Restoration

Chapter One. The Five Beginnings

I am, I discover, a very untidy man.

Look at me. Without my periwig, I am an affront to neatness. My hair (what is left of it) is the colour of sand and wiry as hogs' bristles; my ears are of uneven size; my forehead is splattered with freckles; my nose, which of course my wig can't conceal, however low I wear it, is unceremoniously flat, as if I had been hit at birth.

Was I hit at birth? I do not believe so, as my parents were gentle and kindly people, but I will never know now. They died in a fire in 1662. My father had a nose like a Roman emperor. This straight, fierce nose would neaten up my face, but alas, I don't possess it. Perhaps I am not my father's child? I am erratic, immoderate, greedy, boastful and sad. Perhaps I am the son of Amos Treefeller, the old man who made head-moulds for my father's millinery work? Like him, I am fond of the feel of objects made of polished wood. My telescope, for instance. For I admit, I find greater order restored to my brain from the placing of my hands round this instrument of science than from what its lenses reveal to my eye. The stars are too numerous and too distant to restore to me anything but a terror at my own insignificance.

I don't know whether you can imagine me yet. I am thirty-seven years old as this year, 1664, moves towards its end. My stomach is large and also freckled, although it has seldom been exposed to the sun. It looks as if a flight of minute moths had landed on it in the night. I am not tall, but this is the age of the high heel. I strive to be particular about my clothes, but am terribly in the habit of dropping morsels of dinner on them. My eyes are blue and limpid. In childhood, I was considered angelic and was frequently buttoned inside a suit of blue moire, thus seeming to my mother a little world entire: sea and sand in my colours, and the lightness of air in my baby voice. She went to her fiery death still believing that I was a person of honour. In the scented gloom of Amos Treefeller's back room (the place of all our private conversations), she would take my hand and whisper her hopes for my splendid future. What she couldn't see, and what I had not the heart to point out, was that we no longer live in an honourable age. What has dawned instead is the Age of Possibility. And it is only the elderly (as my mother was) and the truculently myopic (as my friend, Pearce, is) who haven't noticed this and are not preparing to take full advantage of it. Pearce, I am ashamed to admit, fails to understand, let alone laugh at, the jokes from Court I feel obliged to relay to him on his occasional visits to me from his damp Fenland house. The excuse he makes is that he's a Quaker. This, in turn, makes me laugh.

So, to me again – whither my thoughts are extremely fond of returning.

My name is Robert Merivel, and, although I'm dissatisfied with other of my appendages (viz. my flat nose), I am exceedingly happy with my name, because to its Frenchness I owe a great deal of my fortune. Since the return of the King, French things are in fashion: heels, mirrors, sedan-chairs, silver toothbrushes, fans and fricassees. And names. In the hope of some preferment, a near neighbour of mine in Norfolk, James Gourlay (an ugly, rather disgusting person, as it happens), has inserted a "de" into his otherwise Scottish-sounding name. So far, the only reward to come to the pompous de Gourlay is that a French wit at my dinner table dubbed him "Monsieur Dégeulasse". We giggled a great deal at this and some new scarlet breeches of mine were stained with the mouthful of raisin pudding I was forced to spit out in my attack of mirth.

So this is how you might imagine me: at table, rustling with laughter in a gaudy suit, my migrant hair flattened by a luxuriant wig, my freckles powdered, my eyes twinkling in the candlelight, my pudding being ejected from my mouth by that force within me which snorts at sobriety and is so greedy for foolishness. Do not flatter yourself that I am elegant or worthy in any way, but yet I am, at this moment that you glimpse me, a rather popular man. I am also in the middle of a story which might have a variety of endings, some of them not entirely to my liking. The messy constellations I see through my telescope give me no clue to my destiny. There is, in other words, a great deal about the world and my role in it which, despite all my early learning, I utterly fail to understand.

There was a beginning to the story, or possibly a variety of beginnings. These are they:

1. In 1636, when I was nine years old, I carried out my first anatomical dissection. My instruments were: a kitchen knife, two mustard spoons made of bone, four millinery pins and a measuring rod. The cadaver was a starling.

I performed this feat of exploration in our coal cellar, into which, through the coal hole, came a crepuscular light, augmented a little by the two candles I placed on my dissecting tray.

As I cut into the thorax, a well of excitement began to fill and glimmer within me. It rose as I worked until, with the body of the starling opened and displayed before me, I had, I suddenly recognised, caught a glimpse of my own future.

2. At Caius College, Cambridge, in 1647, I met my poor friend, Pearce.

His room was below mine on the cold stairway. We were both by then students of anatomy and, though our natures are so antipathetic, our rejection of Galenic theory, coupled with our desire to discover the precise function of each part of the body in relation to the whole, formed a bond between us.

One evening, Pearce came up to my room in a state of hilarious perturbation. His face, habitually grey-toned and flaky, was rubicund and damp, his stern green eyes suddenly afflicted with a louche brightness. "Merivel, Merivel," he babbled, "come down to my room. A person is standing in it who has a visible heart!"

"Have you been drinking, Pearce?" I asked. "Have you broken your vow of No Sack?"

"No!" exploded Pearce. "Now come down and you will see for yourself this extraordinary phenomenon. And, for a shilling, the person says he will permit us to touch it."

"Touch his heart?"

"Yes."

"It's not a cadaver then, if its mind is on money?"

"Now come, Merivel, before he flees into the night and is lost to our research for all eternity."

(Pearce, I report in parentheses, has this flowery, sometimes melodramatic way of speaking that is interestingly at odds with the clipped, odourless and self-denying man he is. I often feel that no anatomical experiment would be capable of discovering the function of these ornate sentences in relation to the whole, soberly-dressed person, unless it is a universal but contradictory fact about Quakers that, whereas their gait, habit and ritual are monotonous and plain, their heads are secretly filled with a rapturous and fandangling speech.)

We descended to Pearce's room, where a fire was burning in the small grate. In front of the fire stood a man of perhaps forty years. I bade him good evening, but he only nodded at me.

"Shall I unbutton?" he asked Pearce.

"Yes!" said Pearce, his voice choking with anticipation. "Unbutton, Sir!"

I watched as the man took off his coat and lace collar and began loosening his shirt. He let the shirt fall to the floor. Bound to his chest, and covering his heart, was a steel plate. Pearce, at this moment, took a handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his moist brow. The man removed the plate, under which was a wad of linen, a little stained with pus.

Carefully, he unbound the linen and revealed to us a large hole in his breast, about the size of a Pippin apple, in the depths of which, as I leaned forward to look more closely at it, I saw a pink and moist fleshy substance, moving all the time with a regular pulse.

"See?" exclaimed Pearce, the heat of whose excited body seemed to fill the room with a tropical dampness. "See it retract and thrust out again? We are witnessing a living, beating heart!"

The man smiled and nodded. "Yes," he said. "A fracture of my ribs, occasioned by a fall from my horse two years ago, was brought to a terrible suppuration, voiding such a quantity of putrefaction that my doctors feared it would never heal. It did, however. You can see the sconce of the old ulcer at the edge of the hole here. But its ravages were so deep as to expose the organ beneath."

I was dumbfounded. To observe, in a living being, standing nonchalantly by a fire, as if about to welcome friends for a few rounds of Bezique, the systole and diastole of his heart affected me profoundly. I began to understand why Pearce was in such a lather of excitement. But then – and this is why I set down the incident as a possible beginning to the story now unfolding round me – Pearce produced a shilling from the greasy leather purse in which he kept his pitiful worldly income and gave it to the stranger, and the man took it and said: "You may touch it if you wish."

I let Pearce go first. I saw his thin, white hand creep forwards and tremblingly enter the thoracic cavity. The man remained still and smiling. He didn't flinch. "You may," he said to Pearce, "put your hand around the heart and exert gentle pressure."

Pearce's thin mouth dropped open. Then he swallowed and withdrew his hand. "I cannot do that, Sir," he stammered.

"Then perhaps your friend will?" said the man.

I rolled back the lace at my wrist. Now, my own hand was shaking. I remembered that, just prior to Pearce's appearance in my room, I had cast two pieces of coal onto my fire and hadn't washed my hands since, but only wiped them carelessly on the seat of my breeches. I examined my palm for coal dust.

It was faintly smudged with grey. I licked it and rubbed it again on my velvet buttocks. The open-hearted man watched me with an utter lack of concern. At my elbow, Pearce, in his vaporous dampness, was breathing irritatingly through his mouth.

My hand entered the cavity. I opened my fingers and, with the same care I had applied, as a boy, to the stealing of eggs from birds' nests, took hold of the heart. Still, the man showed no sign of pain. Fractionally, I tightened my grip. The beat remained strong and regular. I was about to withdraw my hand when the stranger said: "Are you touching the organ, Sir?"

"Yes," I said, "don't you feel the pressure of my fingers?"

"No. I feel nothing at all."

Pearce's breathing, at my side, was rasping, like that of a hounded rodent. A pearl of sweat teetered on the tip of his pink nose. And my own mind was now forced to contemplate an astounding phenomenon: I am encircling a human heart, a living human heart with my hand. I am now, in fact, squeezing it with controlled but not negligible force. And the man suffers no pain whatsoever.

Ergo, the organ we call the heart and which is defined, in our human consciousness, as the seat – or even deified as the throne – of all powerful emotion, from unbearable sorrow to ecstatic love, is in itself utterly without feeling.

I withdrew my hand. I felt as full of trouble as my poor Quaker friend, to whom I would have turned for a tot of brandy, except that I knew he never had any. So while our visitor calmly strapped on his linen pad and his steel plate and stooped to pick up his shirt, Pearce and I sat down on his extremely hard settle and were, for a good few minutes, devoid of words.

From that day, I was unable to have the same reverence for my own heart as other men have for theirs.

3. My father was appointed glovemaker to the restored King in January 1661.

I was by then at the Royal College of Physicians, after four years at Padua, studying under the great anatomist, Fabricius. I was at work on a paper entitled, "The Footsteps of Disease: a Discussion of the Importance of the Seats of Tumours and Other Malign Diversities in the Recognition and Treatment of Illness." But I was becoming lazy. Several mornings a week, I would sleep late at my lodgings, instead of attending, as I was pledged to do, the Poor Sick of St Thomas's. Several afternoons, I would walk in Hyde Park, with the purpose only of snaffling and leading to what I call the Act of Oblivion with some plump whore – when I should have been at lectures.

The truth is that, when the King returned, it was as if self-discipline and drudgery had exploded in a clap of laughter. I became much too excited by and greedy for life to spend much of it at work. Women were cheaper than claret, so I drank women. My thirst for them was, for a time, unquenchable. I tumbled them riotously. Two at a time, I longed to take them, immodestly, like the wild hogs whose hair my own spare locks resemble. In public places even: in the night alleyways, in a hackney coach, on a river barge, in the Pit of the Duke's Playhouse. I dreamed of them. Until the day I went to Whitehall. And after that day – so extraordinary and unforgettable was the impression it made upon me – I started to dream about the King.

Admiration for craft and skill is, I now understand, at the root of the generous but stubborn nature of King Charles II. He took my father into his service because he recognised in him the dedicated, skilled and single-minded craftsman. Such people delight him because they inhabit an orderly, meticulously defined world and never aspire to cross over into any other. The haberdasher, my father, never considered for one moment becoming, say, a gardener, a gunsmith or a moneylender. He laid out a precise territory with his skill and kept within it. And King Charles, while trying on a pair of my father's exquisitely moulded kid gloves, revealed to him that this was how he hoped the English people would behave during his reign, "each," he said, "in his appointed station, profession, calling or trade. And all contented in them, so there is no jostling and bobbing about and no one getting above himself. In this way, we shall have peace, and I will be able to rule."

I don't know how my father answered him, but I do know that it was on this occasion that the King promised, "at some future time, when you are bringing me gloves", to show my father the collection of clocks and watches he kept in his private Study.

No doubt my father bowed humbly. Very few people ever enter the King's Study. The only key is kept by his personal servant, Chiffinch. And it was at this moment – on his knees, perhaps? – that my father spoke up for me and asked the King whether he could bring his only son, from the Royal College of Physicians, to make his acquaintance, "in case His Majesty should ever have need of an additional physician in his household… a physician for the People of the Bedchamber, perhaps, or even for the scullery boys…"

"By all means," it seems the King replied, "and we will show him the clocks, too. As an anatomist, I expect he will be interested in their mechanical complexity."

So, on a November afternoon, with a chill wind blowing him forward up Ludgate Hill, my father arrived at my lodgings. I was, as had become my habit on a Tuesday, engaged in the Act of Oblivion with the wife of a ferryman called Rosie Pierpoint. Her laugh was as rich and juicy as that part of her anatomy she coyly referred to as her Thing. Encircled both by the Thing and the laughter, I was giggling ecstatically and bumping so energetically towards my brief Paradise, that I didn't see or hear my father as he entered my room. I must have been a risible sight: my breeches and stockings still tangled round my ankles, the sandy hogs' hair that sprouts in the crease of my bottom unflatteringly visible, Mrs Pierpoint's legs flailing either side of my back, like a circus tumbler's. I blush to remember that my own father saw me like this and, when he was consumed by fire a year later, I had, in the midst of great sorrow, the cheering thought that at least this memory burned with his poor brain.

An hour later, my father and I were at Whitehall. I had put on the cleanest coat I could find. I had washed all trace of Rosie Pierpoint's rouge from my face. My hair lay concealed and tamed under my wig. I had polished my shoes with a little furniture oil. I was excited, eager and full of admiration for the attention my father appeared to be getting from the King. But then, as we walked down the Stone Gallery towards the Royal apartments, I felt myself suddenly hesitate, gasping for breath. The public wandered freely here and all the people we passed looked at ease. But, to me, it was as if the presence of the King had altered the air.

"Come on," said my father. "Thanks to your acrobatics, we're already late."

The doors to the Royal apartments were guarded, but were opened to my father's nod. He held, over his arm, a silk pouch containing two pairs of satin gloves. We entered a Drawing Room. A fire was roaring under a vast marble mantel. After the chill of the gallery, I would have moved towards it, except that by now I felt almost too weak to move at all and wondered whether I was going to inconvenience my father (who had had enough embarrassment for one day) by falling down in a faint.

Moments passed, as if in a distorted, dreamlike time. A servant came out of the King's bedchamber and asked us to go in. I felt us glide, like skaters, across thirty feet of Persian carpet, stumble through the great gilded doors and fall flat on our faces at the feet of a pair of the longest, most elegant legs I had ever seen.

I realised, after a moment, that we were not prostrate, but only kneeling. Somehow, we the skaters hadn't fallen. This in itself seemed to be a. miracle, because everything around me – the canopied bed, the candle sconces, even the brocaded walls themselves – appeared to be moving, coming in and out of focus, first clear, then dim.

Then a voice spoke: "Merivel. And who is this?"

These days, enmeshed as I am in the tangle of the story, the voice returns to me frequently: Merivel. And who is this? First my name. Then a denial of all knowledge of me. Merivel. And who is this? And the memory is so fitting. I am not now the Merivel I was that day. On that November afternoon, I was shown a roomful of clocks, chiming and ticking in disunion. I was offered a sweetmeat, but could not swallow it. I was asked questions, but could not answer them. A dog snuffled at my foot and the touch of its nose felt repellent, like the touch of a reptile.

After an interminable time (and I do not know to this day how that time was filled up) I was out in the gallery again with my father, who began to shout at me for being a dumbcluck and a fool.

I walked alone back to Ludgate and climbed wearily to my room. There, in my shabby loft, the enormity of what had happened became suddenly and terrifyingly visible to me, as if a nest of maggots had all at once broken out of the wall. I had been within a glove's length of obtaining power, and I had not taken it. It had been there for me, and now it had gone for ever.

I began, like a pig in pain, to howl.

4. It is not clear what started the fire in my father's workshop in the New Year of 1662. It was of course crammed with wooden boxes and shelves holding the flammable materials of his trade: felt, buckram, goatskin, fur, lace, feathers, ribbons and bales of satin, camlet and silk. A small blaze begun by an upturned oil lamp or candle would have had ample substance on which to feed.

All that is known is that the fire began in the late evening, engulfed the workroom and spread ravenously upwards to my parents' apartments, where, it seems, they were at supper. Their servant, Latimer, managed to open a small skylight onto the roof, to scramble up and endeavour to haul his elderly master and mistress to safety. My mother had a hold of Latimer's hand when she suddenly fell back, retching and choking on the smoke. My father tried to lift her up again towards Latimer, but she was unconscious in his arms.

"Fetch a rope!" my father screamed, perhaps, but his instructions were muffled by the dinner napkin he had tied round his nose and mouth and Latimer could not make out what he was saying. He stared helplessly in, while all the time the smoke became thicker and darker and to belch out in his face while he clung precariously to the leads of the roof. He told me, in the bitter chill of the following morning: "I watched them die, Mr Robert. I would have given all my life's wages to save them, but I could not."

The burial was well attended. Lady Newcastle, for whom my father had made moleskin eye patches, arrived in a black coach with her horses decked with black plumes. The King sent two Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. Amos Treefeller, now in his dotage, hired a sedan-chair to carry him to the graveside, where he began to blub. The January wind carried the prayers up and away into silence.

The following day, I was summoned back to Whitehall.

The death of my kindly parents, as well as slaking for the time being my thirst for women, set moving in my anatomist's brain an acute awareness of the speed at which the body can succumb to death. I am not squeamish. At Padua, short of cadavers in the summer months, Fabricius once conducted an anatomy lesson on the body of a pauper that had been floating in the river for three days. The German students, notorious for their interruptions and disorderly behaviour, now took to vomiting and swearing all round me. I stayed perfectly well and calm and took notes as Fabricius worked. However, after my mother and father perished, I looked at my own body, of which I had never been at all proud, with a new distaste, with a new antipathy and with a new fear. And it was this fear which, in the contradictory workings of the world, brought me to the honour about to be conferred on me. Fear of death, you see, had lessened, if not obliterated, my fear of power. So when summoned to Whitehall, I was no longer overcome by the scent of majesty and thus no longer idiotic and dumb. My poor father would have been very pleased, in fact, by the way in which I was able to conduct myself.

The King received me in his Drawing Room. He talked at length and most flatteringly about my father's skill. He repeated his theory that no man should get above himself, but know his own talents and his own degree. I nodded and bowed. Then he said: "Out of my affection and admiration for your late father I have summoned you, Merivel."

"Yes, Sire," I said. "Thank you."

"But I have a task for you, a task in which you must succeed, because my heart will suffer very much if you fail."

"Did you know, Your Majesty," I ventured, "that the human heart – the organ itself, that is – has no feeling?"

He looked at me with sorrow. "Ah, Merivel," he said, "where have you learned that?"

"I have seen it, Sir."

"Seen it? But what we see is but a fraction of what it is. You, as a physician, must no doubt have understood that. Look at my hand, for instance. Wearing a glove made by your late father. What we see is the excellent glove, a little rucked on my fourth finger by the large sapphire ring I am fond of wearing. Whereas, underneath the glove is the hand itself, capable of a thousand movements, en l'air like a dancer, supplicant like a beggar, fisted like a ruffian, in prayer like a bishop… but then again of what fantastic complexity is the arrangement of bones in the hand…"

He went on to describe, with some degree of accuracy, the skeletal structure of the human hand. By the time he had finished, I thought it prudent not to return to the subject of the heart, but to allow him to come at last to his reasons for calling me to the palace.

"One of my dogs appears to be dying," he said. "The veterinary surgeon has bled him repeatedly, shaved the hair off his back in order to cup him, has tried without success lesions, emetics and purges, but the little creature doesn't rally. If you can cure him, Merivel, I will offer you a place here as a Court Physician."

I knelt. Aghast, I noticed there was a stain of boiled egg on the thigh of my breeches. "Thank you, Sir," I stammered.

"I will have you taken to the dog immediately, Merivel. Food and drink and night linen will be brought to you and any surgical instruments you may need made available to you. You will stay until the dog dies or recovers. Call for any medicines you deem suitable."

"Yes, Sir."

"The dog's name is Bibillou. He also answers to Bibi and Lou-Lou."

"Lou-Lou, Your Majesty?"

"Yes. Your own name, by the way, has a very pleasing cadence."

"Thank you, Sir."

"Merivel. Very pretty, to my ear."

I left the royal presence and followed two servants down acres (or should I say hectares, in that the King appears committed to distributing French names everywhere?) of corridor. I was shown into a pleasant bedroom, with a view of the river and the crowded wharves. A fire had been lit. In front of the fire, in a little basket, a brown and white Spaniel was lying. Its body was pitifully thin and its breath rasping. On a table near the window, a decanter of claret, a goblet and a dish of Portuguese figs had been placed. Laid over the bed was a fine linen nightshirt and a matching nightcap, which, once the servants had left me alone with the dog, I immediately put on, suffering as I was that day from a scabrous itching under my wig. I also removed my shoes and coat and poured myself a glass of claret.

I felt extraordinarily tired. I had slept badly since the fire, but it was more a total exhaustion of the mind, rather than of the body, that I felt. I was glad to be alone. I took the claret over to the bed and half reclined on it, sipping the wine greedily, like a Roman senator. Once or twice, I glanced in the direction of the dog. It twitched and whimpered in its dreams. "Lou-Lou," I called softly, but it didn't stir. Presently, I told myself, I will get up and examine the dog and see what can be done. Meanwhile, I went on drinking the claret, which was some of the finest I'd ever tasted, and soon began to feel a delicious ease, like velvet, caressing my mind. Once, experiencing a sudden hunger, I forced myself to get up and eat a couple of figs, but my body felt as heavy and unsteady as a barrel of eels in a swell, and I stumbled back to the bed, where I passed out in a stupor of claret and delayed grief for my parents' dying.

I slept, it seems, for seven hours. When I awoke, it was dark, but my room had been lit with candles and a supper of roast partridges and boiled salad placed on the claret table. Had the servants tried to wake me? If so, they would have had to report to the King that Physician Merivel lay in a drunken sleep, with his nightcap fallen over his eyes. I groaned. For the second time, I had been near to preferment, and yet again I had let it elude me.

I got up, my legs still unsteady. I knelt down by the fire, which still burned well, with fresh logs laid on it by the invisible servants. I stroked the head of poor Lou-Lou. To my surprise, he opened a watery brown eye and looked at me. I bent and listened to his breathing. The rasp in it had lessened. I looked in his mouth. His tongue was swollen and his muzzle dry. I fetched water from my washstand and spooned a little into his mouth. He lapped it with all the eagerness a sick Spaniel can muster. It is as if, I said to myself, the purging and vomiting he's been forced to endure has drained his body of its vital moisture. And with this realisation, I suddenly saw that my hopes of curing the dog were probably greater now than they had been when I had arrived eight hours before. My own neglect of him could, indeed, be the key to his recovery. For while I'd slept, he'd been left alone, possibly for the first time in several days and nights, and nature had had a chance to work quietly within him.

