Conceit

PRAISE FOR
Conceit

“Buy the book Find a free weekend and a quiet place…. Recall what it means to know a world through the surface of a page, created in the words of a gifted stranger, made uniquely yours by your own storehouse of experience and the mystery of your subconscious.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“How to write a review in 350 words that does justice to Mary Novik’s extraordinary debut novel
Conceit?
… As delightful as Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando
and as erudite and readable as A.S. Byatt’s
Possession”

—
Quill & Quire
(starred review)

“Few novels truly deserve the description rollicking in the way Mary Novik’s
Conceit
does. A hearty, boiling stew of a novel, served up in rich old-fashioned story-telling. Novik lures her readers into the streets of a bawdy seventeenth-century London with a nudge and a wink and keeps them there with her infectious love of detail and character. A raunchy, hugely entertaining read that will leave you at once satiated and hungry for more.”

—Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of
The Cure for Death by Lightning

“In this gorgeous, startling, deeply moving novel about the family of the poet John Donne, the mind is shown to be one of the body’s most erogenous zones. A feast, a pageant, a seduction of words.”

—Thomas Wharton, author of
Icefields

“A
vivid and sensuous tale set in the world where passion and death are never far apart.”

—Eva Stachniak, author
of Garden of Venus

“Read
Conceit
not for its foods and flowers and silks and seductions-though these are here in all their lusty Elizabethan richness-but for its prose…. Novik’s writing couples the sacred and the sexy as neatly as Donne’s own.”

—Annabel Lyon, author
of Oxygen

“I
loved
Conceit
, the fully formed characters, the wonderfully evoked historical setting, but above all the passion that informs the narrative throughout. The writing is graceful and fluid and the rhythms remain with you long after you have put the book down. It would do the novel little justice to speak of it as merely a work of historical fiction. It is better described as a glorious exploration of the human heart.”

—Béa Gonzalez, author of
The Mapmaker’s Opera

FOR OREST

The City 1666

Yearnings 1622-1631

Death’s Duel 1631

Tongues 1631-1667

T
HE
C
ITY

1666

It is the second of September, a Sunday, at one o’clock in the morning.

Samuel Pepys is making his way home from the Three Cranes, where he drank too much mulled sack and sang himself hoarse. He feels an odd sensation and pushes away a mongrel sniffing at his breeches. To walk well with a sword requires a certain amount of swagger and forward thrust, but he is weaving back and forth, focusing only two steps ahead. As he passes through Pudding lane, he takes little notice of the unusual glow inside the bakery. He is concentrating on sobering up so he can go straight in to his wife if she calls out. When she cannot sleep, Elizabeth likes to read to him or play at cards, and he counts it the most pleasant hour of his day. In his pocket is a new comedy that has been banging against his thigh all night. He will produce the book to divert her, if she is willing.

The baker, Thomas Farrinor, set out his dough to rise and dampened the coals in his oven before going to bed, but forgot to latch the window. When the wind came up early from the northeast, it stirred the embers and carried a spark into the Star Inn in Fishstreete. Fuelled by the straw in the stable-yard, the fire has now doubled back and is menacing Farrinor’s own bedchamber. At two o’clock, he is awakened by the smell of baking dough and is greeted by an unusually red dawn and an unseasonable heat. Farrinor scrambles out onto the rooftop for safety. The houses are pitched so close together at the top that he can leap over the narrow street onto his neighbour’s roof.

And so he does, for the fire is right behind him.

Told that his wife is unwell, Pepys is sleeping in his great chamber below-stairs. At three o’clock, his maid shakes him, urging him to come to her bedchamber. She leads him up the narrow staircase to her window to point out a fire burning to the west, not far from London bridge.

In the amber light, his maid’s breasts appear to beckon, and he codes his thoughts in the lingua franca he has picked up from sailors. Her candle tilts towards his nightshirt, more of a threat than the fire, which the wind is driving towards the river. Musing over how pleasant it would be to tocar her mamelles so as to make himself espender, he crawls back into his solitary bed. He snuffs out his candle, lies down, sits up to check that the wick is truly out, and falls, by an erotic meandering or two, into a deep and satisfying sleep.

At seven, his maid wakes him again, telling him that three hundred houses have been destroyed in the night. He walks to the Tower and climbs up for a better look. From there Pepys sees that the fire has burnt all down Fishstreete to the bridge, and as far as the Steelyard to the west. However, the wind has now turned and is driving the blaze straight into the City. Even the stones of St Magnus’s church-or so it seems in this red light-are burning after the long summer drought.

Pepys takes a boat along the river to view the extent of the fire, getting out at Whitehall and up into the King’s closet as quickly as he can. Attracting a crowd, he is called to the King to give his account first hand. He warns the King and the Duke of York that unless houses are pulled down in its path, the fire will stop at nothing. Asked by the King to find the mayor and give him this advice, Pepys takes a coach as far as Ludgate, then is forced to get out and continue on foot.

On Ludgate hill, he finds St Paul’s cathedral being turned into a storehouse. The mercers are piling up their yard-goods in the nave, and the booksellers are carting their books down the twenty-six steps into their parish church in St Paul’s crypt, where they will be doubly safe beneath the marble flagstones. Whole bookstores are being stacked in St-Faith’s-under-Paul’s and small boys have been put to work stopping up the crevices in the walls with rags. A bookseller bumps his cart through the churchyard past Pepys, who picks up an octavo that has landed face-down in the grime. In this turmoil, no one cares about a single book, so he pockets it and walks east along Watling street.

Overtaking Mayor Bludworth in Canning street at noon, Pepys advises him to knock down the buildings ahead of the fire. If this is done, Pepys says, there is still hope of stopping the destruction at the Three Cranes above and at Botolph’s below the bridge. However, Bludworth has been up all night and is now spent. He rejects the Duke of York’s offer of soldiers to pull down houses, for the owners are militantly against it.