Read Online Conceit by Mary Novik - Free Book Online Page A

water-fox, for her cunning. I once tried for a week to catch one using cherries. She also comes for a sweet bread paste, or for a ringing bell. Oh, say you have brought a bell, Pegge Donne, and I will love you better than your sister Con, for I have no white bread and honey!”
    “If you help me, I’ll get you something better.” She slid towards him, her petticoat riding up above her knees, then sat on her heels, shifting her heavy rope of hair out of his way. “Loosen the ties that fasten my bodice up the back.” His fingers fumbled—the same large fingers that were quick and deft when working tackle. “Lower, there is a loop at the bottom.”
    Taking his hands, she placed them on her waist. His knees straddled her hips as he tugged and eased the bodice up and over her head. Now only a lawn chemise clung damply to her skin. She let him feed his eyes, to see how the sun had kissed and swollen her young nipples.
    He was holding up the bright cloth like soiled laundry. “But how are we to catch them?”
    She pulled the drawstrings tight around the neck and arms. “Do you see?” she said. “It is a bag. And scarlet—for look how they come to mulberries! It will be as easy as snigling for eels.”
    She rolled onto her stomach and slid back along the narrow overhang, then tipped on her side to make room for him. As he inched forward, first her leg, then her arm, crossed over him to hold him steady. His hair brushed her face, and his lips curved an inch away from hers, as if to ask what next? Then he turned away, dropping his beautiful white arm over the edge towards the moving shapes beneath.
    “The fish are throbbing! Do you feel that, Pegge?”
    The raw heat of the sun and rock, the blows of her heart, the prickling of her skin, which did he mean? She could feel everything, and nothing would ever be the same. Her belly was trembling, as it had done when she was little and her father blew on it to tease her. She wondered whether a brace of carp would buy a night’s lodging at the Frog & Pike. While she was waiting outside the inn, a young couple had passed by boldly. Calling for the landlord, they took a room for the night. They would not wait for nightfall to taste their first embraces. Even now, at the noon of day—with the warblers carolling, with the mulberries raining from above, with Izaak Walton’s buckle pressing hard against Pegge’s belly—the young couple would be consummating their love in the Frog & Pike.
    “Are you ready, Pegge?”
    Several carp were splashing on the surface, mirroring the sun so brightly that it blinded her. It was clear now what was happening. There was only one female, and she had attracted six or seven large mirrors to her spawn. They were in the very act of spawning, the melters bearing up the spawner who was rubbing herself against Pegge’s hand.
    It seemed a shame to take her, but Walton had never balked at catching spawning fish. It was too late to dull his appetite. If she argued for the mirrors’ progeny, he was likely to contend that the sun and fertile weeds had generated them and treat her like an ignorant child again.
    Walton lowered the scarlet trap downstream, careful not to splash or cast a shadow. “I must lean out as far as I can. Hold me fast so I do not fall in.” His head swivelled around towards her. “You have the look of a trout fresh from the river. Are you ill, or sickening for something? Open your eyes. This is no time to fail me, Pegge.”
    “It is just the mulberries staining my face.” She gripped his breeches with her free hand. With the blood pooling in her head from hanging over the edge, the last thing she was thinking about was sliding the fat-bellied carp into a hot pan with oysters.
    Now Walton was urgent, and in command. “Just tease them into the bag,” he ordered. “Do not squeeze or push, just tickle them towards it—tickle them sweetly, and let them go.”

5. MIRRORS
    Pegge was in the Deanery frying bread in dripping when