"Studenti!" Fabricius would thunder, his voice echoing like the word of God round the tiers of his primitive anatomy theatre. "Non dimenticare la natural! Do not forget nature! For nature is a better doctor than any of you – particularly you Germans, who are so noisy – are ever likely to be!"

I watched over Lou-Lou for the next seventeen hours. I sent for alcohol to dress the boils and lesions made by the cuppings, but otherwise I didn't touch him, only gave him water, and when his fever lessened, fed him morsels of partridge mashed in my own mouth. By the following night, when a meal of guinea fowl, cream and radishes was brought to me, I was confident that he wouldn't die. And I was right. Four days later, I carried him to the King's bedchamber and set set him on the Royal lap, where he stood entranced and wagged his tail.

5. The fifth beginning is the strangest, the most unlooked for and the most momentous. Without it, the story in which I find myself would not have happened as it has.

I can tell it with reasonable brevity. (I am, unlike Pearce, usually able to come swiftly to the point of a story, whereas his tales are so larded with lugubrious metaphysical observations that his audience is prone to lose the thread of the thing almost before he's begun.) Here it is then:

I abandoned my studies at the Royal College and my lodgings at Ludgate. I was allotted two pleasant rooms inside the Palace, which lacked only, alas, a view of the river, which was of great fascination to me, in all its hubbub, vagabondage and changing light. My duties were defined as follows: "The daily Care and Comfort of the eighteen Royal Dogs, with, as required, the right to perform operations upon them, prescribe Remedy for Disease and do all in my power to ensure the Continuity of their Life." The stipend paid to me was one hundred livres per annum, and this, added to the two hundred and thirty-seven livres left to me and mercifully found unharmed in my parents' damp cellar, was quite enough to keep me in good claret, high-heeled shoes, silk coats, Brussels lace and well-made wigs for the foreseeable future. Astonishing good fortune had, in short, fallen on me ("All undeserving you are, Merivel," noted Pearce, who was struggling on, trying to cure the paupers of St Barts and – ghastly enterprise – the lunatics of Bedlam).

I celebrated by visiting Mrs Pierpoint, getting drunk with her at the Leg Tavern and tumbling her in a muddy ditch on Hampstead Fields. Afterwards, she had the temerity to ask me whether, now that I was in the King's employ, I could get some position at Court for the uncouth Mr Pierpoint, who is a mere bargeman, and I learned at once a lesson I never let myself forget: that power and success carry in their train a clamouring queue of greasers and supplicants, the noise and sight of which haunt my private pleasures and my dreams, but from whom multifarious and handsome bribes may very often be had.

A year passed most profitably and pleasurably. My nature, I quickly understood, was in every particular well suited to life at Court. My fondness for gossip and laughter, my brimming appetites, my tendency to sartorial chaos and my trick of farting at will made me one of the most popular men at Whitehall. Few games of Cribbage or Rummy were started without me, few musical evenings or soirées dansantes were given to which I was not invited. Women found me hilarious and in magnificent numbers allowed me to tickle not only their humours but their charming and irresistible centres of pleasure, and I seldom slept alone. And – most fortunate of all – the King showed towards me from the start a most flattering affection, stemming, he told me, not only from my curing of Lou-Lou, but from my ability to amuse him. I was, I suppose, his Fool. When I made him hold his sides with laughter, he would beckon me to him, take hold of my squashed nose with his elegant hand and draw me towards him in order to smack an affectionate kiss on my mouth.

After a while, I realised that he actively sought my company and this realisation was to me a most astounding thing. He would show me his gardens and his orchards and his tennis court, and began coaching me at tennis, at which I proved more adept and nimble than I expected. He gave me presents: a handsome French clock from the collection I'd seen that first afflicting day, a set of voluminous striped table napkins, large enough to cover my whole suiting while I ate, lending me the risible appearance of a man in a tent and thus causing mirth at the dinner table, and a dog of my own, a sweet Spaniel bitch he insisted I christen Minette, after his own adored sister.

Impossible to say I wasn't happy. My half-finished knowledge of medicine was adequate to keep the dogs well, particularly dogs fed on milk and beef and bedded in warm rooms. And as to comfort, diversion and women, I had all any man could ask. I was growing fat and a trifle indolent, but then so were many at Court, not possessed of King Charles's great energy and curiosity. When Pearce visited me, he grew white and rigid at the sight of so much profane luxury. "This age suffers from a woeful moral blindness," he said stonily.

And then…

On an April morning, the King sent for me.

"Merivel," he said, "I want you to get married."

"Married, Sir?"

"Yes."

"Marriage, Sire, is not, has never been, on my mind…"

"I know. I'm not asking you to want it. I'm asking you to do it, as a favour to me."

"But-"

"Have I not done very many favours to you, Merivel?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Voilà! You owe me at least this one. And there will be compensations. I propose to give you the Garter, so that your bride will have a title, albeit a modest one. And small but agreeable estates in Norfolk I have confiscated from a recalcitrant Anti-Monarchist. So arise, Sir Robert, and go to your duty without hesitation or barter."

I knelt. We were in the Royal Bedchamber and from the adjoining study came the disunified tick-tocking and pinging of the clocks, which perfectly mirrored, at that moment, my own confused thoughts.

"Well?" said the King.

I looked up. The Royal visage was smiling at me benignly. The Royal fingers caressed the dark brown moustache.

"Who…?" I stammered.

The King leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. "Ah yes. The bride. It is, of course, Celia Clemence."

The knee on which my weight was balanced trembled and then tottered beneath me. I fell sideways into the carpet. I heard the King chuckle.

"It means, of course, that you – and possibly she – will have to spend some time in Norfolk, thus depriving me of your respective companies now and then. But this is a sacrifice I am prepared to make."

I endeavoured to right myself, but my left knee had gone suddenly numb and wouldn't support me, so I had no alternative but to lie in a kind of foetal heap by the Royal footstool.

"I don't," said the King, "need to explain myself further, do I, Merivel?"

"Well, Sir…"

"I do? I'm surprised at you. I thought you were one of the most knowledgeable people at Court."

"No, it is merely that this is… this matter is… somewhat difficult for me to grasp."

"I can't for the life of me see why. It is childishly simple, Merivel. The frequent presence of Celia Clemence in my bed has become a necessity in my life. I am, as everyone knows, utterly beguiled by her. Likewise, my grand amour, Barbara Castlemaine, is absolutely essential to my continuing health and well-being. In short, I love and need both mistresses, but I have no wish to continue to endure Lady Castlemaine's tantrums on the subject of Miss Clemence. They make me edgy and give me indigestion. So she must be married at once – the better that I may come by her again secretly, without Castlemaine's knowledge. But to whom must I marry her? Not, I think, to a powerful aristocrat, who will soon irritate me profoundly by starting to consider his own position and honour. No. What I am looking for in Celia's husband is a man who will enjoy and profit from his estates and title, and who will be kindly and amusing company to his bride on the rare occasions he is with her, but who is far too enamoured of women in general to make the mistake of loving any particular one. And in you, Merivel, I have surely made the perfect choice. Have I not? You also, as I am fond of observing, have a pleasingly fashionable name. To ask Celia to become – in name alone, of course – Lady Merivel, is something I feel I can undertake with equanimity."

So that was it, uttered: the fifth beginning.

The dogs were to be taken from my care and in their place was to be put the youngest of the King's mistresses. The practical matter which most absorbed me, as I left the King's presence, was that I could not remember how far from and in what relation to (viz. north-east or directly north of) London lay the county of Norfolk.

Chapter Two. Wedding Games

On her wedding eve, my future bride was to be locked, as custom dictates, with her bridesmaids inside her father's house. In the morning, I would ride to her door (from the rather lowly inn I would be forced to occupy on the night the sixth of June), with all the village running and shrieking before me, got up in homespun garters, love-knots, ribbons and general fooleries, playing flutes and viols and banging tambourines. I was looking forward to these proceedings. You do not need reminding that I am a glutton for foolishness, and this rowdy pageant was, in prospect, greatly to my taste.

I was also looking forward to putting on my wedding clothes, chosen by the King and made by his personal tailor: an admirable white silk shirt, a sash of purple, breeches striped white and gold, white stockings, purple shoes, gold-buckled, a black brocaded coat and a purple and black hat with white plumes of such magnificence that, from a distance, I appeared to be wearing a three-masted barque upon my head.

I had, of course, invited Pearce to the wedding, but he had declined my invitation, much to my chagrin. I would have liked Pearce to see me in my garb. I can only conclude that he refused, not from envy or mean-mindedness, but that he feared the sight of me might cause his circulation to cease, thus cruelly sundering him from his mentor, the late William Harvey, the first man to understand that blood moved in a circular motion, outwards from the heart and to it again via the pulmonary veins. "Not a day passes," Pearce once said to me, "when I do not feel WH within me." (Pearce is much given to metaphysical utterances of this kind, but my affection for him makes me charitable towards them.)

To my bride's father, Sir Joshua Clemence, I had had to go, in mid-April, to beg his daughter's hand. The King, it seems, went before, to vouch for me as a man of honour, talent and wealth, owner of the country estate of Bidnold in Norfolk and desirous only of making his daughter contented and comfortable in all things, for as long as I should live.

So it was that Sir Joshua Clemence received me with great affability, pouring sack for me, averting his eye only fractionally when I spilt a little of it on the watersilk arm of my chair, and assuring me that the King's word was all he needed to deliver his pretty daughter into my hands. What I do not know is whether, at the time of the wedding, Sir Joshua already knew that Celia was the King's mistress. I suspect that he did and was flattered by the knowledge. For the King moves like God in our world, like Faith itself. He is a fount of beauty and power, of which we all yearn, in our overheated hearts, to feel some cooling touch. Sir Joshua struck me as an intelligent and in all respects noble person, yet even he, when he heard that the King was to be a guest at the wedding, couldn't conceal the hectic spots of joy that broke out on his cheeks. He told me that his greatest love was music, in particular the playing of the viola da gamba. "Now," he said rapturously, "I will play at my daughter's wedding and at the same time achieve my life-long dream, that the King, restored to his throne, would one day listen to my music."

With Celia, I had, prior to the wedding, half a dozen meetings, all presided over by the King, with whom my bride (as was generally gossiped round London) appeared so deeply in love that her hazel eyes hardly ever strayed from his face. I had a sense, at these meetings, of my own superfluity, but was too enthralled by the maps of Norfolk the King produced, on which to show me Bidnold Manor and its lands, to let this feeling discomfort me.

The glimpses I allowed myself of my bride confirmed her to be a pretty, small-featured woman of about twenty. Her skin was pale and absolutely without blemish. Her hands were tiny. Her hair was a weak brown, swept up from her face by ribbons and allowed to tumble to her shoulders in ringlets. Her breasts, I perceived, were meagre and her feet narrow. Her countenance, like her father's, was admirably serene. Though able to confirm that she was a quiet beauty, I was relieved to find that she was a woman not at all to my taste. She was too refined, her back held at too straight an angle, her curves too modest. Compared, say, to Rosie Pierpoint (despite the women available to me at Court, I had found it impossible to break off my riotous relationship with this naughty drab), Celia was as the mouse to the kittyhawk. In my amours, I crave the tearing beak and the cruel claw. I like a fight, a drubbing. The passivity I saw in Celia rendered her, in my darker imagination, useless.

What, then, of my wedding night? Well, I shall tell you in time, for no man in England can have had one so strange. But first, I must relate how I went with the King and Celia to Bidnold.

It was a Jacobean manor, moated and bordered by a substantial park, in which red deer harmoniously browse. Its interior was plain and dingy, reflecting the Puritanical tastes of the unfortunate John Loseley Esquire, its previous incumbent. Though struck by its drabness, I rejoiced in it. For from these plain rooms, I decided at once, I would fashion interiors that reflected, in their crimsons and vermillions, in their ochres and golds, in their abundance of colour and light, my own excessive and uncontainable nature. I would transform the place. I would open it up and let it explode with diversity, in the same way as the glorious complexity of the starling's anatomy had exploded to my eye in the shaft of light from the coal hole.

On my first visit, I bounded from room to room, leaving the King and Celia decorously perched on a Tudor settle, becoming, as my vision of the place began to catch fire, so boiling and flushed that I threw off my coat and unwound my sash and flung them down. My house! I had imagined passing my whole life in cramped apartments. Now, I had thirty rooms in which to spread myself. In one almost circular room in the West Tower, I let out an involuntary yelp of delirium, so perfect did the space seem – for what, I didn't know or care, I merely sensed in prospect the degree of perfection to which, in my mind, this space would one day arrive. It was as if, in the body of Bidnold, I had come at last to what Harvey called, "the divine banquet of the brain." And the banquet was mine! I sat down and took off my wig and scratched my hogshair and wept for joy.

Arrangements for the wedding went ahead, then, with all parties content with the arithmetic. That Celia and I had scarcely said a word to each other, and that she eyed me with some distaste did not appear to matter at all. The lengths to which the King had gone in order to hold onto her, in the face of Lady Castlemaine's jealousy, no doubt convinced her that his love for her was considerable. And he reassured her, as he had me: "There will be no physical union between you. When I am not with Celia, you will give her brotherly companionship and she will order your house."

"I prefer to order my own house, Sir."

"As you will. A hostess can be invaluable, however, if you want to entertain at Bidnold, which I suppose you do?"

"Definitely, Sir. I am already dreaming of entertainments."

"Good. I like you, Merivel. You are utterly of our times." So, in a mood of feverish excitement, occasioned by my constant visits to plasterers, wall painters, upholsterers, silversmiths, tapestry-makers and glass cutters, my wedding day, the seventh of June 1664, approached.

How shall I describe my wedding? It was like a tolerably good play, a play of which, long after the thing is over, certain lines, certain scenes, certain arrangements of people and costume and light return vividly to your mind, while the rest remains dark.

The lowly inn returns to me. I see its sawdusted, spittle-stained floor, as I cross its threshold in my purple, white and gold attire to follow the rag-bag cavalcade to Celia's house.

I am hoisted onto a grey horse with bells on its bridle. I have been deeply affected by the sight of myself in my outrageous clothes and my spirit is shouting: Forward! Onward! Go!

The crowd is drunk already and full of lechery and screeching, gallants and peasants messed together, waving gloves and ribbons. I couldn't ask for more delirious company, and, above it, smiling and nodding on my plumes, is the midsummer sun.

Up the hill we go, children running before, a fiddler skipping at my side, his head and hair like a turnip, his tune like a maypole dance. This is a pageant, a play, I tell myself, as I sit on my festooned horse. I am the Player Groom; Celia a Dumb-Show Bride. And yet I am, as we set out, ecstatically happy. I want to embrace somebody – God? the King? my dead mother? – for the gift of this ornamented morning. So what I do, as the house comes into view, is lean down and gather into my feverish arms a dimpled village girl and kiss her and the men whistle and the women clap their hands and the turnip fiddle player shows the black creases of his smile.

The next thing I vividly remember is Joshua Clemence's music. We have returned from church, man and wife. Celia wears my ring on her little white hand. I have placed, as required, a chaste kiss on her narrow mouth. I have given her my arm to lead her out into the sunlight and up the lane to Sir Joshua's house. The feast set before us surpasses in splendour anything I've seen placed on a table, and I attack the food and wine with my usual relish. The King, seated next to my bride, giggles at me and makes an elaborate show of swaddling me in a table napkin. For the second time that day, I am glad Pearce isn't here after all. His abstemious nature would shudder at the number and diversity of the dishes prepared for us. With a quick sweep of my eye, I see fricassées, steamed bass and poached salmon, roast snipe, peacock, teal, mallard and quail, game pies and carbonados, tarts of marrowbone, neats' tongues, venison pasties, baked guinea fowl, compound salads, dishes of cream, quinces, comfits and marzipans, preserves, cheeses and fruits. There are sparkling French wines and strong Alicantes and of course the Sack Posset which will be consumed before Celia and I are flung, in a rumple of ribbons, to bed.

After an hour or so of gorging and toasting ourselves, and with a not unpleasing feeling of sleepiness beginning to quieten the excitement within me, I see Sir Joshua rise, take up his viola, and stand alone before us in front of a little spindly music stand. The King endeavours to procure quiet in the room, but the gallants at the end of the table haven't noticed Sir Joshua and continue with great rudeness to belch and giggle. One of them, I notice with amusement, is vomiting into his hat. Sir Joshua ignores them. He takes up his instrument and, without speech or introduction, begins to play.

I am expecting some sprightly dance, so that we can, if the mood takes us, remove ourselves from the table and break into a little canter. But it is music of the utmost seriousness and melancholy that Sir Joshua has chosen, Dowland's Lachrimae, if my musical knowledge has not misinformed me, and within a moment or two, I find myself overtaken by an unquenchable urge to weep. I stare at Sir Joshua's face, looking down towards his viola, and, layer by layer, in my anatomist's sadness, I peel back skin and muscle and nerve and tendon, until I can see only the white bone of his skull, the empty sockets of the eyes…

I look away. I bury my face in my table napkin. I don't want my make-believe wife to see me crying. I pretend I am choking. I rise from the table and fumble my way out of the room. Tears are pouring from my eyes and I am sobbing like a sick mule. I blunder into the sunshine and throw myself onto the lawn, where I lie down and weep for a full ten minutes.

When I sit up at last and blow my nose on the sodden napkin, I become aware that a man is sitting silently no more than a few feet from me. I wipe my eyes and look at him. It is Pearce.

"What are you blubbing for, Merivel?" says Pearce.

"I have no idea."

"So," says Pearce, with his habitual gravitas, "you are married."

"Yes. What do you think of my wedding garb?"

Pearce stares at me intently, noting, I presume, the pricelessness of my buckles, the faintly royal air the colour purple lends to the whole ensemble. Luckily, I am no longer wearing the three-masted barque, for I feel suddenly glad that Pearce is there, and wouldn't want, at this moment, to cause any malfunction of his blood vessels.

"It is terrible!" he says after a while. "I expect it is that which has so unmanned you."

I smile and he smiles, and I reach out a hot hand to him, which he takes and encircles with his glacial fingers.

Pearce and I take a turn round the rose garden. Two gardeners observe us with stony faces. "I am the groom," I want to say, "you must rejoice with me," but then I remember the confusions inherent in these words, so I say simply to Pearce: "If they want to be glum, it doesn't matter one whit to me." Almost as soon as we have returned to the feast and I have settled Pearce at the table, persuading him to take a few hesitant nibbles at a duck thigh and a sip of Alicante, the King rises and calls for the Sack Posset. So the moment approaches! I watch my wife look anxiously at her Royal Liege. He smiles at her the dazzling Stuart smile, in which half the men and most of the women of our country claim to spy proof of his divinity. Then we all get to our feet and, even before the toast is ended, I feel myself being surrounded by my Court friends, who have begun braying and whooping and banging the table, setting the remains of the fricassées and pies juddering about and bottles of wine tumbling. Then I am hustled, half pushed, half lifted, out of the room and into a long corridor. I hear Celia and her bridesmaids making a giggling progress behind us. Though I am half enjoying this charade, I look forward to returning to the table and drinking more wine and then losing myself in dancing and debauch. But I go on, herded up two flights of stairs, and into a magnificent bedchamber where, with shrieks of gaiety, my clothes are unceremoniously untied and unbuttoned and torn from me, leaving me naked but for my wig, my stockings and my garters. With-a cackle of ribald laughter, a purple ribbon is tied around my prick. I admit that this amuses me very much. I push my friends away, so that I can walk to a mirror and there I am revealed: the Paper Bridegroom. My eyes are red and puffy from my attack of weeping, my moth-covered stomach distended from the quantity of mallard and carbonado I have packed into it, my wig awry, my stockings sagging and covered in grass stains and dribbles of red wine, and my cock tied with a bow like a jaunty gift.

But I have no time to dwell on this arresting image of myself. A nightshirt is bundled over my head and I am led out along the passage to another bedchamber, at the door of which most of the wedding guests are clamouring. When they see me, a cheer goes up, and then a relentless chant begins, as I am pushed forward into the bedroom:

"Mer-i-vel Bed her well!"

"Bed her well Mer-i-vel!"

I enter the room. Celia is sitting up in the high bed. As I am hurled towards her, she averts her eyes, but the guests press in on us, so that we're forced close together, and I am aware, now, of the need to act my part. I put my arms round Celia and kiss her shoulder. Her body is taut and rigid, but she forces herself to laugh, and the company pounce on us, pulling the ribbons from Celia's hair, the love-knots from her wrists and the stockings and garters from my legs. With a final braying, the bed curtains are drawn around us and, though the chant of, "Mer-i-vel, Bed her well", can still be heard, it begins to grow fainter as the guests move out of the room and make their way back to the feasting tables, where musicians have now begun to play a sprightly polka.

I release Celia from my token embrace and she looks relieved. Absurdly, I find myself wondering whether Pearce has eaten all, or only part, of the duck thigh. I begin to giggle. I know what is going to happen now. The King has planned it with his usual attention to detail, and I find it hilarious. "Well, Lady Merivel," I begin to say to Celia, but she's in no mood for even a short conversation with me. Already, she's out of bed and opening the door of the adjoining closet to let in the King who, like us, is now attired in a nightshirt. He is smiling mischievously as he takes Celia by the arm.

"Well done, Merivel," he says, "good performance."

I get out of the bed and the King and my wife get into it.

I go into the closet where, laid out for me, as arranged, is a clean suit of clothes (scarlet and grey, this time), a white wig, a false moustache and a mask. I close the door on myself and start to take off my nightshirt, when I realise for the first time the one flaw in the plan. In order to return to the party – which of course it is agreed I should do – my only route is back through the bedchamber, in which, by the time I've struggled into the new clothes, the King and Celia will be engaged in some nuptual tumblings. I am not, as I've told you, squeamish, but I really have no desire to bear witness to these, nor to interrupt them. I can only hope that they will remember to draw the bed curtains and that I will be able to creep out of the room without being mistaken for a spy or a voyeur.

I dress as speedily as I can. As a famed lover, the King I imagine will not go to the act in a hasty way, but precede it with well-placed kisses and caresses and teasing words. Thus, I have a little time. I put on the mask. It squashes my flat nose even flatter and the eye-holes are so small that I feel like a horse in blinkers. The thought of keeping this thing on for the remainder of the night is exceedingly irksome but, if I want to go down and enjoy myself without revealing my identity, I have no alternative.

I am ready now. The red and grey suit is very nice, but I think with a moment's regret of the lost gold striped breeches and the outrageous coat. They expressed the essence of Merivel with such perfection and finesse. As a memento of this extraordinary day, I have at least kept the purple ribbon tied round my prick.

