters the gates of paradise.”
    It was an odd sentiment, Pegge thought, for a man so recently married. Her father seemed to think so also, for the idea that there would be no marriages in heaven struck a sour note. The Dean snapped open his eyes and stepped off his funeral urn more nimbly than a dying man had any right to. He hobbled in his shroud towards Walton, declaring that Christ had only meant that there would be no new marriages in heaven, and that the old ones would go on exactly as before.
    But Walton was determined to rid himself of his spouse at the resurrection. He rose from his stool too abruptly, knocking the bible to the floor. Pegge had never seen him so impassioned. Even as her father neared, Walton stood his ground.
    “I have never heard the verse interpreted in such a light, even in one of your own sermons,” Walton protested. “What of your daughter Constance, who has already had two husbands and is young enough to have a third?”
    At this, her father’s arm burst out of the shroud and beat the air, causing the fabric to gape immodestly. Released from his grip, the drapery now tumbled in a heap about his ankles, exposing the full mortality of his white, cadaverous frame.
    Pegge stared at her father, his wondrous dangling folds, his drapery of skin. Two arms, two legs, and all the matter of a man between. He had once been a shapely fleshed-out man, but now was sadly wasted. The artist tacked up another sheet of paper, making quick studies of his model’s torso. Walton tried to gather up the shroud and fasten it around the Dean, but was waved back to his infant-stool.
    “Do not look to death to break your marriage bond,” her father shouted. “I shall rejoin my wife in the resurrection as surely as I stand here in this mortified flesh. And so shall you. Resurrected love is not fornication. The only fornicator is the soul that turns its back on God!”
    Bess was resurrecting the fires with her poker, trying to wake Pegge’s father to his senses. Even over the rattling coals, the Dean’s voice was loud enough to outshout all the church fathers down the bleak expanse of Christian time. He was still sputtering out his wrath when the nauseating thought hit Pegge that her father must have been the priest who had married Rachel Floud and Izaak Walton.
    Bess signalled with the poker to hurry Pegge from the room, but Pegge had a word or two to say to Walton before she left. He was tilting his little stool, trying to reach the bible on the floor without drawing the Dean’s eye again. Walton did not seem to know what he had done to provoke the outburst. But then, he still did not understand that he had teased and tricked Pegge into giving him her love, then run off with a woman twice her age and size to get her thriving draper’s shop. And Walton had not yet weaned himself of Constance, for it was clear that he now hoped to have her in the resurrection.
    Pegge’s father was trying to free his ankles and pull the winding-sheet back up. No doubt he had forgotten that she was in the library. She often came in while he was at work, gliding silently about on errands of her own, though she had long outgrown the silly infant-stool. Pegge trailed her hand over the haphazard shelves of books, grazed Sir Thomas Mores yellowed skull, straightened her father’s portrait on the wall and sounded out its Latin inscription. Illumina teneb. nostras Domina. Lighten our darkness, mistress. Who was this Domina? Was it her mother, or one of the women in his erotica, the poems he kept locked inside his cabinet? Only a youth at the time, he had posed in the style of a brooding lover, with pale, delicate fingers, black hat, and a soft dark eye.
    Even the blazing sea-coal could not heat her father, who was shuddering from an inner coldness, his teeth chattering in his slack old jaw. The artist was now helping him to pull up the