I open the door of the closet and this is what I see: the King, completely naked, kneeling by the bed, his arms encircling Celia's spread thighs and his glossy head buried in her little brush. I stand rooted to the expensive carpet. My face, under the mask, becomes boiling red. I close my eyes. I cannot move. I retreat back into the closet and close the door.

Back inside the small room, I feel lonely and suffocated. Surely, the reward for what I've done today cannot be to condemn me to a night on the floor of a closet? I will wait, I decide till the King and Celia have got to the, "divine banque", (pace, Harvey) of the thing and pray that it will be done inside the curtains, or at least that it will be noisy enough to conceal from them my hurrying footsteps.

Meanwhile, what shall I do? I decide to think about my future. I cannot see it at all clearly. I take off the mask. What I believe I can see now is that I'm weary of medicine. All my anatomical studies seem to have brought me to a great sadness. When a man plays a viola da gamba, I want to share in his joy, not see his skull. For where will such visions end? What if, on an August evening, I am on the river with Rosie Pierpoint and I suddenly see, not the red of her lips nor the pink of her thighs, but the white of the maggots in her bones? Such a perpetual and visible awareness of mortality would, I am certain, bring me to despair in a very short time. And what would become of me then? Even my rooms at Bidnold wouldn't be able to comfort me. I'd go mad and be locked up in Bedlam, only to be visited by poor Pearce, who would shake his head and say he could do nothing for me.

I must avoid, then, coming to despair and madness. I must try to forget anatomy. Forget it utterly. I must whisper over it words of oblivion. I must forget the starling. I must forget Fabricius and the drowned pauper. I must forget the interior of the human temple altogether. Instead, I will do decorative things. I will buy more furniture and pictures and drapes. I will paint pictures, even, for like my father, I am a good draughtsman and I am not afraid of trying my hand at oils. So this will be it: forgetfulness of the cavity, the cavern, the cave, the ghastly deep. My life will move in reverse order: I have endured the night; now, with my mind on superficial things, will come the morning. I am, after all, a citizen of a New Age.

Some minutes have passed while I have conversed with myself about my future. I replace the mask over my eyes and nose and listen. I can hear laughter – Celia's and the King's – a hopeful signal that they're rowing noisily together to heaven.

I open the door and find, to my intense relief, that the bed curtains have been drawn. I duck down nevertheless and crawl on my hands and knees to the door, which squeaks loudly when I open it, but then closes on me with hardly a sound.

A while later, I am in the park of Sir Joshua 's house. Some hours have passed, in which I have jigged and polka'd and drunk and flirted and generally flung myself about in such an untrammelled way that I am now exceedingly dizzy. It is cool outside, because the sun has gone down and I am tottering towards a little shadowy copse in which, I have convinced myself, Pearce is hiding.

I stop to piss. I take down my breeches and see the ribbon on my cock. The ribbon slides off and falls to the ground and I moan gently to myself as I piss onto it.

I pull up my breeches. Ahead of me, just at the edge of the wood, someone is moving. It must be Pearce, to whom I will now confess that I am abandoning medicine altogether. "I cannot go on," I will say.

But it isn't Pearce. For now, the person has put on – I would recognise this confection anywhere, even in the coming crepuscule – the three-masted barque! Even to tease me, Pearce would be unable to bring himself to place such a thing on his head.

I hear laughter. It is high and cackling. And there, suddenly, in front of me, laughing up into my face, is the plump village girl I kissed that morning on my way to my wedding.

"Bridegroom," she giggles, "Sir Master Bridegroom!"

I reach up a hand to my face and realise with terror that my mask is no longer there.

"Come inny, Bridegroom!" cackles the girl. "Come to Bridey!"

She is drunker than I am. The hat falls over her eyes and she hiccups. I reach up swiftly under her skirt and cup and squeeze the flesh of her buttocks in my hands and in this way propel her forwards into the woods. As I pitch her down and feel myself stagger and fall onto her, it's as if the night descends on us like an executioner's blade, leaving our severed bodies to wriggle in the darkness.

Chapter Three. My New Vocation

The most beautiful room at Bidnold (aside from the little circular space in the West Turret which, for the time being, I kept empty, my imagination not yet having discovered the most satisfactory way to reveal its perfection) was the Withdrawing Room. As one who had spent the greatest part of his life in meagre apartments, I could not prevent a foolish grin from breaking out over my face every time I remembered that I was now the owner of a room so designated. The title, "Withdrawing Room", entranced me. For it inevitably implies that one is living a busy and pleasurable life on its periphery, from which one occasionally "withdraws" in order to sip a little brandy by its excellent fire, or to indulge in sweet and silly talk with the likes of my handsome neighbour, Lady Bathurst, on its scarlet and gold sofas. Thus, with my usual excess of enthusiasm, I set about making certain that my life at Bidnold was full of diverting activity, from which I could "withdraw" from time to time.

I equipped myself with a Music Room (I had not, at that time, yet learned to play the oboe), a Billiard Room (I had not, then, ever held a billiard cue in my hands), a Card Room (I was already fond of Rummy and Bezique), a Studio (in which I would begin my new career as a painter), a Study (in case Pearce should visit me and find himself discomforted by the oriental brilliance of my Withdrawing Room), a Morning Room (facing east, where I would sit between nine and ten to do my household accounts) and of course a most sumptuous Dining Room (the abundance of its table such that one would need to "withdraw" a little after dinner to let the digestive system work in comfort and tranquillity).

My stipend from the King as Celia's husband was two thousand livres per annum – riches I could not, a year before, have dreamed of. This money enabled me to buy a great quantity of Chinese furniture for my Withdrawing Room, to hang the walls with ruched vermilion taffeta and Peking scrolls, to upholster my chairs in scarlet and fuchsia and gold and to lay upon the floor a carpet from Chengchow so elaborate in design it had been a thousand days upon the loom.

I was exceedingly pleased with these decorations. As I poured beer for my exhausted upholsterers, I congratulated myself that I had got the rampant tones of red, pink and gold so absolutely right that I must quickly hit upon some ingenious idea for ensuring that the guests, in whose company I would withdraw into this room, would not sully it with drabness. It came to me speedily: I would order to be made a dazzling collection of scarlet sashes, bilberry shawls, ruby slippers, pink bonnets and yellow plumes, with which to adorn my invitées, thus affording my eye considerable delight and my spirit a great deal of mirth.

Celia, as you will have understood by now, had no part in the designing of my house. Though it was thought that, when expedient, she would spend some time at Bidnold, the King preferred her to be nearer to him and had thus installed the new Lady Merivel in a pretty house at Kew, a short journey by water from Whitehall. It was gossiped, I learned from my Court friends, that on summer evenings, when his desire for my wife overcame his passion journalière for Barbara Castlemaine, he would skull himself alone and in disguise to Kew, thus putting himself grievously at risk from the vagabonds of the water. Unlike myself, so prone to cowardice with regard to my own mortality, the King appears to be a man without fear. I had become by this time, I feel obliged to admit to you, extremely fond of the King, and experienced some pain in the realisation that, now I had served his purpose and been rewarded with lands and a title, he could, if he chose, forget about me utterly. I thought with fondness of the smacking kisses he had once slapped on his Fool's lips, and earnestly hoped it would not be so.

Let me relate to you my first attempts at becoming an artist.

Thirty canvases, fourteen brushes, fifty-eight boxes of pigment and an easel were sent to me from Pelissier and Drew in London. My tailor made for me a floppy hat in the manner of the great Rembrandt, and a hessian smock, in which garment, I admit, I looked more like a swine feeder than a Renaissance Man.

The mixing of pigments was an activity to which I responded with great eagerness. If I have a visionary side, it is visions of colour and light that I see. Thus, I longed to dispense with drawing and dabble pure colour onto the virgin canvases. I was aware, however, than an artist must have a subject and the only subjects I could execute well with my charcoal were parts of the human anatomy – the very thing I has sworn to consign to oblivion, but found myself unable to forget.

My first picture, then, was of a man's thigh and buttocks. The background, I had decided, would be ochre, suggesting a pastoral scene, in which the severed half of my man was striding through a field of corn. (I made a rather feeble attempt at drawing some stooks in the distance and a few single ears of wheat close to.)

The musculature of the buttocks and thigh was, I think, reasonably well and accurately drawn but, such was its detail, that when I came at last, in a state of trembling excitement, to apply oil paint to it, I was all too aware that I had no idea whatsoever how to render shadow and light (and thus the third dimension) in this medium and, although I worked at it for hours and long into the night, my picture was an utter failure, resembling in the end a garish still-life of a plate of bacon and scrambled egg. I took off my floppy hat and smock and withdrew, this time to my bed, where I was forced to gnaw upon my sheet to stop myself shedding tears of frustration and rage.

The next day, a brilliant idea came to me. If I could execute parts of the body quite competently, it would surely be within my power to draw a body in its entirety, particularly with the help of a model.

After breakfast, I called for my horse, Danseuse (another gift from the King), and rode up the hill to the village of Bidnold and knocked on the door of the Jovial Rushcutters, a nice little inn I was in the habit of visiting from time to time, when in need of rough conversation and the smell of beer, tobacco and spittle.

The barmaid of the Jovial Rushcutters was one Meg Storey who, in her manner and in the teasing fullness of her breasts, slightly resembled Rosie Pierpoint, and to whom, in consequence, I was involuntarily drawn. I now managed to flatter Meg Storey sufficiently – with praise and promise of silver -for her to agree to coming to my Studio to pose for me. Not, I assured her, naked, but prettily draped with scarves and sashes and wearing quite possibly a posy of geraniums in her hair, thus giving me access to my reds, which I had used to baleful excess in the man's thigh, but without which I could not imagine any picture of mine succeeding.

She arrived on a rather chilly September morning. At the sight of me in my smock and hat, she let out a hoot of derisive laughter. I was further discomforted by her complaints, as she took off her cloak, about the cold and sunless nature of my Studio.

"It faces, as it must, north," I said, beginning to sharpen my piece of charcoal. "Artists must work in a northerly light."

"Why?" asked Meg Storey.

I looked up. I did not wish to admit to this saucy tavern jade that I had not the least idea. "Because," I snapped, "a north light is cruel."

After a great deal of shivering and protesting, Meg Storey agreed to remove everything but her drawers, sat down on a tall chair and allowed me to drape a magenta scarf around her neck to fall flatteringly over one of her large, bright-nippled breasts. I stood back. Her hair was sand-coloured, not unlike my own, but a deal finer and silkier. She looked exceedingly pretty. I felt my enthusiasm for my picture grow. Now I understand, I told myself, what the Flemish masters felt as they prepared to render their voluptuous Dianas, their fleshy shepherdesses…

I began to sketch in Meg Storey's neck, shoulder and right breast. At her waist, the drawers began, but I ignored them. In my knowledge of the form of the female leg, of the degree of fatty tissue in the upper thigh, I was able to depict what was, in fact, invisible to me. I was now excited by my work to such a degree that I felt my loins grow hard and had to force out of my mind, as I drew her hand, a sudden image of it flaying my bottom with its little pearly nails. Luckily, the size of the canvas and the voluminous nature of my smock prevented Meg Storey from witnessing any arousal in me, and for two hours or more she sat obediently still, despite the cold.

At mid-day, she had to leave to serve dinner at the Jovial Rushcutters. I pressed a florin into her palm and asked her to return the following morning. I made no attempt to touch her, though the urge in me to do so was very strong. Art, I told myself, must be put before beastliness.

But I couldn't stay away from my picture. Even on my return from an excellent supper with my neighbour, Lady Bathurst, at a very late hour, I went at once to my Studio and lit several lamps and stared at my drawing of Meg Storey and felt myself greatly pleased by it. It was a relief to see, reasonably well drawn, an entire body and not bits and pieces of it. Art, I thought picturesquely (and with a metaphysicality worthy of Pearce), will make me whole, where before I was but half made up.

The next morning dawned sunny, thus slightly altering the light in my studio. I had spent a peevish night trying to decide which pigments to use and in what quantities in order to achieve the exact colour of Meg Storey's neck, her hair, her heel, her nipples. I longed with such envious longing to put onto my canvas something that was more than a mere portrait of Meg Storey. I wanted to capture in colour her very essence, so that anyone seeing my picture would be able to "see" her, exactly as she is, both beautiful and vulgar, and these two opposing conditions conflicting in her with such subtlety that one's perception of her is a constantly changing thing. But how was I to do it?

I stood at my easel exhausted and downhearted. How can you capture in a medium which is static that which is constantly moving and altering? I began, without confidence, to mix my pigments. Meg's nose, I noticed, was red ("From the cold I caught, sitting here, Sir Robert"), so I thought I would start with that and work outwards. At once, I could see, I had made a bad decision. You do not, if you are striving for the essence of something, begin with a small detail. I darted to the nipple and painted that. Now, my canvas had two lifeless red spots upon it. Quickly, I mixed some umbers, vermilions and browns and began to colour Meg's hair. Again, there was no light upon it or life within it, and I began to understand now that I simply did not have the technique to paint a tolerably pretty picture of Meg, let alone a portrait that would reveal her essential nature and being.

I put down my brush. I picked up Meg's shawl and put it round her and told her sadly that I would pay her to return at some future date, when I had taken some lessons in becoming an artist.

I believe I might have succumbed, after this first ignominious flop in my chosen field, to a bout of sadness, had it not been for the kind attentions of my neighbour, Lady Bathurst.

Let me describe the Bathursts to you.

Bathurst is a hunting man. He is past his seventieth year and his memory parted from him in his sixty-eighth, when his horse threw him in the field and trod on his ear, through which orifice his mind dribbled away. He wears aged green clothes which are seldom cleaned, and so carry with them the stench of saddle soap, tobacco and boiled pudding. Of his wife's name, which is Violet, he has lost all remembrance and has been heard to enquire at the dinner table: "Who is that woman? Do I know her?" But if you imagine him confined to bed, or even to his room, you would be wrong. Every morning, he is hoisted onto his horse and with his greyhounds and terriers rampages about his fields and forests running to their death hares, foxes, badgers and even stags. The walls of his great hall are hung with game-keepers' poles, hunting whips, the skins of foxes, badgers and marten cats and the heads of deer, its floor strewn with marrow bones for his dogs, which are kennelled there and do their business all over the parquet.

I am fond of Bathurst. His claret is excellent and his table manners worse than mine. His conversation is pure drivel, but spoken with a perpetual passion, emphasised by his constant farting and thumping of the table. Though his memory has left him, his spirit has not. His friends, he tells me, have deserted him; he does not know who they were or why they have gone, but he senses a void, a vacancy, where once there was conversation and laughter, and seems delighted that I should be there to fill it up a little. Confusingly, he appears always to remember my name, or rather his own Anglicised version of if. Merryvale. "Welcome, Merryvale!" he thunders, across the braying and barking of the dogs. "Welcome and Good Cheer and Devil take the Laggards and the Hindmosts!"

If I were, like Pearce, prone to Godliness and guilt, I might find myself a little discomforted by the fact that, attached as I am to Bathurst, I am deceiving him. For I am embarked, I will now admit, on a most agreeable affaire de coeur with his wife, my Lady Bathurst, or, as I call her in the intimacy of her chamber, Violet.

Violet is some thirty years younger than her husband and a most handsome person, very witty and smart. She called on me not long after I took up residence at Bidnold Manor, and, on that very first meeting, related to me the lamentable state of Bathurst 's mind, putting particular emphasis on his forgetfulness of her existence, thus bringing into my head at once the idea that there could be something between us. For a man who has forgotten that he has a wife cannot care a great deal about which bed she chooses to inhabit, or with whom. Our amours are not of the tearing and clawing kind, but agreeably hot for all that and tolerably frequent, Violet being at that age when she sees her beauty starting to vanish and so wants to make hay while the sun still shines, albeit less radiantly than in her youth, in which, by her own account, an abundance of hay was made and time seemed forever halted at summer.

Thus it was to Violet Bathurst, lying in my arms under the silver and turquoise canopy of my bed, that I confessed my misery at my failure with art. "Without this," I said, "and abandoned as I seem to be by the King, I am a man without a direction and I very much fear that I will lose myself in drunkenness and excesses of all kinds."

Violet looked at me sharply. She was already a little jealous of my young wife and had made me swear on a copy of Thomas a Kempis that I had no carnal knowledge of Celia. The thought that I would fall into excessive behaviour clearly alarmed her a great deal.

"You must not worry, Merivel," she said, leaning on a white elbow and caressing the moths of my stomach with an elegant finger. "I will organise some painting lessons. I know a talented young man, very eager to make the acquaintance of gentry, who will be only too keen to oblige. I commissioned a portrait of Bathurst from him, and, considering that Bathurst is not able to sit still for a second, the finished work was admirable. His name is Elias Finn – a Puritan, one rather suspects, but so keen for advancement and success that he cuts his coat according to the times. He is desperate, of course, to get to Court, and perhaps, if he proves a good teacher, you might be able to set him on the road?"

"You forget, Violet," I said miserably, "that it is now three months since I had a word from the King."

"Is it? Then perhaps you should go to London?"

"I have no position at Court any more."

"But surely, His Majesty would be overjoyed to see you?"

"That I cannot know."

"He used to give you kisses, Merivel."

I smiled. "You and I both know, Violet," I said, "that kisses are as fleeting as pear blossom."

The entry of Elias Finn into my life was, I suspect, of some importance.

He describes himself as a portraitist, but leads, I discover, an almost mendicant life in the shires of England, going on foot from one great house to another, begging to paint its inhabitants. He is young, but his face is gaunt and grey and his wrists as thin as a cuttlefish. He has a shifting, uneasy glance. His lips, however, are sweetly curvaceous and feminine, giving evidence of some sensitivity. His voice is honeyed and polite. He is a paradox. On our first meeting, I didn't know what to make of him at all.

I led him to my Studio and showed him my bacon and egg man and my unfinished portrait of Meg Storey. He stared at them in alarm, as if they frightened him, which indeed they probably did, so far do they seem from anything one could possibly admire.

"Why do you wish to paint, Sir?" he said after a while.

"Well…" I began, "as a kind of act of forgetting. My studies have been in anatomy and disease, but I wish, for reasons of my own, not to continue with medical work."

"So you would be an artist instead?"

"Yes."

"Why, pray?"

"Because… because I must do something! I have a very immoderate nature, Mr Finn. Look at me! Look at my house! Since the Restoration, I have become inflamed, full of riot! We're in a New Age and I am its perfect man, but I must channel myself into some endeavour, or be lost to idleness and despair. So please help me."

He returned to my pictures. "To judge from these," he said, "you draw tolerably well, but have no sense of colour."

No sense of colour! I was dumbfounded. "Colour," I began to say, "is what excites me more than anything on earth. I was married in purple and gold! At the King's coronation, I fainted almost at the sight of his crimson barge…" But then I stopped myself. "You are right, of course," I said. "I have a great love for colour, but a love for something is never enough. What I utterly lack is the skill to turn love into art."

We began my painting lessons there and then. Finn had brought with him some of his own work, portraits mostly of fashionable women, which had presumably not been liked, in that they were still in his possession. I thought them admirable. "If, in time, I can execute one painting as good as any of these," I said, "I will be a happy man."

He smiled pityingly. He began to discuss his technique with regard to background, which, he said, should always be classical – a Palladian garden with broken columns, a naval battle, or a merry hunting scene.

"You mean," I asked, "that instead of drawing a window behind Meg Storey, I should have put in ships, or horsemen?"

"Yes," said Finn. "Naturally."

I couldn't recall that Holbein's famous portraits had classical backgrounds, but I didn't mention this, because I knew I would be very grateful to Finn if he could teach me how to paint Doric columns or a battleship in full sail.

"The background," he continued, "must flatter. More, it must lend permanence to the life of the sitter, no matter how brief his actual existence may turn out to be."

For these considerations, I had of course taken no previous thought, but I could see some truth in what he was saying, and so our first morning passed in discussion of how a picture must be composed so that no part of it is "dead", so that, wherever the eye wanders, there is interest, whether it is in the detail on the hilt of a sword or a minutely rendered rowing boat on a distant Arcadian shore. We furthermore approached the question of distance and perspective: how hills, for instance, which are further away will seem paler and less well defined than those which are near, and how the sitter's nearness and vigour will be emphasised if he or she inhabits a pool of light.

"When you are next at Whitehall," Finn concluded, "go and look at the Raphaels and the Titians the King reputedly has in his apartments and you will see some of the finest examples of everything I've talked about."

So, Violet Bathurst had already informed Finn of my acquaintance with the King. I merely nodded. It was much too early for me to decide whether Finn was worthy of any favours, but I detected that his longing to go to Court was even greater than my longing to learn to paint and decided at once that I might be able to use this finely balanced inequality to some advantage.

Towards the beginning of November, by which time, under Finn's tuition, I had painted a moderately bad picture of my Spaniel, Minette, asleep by an imaginary waterfall, my little dog became ill.

A rampaging fear gripped my heart. I loved Minette. Her presence was a constant reminder to me that I had been -and still hoped to be again – the King's friend and Fool, and I was certain that her dying would be a terrible portent of derelictions yet to come.

Very reluctantly, I got out my surgical instruments and my remedies, ointments and powders, but, having set them out next to Minette on the Dining Room table, found that I was at a loss to know what to do; in my desire to forget my former profession, I had succeeded in burying knowledge that was vital to me now.

I thought of Lou-Lou and Fabricius's dictates about nature. Would I be able to cure Minette by a similar attack of idleness? I did not think so. She was vomiting almost constantly, poor thing, and on her belly was a large dribbling sore.

I diluted a little laudanum with milk and spooned this down her throat, and after some minutes she entered a quiet sleep. I examined the sore. It was a foul and stinking thing. I imagined its poison entering her blood vessels and thus being carried to her heart. If only it had been a boil I could lance, but it was not, it was an open wound which, because it was on her belly, I had neglected to notice for several days, or even weeks.

I cleaned the thing as best I could with some warm water, moistened some linen with alcohol and laid this upon it. Minette whimpered in her sleep and then her body was suddenly wracked with terrible convulsions. Foam-flecked spittle appeared at the corners of her mouth. I held onto her and waited for the convulsions to subside. At my elbow, my servant, Will Gates, was sweating and pale.

"It's no good," I said to Will. "I don't trust my own knowledge. Where can I find Doctor Murdoch at this hour?"

"Doctor Murdoch is a quack, Sir, a regular empiric."

"Never mind. He's our best hope. Where is he to be found?"

"In one place and only one."

"Well?"

"At the Rushcutters, Sir."

Why did I not send Will to the inn? I did not send him because I thought a fast canter on Danseuse in the crisp November evening would help to rid me of some of the fear and anxiety by which I felt myself gripped. Shouting to my groom to saddle the horse, I carried Minette to my bedroom, laid her on my bed and told Will not to leave her side, on pain of immediate dismissal.

"What will I do if she rack and rigor again, Sir?"

"Hold her," I said, "try to hold her still."

I mounted Danseuse and was away through the park, sending the deer scurrying from our pathway. I pressed her to a fast gallop and, as I filled and refilled my lungs with the rich air, began to feel my terror depart a little.

I was sweating by the time I tied Danseuse to her post outside the Jovial Rushcutters and my face was aflame. I walked in, blowing like a whale. I cast around for the unmistakable sight of Doctor Murdoch, with his stooped shoulders and long clammy hands, but I couldn't see him. "Doctor Murdoch?" I asked one of the hobnailed peasants with his nose in his ale. "Was he here this evening? Does anyone know where he might be found?"

Through the malodorous crowd of pigmen, game-keepers and fowl-breeders came Meg Storey. In the dim candlelight of the tavern, her hair looked fiery. The dress and apron she wore were lilac. She bobbed a cheeky curtsey to me, then took my hand and led me without a word to the cool, dark stillroom where the barrels of beer were stacked and there reached up and placed a soft kiss upon my mouth. "That is to tell you," she said, and I caught the sour scent of beer on her breath, "I am sorry for what happened to your new vocation."

I let out a yelp of laughter, and, all hot and in a lather of body and brain, gathered Meg Storey into my arms. "Nature…" I murmured between kisses and caresses. "Let nature work upon Minette and upon me…" And in moments I had abandoned my poor dog to her fate and lay tumbling with Meg on the earthen floor.

An hour later, Doctor Murdoch came into the tavern, but so confused and excited was I by my amours with Meg Storey, that I no longer thought to find him there, but spent the rest of the night riding hither and thither in search of him, until Danseuse would gallop no more and we walked wearily home.

Will Gates was asleep on the floor of my bedchamber. Laid out on my bed, under a striped cloth I recognised as one of the large table napkins given to me by the King, was the dead body of Minette.

I knelt down and tried to think of a prayer, but found that, along with my all too insubstantial knowledge of disease, I had consigned to oblivion any number of the ancient words of God.

Chapter Four. An Indian Nightingale

The morning after the death of Minette, Finn arrived to give me a painting lesson. Wearily, I put on my floppy hat and my smock. A chill rain, now driving against the panes of my studio window, had saturated Finn's rather threadbare outer garments and given him the look of a destitute. We were, in short, a miserable pair. And it occurred to me that, although the spur to creative endeavour may very often be melancholy, it relies in its execution on its opposing element, choleric fire, of which, that morning, I felt not the smallest flame.

"Go home," I said to Finn, unwisely as it turned out, for Finn at that time had none to go to, but had spent the previous night in one of Lord Bathurst's cowsheds. And so wet and woebegone did the poor artist feel, that he was emboldened to broach with me, not for the first nor the last time, the great subject of my influence with the King and the chance of my obtaining for him some position, however meagre – a fresco assistant, a designer of playing cards – at Court.

Now, the loss of Minette had not only saddened me, but had also made me afraid. My own deliberate act of forgetfulness had allowed her to die; King Charles, in his turn, I now saw, had consigned his onetime Fool to oblivion. I had my house and my title as recompense, but I was forgotten. Cleverer, wittier, less ignoble people had replaced me. I had served my purpose and was now cast from favour. Sick at heart as I was, however, I had no intention of revealing to Finn (himself so full of hauteur in his disdain of my painting talent) that I no longer had any influence at Whitehall.

"Finn," I said, whipping off my floppy hat and throwing it down on the stack of virgin canvases, "it is pointless to raise this matter with me, when it is manifestly clear that you have utterly failed to comprehend the way in which such transactions are carried out."

"What can you mean?" asked Finn, shifting his feet uncomfortably, so that I heard the squelch of his shoes.

"What I mean, Finn," I said acidly, "is that we live in commercial times. Take it or leave it, this is the world we inhabit. And he who takes no account of this is likely to die poor and unknown."

Finn's pretty mouth dropped open, giving him a childlike, idiotic look. "If I were rich," he said piteously, "I would of course give you gold to mention my talent to His Majesty, but, as you see, I barely make a living, and if I am to sacrifice the little you pay me for painting lessons…"

"How you set about the task of persuading me to use my influence in London is of no interest to me," I snapped. "I merely remind you that, although an Age of Philanthropy may one day catch our commercial English hearts unaware, the time is not now. And he who is not of the time risks the scorn of his peers and the grave of a pauper. Go home, or rather go back to Lord Bathurst's cowshed, or wherever you plan to lay your innocent head tonight, and think about what I have said."

I watched him walk out into the rain. Tall and thin, his retreating figure reminded me, as it never previously had, of my father, and I experienced a moment of regret, like a sudden wounding in my belly. I felt most extraordinarily alone. I would have mounted Danseuse and begun a mad-cap journey to London there and then, had I not promised the King to stay away from Court – "and neither at Celia's house at Kew, not in the corridors of Whitehall to show your face, Merivel," – unless invited there by him alone.

I sat down before my empty easel. I took off my wig and ran my hands furiously through my hog bristles. When I contemplated all that I had been given, I knew I had no right to feel that I had been betrayed, and yet I did. It had never occurred to me, you see, when I woke from my wedding night, alone and sickly in a dank forest, to see in the distance the King's coach moving off down Sir Joshua's drive, that I would never set eyes on him again. My future, I had believed, was now tied irrevocably to his. And without my foolishness to divert him from the cares of State, he would, I had convinced myself, surely grow grave and sorrowful and start to feel some need of me. But Minette's death now revealed to me that I had been wrong. It was now almost winter. In five months, despite frequent visits from some of the Court gallants, fond of the Norfolk air and games of croquet on my lawn with their pretty mistresses, I had had from the King no word, message or token of any kind. "Never fear," the Court wags had told me, "he will send for you, Merivel, when he's in the mood for farting!" And they had doubled up with laughter over their croquet mallets. I had, of course, joined in the general mirth. I was loved by these men for my willingness to ridicule myself. But I was not, as you can imagine, in the least comforted by their words.

I left my Studio and went to my Morning Room, where I sat down at my bureau and prepared to write the King a letter:

My Most Gracious Sovereign, I began, and the image I had, as I wrote these words, of the King as a moving, shimmering body of celestial light was overwhelming.

Your loyal Fool, Merivel, salutes you, I continued, and prays this letter finds Your Majesty in excellent health and spirits, but – God forgive me – the latter yet no so entirely excellent that you would not, as the rememberance of my antics and my untidy person comes now to your mind, believe yourself contented by some small dose of my company. Let me hasten to say that, were you, Sir, for however brief a time and in whatever role your whim or disposition might dictate, desirous of seeing me, you have only to send word and the speed of my journey to London would be scarcely less than those swift-traveling thoughts which bring me so frequently, in my presumptuous mind, to Your Majesty's side.

Honesty now forces me to relate a great sorrow that has befallen me here, in the midst of all my luxury and brocaded living, namely the death of my dog, your Minette, who was the small creature I most loved in all your Kingdom. I beg my Sovereign to believe I did all within my power towards the saving of her and to know that she was never in her in short life, no, not for one day or one hour, neglected by Her Master,

Your Servant,

R. Merivel

I read through my letter, without permitting the truth-telling inhabitant of my mind to comment upon the words written by the liar who also lodges there, preferring as I do that these two remain distant but courteous neighbours. I sealed it and gave it to Will Gates with instructions that it be sent post-haste to London.

Writing it had eased my mind sufficiently for me to call for my coach and make the short journey through the continuing downpour to the Bathursts, having first powdered my armpits, put on a yellow coat and done what I could to make my person agreeable, in case I chanced on Violet alone and was able to bury my sorrows in her velvet bosom. Alas, I was not so lucky. Bathurst 's memory, so frequently a vessel given up for lost, had that morning bobbed briefly but jauntily to the surface, during which time it recognised Violet as the very woman he had long ago bedded in a frenzy of torn love-knots and snatched garters. He was, as her servant announced my arrival, in the act of tearing a marten cat's head and a couple of badgers' pelts off the wall and laying these trophies at his wife's feet.

The following Friday, Finn did not appear for my painting lesson.

It was an exceedingly splendid autumn morning, burnished by the sun, but my mind wouldn't rid itself of the sodden and bedraggled figure, with my father's long but awkward stride, I had sent off into the rain. Had the poor man died of damp and cold? Or had my Court-wisdom shocked him into abandoning the gentry and their corrupt ways – to paint pictures of the likes of Meg Storey, perhaps, in return for a pint of ale, or a quick favour on the stillroom floor?

The day was altogether too fair to waste on worry or remorse. Finn's fate was not mine to control. I put on my floppy hat and my smock and, with Will's help, carried my easel and my painting equipment to a far corner of my south lawn, from which I had a most magnificent perspective of the park – the purple and gold beeches, the russet elms, the fiery chestnuts and the soft sweep of brown beneath them that was the line of grazing deer.

I stared at this scene. I knew that to render the foliage of a tree in all its complexity was beyond my skills as a draughtsman, let alone as a painter in oils. What I could try to capture, however, were the colours. Thus, without sketching anything in charcoal on my canvas, I began furiously to mix my pigments and to lay the paint on in bold sweeps and flourishes, colour upon colour, a scrabble of white for a cloud, wavering lines of green and yellow for the rich grass, cascades of oranges, reds and golds for the chestnuts, a deep mass of purple and brown and black for the further beeches. I worked like a furnace-feeder, like a glass-blower, puffing and straining. My temperature rose and my heartbeat quickened. I was ablaze with my painting. I knew that it was as wild, as undisciplined, as excessive as my own character, but it perfectly expressed, all unskilled as it was, my response to that autumn day, and thus, to me, had a satisfactory logic to it. Furthermore, when it was at last finished and I stepped back from it a few paces and looked at it through half closed eyes, it did resemble to some degree the scene before me. It was, perhaps, as if a child had painted it. It was crude. The colours were too bright and too many. And yet it didn't lie (not even as much, Finn, I wanted to say, as your beautifully painted Greek columns or shepherdesses' picnics). It was, in some essential way, what I had seen. I walked round to the back of the canvas and scribbled a title on it in French: Le Matin de Merivel, l'automne.

It was then, as I looked up, that I saw Finn, dressed I noticed rather gayly in Lincoln Green, striding towards me across the lawn. I was glad he hadn't starved to death, even more glad when I read from the knowing half smile on his face that he had heeded my words and brought me some little inducement to carry out the favours of which he believed me capable. For I am extremely fond of receiving presents. Possessing, as I do now, an abundance of useless knick-knacks and objets d'art, has not diminished my enthusiasm for accepting more, and the gift, say, of a fine pewter tippling jug or even the head of a marten cat from old Bathurst can cause me an entire day's good spirits.

"Finn!" I called warmly. "You are not starving in some hovel like Poor Tom, as I imagined you to be!"

"What?" said Finn, checked in his stride.

"Oh, never mind my follies," I laughed. "Come and look at my painting."

Finn approached. The sun had now moved and was falling smack across my picture, causing the colours to seem even more gaudy than they actually were. The artist stared at my work. Across his face began to spread a look of recoil, as if, upon the clean waistcoat of this Robin Hood, his Maid Marian had thrown up her pudding. I saw him struggling with words, but they seemed to choke him and he turned away.

"Well?" I said.

"It is," said Finn, "an excrescence."

"Yes," I commented, "probably that is the right word for it."

"In the time of Cromwell, you would…"

"What, Finn?"

"No. I do not mean that. But really, you cannot…"

"What?"

"You must not show this picture to anyone. You must, I think, burn it."

"It offends you, I see."

"It breaks…"

"What does it break?"

"All the laws, all the procedures and disciplines I have been at such pains to try to teach you."

"Yes. You're undoubtedly right. It is a grievous mistake. And yet to me, you see, it's a rather memorable rendering of all that I feel about the colours of my park. Which only illustrates, does it not, that feeling, however passionate a spur it may be to the poor dabbling painter, is, without technique, an impotent and ridiculous thing, like a eunuch in love, one might fancifully suggest."

I laughed, but Finn did not even smile. I felt light-hearted, despite his loathing of my work, and sorry for him that his spirit seemed so grave.

"Well," I said, "let's forget the picture. I shall put it on the fire presently. Will you take a glass of wine, Finn, to restore your lightness of heart?"

Poor Robin agreed and we returned to the house, where I ordered some cool white wine to be brought from my cellar to the Morning Room.

Finn gulped his drink like a parched traveler. His hand shook. Almost before he had sat down, he leapt to his feet again and announced to me that he had taken good heed of my advice on how to get on in what he called "this heartless age" and had therefore spent a great deal of money and time preparing a gift for me, in the hopes that now, at last, I would speak of his talents to the King.

"Excellent, Finn!" I said. "You're learning fast. Would that you could say the same of my painting, what?"

A little nervous smile crossed his angelic mouth. Then he darted out and returned a few seconds later, carrying in his arms a large cylindrical object covered in a pretty embroidered cloth, which he laid carefully at my feet.

"What is it, Finn?" I asked, fearing suddenly that he had brought me the kind of truncated piece of Corinthian column he was so fond of dotting about in his own pictures. But he wouldn't answer, only looked from me to the object and back to me again, like a timorous fieldmouse looking for danger as it spies some split grains of wheat.

I removed the cloth. Before me stood a birdcage of great delicacy, painted a deep Prussian blue and gilded with gold leaf. Inside it, on a swing perch, was a bird, which at first I took to be a stuffed thing, so still and staring did it remain. Then it turned its yellow eye on me and opened its beak and let out a sweet trill. "My word, Finn," I said, "it's alive!"

Finn nodded. "It's an Indian Nightingale," he announced proudly. "It has traveled the seas."

I will at once confess that I was delighted with this gift. Seldom, I thought, can more pains have been taken over a bribe. The cage was an object of wistful beauty, like something from a departed time. The bird inside was ordinary in its appearance, with a sleek blue-black body and an orange beak. Its song, however, was a pure and brilliant sound, a sound I seemed to have heard in my mind, but could not recall in nature.

"They say," said Finn, "that it may be taught other notes, even tunes, if you play a wind instrument to it, particularly the oboe."

"How astonishing," I said. "Why particularly the oboe?"

"The oboe, I believe, is within its register."

"Ah."

"But you do not play?"

"No. But I will learn. I could, I think, acquire a strong appetite for music."

Across Finn's countenance darted a momentary flicker of fear. I knew what he was thinking and his little discomfort amused me, but I chose not to comment upon it and we sat for a few moments in silence, both staring at the Indian Nightingale.

"So," said Finn at last. "When you are next at Court…"

"Your gift is very fine. Thank you."

"When you are next with the King…"

"Hush, Finn," I said, "for I am quite unable to raise your hopes over your own matter. The King at the moment is very burdened down with affairs of State and I must bide my time until the more frivolous side of his nature turns again to me."

"I understand."

"Timing is all. And it may be that we must wait out the winter."

"The winter?" said Finn with dismay. "But I will starve, Sir Robert. I will die of cold and chilblains."

"You must believe me," I said, "no one thirsts for the return of His Majesty's gaiety and laughter more than I. But until such time, I can promise you that he will take no more painters, oboists, tennis coaches or other riff-raff into his service…"

By my inadvertent inclusion of the word "riff-raff", Finn looked utterly downcast. I was about to explain that, as the son of a glovemaker, failed anatomist and failed physician, I included myself in that category of people. We are all, I nearly said, so much chaff, so many airy feathers, blown by wind, burned and suffocated by fire, but I refrained, preferring to conceal from Finn, in case he might one day teach me how to paint something of worth, my modest lineage, my failures in medicine and my deterministic pessimism which could so cruelly cross the grain of his own faith. I contented myself with slapping Finn's green-hosed knee and saying boisterously: "Don't sulk, old Finn. No one could say for certain that you won't be in Whitehall by Christmas."

After several weeks had passed and I had no word from the King, I began to recognise that, while my letter to him had momentarily relieved my anxiety, the sending of it had now thrown me into a worse distress than ever. For before I had sent it I had been able to convince myself that the King's thoughts might turn to me again at any moment, that his mind had, in fact, mislaid me for a while, but that he would rediscover me during, perhaps, a game of ninepins or in the course of some immodest banquet. Now, on the other hand, I could only interpret his silence as a deliberate act of forgetting. Not even the death of Minette had moved him sufficiently to write to me. This in itself was proof enough that he no longer regarded me with any of his former affection and that I was, from his radiant inner circle, now cast into outer darkness.

The profundity and Stygian gloom of this darkness oppressed me most fearfully during the hours of the actual night, so that I began to keep a candle by my bed, or, better than this, to flee my house entirely and spend my nights in Meg Storey's garret in the roof of the Jovial Rushcutters, keeping sleep at bay with ale and rowdy couplings and foolish stories about my travels in the Land of the River Mar, a country of my imaginings, located in Meg's ignorant head as "just above Africa" and about which I invented the most absorbing lies. "The preferred element of the natives of the River Mar," I told her, "is water. And this is how they sleep, with their bodies immersed in the river. And all along the banks of the Mar, hanging from the mangrove trees, are loops made out of hide, to hold the sleeping heads out of the water, so that they do not drown." Meg would sigh with wonder at such unimaginable things and threaten to drift to sleep, lulled by my voice, while outside I would hear poor Danseuse paw the frosty ground and whinny with cold.

Though the solace afforded me by Meg Storey's plump and energetic body was considerable, I felt urgently in need of some spiritual comfort, and began, at about this time, to send out messages to God. I imagined these feeble communications as minute blips of light, little wriggling glow-worms which, unless God had a telescope pointed directly at them, he would be unlikely to notice. The days when God and I engaged in daily conversation had long since passed away. They passed away at the time of the fire, which, as surely as it consumed the bodies of my poor parents, together with the ribbons and feathers that were the stuff of their innocent trade, had also burned up what remained of my faith. I had found, since my rejection of Galen's theory of divine perfection, that anatomy had begun to lead me away from God. My comparative study of the uterus bovinae and the uterus hutnani had shown me that the generative process of the cow is so similar to that of the woman as to make me wonder whether there is not some essential thread connecting us to the animal kingdom and thus toppling us from the pillars of divinity upon which, not merely kings and rulers have set themselves, but upon which the vilest rogue and murderer believes himself to stand. These heretical thoughts I had kept to myself of course, but when I saw how swiftly, how cruelly my good parents died, how, without the least sign of God's lamentation, their lungs burst and their flesh burnt up like meat, I felt compelled to cease my own conversing with an omnipotent and benevolent God. For surely, He is neither? If He is benevolent, why did He send such terrible destruction on such honest and hard-working people? And if He is omnipotent, why did He not prevent it? "Ah," Pearce, would say, "but suffering redeems, Merivel. In their agony, the sins of your parents passed from them."

"They had no sins, Pearce," I reply. "They attended two sermons on a Sunday. They said their prayers morning and night, kneeling by the bed from which neither of them ever strayed. But look at me! I am boiling with lust, immoderate in my consumption of wine, irreverent in my speech and a self-deceiver. Why did the fire not consume me? Why is suffering so arbitrary? No, Pearce, it will not do. If God exists, He is surely cruel. He is the old and terrible God of Moses, the God of Abraham. But the most logical conclusion is that He does not exist at all."

It is interesting to note the ease with which I had let my faith fall from me. Any love I had hitherto felt for God, I had given to the King, who had reciprocated (not as God had done, by speaking through the mouths of fat bishops and having frequent recourse to long periods of enigmatic silence) by laughing at my jokes and giving me royal kisses far sweeter to me than any embrace I'd had from any woman. It was the absence of these tender expressions of friendship and affection that had plunged me into such despair and sent me scrabbling about in the darkness once more, in search of my lost Redeemer, however cruel He might turn out to be.

This search of mine, these glow-worm prayers I sent out into the starry sky above Meg Storey's roof, if they failed to bring God back to comfort me, did, after a few weeks, send me my old friend, Pearce, who arrived at Bidnold on a mule. Strapped to the mule's back, were Pearce's pitiful worldly possessions (referred to by me, rather wittily, I think, as his "burning coals", in reference to a mad Quaker at Westminster who had wandered about calling the fops to repentance with a dish of the said coals balanced on his head). What Pearce owned, in fact, was the following: three Bibles, one copy of his beloved Harvey's De Generatione Animalium, various other anatomical tracts, including works by Vesalius and da Vinci and Needham's Disquisitio Anatomica De Formato Foetu, some quill pens, a black coat and hat, two pairs of black breeches, some torn shirts and stockings, a box of rusty surgical instruments, a single pewter mug and plate and a china soup ladle made in Lancashire. This ladle was the only legacy of his mother, who had died in poverty to send Pearce to Cambridge. Sometimes, in the melancholy moods that so frequently afflict him, Pearce would hold the ladle close to his body and let his long fingers caress its cold surface, in the manner of a lute player plucking a living tune from its dead, hollowed wood.

I was glad, I will admit, to see Pearce. When Will Gates informed me that a man with a long neck and dressed in black was coming up the drive on a mule, I knew it could be none other than my old friend and former fellow-student and I ran out to greet him.

It was drizzling slightly and both Pearce and the mule appeared wet and muddy.

"We have come from the Fens," he announced in his voice of doom.

"From the Fens, Pearce?" I said. "What were you doing there?"

"I am a Fenlander now, Merivel," he said. "My work and life are there."

"I notice that you put them in that order, Pearce: work first, life second."

"Naturally. Except that the two are inseparable."

"Well, I do not work at all, except a little painting."

"Painting? How peculiar."

"You've left the Royal College, then?"

"Yes. I work only with the insane. Take the mule, will you, and see she's fed? We're both very weak."

Pearce then dismounted, staggered a pace or two and fell to his knees. I shouted for Will Gates, who came running like a bullet, and together he and I helped Pearce into the house. I asked the groom to rescue the "burning coals" quickly, before the mule died and rolled over on the soup ladle.

We put Pearce to bed in the least colourful of my rooms, the Olive Room, a north-facing bedchamber, in which I had left intact some dark panelling and had curtained the bed in a sombre green, only enlivened by a little crimson fringe. Here, after drinking some venison broth and enquiring whether his books could be sent up to him, he fell into a sleep that lasted thirty-seven hours. During most of this time, I stayed at his bedside, checking his pulse now and then, listening to his breathing, dozing a little and sipping claret and staring at his elongated grey face, which I found at once so irritating and yet so inexpressibly dear to me.

When he woke up at last, I was anxious to tell him of the despair into which I had fallen and to see whether he could suggest any remedy. But he had, it turned out, made the arduous journey on the mule from the Fens for one reason only: to reveal to me that he had found, in his work with the mad people of what he called the New Bedlam, located somewhere between Waterbeach and Whittlesea, a deep and profound sense of peace, and to try to persuade me to leave my life of "vanity and show" to join him in his labours.

"I sense," he said, staring at my freckled, ruddy and be-wigged visage, "that you're not at ease, Merivel. The light has gone out of your eyes. Luxury is suffocating your vital flame."

I looked down. Though I had a terrible urge to confess to Pearce, amid childlike tears, that it was not luxury that had robbed me of my happiness, but the King's abandonment of me, and that I was indeed a desperate man, though not at all for the reasons he surmised, I refrained from doing so, knowing that it would only lead Pearce into more flowery discussion of how the insane are the innocent of the earth, and how, only by succouring them "like little children" can we be saved.

"Thank you, Pearce, for your concern," I said, "but you are completely wrong. If my eyes appear a little lacklustre, it's merely because I have watched at your bedside for a great quantity of time with hardly any sleep. As to my vital flame, it is burning very brightly."

"I know you, Merivel. When you stood in my room in Caius and put your hand on that man's heart, then it was burning!"

"Indeed! And if you had seen me in the park the other day with my oil paints – "

"You hope to find salvation in art?"

"I'm not speaking necessarily of salvation…"

"But I am, Merivel. For is not death the supreme moment of mortal existence, the hour in which we reap what we have sown?"

"You choose to see it like that, Pearce."

"No. I do not choose. The Lord tells me it is so. And what are you sowing, Merivel, here in your palace?"

"It's merely a manor, Pearce."

"No! It's a palace! And full of iniquity, if these scarlet tassels are anything to go by."

"They're nothing to go by."

"Answer me, Merivel. What are you sowing?"

Again, I looked down. The agricultural metaphors with which the Bible is strewn have always struck me as simplistic and crude, but I particularly did not like Pearce's repeated emphasis on the word "sowing", for it somehow evoked in my mind my letter to the King, which had been intended as a seed in the forgetful Royal brain, but which had indubitably fallen upon stony ground.

I looked up at Pearce, white and gaunt on his white pillow.

"Colour," I said. "Colour and light. I am sowing these."

"What pagan, freakish piffle you do spout, Merivel!"

"No," I said. "Have a little faith, Pearce. Through colour and light, I hope to arrive at art. Through art, I hope to arrive at compassion. And through compassion, though the journey may be a deal more terrible than the one you've just undertaken – your mule is dead by the way – I hope to arrive at enlightenment."

"Enlightenment," said Pearce with a sniff, "is not enough."

"Perhaps. But sufficent to be going on with."

Before Pearce could comment upon this, I plucked his ladle off a walnut escritoire, where a servant had placed it, and handed it to him.

"Here is your ladle," I said. "Play upon it quietly, until you feel restored enough to venture downstairs, where I have something of great beauty to show you."

"What is it?" asked Pearce, suspiciously.

"An Indian Nightingale," I replied. And before Pearce could make some disdainful comment about my bird, I left his room.

I will now tell you that it had become my daily habit to sing a little to my Indian Nightingale. I have no voice at all, and so flat do the notes come out that Minette, in her brief life, used to howl and whimper the moment I opened my mouth, as if I was a desert dog from the Land of Mar. But, my lack of talent notwithstanding, I love singing. I hear the right notes in my head. The fact that I can seldom attain them distresses my listeners, but doesn't seem to upset me in the least. I am, in this respect, like a man trying to fling his body over a five-barred gate and, no matter how spirited his run or ready his heart, finding himself at each attempt still on the wrong side of it and yet nonetheless filled with joy at his efforts. Finn had told me to play the oboe to the bird, and I had sent to London for one of these instruments but, in the meantime, I sang to it, rather quietly so as not to affront it, and it regarded me watchfully, moving its tail up and down and letting fall onto the painted base of the cage tiny filaments of shit.

When at last Pearce rose from his bed and arrived in my Withdrawing Room dressed in his greasy black clothes, he found me singing to my nightingale. Shading his eyes from the brilliance of the furnishings, he approached the cage and stood blinking at it like a lizard. I ceased my singing and the bird at once let out a melodious trill.

"I recognise that," said Pearce.

"What is it?" I asked excitedly. "Something by Purcell?"

"No," said Pearce, and turned upon me a pitying, reptilian look. "That is the warble of a common blackbird."

"Don't be foolish, Pearce," I said at once, meanwhile recognising that my heart, all unfeeling as I know it to be, had started to beat erratically. "The bird was a gift to me. That creature has traveled the oceans."

"When? Who brought it?"

"I have no idea. An ornithologist, no doubt. It has been round Cape Horn. So let us have no more talk of blackbirds!"

Pearce shrugged and turned away from the cage, as if it was of no further interest to him whatsoever. "You've been duped, Merivel," was all he said.

"Very well," I said. "We will go out into the garden and find a blackbird and listen to its feeble song, and you will see that you're wrong."

"As you wish," said Pearce, "but I would remind you that it is winter and birds do not sing a great deal at this time of year."

"Further proof, then, that this is not an English bird. You just heard its lovely trill."

"No doubt it mistook its surroundings for a flower bed."

I smiled at Pearce. The insult he'd intended to my gaudy room in fact pleased me a great deal, and I mention to you, in passing, that Pearce's criticisms of me do not inevitably have the humbling effect upon me that they so strenuously desire.

Pearce and I then put on our cloaks (his so exceedingly threadbare that an irritating shiver of pity ran through me) and went out into the December morning, filigree'd with frost, sparkling and silent in the dry, icy air.

We stood still and listened. Some way off in the park, rooks were circling and cawing above the beech trees, but there was scarcely another sound at all. "Let's walk down the drive a little," I suggested, and we set off at the slow pace always adopted by Pearce, who, if God himself were suddenly to appear before him with open arms, would, I believe, forbear to run, but approach his Maker with his habitual measured and ungainly step.

After we had gone a very little way, a sound I had not expected at all began to clatter and jingle in the frosty quiet. It was the sound of a coach and four. I caught my breath. Without any doubt, it would be Violet Bathurst riding over for a little mulled claret and an hour in my bed, and here was I listening out for blackbirds with the one friend whose mind would be tormented by her arrival. I knew, if I wished to keep Pearce at Bidnold, I would have to send Violet away, however beguiling the thought of her company might be.

We stepped to one side as the coach came on, but as it rounded the curve in the drive, I saw immediately that the beautiful greys which pulled it were not Violet's horses. I was expecting no other guests and couldn't imagine who could be coming to my house at such a gallop.

I put out an arm and the coachman (recognising me by my fine clothes as the master of Bidnold) attempted to slow the horses. But their canter had been so brisk that they and the coach had gone past me before they could be pulled up, and all I had was a fleeting glimpse of a woman's face at the carriage window, shrouded in what appeared to be a black veil.

The coach had now arrived in front of the main doorway. With Pearce trailing me, like the ghost of the exiled John Loseley, I started to run towards the house, unfortunately slipping in my haste on an icy patch of the driveway, falling down in a most humiliating fashion, tearing my peach-coloured stockings and grazing my right hand.

I got up and stumbled on. "Ho there!" I called. "Hello!" But when I arrived, puffing and flushed, at my doorway, I saw that the occupant of the coach had already gone inside the house and that some large boxes and trunks were now being carried in by my footmen.

Noticing with great vexation that my hand was bleeding, I walked into my hallway. After the bright, cold sunlight, it appeared very dark, and indeed I could at first see no one at all. Then I looked up. Standing on the oak stairs was the woman in the black veil. Her stance was strangely familiar to me and, even as she reached up and flung back the veil, I knew whose face I was about to see. It was the face of my wife.

We stood staring at each other. Her stare – notwithstanding my crimson cheeks and my wig fallen over my eyebrows – was far more terrible than mine. She seemed to have aged almost out of time. Her small face, dimpled and pretty in my memory, looked grey and gaunt and her eyes were swollen and red, as if she had been crying day and night since the beginning of winter. I moved forward a pace. I wanted, in my pity for her, to say her name, but realised, even as I opened my mouth, that I couldn't remember what it was.

Chapter Five. Two Worms

During my fanciful and hectic redecorations at Bidnold, I had allowed myself to ignore the possibility that Celia Clemence would one day take up habitation under its roof.

Thus, although the house contained eleven bedchambers, none, in my mind, had been furnished for the woman Violet Bathurst jealously referred to as "Lady Merivel, Your Bride", but whose continuing existence was invariably absent from my mind. "Listen, Violet," I was in the habit of saying on the occasion of my Lady B's envious outbursts. "I am no more conscious of Celia as my lawful wife than Bathurst is of you as his. Rest assured that I never think of her."

Usually, Violet's jealousy would be assuaged by this statement, but one evening, even as I knelt over her and gently eased my tumescent member along the soft furrow between her breasts, she suddenly reached up and pushed me sideways, so that I would have fallen onto the floor had my right leg not been tangled in the sheet. "Your analogy with Bathurst," she said crossly, "is misleading and, if deliberately so, then you are a cruel and cynical man. For as you well know, Merivel, Bathurst has moments of remembering and at such times becomes importunate. On Wednesday night, for instance, lucidity returned to him in the middle of supper and he began crawling towards me on his hands and knees under the Dining-Room table, the while unbuttoning himself. If I had not quickly reminded him that his brace of woodcock – his favourite game – were getting cold on his plate, I simply do not know what might have happened. And so it may be with you, Merivel. That which you swear you have forgotten, you will one day come grovelling towards."

"Violet," I said, recovering my kneeling position (only disconcerted very mildly by the similarity of my stance to Bathurst 's under the table), "grovelling is a thing I have done but once in my life, when I inadvertently fell over at the King's feet. The notion that I will ever, as long as I am of sound mind, grovel to Celia is a pure fiction, not to be entertained for one second more!"

I put my mouth upon Violet's at this moment, thus preventing further speech, and the evening proceeded very pleasantly, Violet's sudden attack of jealousy having roused her to a wild and shameless abandon.

But even as I saw her into her coach, I found myself remembering Celia and wondering where, in the unlikely event of her unexpected arrival at Bidnold, I would lodge her. Had I not, on my strange wedding night, witnessed the immodest thrusting of her loins towards the King's mouth and heard through the closet door a wailing of pleasure worthy of an African wildcat, I would have believed Celia to be an entirely chaste and modest person, a person of sober taste and small appetite, finding comfort and contentment in a bedchamber hung, say, with pale apricot moire and ornamented by sombre prints of rivers and cathedrals. As it was, by the time I had ceased waving to Violet's gloved hand disappearing into the night, I had already decided that what I called the Marigold Room would be the one I would offer to Celia. Late as the hour was, I had my servants go up and light candles in the Marigold Room, so that I could take a look at it. I would have given the thing no thought at all but for Violet. For this one brief night, she had awoken in me a minute flicker of excitement at the idea of my wife's arrival. The next morning, however, Celia was once more consigned to that part of my brain I imagine to be like a coiled fistula, filled not with putrescent matter, but with utter darkness and into which so much of what I have once known is carefully crammed.

Now, here I am, in my torn stockings and with my bleeding hand, staring at my poor wife as she turns to me on the stairway and I read in her face some terrible calamity. "My dear!" I burst out, whipping from my pocket a plum-coloured silk handkerchief and fumblingly binding my hand with it. "Welcome to Bidnold! If you had given me a little warning, I would have made everything ready for you."

"I need no welcome," says Celia, and her voice is reedy, like the voice of an old dying crone. "The servants will show me to my room."

"Yes," I stammer, "or I will show you. It's to be the Marigold Room…"

My hand is bound now, but as I take hold of the banister rail and prepare to mount the stairs towards her, I see her recoil from me, as from some rearing viper. "Stay away!" she whispers, seemingly faint with revulsion. "Please stay away."

I stop at once and smile at her kindly. "Celia," I say, remembering her name at last, "you need have no fear of me whatsoever. I will never ask anything of you. All I wanted was to show you to your room, the colours and furnishings of which I hope may be of some comfort to you in whatever misfortune – "

"The servants will show me. Where is my woman, Sophia?"

"What?" I say.

"Where is my woman? Where is Sophia?"

"I have no idea. Did you bring her with you? She's your maid?"

"Yes. Call her please, Merivel."

I turn and look towards the front door. Two grooms are stumbling through it with a leather trunk, filled no doubt with ermine-trimmed bonnets and newt-skin shoes bought for his Dear One by my sometime master, the King. My mind is travelling in sudden sorrow towards a certain set of striped dinner napkins, now unused but kept folded in linen in an oaken chest, when I suddenly see Pearce, panting and wheezing like his late mule, arrive in my hall.

"Ah, Pearce." I say quickly. "Have you caught sight of a woman named Sophia?"

Pearce is blinking. His huge eyes, his prehensile nose and his long neck make him, on the instant, resemble a species of nocturnal tree-climbing animals I have seen described as marsupials (a strange word).

"No," says Pearce. "What is occurring, Merivel? I scent some misfortune."

"Yes," I say, "misfortune there does seem to be. But for now we must find my wife's woman…"

"Your wife is come?"

"Yes. Here she is. Go out to her carriage please, Pearce, and tell her maid that her mistress calls."

Pearce is wiping his eyes on his threadbare cloak, the better to believe that the ghostly woman in black is indeed Celia Clemence, last glimpsed by him laughing merrily at her wedding. I am about to urge him outside once more when a buxom, ugly, dark-haired woman of perhaps thirty-five appears, carrying two or three dresses in her arms.

"Sophia," Celia calls hoarsely, "come up."

Sophia looks from Pearce to me, seems immediately affronted by the sight of us both and so goes swiftly up the stairs to where her mistress is reaching out her hand.

At my side, emerged from I know not where, I now find Will Gates.

"Will," I say with great urgency, "please conduct my wife and her woman to the Marigold Room."

"The Marigold Room, Sir?" whispers Will. "Might I suggest another?"

"No, you might not," I snap.

Will glares at me but nonetheless, like the matchless servant that he is, goes nimbly up the stairs past the two women and with his habitual unflowery courtesy leads them onwards and up. The grooms follow with the heavy trunks and boxes.

I did not see Celia again that day.

After supper, which I took alone with Pearce, I enquired of my cook whether orders had come down for food. I was told that some bouillon and a plum tartlet had been sent up.

"Was it eaten?" I asked.

"Either that," said my wall-eyed chef, Cattlebury, "or the dog had it?"

"Dog?"

"Aye, Sir."

"What dog, Cattlebury?"

"Mr Gates, Sir, says they brought in a dog, a small Spaniel like the one as died on you, Sir Robert."

Ah, was my melancholy thought as I left the kitchens, the King is too cunning for us all! To those he knows he must one day abandon, he gives this sweet, living gift, just to be certain that our love for him remains with us (as if he could doubt that it would!) in case he may, at some future time, have need of us again. Poor Celia!

As I returned to my Study, where I had left Pearce reading some forgotten Latin text from my Padua days, I resolved that I must try, as soon as she would let me, to offer words of understanding and comfort, and in so doing perhaps find a little relief from my own despair. For there was no doubt in my mind now: the King had sent her away. She had played her part, just as I had once played mine, and now he had cast us off. I imagine him at dinner, his arm draped elegantly round Lady Castlemaine's white shoulders, the candlelight lending a seductive gloss to the little moustache he keeps so fastidiously trimmed. He leans towards Castlemaine, nibbles the emerald dangling from her ear. "What do you know of Norfolk, Barbara?" he whispers.

"Very little," she replies, "except that it is far from London!"

"Precisely!" smiles the King, "and therefore useful to me. It is there, you see, that I envoie all those I have begun to find tedious."

"Well," I said to Pearce, as I sat down in the Study, "I believe I know now for certain what has happened. What I greatly fear, however, is that Celia will believe her life is over. I really do not think she will ever be consoled."

Pearce (as is one of his irritating habits, detested by me since our student days) did not so much as glance up from his book when I finished speaking, but simply read on, as if I had not even entered the room. I waited. Sometimes I find Pearce so deeply annoying that, were I the King, I could have bouts of wanting to send him to Norfolk.

"Pearce," I said, "did you hear what I said?"

"No," said Pearce. "I didn't. I imagine it was some observation on your wife's plight."

"Yes, it was."

"Well, I have nothing to add. Fools such as you have become and courtesans such as she, once the whiplash of mirth or passion has died, invariably feel the scourge of the whip itself."

I sighed. I opened my mouth to discourage Pearce from further muddled metaphorical utterances of this kind when he lifted the little book he'd been reading and brandished it in my face.

"This is interesting!" he announced. "On the Cartesian question of spontaneous generation: 'For if generation of the lower forms is not spontaneous, then vermiculus unde venit? Whence the maggot?' "

I got up. "I'm sorry, Pearce," I said, my voice brittle and cold, "but I do not feel able, after the troubles of this day, to enter upon a discussion of maggots. I shall go and play my oboe until bedtime."

With that I strode out and went to my Music Room. I shall spare you an account of my struggles with my instrument that evening and the quantity of anxious spittle with which reed after reed was saturated. I shall report only that I wrestled with simple scales for an hour or more, after which time my grazed hand was giving me so much pain that I lay down on the floor of the Music Room and put it between my thighs, with my knees drawn up to my stomach, and in this childlike posture fell into a troubled sleep.

When I awoke, very stiff and cold, with my hand swollen and set into a premature rigor mortis, I saw from the grey light at the window that the winter dawn was breaking over Norfolk, County of Exiles. Despite my numbness and pain, I found myself, on the instant of waking, filled with purpose and resolve. I must go immediately to Celia. I must make her understand that, stranger to her though I am, disagreeable though she may find my physical self, I am occasionally a person of generous mind and that – forswearing any hope of recompense or reward – I am content to be her protector and treat her with respect and kindness for as long as she remains at Bidnold.

I went up to my own chamber, where I changed my clothes and wig. None of the servants was yet stirring. By the handsome timepiece given to me by the King, I saw that it was a little before six. The embers of a fire were still glowing in my grate and I tried to warm my dead hand somewhat before setting out along the chilly corridors to the Marigold Room.

I stopped in front of Celia's door. I could hear a tiny, piteous sound, which I first took to be weeping, but then recognised all too foolishly well as the whimpering of a Spaniel. Minette, Minette, I thought. I grieve for you. You are buried in the park and the deer chomp the grass above you… But this was quite the wrong moment for self-pity, so I knocked with a firm and authorative hand (my left hand, the other one being now afflicted with a sudden intolerable pricking and tingling) and waited.

After a moment or two, an unfamiliar foreign-sounding voice, the voice of Sophia no doubt, called angrily: "Who is there?"

"Sir Robert," I replied, "I want to speak to Lady Merivel, please."

The dog was now scrabbling at the door. I believe the maid pushed it away roughly before she said: "My mistress is sleeping. Go, please, away."

"No," I said. "I will not go away. Please wake my wife. I have much that is important to say to her."

"No!" hissed Sophia. "My Lady is sleeping!"

"She may sleep later. I must speak to her now."

I was about to add that at this precise moment I was feeling a great deal of compassion for Celia but that such is the nature of mood and emotion that I could not guarantee, if forced to return at another time, to find within me the same degree of kindness, when the door was opened. The maid stood there in her nightgown and lace cap. I saw now that her skin was sallow and her upper lip uncommonly hairy. I decided she must be one of the large retinue of Portuguese women who had been shipped to England with Catherine of Braganza, many of whom had found themselves forced to serve outside their beloved Queen's household and who, by the Whitehall gallants, were known scathingly as "the Farthingales" after the peculiar hooped skirts beneath which they concealed their stocky legs.

This Sophia gave me a look of the utmost loathing as I went past her into the room. I shall be rid of you, Farthingale, I said to her in my mind, for I am master here.

I must relate, however, that in the scene which followed (I deliberately refer to it as a "scene", for the albeit unoriginal notion that my life since my wedding has become something of a farce does very often strike me as apt) I demonstrated all too lamentably my lack of masterliness and found myself most horribly insulted and abused. This is what happened:

I found Celia, not in bed as Farthingale had pretended, but sitting on the orange and green cushions of the window seat, fully dressed in her black garb, staring out at the dismal dawn.

I asked her if she had slept well and she replied that she had not slept at all so hideous did she find the room, so vulgar, so gaudy and tasteless. She could not, she said, imagine anyone – except probably myself – being capable of finding any rest within it.

Reminding myself that I should not become angry, I assured her calmly that she was free to select another room whenever she wished. I then asked her if I might sit down. She answered that she would prefer me to remain standing.

By this time disconcerted by Celia's hostility, of which I truly believed myself undeserving, I nevertheless began upon what I had come to say. I told Celia that I of all people, who had briefly known some affection from the King, understood exceedingly well the quality, the measure of her sadness. I began to speak of the terrible degree to which my being and my spirit, once calm and content in its serving of God and the Trinity, was now possessed by the King. I went so far as to say that I believed there was no man or woman in the Kingdom (be they as pious as my dead parents, be they Puritan or Quaker, be they lord or lunatic) utterly free from and untouched by any longing to see their own putrid lives lit up by his radiance. "Inevitably then," I went on, "you and I, Celia, who have known something of the man's love…"

"Love?" shrieked Celia. "What presumption, Merivel! What self-deception! How can you dare to speak of what the King felt for you as love! Not for one second, not for one mote of time did King Charles love you, Merivel. I advise you never again to use the word!"

"My only intention…" I began, but Celia, now standing and fixing upon my face her fearful eyes, refused to let me speak. She jabbed a small white finger towards my scarlet waistcoat as she yelled: "The truth is that the King, in his love for me, in his passion for me, made use of you. He used you, Merivel. He looked around for the stupidest man he could find, the densest, the most foolish, the one who would accept whatever he did like a dog and cause him no trouble – and he found you! I begged him, don't marry me to that idiot, I begged him on my knees, but all he did was laugh. "Who can I ask," he said, "to be paid cuckold except an idiot?" Do you understand, Merivel? Dense as you are, do you comprehend what I'm saying?"

Well, I'm afraid I cannot go on with the scene. It is very painful, is it not? Of course I "comprehended", as she put it. I comprehended all too chillingly and although, in her rage and despair, she flung yet more insults at me, while the odious fat Farthingale looked on and smirked, I simply am not able to set them down.

I made no further attempt to offer my friendship to Celia, let alone enquire how the King's rejection of her had come about, but quietly withdrew from the room, shutting the door behind me before Farthingale could slam it in my face.

My first thought was: to whom, after this terrible revelation, shall I turn for comfort? To Pearce? To Will Gates? To Violet Bathurst? To Meg Storey? To my lost wench, Rosie Pierpoint? I felt a most terrible need of some kindly human company. But the hour was still early, my house dark, and I imagined them all sleeping: Pearce on his back with his white hands folded upon his ladle; Will Gates on his truckle bed dreaming of village girls; Violet enclosed by sumptuous brocade, safely absent from old Bathurst's brain; Meg in her attic, fallen asleep in her drawers and with beer upon her breath; sweet Rosie in Pierpoint's bed, stirring now to the murmur of the waking river… and I let them be.

I walked away from the Marigold Room to the west wing of the house and climbed the cold stone stairway to the circular room in the turret, whose discovery had given me so much joy. The room was still empty, still untouched. I went to each of the windows and looked out. A small slit of red in the sky hinted at sunrise. A white mist lay on the park, shrouding the deer.

I sat down under one of the windows. It will never be used now, this seemingly perfect room, I thought. At least, not by me. For it is surely the place which, though it aspires to do so, my mind can neither order nor understand. It is beyond my limit. I am earthbound, gross, ignorant. I will never reach to here.

It was of course Pearce to whom I eventually confided what had been said by Celia in the Marigold Room.

I had agreed to go with him upon a strange errand: to dig up a small quantity of earth from the village graveyard, from which Pearce intended to extract the saltpetre. He is suffering, among other afflictions, from a bladder stone and hopes to dissolve it in time by swallowing regular doses of this foul substance.

For the purposes of gathering the earth, he had taken with us a small spade and a leather bag. With some chivalry (Pearce still being weak from his arduous journey across the Fens) I offered to carry the spade and Pearce hung the bag about his long neck, thus giving himself more than ever the air of a mendicant.

We walked slowly down the drive and out onto the little road that leads to the village. Once we had gathered the earth, it was my intention to offer Pearce some refreshment at the Jovial Rushcutters, over which I could tell him what had been said to me. I found, however, that so slow was the pace of Pearce's walk that I was forced to prattle to keep myself from getting cold and thus had come out with my sad story long before we had reached the village, finishing it by hurling the spade away from me in a violent gesture of anguish.

Pearce looked at me. In his large eyes, I did detect a small glimmer of pity, but for some time, during which I retrieved the spade, he walked on in silence. I was just beginning to wonder whether I should embark on my tale again, this time making certain every few sentences that he was listening to me, when Pearce cleared his throat and said:

"It is my belief, all unfashionable as I know it to be, that all things, including lunacy, may be susceptible to cure."

"What?" I said.

"It has been believed since the beginning of time, that the mad are possessed of Devils and are thus filled with evil. This evil, it is universally agreed, must be beaten out of them by extreme chastisement, torture and all other conceivable kinds of cruelty…"

"Pearce," I said, "happy as I am to discuss your work at the New Bedlam at some later time I would ask you now to give your attention to my state of mind and – "

"I am giving my attention to your state of mind, Merivel. If you could, for once, listen to what I have to say instead of disregarding me, you will see that I have some helpful ideas on the subject."

We walked on. A pale sun now emerged from behind a bank of cloud and glimmered eerily upon us.

"Let me describe to you," Pearce went on, "a woman who was brought to me at the Whittlesea Hospital – for such is the name we have given to our Bedlam. This woman had been found half drowned in a ditch after wandering the shire for month upon month, year upon year, begging and shouting obscene words, mortifying her body, particularly her breasts and her arms with sharp hawthorn twigs. Her chief delight, in her poor suffering mind, was to defile. She kept her own excrement in a pouch, with which to smear the hands and fine clothes of those who gave her alms; with the same substance she daubed tombstones and churches. When we took her in, so terrible was her rage that, though I do not like to see this done, we were forced to chain her limbs to the wall. And for several weeks, she fought night and day with her chains, so that her wrists and ankles became running sores, no matter how carefully we bound them with cloth. Do you begin to form a picture of this woman, Merivel?"

"Yes, thank you, Pearce," I said.

"Very well. Let me recount to you then the morning upon which I went to this woman and found her quiet at last. She was sitting hunched in the corner, her limbs folded up and still. As I entered, she lifted her arm and pointed to two large turds she had recently voided onto the floor. I did not particularly wish to look at them, but her pointing was very insistent and the change in her demeanour so considerable that I did what she asked. And when I approached, I saw that writhing in and out of the greenish stools were two great worms, each several inches long, very white and loathsome. And then I looked again at the woman and she was weeping. And I unchained her and we took her away and washed her and put her in a clean bed. And from that day she was calm and talked with us of her home when she was a child and of the baby she had in her sister's care and we knew that she was cured. The worms had poisoned her blood and this poisoned blood had entered her brain. She was not wicked, Merivel. She was ill. Mercifully for her, her body at last discharged from itself the source of her illness."

"I am glad for her," I said flatly.

"And so to you, my dear friend. Now I shall tell you what I perceive has happened. You are possessed by one thought: you wish the King to draw you back to him and to love you. In the absence of this love, you are literally mad with grief. And in time this madness will work horribly in you, so that you will become, like the woman I've just spoken of, a defiler. True, you may not daub others with excrement, but you will daub them with hate. Unless you can come to see your ache for the King's favours as a morbid affliction from which you must rid yourself or die."

Pearce stopped on the road and reached out and placed his bony hands on my shoulders. I opened my mouth to speak, but he went on:

"What happened this morning, those harsh words that were spoken, I can only see as beneficial, Merivel. Do not stop me, but listen! In this knowledge, the knowledge that the King has never loved you, only used you, as I long suspected, lies the only hope of your cure. For this knowledge must be the beneficial evacuation of nature, the rank and putrified stool which, foul as it is, carries out and away the far fouler source of poison and decay – the great worm of hope."

I stared at Pearce. I was unable to speak, so filled was I suddenly with belief in the rightness of what he had said. I could only nod my head and keep nodding it up and down, as if I were a stupid jester trying to jingle the bells on his hat.

Chapter Six. The King's Drops

Some days passed, during which I felt a welcome calm settle upon my spirits.

When Pearce informed me he must return to Whittlesea, I thanked him – with precisely the kind of sentimental profusion he so scorns in me – for saving me, before it was too late, from becoming a veritable lunatic and earnestly begged him to visit me again at Bidnold as soon as his work permitted. He replied that he would pray for me and urged me meanwhile to return to my medical books, "in order," as he put it, "to replace the world of acquisition with the world of knowledge." I had not the heart to tell him that I did not feel capable of doing this. "What I can promise you Pearce," I said, "is that my foolish expectation with regard to all matters Royal is dead. I do not expect, as long as I live, to see the King again. Where my future lies, I cannot tell. In my painting, perhaps?"

I report here that Pearce's opinion of my pictures was very little higher than Finn's, but he made no comment upon this last statement, only busied himself with gathering up his "burning coals" and placing them into a little tragic pile. In a sudden excess of affection for him, I offered to give him my horse, Danseuse, for his journey, but he refused, informing me that the mare was too strong and high-spirited for him and requesting me modestly to purchase a new mule for him.

One of my grooms was duly sent on this errand and returned with a speckled, ungainly creature, "somewhat prone to bite, Sir Robert, but stout-hearted, Sir, for the long trek."

I did not tell Pearce about the biting and the mule was straight away saddled up. Pearce mounted and without further word to me, trotted off down the drive. Just as he reached the first bend, I saw the animal throw its head round and attempt to snap at Pearce's foot. Pearce answered this insult with a kick to the mule's flank and man and beast shot off at gallop, leaving behind them a small plume of dust, at which I stared until it settled.

Feeling chilly and in need of some refreshment, I asked Will to bring a jug of mulled wine to my Withdrawing Room, where I intended to pass an hour or two alone in thought. Somewhat to my consternation, I found Celia there, staring at my bird.

"Ah," I said, "I will not disturb you," beginning to turn and go from the room.

"What is the bird?" enquired Celia.

I hesitated. The notion that Celia, like Pearce, would slander the poor thing depressed me exceedingly.

"It was a gift to me," I said hesitantly. "I am told it is an Indian Nightingale."

"It is most beautiful," said Celia. "Only it does not sing."

Celia turned her face towards me then and I saw that it had regained some measure of its youthfulness and repose. It struck me, as it had never struck me hitherto, that she was indeed a very pretty woman.

"Well," I said. "It does sing. But it has to be encouraged. I could, if you wish, fetch my oboe and play a few notes to it and you might hear its very melodious trill."

"Pray, do," said Celia.

I shall now tell you that, in the preceding days, during which I had begun to regain some solace of mind, I had spent many hours alone in my Music Room doing battle with my instrument, as a result of which I was now able to play a little song upon it, entitled Swans Do All A-Swimming Go.

It was this then, after I had offered Celia a glass of mulled wine and she had, to my astonishment, accepted it, which I attempted to play for her and the bird. Like all beginners, I made a false start or two, but eventually succeeded in playing the piece quite jauntily. When I had finished, Celia, who had been watching me, turned away and put a hand up to her mouth, as if to hide a smile. I was not the least offended, because my efforts with these wretched Swans amused me greatly and, as I laid the oboe down, I burst out laughing. Celia now could no longer contain her mirth, and for a full minute we stood side by side and laughed and the bird opened its marigold beak and poured out at us a crystalline trill.

A most pleasant hour then ensued. Uninterrupted by the odious Farthingale, Celia and I drank the spiced wine and, with great dignity and courage, she asked me to forgive her for the insults of the morning in the Marigold Room. "The truth is," she said, "I believe we live in an age where many are made fools and many are deceived. I, in my faith in the King's love, am very probably as foolish as you. And yet I am convinced he will call me back to him."

"Celia," I began, "is it not better not to hope…?"

"I have no choice," she said, "I must hope or die. For to no other thing on earth do I give any value whatsoever. There if no other thing for me but this."

"Then with all my heart I shall pray that King Charles will send for you. But meanwhile – "

"Meanwhile, Merivel, accept my gratitude for this lodging. I shall spend much of my days alone, but I trust the times when we meet may be as cordial as this."

"Amen," I said.

"Merely, Merivel, do not expect me to be merry."

"I shall not."

"And I would ask you, now that Sophia and I are comfortable in the Rose Room, to let this be my private habitation. Never, if you will, come near it."

"Naturally, I would not…"

"Then we shall endure," she said, "until a better time arrives."

She stood up to leave then. Emboldened by her honesty and courtesy, I asked her whether she would sup with me that evening. She hesitated only momentarily before replying that she would.

So overjoyed by this was I, that I descended at once to the kitchen. To Cattlebury's creative hands, I consigned a menu of eel tart, pigeon breasts stewed with madeira and Spanish plums, roasted quail with a salad of fennel, followed by egg pudding and boiled apples. Farthingale, I commanded, was to be served her supper upstairs.

She came flying down to Bidnold in her coach and the snorting and whinnying of her horses was to be heard far and wide. She entered my house in all her most magnificent finery with her head held high and proud, my Lady Bathurst with a great anger and lust upon her!

She demanded to see me. She was told I was at supper with my wife. She pushed past the servants and swept into the Dining Room, where Celia and I were at work upon the eel tart. She stared at us. She wore on her head a most admirable velvet cap, from which protruded upright two pheasant tails, a most peculiar but arresting fashion. I gazed at her.

She did not have to speak for me to understand the crime of which I stood accused. Since the arrival of Pearce, I had not once been to visit her or sent word to her. By now, the news that my wife had come would have reached her and she would have wrongly supposed this to be the cause of my neglect.

I must now tell you that Violet Bathurst's language, learnt I suspect from Bathurst and the hunting field, can turn at times most deliciously vulgar and I saw, even as Violet opened her mouth, that this would be one such time. Anxious that Celia be spared accusations that would distress her, I stood up, bowed and apologised to my wife, caught Violet by her angry wrist and pulled her peremptorily from the room.

Letting her fury rain down upon my head, I led her quickly to my Withdrawing Room, where I slammed my door behind us, took the wild struggling creature in my arms and kissed her with considerable force. Her body was hot and trembling and her rage seemed to have perfumed her skin with a scent so magnificently irresistible that in a matter of moments I had torn the pheasant tails from her head, lain her down upon the carpet from Chengchow, unbuttoned my breeches and entered her with more passion and haste than I had felt for any woman since my lost afternoons of Rosie Pierpoint. With each push of my loins, Violet swore at me, thus further exciting both herself and me, so that shrieking and foul-mouthing each other, we arrived together at our little moment of ecstasy and clung to each other, swooning and gasping as it passed.

We stood up at last. Violet had ceased her shrieking. I kissed her shoulder, swearing on the life of my sweet mother that I was not, nor would ever be, in the habit of touching my wife and promised to visit her the following evening and spend the night in her bed. At which time, I told her, I would explain my absence, which had been caused only by a visit from my friend Pearce, with whom I had had such grave discourse that all thoughts of pleasure had been dislodged from my mind.

I fastened the pheasant tail hat to her lovely head. She placed a very tender kiss on my flat nose and obediently left. I waited until I heard her coach clatter off into the night, and then returned to the Dining Room. The eel tart had been removed and the pigeons served. Celia sat upright and still, sipping her wine.

"I must apologise," I said, "for the unforeseeable interruption. Pray do begin upon your pigeons."

"Thank you," said Celia. "Your cook, at least, is exceedingly good. Tell me, Merivel, do you have mistresses?"

"Naturally," I replied, "I am a man of my time."

"And is that woman one of them?"

"She is. Her name is Lady Bathurst."

"And do you love her?"

"Ah," I said, "that word that finds itself so frequently upon our lips!"

"Well?"

"No, Celia. I do not love her. Now pray tell me how you find Cattlebury's madeira sauce?"

Celia replied that it was excellent. My unexpected exertions with Violet had given me a ravening hunger and I set upon several pigeons with somewhat unseemly attack. I was wiping my mouth in preparation for the quail when I heard the unmistakable sound of a horse cantering swiftly up the drive. Moments later, just as the quail were being put before us, the Dining Room door was flung open once more and Will Gates came rushing in.

"A letter, Sir!" he said excitedly. "Come this very moment from London."

"Very well, Will. There's no need for such haste. Give it to me."

He put the letter into my hands. He looked at it and I looked at it. We both knew, by the unmistakable seal upon it, that what had arrived on this extraordinary night was a letter from the King.

It is in my possession still, this letter.

This is what it says:

Merivel,

To our dear Fool, we send greetings.

Pray be good enough to visit us in our Physic Garden at eight o'clock before noon tomorrow, Friday December the tenth in this the fourth year of our Reign, 1664.

This command comes from Your Only Sovereign and Loyal Servant of God,

Charles Rex

I rode through the night, taking Danseuse as far as Newmarket, changing horses there and again at Royston. Will Gates begged me to let him accompany me, fearful, I believe, that in my passion to reach London I would go flying into a ditch, there to die unmourned. But I refused. "The stars," I said, (succumbing, I know not why, to a fleeting attack of Pearceian romanticism), "will be my companions, and the very darkness itself!"

I had anticipated and indeed so it proved, that my spirit on this journey would be hurtling ahead of my body, causing me to shout at it in order to rein it in. It did not worry me if some poor cottar woke under his low eave to hear me singing or shrieking in the December night, but I preferred to undertake this noisy adventure alone, leaving Will to keep an eye on Farthingale lest, in my absence, she got intolerably above herself and began setting fire to my paintings, baiting my bird, playing my oboe, or I know not what.

As I set off, Celia was weeping. No doubt it pained her, nay, frightened her beyond measure that it was to me and not to her that the summons had come. She would, she said piteously, send some message with me, some plea, but knew not how to shape the words. And I could not linger for an instant, not even to finish my supper or powder my wig. "If I do not throw myself into the saddle at once," I told Celia, "I shall not reach London by morning, and you know as well as I that if I am not there at the hour appointed, His Majesty will not wait for me. As sternly as he commands loyalty from his subjects does he command punctuality. A betrayal of time he regards as a betrayal of faith. The first object that he ever showed me, Celia, was a clock."

And so I galloped away. Into my pockets I had thrust four or five quail to sustain me through the twelve hours of travel and at the moment of my departure, Will came running with a flask of Alicante, which I strapped to my saddle. "Farewell!" I shouted, but did not look behind. The road ahead mesmerised my being.

I entered London at seven o'clock. Over the river, unglimpsed by me for so long, rose the sluggish sun and mist streamed up off the water. I heard the swearing of the bargemen and the shouting of the lightermen, the cry of gulls and the ruffle of pigeons, and though my thighs ached and my rump was sore, I knew that my spirit was still strong.

See me, then, arrive at last at Whitehall. I have stopped at an inn to relieve myself and to drink some water, suffering suddenly from a terrible thirst. I have had the serving girl brush my breeches and wash my boots. I have shaken the dust from my wig and soaped my face and hands. I feel extraordinarily hot as I enter the Physic Garden, I wonder if I am about to vaporise and disappear, leaving behind nothing more than a greasy puddle. Once again, as on that first most terrible visit, I feel that the near presence of the King has altered the air. "Lord God," I say, sending out one of my little bleeps of prayer, "help me to breathe."

I walk on between the neat hedges of box, smelling those herbs that outlast the winter, bay, rosemary, sage, lemon balm, thyme, and there, in the very middle of the garden, setting his watch by the sundial, I see him, the man who, if a hole were made in my breast such as the one I saw at Cambridge, I would beg to reach in and take hold of my heart.

I approach and remove my hat. I go down on my knees. I am choked and unable to speak. To my shame, I feel my eyes fill with tears. "Sir…" I manage to whisper.

"Ah. Merivel. Is it you?"

I raise my head. I do not want the King to see that I am crying, yet I know that in this instant he will see far more than this, that in my face he will be able to discern, with terrible precision, the degree of suffering which his neglect of me has caused.

"It is me. It is I, in fact, Sire…" I stammer.

He walks elegantly to where I'm kneeling, the harsh cinders of the path seeming to make wounds on my skin. He reaches out and touches my chin with his glove.

"And how is your game of tennis coming along?" he asks.

I feel, to my intense agony, a fat tear slide down my chin and moisten his glove.

"It would be coming along well, Sir, I'm sure," I say stupidly, "except that I do not have a tennis court at Bidnold."

"No tennis court? That is why you are getting fat, then, Merivel."

"No doubt it is. That and a greed of which I do not seem able to rid myself…"

It is at this moment that I realise that the pocket of my coat is terribly stained by the remnants of the quail, which I have forgotten to remove. I cover the pocket quickly with the plumes of my hat. The King laughs. To my intense delight. I feel his hand leave my chin and his long fingers travel upwards over my mouth, take hold of my flat nose and give it a vigorous tweak.

"Get up then," he says, "and come with us, Merivel. There is much to discuss."

He leads me, not to his State Rooms, but to his laboratory which, during my time at Whitehall, was a place that fascinated me and in which the King's restless mind was forever at work on new experiments, the most engrossing of which was the fixing of mercury. The smell in the place reminded me of the smell of Fabricius's own room at Padua where, on his night table, he was fond of dissecting lizards. It had about it something of the smell of the sewer or the tomb and yet my brain was invariably excited by it. I suppose that, before I turned away from anatomy, I recognised it was the odour that accompanied discovery.

As we enter the laboratory, the King casts off his coat and throws it down. His chemist is not at work yet so we are alone in the room. I gather up his coat and hold it in my arms while he strides along the tables looking and probing and sniffing. So engrossed does he seem for a moment with the experiments in progress, that I wonder if he has forgotten me. But after a few moments he stops and picks up a phial of ruby-coloured liquid and holds it to the light.

"Regard this," he says. "A purgative recently patented by me."

"Excellent, Your Majesty," I say.

"Excellent it is. But it is no mere tedious physic, Merivel. It has a property I did not foresee and which is both informative and amusing. We call it the King's Drops. Presently, I shall put some into a sip of wine for you. And we shall see what follows."

I say nothing. The King perches on a stool very near me and stares up into my face.

"Time has altered you, Merivel," he says. "Some vital part of you appears to be asleep."

I do not know what to say to this either.

"I see this same look in very many of my people, as if they merely prefer to be and no longer to think. Put down my coat, Merivel."

I lay the heavy brocaded coat aside, catching a fleeting whiff of the sweet perfume with which even the King's gloves and handkerchiefs are scented.

"Mercifully for England – perhaps mercifully for you, my dear Fool – something has arrived on our shores which may rouse us all from sleep."

"What may that be, Sir?"

"Plague, Merivel. Pestilence. At Deptford four people have died. And it will spread. Some of us will be spared and some will die. But all of us will awake."

"I heard no rumour of plague, Sir."

"No. But then you are at Bidnold. You are asleep in Norfolk. You are dreaming, Merivel!"

I am about to reply that indeed I have been dreaming of former times and wishing them with me again, when the King takes from his pocket a lace handkerchief and proceeds, with some tenderness, to wipe the moisture from my boiling face.

"Now," he says, having cleaned me up, "we must speak about Mistress Clemence, your wife. For this reason I have summoned you, Merivel. From my knowledge of your character – and I hope I am not mistaken in this – I believe you to be, like your father before you, a man who clearly understands and accepts the station to which chance and favour, no less than his own deserving, have brought him and does not diminish himself by lusting after what he cannot have. Much has been given to you, Merivel, has it not?"

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"And you do not, even indolent as I fear you have become, drive your brain to despair by wishing for more, n'est-ce pas?"

"No…"

"Or do you? Is it a Dukedom you want of me now?"

"No, no. On my honour."

"Good. Look at that toad, by the way, the thing in the bell jar. Will you help me to dissect it later?"

I look to where the King is pointing and I see an awesomely large bull toad, stiffened and bloated by death.

"If you wish me to, Sir," I say.

"Yes, I wish you to. Now, listen well, Robert. When I married Celia to you, it was to hide her, so to speak, from the very intelligent gaze of Lady Castlemaine, the better to find her again myself and sport with her unobserved."

"This I know, my Liege."

"Very well. You may imagine then my dismay, my fury nay, when I hear from the lips of your wife the command to end my liaison with Castlemaine, likewise to terminate my amours with certain actresses from the Playhouse, and keep her as my only woman, outside the bed of my good Queen. Naturally, I did not answer her one single word, for no subject on earth may command me thus. I merely gave instructions that she was to vacate her house at Kew and all her possessions save her dresses and jewellery and ride at once to you, where she must remain until the folly of her importunate conduct burns shame into her skull!"

The King gets up off his stool and begins once again to walk up and down, poking and prying at his chemical compounds. I see his cheek twitching, a tick of nature caused only and always by anger. I remain silent, only nodding. After a moment or two, the King picks up a large pestle and, using this for emphasis, continues thus:

"Yet, alas, Merivel, I miss her! Though I would whip the silly girl the grosser part of me is uncommonly sensible to her absence. What a plight! My reason tells me to abandon her for ever, but this, the Royal tool, is waving about in search of her. And life is brief, Merivel. We should go to pleasure, as to all things, with energy and will, a gift you once had even to excess, if I recall."

"And still would, Sir, if my mind – "

"Then go to this one task with a will for me. Impress upon Celia the folly of her demands. Remind her of my fondness for order and rank and my loathing for those who get above themselves. Teach her to be content with what she has, for what she has is much, and bid her never to hope for more. Tell her then to come to me in humility and she may have it all again, her house, her servants, her money and the King in her bed from time to time."

Disliking my role as messenger, I am about to say to the King that I have had very little in the way of conversation with Celia and fear that her dislike of me may hamper my attempts to pass on his wisdom, when the King grabs my hand and declares: "Enough of that. I leave it in your hands. Now come, Merivel, I shall now pour you a cup of wine and, into the wine, we shall put one or two of my Drops!"

His anger has vanished as swiftly as it came on. He chuckles as he pours and measures. I watch his hands, then his smile, which is so beloved to me. I have a sudden belief that whatever is in this cordial, the King intends me no harm.

I drink down the draught. The King is amused and delighted and slaps his thigh.

"Good!" he says. "Now we shall start work upon the toad."

It would be vain to remind King Charles, I decide, that very many months have passed since I held a scalpel or a cannula in my hands and that, by an act of will, I have consigned my dissecting skills to oblivion. I sense also, that he is eager to anatomise the toad himself, demonstrating to me the deftness of his long fingers, the neatness and care of his work. So I say nothing, as the toad is taken out of the bell jar and laid upon the tray and His Majesty rolls up his sleeves. I merely watch and, as I do so, I find myself unaccountably invaded by an intense happiness, such as I have not known since the far-off days of Rosie Pierpoint, of tennis lessons, of games of Rummy, of the gift of dinner napkins.

The King cuts, flays and pins the whitish skin of the toad's belly.

"The gut," he says as he makes his first incision in the flesh, "has a jewelled sheen to it, as we shall see…"

Careful as he is, the intestines spill out, so that their precise arrangement is lost to us. Across time, the voice of Fabricius snarls in my ear, "Do not tangle with the bowel, Merivel! You are not a Laocoon!"

"Ah!" says the King. "See the colour?"

I am staring at the toad's intestines and I am aware that the soft coils have a silvery patina. But I am a little distracted, for the word "colour" has reminded me suddenly of my attempts at painting and the frenzy of mind that seems to accompany them, and without really intending to, I begin to tell the King of my desire to paint, to capture the essence of people and nature, "before they dissolve or change, you see, Sir, for everything on earth, or so it seems to me, is in a state of perpetual motion, even inanimate objects, for the light upon them changes, or the eye with which we beheld them yesterday is today re-shaping what it sees…"

I babble on. The King does not speak, but works methodically, unhurriedly at his dissection until all – heart and lungs and spleen and windpipe and sperm sacs – is laid out before us. I speak about my painting of my park and Finn's loathing of it. I try to describe the painting but hear myself, as if my voice is no longer mine, as if it belonged to Pearce's worm-filled lunatic, describe instead the feelings that drove me to painting: my terrible fear that the King had abandoned me, no longer loved me or found any need of my company. "I was your Fool," I hear myself wailing, "and however serious may be the business of government, do not tell me that the King has no need of laughter!"

I am crying again. Tears are coursing down my face and onto the toad on the tray, over which, finding myself now tired to my very marrow, my body has slumped.

I see the King's hands put down his instruments. He picks up a cloth and wipes blood and viscera off his fingers. And then I lose him. I do not know what happened except that I hear myself talking on and on, to the King I believe, who is no longer near me but in the shadowy laboratory somewhere, moving up and down as he always does, restless and tall and never still… but he is not there. I am alone in the place. He has gone out into the sunlight and I am lying down in the dark, under the oak work bench. I am getting into my grave.

I am woken by an elderly man, wearing the garb of an apothecary. I am parched. The old man understands this and gives me cool, sweet-tasting water in a beaker.

Food is brought to me. I am seated at a little table. I eat some bread. A liveried servant hands me a letter.

I am in the Physic Garden. The sky above me is bright. I break the seal of my letter.

Poor Merivel, (says the letter) I did not warn you, the King's Drops alchemise secrets into words. And yet you have told me nothing. For every thing you revealed, I saw in your face. Beware, however, that love does not turn into need. And so Godspeed with your mission to Celia. I would have her think upon our displeasure for the duration of two months, after which time, she may, if in humble spirit, return to Kew, where we shall come to her.

Signed, Charles Rex

I look over to the sundial. What I wish to say to the King is, "Let me make my entrance again. Let me arrive again, knowing what I know about the Drops." But of course he is no longer there.

Chapter Seven. Water

I did not linger at Whitehall.

Though greeted warmly by a posse of gallants in whose chambers I once played at cards, forfeits and music-making, I found I was in no mood for their company. My head ached intolerably and the thoughts fashioned by my brain seemed to have the quality of dreams. I had a terrible longing to lie down, not necessarily to sleep, but simply to rest my brain. Fain would I have gone to that first chamber of mine, where I had performed my cure-of-neglect upon Lou-Lou, and put on a clean nightcap and lain upon the soft pillows and listened to the great orchestra of the river.

Dinnertime found me at the Leg Tavern where I drank a good quantity of ale to slake the thirst that still burned in my stomach, and then slept an hour on one of its hard settles. I was hungry when I woke and was served a most peculiar meal, a turnover of starlings and a pigs trotter pickled in olives. "Starlings," said the pretty wench who served me, "having blackish flesh and strong-tasting, cure all men of mopish humours," and it is true that, when I had eaten, I felt my thoughts to be more sensible. Either the starlings had worked some humoural change upon me, or merely the potent effect of the King's Drops was now at last abating.

When I emerged from the Leg, I found the street burnished with most beautiful winter sunlight. I am very susceptible to weather. In a Norfolk wind, I sometimes feel my sanity flying away. My good spirits replenished, then, by the starling turnover and the afternoon sun, I decided to make my way to the house of Rosie Pierpoint. To supplement Pierpoint's meagre wage as a bargeman, Rosie had set herself up, in 1661, as a laundress, and it was among her crimping irons and her vats of starch and her great coal-burning stove that I hoped to find her. If I could not persuade her to let me touch her Thing, I would content myself with watching the sunset from her window while she washed my shirt and removed the quail stains from my coat pocket.

She was at home and hard at work. So great was the heat in the workroom, she was stripped down to her bodice and her soft arms were moist and pink – a pink so very pretty that I would dearly love to arrive at the precise colour on my palette. Even as I approached Rosie and she rested her flat iron on the stove top and we embraced each other with a good deal of joy, I remembered seeing, in some great painting, a cherub the colour of Rosie's arms and fell to wondering how, in his winged existence, the little fellow had got so hot.

What followed was most sweet and delectable, reminding me that there is scarcely any more agreeable thing on earth than the meeting of parted lovers. To the ease of mind engendered by this Act of Forgetting is added the balm of pleasant memory. As the brain banishes its ever-present consciousness of death, so the body finds itself enraptured by rediscovery. It is not, I think, fanciful to say that such meetings are both Acts of Oblivion and Acts of Remembrance.

I stayed with Rosie until the sun went down. We lay on a rumpled pile of soiled sheets, shirts, petticoats, lace collars and table cloths and on this dirty linen made a very fine feast of each other, a feast of which, if I live to be an old man, I may well, in my clean and lonely bed, find myself dreaming.

We got up at last and Rosie lit two rushlights and by the light of these would work on at her ironing table till Pierpoint came home and they had their supper of whelks and oysters and bread and ale.

And I made my way to Hydes Wharf at Southwark where I hired a tilt-boat and asked the tilt-man, who had a foxy and mischievous face, to paddle me to Kew.

" Kew is a fairish way," this tilt-man said, "and it will be black pitch night 'fore we get to there, Sir."

"I know," I replied, "but my day and the best part of last night both put me into a lather of heat and I have a great mind to feel the cool of the river."

"How shall we keep the channel, Sir, in the dark, and not stray onto shallows or be splintered to pieces by a lighter or a barge?"

"There is a three-quarter moon," I pointed out, "and no cloud. We shall see our way tolerably well."

"We shall be as cold as corpses by the time we get there!"

It was plain to me by now that Fox (as I christened the tilt-man) had no desire to take me on this journey, but, remembering that in this new age most things can be had by bribery, I offered to double his fare from two shillings to four. I settled myself comfortably under the little canopy, and we embarked on the evening tide.

Why did I wish to go to Kew? Now that the effects of the Drops had worn off entirely and I was once again capable of rational thought, I knew that I must give some attention to what the King had told me concerning Celia. For reasons which I could not completely comprehend, I felt exceedingly uncomfortable with the message I was instructed to convey. Something within me wished, for the first time in my life, to disobey the King. Why? I really did not know. Far from purging me of all hope, the event of the morning had proved to me that the King's affection for me still endured. What he had said of Celia, however, his hand gesturing with the pestle, seemed designed to convey to me that, beyond mere lust, he had no feelings for my wife at all, and that his restless spirit would very soon tire of her. In going to Kew, then, in hoping to see (all shuttered and dark as I knew it would be) the house he had given her, I believe I had it in mind to try to measure his love for her and, according to how the scales tilted, decide upon the message I would take home to Bidnold. The notion that one is able to guage the quality of one person's love for another by a moonlit glimpse of a house got from a tilt-boat is, I freely admit, preposterous. And yet there is no other explanation for the journey my heart was suddenly so determined upon. Did the King love Celia, or did he not? In the company of Fox and with a light breeze ruffling my jabot and cooling my overheated face, I believed myself to be gliding towards my answer.

Fox, once settled to the task, rowed strongly and well. Binding some threadbare cloth about his neck to protect his scrawny gizzard from the coming night, he pushed me onwards, past the Temple and its arched gate, then on past the crammed acre of Whitehall where in almost every room and chamber lights appeared to be burning and my ears caught for one fleeting moment the sound of an oboe.

By Whitehall and beyond, the river, even at this evening hour, was still noisy, the quantity of small boats making the water slap against the landing steps and the gruff shouts of "Next oars!" from the bargemen putting me in mind of the barkings of a drill sergeant trying to marshal into some semblance of a line a disorderly platoon of fops.

Past Westminster, as the Thames took a southerly turn, it quietened and on our left side I saw begin the dark mass of Vauxhall Woods, where, as an angelic child in my little moire suit, my parents liked to take me on picnics and rambles. "If you are quiet, Robert," I remember my father whispering, "we shall presently come upon a family of badgers." But I fear that I was never quiet enough, for I do not recall ever seeing a badger in my life until one was brought to the dissecting laboratory at Caius and I saw at last the clownish markings of the animal, by which my father had been so touched.

"Tell me," I said to Fox, "are there still badgers in these woods?"

"Yes, Sir," answered Fox, "I heard tell you can see them there. If you are quiet."

I said nothing to this but, as we glided on towards Chelsea, I fell to wondering why I am so attached to noise. Even discordant noise (my own singing and my first disasters with Swans Do All A-Swimming Go) and noise that lacks meaning (the mad discourse of old Bathurst) creates in me a most definite gladness of heart and though, as a student of medicine, I knew silence to be essential to study, there were many days and nights where I suffered within it. When I die, I would like to be laid to rest by a skipping troupe of Morris dancers.

The moon was up now and fattish and by its light we rounded the bend to Chiswick Meadows. Not far from Kew, I turned to Fox and enquired of this old river-rat: "They say the King keeps a mistress at Kew and is sometimes seen by you watermen skulling upriver to visit her. Is there any truth in this story?"

Fox spat into the water.

"I saw him once," he said.

"Can you be certain that it was he?"

"Certain."

"How might you be able to tell?"

Fox spat again. Perhaps he was a Puritan and a Commonwealth man.

"It were morning," he continued,before dawn even come and nothing much moving on the river. I, Sir, I were taking cherries from Surrey to vendors at Blackfriars. Half light it were. Four o'clock in summer. And I saw this thin skiff coming on with a man very tall in it and his cloak cast aside and in this fine golden coat, and I says out loud, "That's one man in the Kingdom and one only!"

"Did you wait and watch? Did you see where he tied up?"

"More than that, Sir. I sold him some cherries."

"You did? So you saw his face close to, and it was he?"

"He all right. Gave me a penny for the fruit from a little jewelled purse."

"And you saw him land?"

"Yes."

"Could you show me the place?"

"Not in this dark, Sir."

I cleared my throat. "My excellent man," I said. "As I predicted, it is not dark at all, with that large moon up."

"Darkish, Sir."

"Nevertheless, please try, if you will, to remember the place and point it out to me."

We glided on. My face, that had burned for so many hours, was cool now and my hands were beginning to feel a trifle numb. Cold as I was, I felt inside me the heat of trepidation and anxiety. At any moment, I would see Celia's house. And then, as we turned and headed back against the wind and the tide, I would have to make up my mind…

I instructed Fox to steer the boat towards the north bank and to slow it. I offered to take the oars while he concentrated upon his task of remembering, but he would not entrust me (quite reasonably) with so precious a piece of his livelihood, informing me instead that he could row from here to Spital-fields blindfolded, and in so doing utterly negating his badinage about lost channels and collisions with lighters with which he had wheedled from me two poxy shillings. Dependent upon him as I was, however, I could not afford to show any anger. We crept forward in silence, turning once and retracing our route along some thirty or forty yards of bank and then going on further till at last Fox spied, in the cold, glimmering light, a small wooden jetty with steps leading up to it from the water.

"There's the place," he said, "that's she."

"Ah," I said, "but there's no house."

Fox shrugged. "It's there," he said.

I had him tie up to the jetty. With some difficulty, I clambered out of the small boat (now earning its name by tilting riotously the moment I stood up) and made my way along the landing stage. A pretty iron gate guarded a narrow path running between squat bushes I took to be hazels and hawthorns. At this moment, the moon disappeared behind a cloud, plunging me suddenly into blackness. I stood still, waiting for the moon to reappear. Though behind me I could still hear the slapping of the water, I had the illusion, for a moment or two, of having lost my way.

I walked cautiously on, aware of the night around me, some scuffling animal in the dead leaves, a night bird putting forth a little stuttering cry.

And then I heard music.

Moments later, as the clouds once again uncovered the moon, I found myself in a small knot garden and before me stood the house. It was not grand or large. Its principal rooms seemed, from the size of the windows, to be modest. It is, I thought on the instant, the kind of small house I would give my daughter, were I to have one. But I could not dwell long in my mind on its size, because it was clear to me now that one of the rooms, from which came the sound of a harpsichord and a flute, was full of people. Lamps and candelabra had been lit. On the window seat, a man lolled with his arm round some pretty wench's neck. A musical supper appeared to be in full swing. As I stood and breathed and tried to warm my hands by rubbing them together, I heard a sudden flight of laughter.

All the way back to Lambeth (where I intended to lodge for the night at an inn called the Old House) I pestered Fox, telling him he must have been mistaken. "Either," I said, "it was not the King whom you saw or else he did not tie up at that jetty." But his rodent features were hard and set, as was his mind, he informed me. He vividly recalled the ease and grace with which the King tied up his skiff and climbed out of it ("as if he had been a very waterman, Sir") and he insisted that there was no similar small jetty for another half mile upstream or more.

At the Old House I dined well and fell into conversation about the art of marble cutting with a likeable fellow from the Navy Office who recounted to me that the marble-cutter's life hangs in its entirety upon patience, for though the mass of stone that confronts him may be as large as a four-poster, he can, with his little tool, cut a mere four inches a day.

Pondering such steadfastness and perseverance and wondering if I would ever be capable of it in regard to my painting, I all of a sudden remembered, with a surge of bile to my stomach, my pledge to Violet Bathurst to spend this very night in her bed.

I had a dream of a drowned body. I was at Granchester Meadows with Pearce and a group of medical students and we sat on the banks of the weedy Cam and we saw this lumpen corpse come floating towards us. We had but one thought: we must retrieve the body for our anatomical studies. We took off our coats and lay on our stomachs and reached out and took hold of the swollen limbs. And then I perceived that the body was Celia's. Her hair streamed among the waterweed and her mouth was blueish and open, like the mouth of a fish. I was about to cry out to my fellow students to let go of her arms and legs when I woke. I was shivering and my throat was sore and my nose full of mucus and my thirst had returned.

I lit a candle and stumbled to the wash-stand in the unfamiliar room in the Old House and gulped some water and then got into the bed and tried to warm myself, but the dream of drowned Celia frightened me so much that I was afraid to sleep again in case it returned to me, as dreams are in the terrible habit of doing.

"God is the engineer of all dreaming," Pearce once announced to me. "He fills the sleeping mind with all we have neglected."

"Tosh, Pearce!" I said at the time. "For the great part of my dreams are about food. My nights are pleasantly filled with rabbit fricassées, venison pasties and chocolate syllabubs, none of which I have in the least neglected." If I remember rightly, Pearce then made some acidic rejoinder about God giving me a vision of my own gluttony, which I utterly ignored, but now the idea that this dream of drowning had been "sent" to me seemed entirely plausible. For, so confused and dismayed had I been by the sight of Celia's house filled with people and music (indeed as if the poor girl was dead and all memory of her drowned) that I had "neglected" to decide what I was going to tell her and in my conversation about the marble cutter had managed to put all thought of her from my mind.

So I lay and shivered and nursed the ague that had come upon me so suddenly and tried to weigh the whole matter in my mind without consideration for myself and in a detached and proper manner, as if Celia were my patient and I not I, but some wise Fabricius, some unparalleled physician utterly unprone to error.

By the time dawn broke and I permitted my snivelling self an hour of soothing sleep, I had come to the following decisions:

I would return to Celia and inform her that the King appeared to have forgotten her, that it was rumoured some new mistress had taken up residence at Kew, that he had expressed very forcefully to me his displeasure about her importunate behaviour but had not given me to believe that he would ever summon her back. I would then counsel her – exactly as Pearce had counselled me – about the folly of hope. "If," I would say to her, "you permit yourself to hope, you will come to insanity, Celia, and then I cannot tell what will become of you. Perchance you may come to poor Ophelia's end, drowned in a stream." I would explain to her that I had at last understood of what element the King was fashioned: "He is mercury," I would say. "He is of that same metal he spends hour after hour in his laboratory trying to extract from his flasks of cinnabar, but which is ever elusive and restless and cannot be fixed and held. And how will it profit any man or woman to love mercury?"

What I could not foresee was how I was to find any remedy for Celia's grief. I knew myself inadequate to the task. I was not Fabricius. I was not even Pearce. I had no wisdom.

This ague of mine, got no doubt from the extremes of heat and cold through which not only my body but my mind had passed in the preceding night and day, forced me to remain in my truckle bed at the Old House for an entire week.

When my fever worsened and I began to detect in my groin and in my neck some slight swelling, terror filled my heart. Plague was coming and where might it arrive more swiftly than to the malodorous Lambeth marshes? For more than fifty hours I imagined myself dying. I wept and cried out. I beseeched my poor burned mother to intercede with God for me, knowing my own prayers to be unheard. "Dear parents," I heard myself say in my delirium, "make God the gift of a hat. He is fond of plumes. Give Him a fine hat in exchange for my life!" I ranted and blubbed. My cowardice was as infinite as a well sunk from Norfolk to Chengchow.

Then on the third day, my fever lessened and my swellings began to go down. To the poor serving woman who brought me broth, I declared that I had been resurrected, which statement she read as an out-and-out blasphemy and quickly made the sign of the cross upon her bosom.

Still somewhat weak from my illness I took a stage coach to Newmarket, where I spent the night. At dawn the following morning, I was reunited with Danseuse and gratified by the little whinny of delight with which the mare greeted me. I am most fond of animals. I enjoy about them, in equal measure, that which is graceful and that which is gross. And they do not scheme. No man, woman or child exists in this boisterous Kingdom who is not full of plotting, yet the animals and the birds have not one good ploy between them. It is for this reason above all others, I suspect, that the King is so attached to his dogs.

Danseuse galloped home like a chariot horse, her spirits far out-distancing mine on this return journey. Though I clung to the reins and pressed my knees ardently to her sides, she unseated me near Flixton and as I lay winded in a ditch I suddenly perceived, not far from me, an old wrinkled woman lifting her hessian skirts and pissing onto the brambles. It amused me and I would have bid her good-day, except that I had no breath within me.

I struggled upright at last and remounted Danseuse, who was foraging for grass in the frosty lane. I tried to persuade her to trot sedately for a while, but she would not and we arrived at last at Bidnold in an unseemly sweat.

My clothes being frankly filthy and full of stench, I was in no mind to talk to Celia until I had soaked for some hours in a hot bath and put on clean linen. I called at once for Will (who reminds me sometimes of a small, nimble animal in his unquestioning loyalty to me) and within a short time I lay at my ease in a tub, regarding the moths on my stomach, while Will poured more and more hot water round me and I told him of my stay at the Old House and how Death had come into the room and laid an icy hand on me and caused me to snivel like a baby.

"If plague does come to Norfolk," I said to Will, "I shall try to show courage, but I am bitterly afraid it will be the false courage of a desperate man and not the true bravery of one whose mind and spirit are at peace."

Will shook his head, about to flatter me, no doubt, with his erroneous belief that when the hour approached I would conduct myself like a Parfit Gentil Knight, but before he could speak we heard suddenly the most lovely sound of a viola da gamba, coming, it seemed, from beneath us in my Music Room.

I sat up, causing a small tidal wave to splash over the rim of the tub. "Will," I said, "who is playing?"

"Ah," said Will, "I was about to inform you, Sir Robert: your wife's father is come."

"Sir Joshua?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Sir Joshua has come to Bidnold. But why, Will?"

"I do not really know, Sir, except or unless it be to take your wife home."

"Take her home?"

"Yes."

"You heard that mentioned?"

"Yes, I did, Sir. That as soon as you were returned, they would leave."

The music continued. I began vigorously to soap my body. I heard myself say to Will very tetchily that I would not permit Sir Joshua to take my wife away, that the King had commanded that she reside with me and that, besides, I had much to discuss with her.

Will gaped at me, being surprised, I dare say, at my apparent strength of feeling upon a subject to which he believed me to be utterly indifferent.

Chapter Eight. A Gift of Instruments

Bathed and scented, with a clean wig concealing my hog's bristles and a blue silk coat upon my back, I descended my stairs. As I did so, the sound of the viola ceased and I became aware – as so often in the wake of pleasant music – of the degree to which my mind is lightened by it, as if it gave to the dark mass of my brain a momentary sheen such as I had perceived upon the viscera of the King's toad.

A moment later, Sir Joshua recommenced his playing. This time, it was a song I had heard long ago at Cambridge, entitled I Lay Me Down in a Wood of Elm, a most sweet tune but with the scansion a little strained, there not being a great abundance of words that rhyme with "elm". I stood in my hallway and listened as an exquisitely high and beautiful voice began to sing. It was Celia's voice, which I had never until this moment heard, but which I now knew to be a soprano of astonishing purity. A cold shiver of delight ran through me. More than her white skin, more than her languid, silky hair, more than her small mouth or her firm breasts, it was surely this voice of hers which had so charmed and seduced the King. Compared to it, her person was nothing, pretty enough, womanly enough, but giving no hint that concealed within it lay a matchless sound. I sat down on a tapestry-covered stool and fell to considering the probability that every one of us conceals some secret talent, though what mine may be I was not yet able to determine. Pearce's, despite his harsh criticisms of the world and most things within it, was a talent for kindness. Violet's, I was tempted to suggest, was anger, for I knew of no other person in whom rage was more delicious or becoming. And the King's? Well, he was a person of a thousand talents, but whether there was yet one more that he kept secret from us all, only time will reveal.

The song continued. "Celia, Celia," I wanted to ask, "why did no one tell me how exquisitely you sing?" And a vision of myself, suddenly skilled upon my oboe, playing enraptured while my wife sang, momentarily rilled my mind. How different, how ordered and knowable life would be, if it could be arranged around a simple duet! As it was, I knew that the moment I entered the Music Room Celia would stop singing. I could play no part whatsoever in her music and by tonight she would be gone to her parents' house and Bidnold would be utterly silent, except for the occasional trilling of my Indian Nightingale. I took out of my pocket an emerald-coloured handkerchief and blew my nose, still intermittently blocked with mucus. I felt myself once again excluded from something to which I desired to contribute – however negligible my contribution might be. There is, I said to myself, as I stowed away my handkerchief, a degree of sadness in this observation.

I stood up. As soon as Celia knew of my return, she would press me for news of her situation and the moment was approaching when I would have to say what I had planned, thus smothering in her heart the small ember of hope which Pearce had led me to recognise as so fearful a thing. But as I walked towards the Music Room, I knew that I had faltered: I could not utter the words I had decided upon. For I knew beyond question that if I said them Celia's indifference towards me would turn again to loathing. As Cleopatra whipped the bearers of bad tidings, so Celia would flay me with her scorn and hatred. I, who was nothing to her, would become less than nothing. She would leave my house for ever and the whole magnificent story that the King had set in train would have reached an ending, long before its proper course had been run. And besides… ah, dangerous consideration!… I did not want to relinquish Celia's voice. So there you have it. At whatever cost to Celia's sanity and mine, I had become determined to keep her with me under my roof, at least for the two months decreed by the King.

So it was then that I entered the room and the music ceased abruptly, as I predicted it would, and Celia turned upon me a gaze full of astonishment and hope and Sir Joshua put down his instrument and held out his hand most cordially to me. I bowed to them both. "I am returned, as you can see," I said superfluously, and then began to compliment them upon their musical talents. Celia was not, of course, in the least interested in my opinion of her singing, but urged me to tell her at once what message I had brought from London. I remained calm in the face of her anxiety and impatience. I offered her my arm.

"If," I said, "you would do me the honour of taking a turn with me in the garden, I will inform you of all that has passed."

Celia cast a look of anguish at her father, but he nodded and so without more ado she laid her white hand on my sleeve and we walked to the hall, where I imperiously summoned Farthingale to go running for a cloak for her mistress.

The day was cold and the sun already a little low in the sky. The shadows cast by Celia and me were long, thus elongating me a great deal, so that had you but glimpsed us on the flat stones, you would have mistaken us for a very elegant couple.

After some moments, during which I rehearsed in my mind what I was about to say, I conveyed to Celia the following fiction, which I had invented on the spot, but by which I found myself to be agreeably impressed. "The King," I said, "would give no promise whatsoever with regard to you. He asks, simply, that you remain here – here at Bidnold and nowhere else – until what he termed 'an awareness of the changeful nature of all things' has grown upon you."

Celia stared at me, utterly disbelieving. "'The changeful nature of all things'? And why would he have me learn that, pray?"

"I cannot say, Celia," I replied. "All His Majesty would say was that he wished you to learn it, but believed it would take time, it being the case that the more youthful a person is, the harder it may be for such understanding to take root."

"And yet," retorted Celia, "has he not, in his cruel repudiation of me, made certain that I have had such an awareness harshly thrust upon me?"

"Indeed," I ventured, "but he is a great deal wiser than you or I, Celia, wise enough to know that, though there is always some learning in times of misfortune or loss, it is only through quiet reflection after the event has passed that we can put such learning to good use."

"But how long is such 'quiet reflection' to last? Am I to grow old in 'quiet reflection' and see my beauty vanish and all that once pleased him come to decay?"

"No. I'm sure he does not intend that."

"Then will it be weeks, months…?"

"He would not tell me, Celia."

"Why? Why would he not tell you?"

"Because he cannot say. He has put the matter into your hands and into mine."

"Into yours?"

"Yes. For I am to be the one to tell him – in his own words – When she has fitted her mind with wisdom and put from her all illusion."

"So!" and at this moment Celia pulled her hand roughly from my arm, "You are to be Judge! The King sends his Fool to decide on a matter of learning! May he forgive me, Merivel, but this does not strike me as just."

"No. Undoubtedly not. And yet I perceive a kind of justice in it. For I am not, as some other protector might be, enamoured of my role, in that I do not consider myself to be worthy of it. Thus, it is in my interest that you embark upon this journey of learning as quickly as possible, Celia, so that I may return to my life of foolishness, you to your house in Kew and the King to your bed."

"But how am I to come by this wisdom? By what means am I to 'embark'?"

"I do not know. Unless through your one peerless gift -through your singing."

"Through my singing?"

"Yes."

"How so?"

"I do not know. I can only guess that this must be your route. In my mediocre way, I am arriving at some misunderstanding of myself and the world through my efforts at painting and I venture to suggest that if you sing, say, of love or betrayal, or I know not what, you will learn not only something of these things, but also of the infinite ways by which men and women deceive themselves and the ruses they employ to make themselves master of another's destiny. And so your journey will already have begun…"

Celia did not look at all cheered by my suggestion. She drew her cloak around her and shook her head and her eyes filled with tears.

"If he had asked of me any practical thing, I would have done it," she said, "but how can I obey a command I do not fully understand? How will I ever obey it?"

"I do not know," I said for the third or fourth time. "I am certain, however, that you shall find a way, through music. And I will do all I can to help you."

That evening, Celia and Farthingale not deigning to stir from the Rose Room, I dined alone with Sir Joshua Clemence, a man who continues to treat me with great civility and for whom I have infinite respect. To my delight, he told me that the decorations at Bidnold amused him and that, though he did not find them restful, they indicated to him that I possessed "a most boisterous originality of mind and this in an age of slavish imitation and apishness."

He then, over a most flavoursome carbonado of pig produced by Cattlebury, broached the subject of his daughter, informing me (as if I did not know it already) that, having given her heart to the King, it was impossible for her to care at all for anyone or anything else on earth. "Even her mother and myself," he said, "though she is loyal and kindly to us, if the King demanded of her that she sacrifice us to get his love, I do believe she would.do it."

"Sir Joshua -" I began.

"I do not exaggerate, Merivel," he said. "For this is the nature of obsession; it is like a fathomless well, into which even those persons or things previously held dear may one day be thrown."

"So what is to become of Celia, if the King does not call her back?"

"He must call her back! She has told me what has been said to you. And so the matter rests in your hands, Merivel. If I read the thing rightly, she has been too importunate with the King. You must help her to see the folly of this. Cynicism is the only form of armour in this age and even my sweet daughter must learn to put it on. She must learn that what she hopes for will never happen."

"What does she hope for?"

"I cannot say, Merivel. I am too ashamed to say."

I did not pester Sir Joshua on this matter and we ate the carbonado in silence for some minutes, during which I was forced to spit out a piece of gristle Cattlebury had inadvertently left in the stew. At length Sir Joshua said:

"You are quite right in believing that she may find some solace – and perchance wisdom – through her singing. While discarding much else, her love for song has remained with her, mainly because it seems it was her voice which first captured the King's heart."

"I know…" I began, "or rather, I did not know… but can imagine…"

"Yes. So by all means encourage her to sing. You play an instrument, I presume."

"Well, the oboe, Sir Joshua, but – "

"Good. She is most fond of the oboe."

"But will you not remain here at Bidnold? Will you not stay with us and accompany Celia on your viola?"

"How courteous of you. But no, I cannot, for my wife is not well and has need of me. I would dearly have loved to take Celia home, but I understand the King wishes her to remain with you."

"So he instructed me."

"Then she must stay. We are now near to Christmas. Pray do all you can Merivel to get her back to Kew before the spring comes."

That night, as I climbed into my soft bed, which I had not seen for more than a week, I expected to be punished for my lies in my dreams. But I was not. All I remember is a most agreeable dream of Meg Storey. I painted her portrait. In the picture, she was wearing a dress of hessian, such as I had seen upon the old woman pissing in the ditch, but her face above it appeared most beautiful and full of joy.

Here I am then, in my crimson suit, as I described myself at the beginning of this tale. You have all too clear a picture of me now, have you not? And, as you see, I am hedged about with events. I am, precisely as I suggested, in the middle of a story, but who can say yet – not you, not I – how it will end? It is too soon, even, to say how one would wish it to end. The delight or disappointment lies in all the surprises yet to come.

I am striving, since the arrival of Celia, to put some control upon my appetites, so that she may like me more, or at least despise me less. I have tempered my greed. I have made no visits to the Jovial Rushcutters. I have cut down on my consumption of wine and sack. I have restrained my farts. But tonight, alas, I am acting like a very fool and debauche. I am at the Bathursts and a great party is in progress in the hall. The Duke and Duchess of Winchelsea are here and assorted other witty aristocrats. We have drunk a great quantity of champagne, and now we are all screaming and braying with mirth, for old Bathurst, who disappeared suddenly half an hour ago, has just ridden into the hall on his vast stallion which, afrighted no doubt by the sight of us, has arched its tail and farted and then through a quivering black anus has let fall onto the parquet a most glistening quantity of shit. Winchelsea is laughing so hard, his face is puce and his eyes bulging, and when I glance up at Violet (who holds her liquor like a Wapping bargeman) I see that she, too, is convulsed behind her fan.

I sway to my feet. "A pox on wisdom!" I shout. "Let us all play at mares and stallions!"

"Ole!" cries Winchelsea and stamps his feet like a dancer of the Flamenco (feet that are perpetually kept, I must add, in extraordinarily high-heeled shoes, Winchelsea not being as tall as he would wish) and at once the whole company falls to clapping their hands and stamping, all that is except an obese elderly man opposite me who has turned to Lady Winchelsea and with his fat hands removed her left breast from her dress and is holding it, as if it were an object of immense weight and value – a ninepin made of solid gold, say.

I lean over to get Lady Winchelsea's attention.

"My Lady," I say, "your neighbour has appropriated something of yours!"

She looks down. She sees her white bosom cupped in her neighbour's florid hands. She gives me a smile of haughty disdain. "Yes," she says, "naturally, he has."

I then feel myself punched hard in the small of the back by a man I knew at Court, an effeminate cavalier by the name of Sir Rupert Pinworth. "Legends!" he says. "Did you not know they were legends, Merivel?"

"What are legends, pray?" I ask.

"Frances Winchelsea's bosoms. Are they not, Frances?"

Lady Winchelsea grins at Pinworth. Her neighbour has now placed his quivering lips around her nipple. Taking no more heed of this than if he had offered her a bowl of radishes, she nods and leans back in her chair and extracts from her bodice her other breast, upon which there is a most fetching brown mole.

The company has not ceased its stamping and clapping, but now most have turned their gaze upon Frances Winchelsea and are applauding her bosoms. I look at Winchelsea. Though somewhat discomforted by the fact that Bathurst 's stallion is backing into his chair, he, too, is applauding. And I suddenly feel most exceedingly stupid. Everyone at the table but me appears to take it quite for granted that Frances Winchelsea's breasts will be displayed and admired in the course of any evening where she is present. I realise all at once how my long sojourn in Norfolk has severed me from the sources of gossip and "legend." I no longer know what is being done or said in high society. My face is burning. I cannot describe to you how foolish I feel. I hide my embarrassment by burying my face in my glass and quaffing yet more champagne.

When I look up again, I see that Lady Winchelsea's breasts have been put away, but that her elderly neighbour is still leaning towards her, his mouth a-dribble. To cheer myself up, I have a wager with Pinworth that the old man's hand is upon his prick. I hear myself bet twenty shillings and sixpence. Pinworth guffaws very prettily, showing his elegant teeth. He pushes back his chair and scrambles under the table. He re-emerges quickly, his face aflame.

"Not merely upon it, Merivel!" he declares. "But entirely around it. He has taken the ancient thing out!"

"Then you owe me money, Pinworth!"

He giggles. He informs me he has no money whatsoever, but lives entirely off the favours his beauty can command. "Do not underestimate beauty," he declares. "It is the hardest currency to be had." He is lying about the twenty shillings and sixpence but, before I can upbraid him, he fixes me with his languid brown eyes and says: "I hear your wife is very beautiful."

I look quickly at Violet, to see if the word "wife" (the mention of which causes her such a deal of anger) has reached her ears, but she is not at her place. She has risen and is attempting to restrain Bathurst 's stallion, the eyes of which are wild and white and which looks as if it will rear or bolt any minute.

Knowing that it is only the quantity of wine I have drunk which prevents me from feeling apprehensive about a sudden death by trampling, I return my attention to Pinworth. "Yes," I say, "Celia is a most pretty woman."

"But," says Pinworth, "I also hear she won't let you lay a finger upon her!"

It is at this moment that Violet succeeds in leading the horse out, Bathurst being now so drunk, he is a slack heap upon it, and so, for some new distraction, the guests now cease their clapping and stamping and turn their attention to me and my role as cuckold which, it seems, is known throughout the land and appears to be a subject that is aired as frequently as Lady Winchelsea's nipples.

I am bombarded by questions. Even Lady Winchelsea's elderly neighbour takes his eyes from her long enough to enquire of me: "How does it strike you, being locked out of the bedroom?" I am about to reply that I give the matter no thought whatsoever, but it seems that I'm not allowed to speak, but only to be the butt of jokes and questions. As is my way, I smile good-naturedly When I am told that I would be a good subject for a play, Sir Willingly Deceived, I slap my crimson thigh and guffaw in agreement. "I would be flattered to be portrayed in a play!" I hear myself declare, but in truth, drunk as I am and eager as I was this night to engage in exorbitant revelling, I feel my good humour being suddenly pricked, as if by a brittle shard of ice. And I know only I feel this. Still grinning, I look from one face to another. What I see behind the smiles and what I hear in the laughter is pity.

Later that night, while the servants toil to set to rights the hall, most horribly awash with spilt wine, vomit and flux from the horse, I am half carried to Violet's satin bed. Excited by the success of her party, she is hot and amorous. Her hands explore me. I feel her breasts touch the moths. I look down at her arched back, the strength of which I have often found strangely arousing, but feel most peculiarly numb, as if my whole body had been enfeebled by a kind of paralysis.

"Violet," I whisper, "I have drunk too much, I must sleep."

"No, you must not," says Violet, "not yet." And she falls to work upon me with great zest. After a deal of time, I am hard enough to take somewhat feeble possession of her, but alas, my heart is not in it and I am immediately limp again, thus rousing Violet to terrible anger. "What is the matter with you, Merivel?" she demands to know. "What in the world is wrong with you?"

"I am not myself, Violet," I mumble. "That is evident. But why, pray?"

"The wine…"

"Nonsense, Robert. You and I have been drunk many times."

"It must be the wine…"

But even as Violet goes to work on me once more, I know that it is not only the champagne I have drunk that has made me such a poor lover. Something else has afflicted me. Partly, it is the realisation that I am, at dinners and soirées in London and elsewhere, an object of pity. I believe, however, I could endure this with fortitude and good humour had the thought not entered my mind that, in my relationship with Celia, I now had cause to pity myself. Poor Merivel, goes my little lament, he has married the woman with the most beautiful voice in England and she cannot bear him to come near her! She is in his house and yet, as long as he lives, he will never touch her, never place a kiss upon her hair, even, or feel the touch of her white hand on his flat and ugly face…

"That's somewhat better," I hear Violet say, as she pauses in her whore's antics.

Alas, alas, my heart is saying, how excellent a thing it might be if, in my journeying from bed to bed, from Meg to Violet to Rosie Pierpoint, I could pause at the door of the Rose Room. I knock courteously upon it and the door is opened and she draws me inside, my wife, and I sit and caress her feet while she sings to me and then, not with my normal haste and flurry, but with a calm dignity, I stand up and kiss her mouth and she puts her arms round my neck, and up and down the corridors of the great houses there is no mockery or pity, for at last I am standing where the King stood, loving the woman he loved but to whom he married me…

I make love to Violet. She caterwauls like an Infidel, but I am silent, thinking my new thoughts.

I was not fully recovered from Violet's party for two days, at which time Farthingale reminded me curtly that it was Christmas Eve.

I try, in my life, not to think very frequently about my mother, finding myself distressed not only by my memory of her death but more horribly so by my memory of her hopes for me, by her belief that one day she would be proud of me. But at Christmas, it is difficult to prevent my thoughts from returning to her, and they did so again as the year of 1665 approached.

She would, on the birthday of Christ, allow herself what she called "an extra helping of prayer." At the time of the Civil War, she would pray for peace. Always, she asked God to spare me and my father. But at Christmas, she talked to God as if He were Clerk of the Acts in the Office of Public Works. She prayed for cleaner air in London. She prayed that our chimneys would not fall over in the January winds; she prayed that our neighbour, Mister Simkins, would attend to his cesspit, so that it would cease its overflow into ours. She prayed that Amos Treefeller would not slip and drown "going down the public steps to the river at Blackfriars, which are much neglected and covered in slime, Lord." And she prayed, of course, that plague would not come.

As a child, she allowed me to ask God to grant me things for which my heart longed. I would reply that my heart longed for a pair of skates made of bone or for a kitten from Siam. And we would sit by the fire, the two of us, praying. And then we would eat a lardy cake, which my mother had baked herself, and ever since that time the taste of lardy cake has had about it the taste of prayer.

On Christmas Day, then, kept inside the house by rain falling hour after hour from a black sky, I sat alone in my Withdrawing Room, thinking about my mother and trying to compose a plea to God, assisted by morsels of an excellent lardy cake which I had ordered Cattlebury to bake.

After an hour or more, I found I had consumed the entire cake and still had not been able to formulate my prayer. In truth, I did not know what I was asking for, or rather I knew and yet knew not. In a kind of desperation, I abandoned all idea of talking to God, but knelt down by the fire with my head stuffed into a chair (as if resting upon my mother's lap) and spoke mumblingly to her. "Guide me, my sweet departed mother," I said, "for the idea of reciprocity has entered my mind. It is creating there a yearning no longer to be Merivel, the Fool, but to be…" (here, I had to pause and shovel the last crumbs of the lardy cake into my mouth) "… to be Merivel, the proper man."

It was, as you see, not much of a prayer at all, but it was the best I could manage, at least for the time being. I got up off my knees and was about to go and sing a little to my bird, which, if my eyes are not deceiving me, is becoming somewhat thin and bedraggled in this English winter (further proof that it is of Indian origin and thus pining for the heat of the Ganges delta) when Will Gates entered the room, carrying in his hands a most exquisitely worked leather box.

"Something come for you, Sir," said Will. "From London and the King."

Will amuses me with his Norfolk way with language. I took the thing from him and set it on a walnut card table. The box was tooled in gold and hinged with brass. I lifted the lid. Set out on a velvet cushion was a set of silver-plated surgical instruments.

Will gasped. "What are they, Sir?" he asked.

"Was there a letter with them? No card?"

"No, Sir. Nothing. Only the box. Tell me what they are, Sir Robert."

"They are surgical tools, Will," I said, "used in dissection and cuttings. With these you might remove a stone from a man's bladder, let blood from the vena saphena, lance an apostem, or sew together the two sides of an open wound."

"God save us!" said Will.

"Indeed," I replied. "Indeed…"

And then I took them up, one by one, the hook, the probe, the cannula, the perforator, the hammer, the osteoclast, the dipyrene, the spathomele and, last of all, the scalpel. I turned each one round in my hands and looked at it. I had never seen a set of instruments so perfectly crafted. I am willing to believe that neither Harvey nor Fabricius ever possessed any as fine. There was no doubt in my mind that they had come from the King. It was not necessary for him to send any message with them. They themselves were the message. Returning the scalpel to its velvet cushion, I saw, however, that its silver handle had been engraved with the date, December 1664. I turned it and found on the other side a marking of four words.

I held the thing up and saw, written on the handle of this sharpest and most terrible of blades, this terse exhortation: Merivel, Do Not Sleep.

Chapter Nine. The Overseer

With January came the kind of ferocious winds my mother had mentioned in her prayers for the chimneys. Norfolk people call these gales "The Russian Wind", for this is where they come from, it seems, down from some petrified icy mountain range (the name of which I do not believe I have ever known) and across the northerly oceans to howl round our houses for days and nights together, like the howling of bears and wolves.

Though not as susceptible to cold as, say, Pearce (who can catch any ague from a mere draught) I nevertheless began to notice a most miserable ache in my bones, relief from which could only be had by sitting in a hot bath and having Will rub my backbone with a sponge.

I thus fell to wondering how the men and women of All the Russias survived the dead chill of the winter. I endeavoured to picture in my mind a people I knew nothing of. And this is how they appeared to me: their faces were rubicund and fleshy, all bearing a strong resemblance to the landlord of the Jovial Rushcutters. And their bodies – even the bodies of the women – were fantastically draped about with furs of every kind, furs not fashioned into coats or cloaks but simply hanging and dangling here and there, so that they looked like paupers in tatters, but were inside this assortment of animal skins most comfortable and cheerful.

Now, in my occasional visits to Meg, I let go my stories about the Land of Mar and began a sequence of inventions I entitled Merivel's True Tales of Russia, which succeeded most well with her sweet gullible mind. But more than this, I began to imagine how much more contented all of us at Bidnold would be if we were warm and so placed an order for a large assortment of furs with an ancient London furrier by the name of Jacob Trench. I requested that Trench sew a motley of skins together into simple tabards "to be placed over the head and hang upon the shoulders, thus leaving the wearer's arms free for such tasks as his station in life dictates, but keeping his trunk warm."

Trench being old and meticulous and used to making ermine cloaks and the like, fussed me with tedious letters, requesting that I stipulate precisely what furs were to be used and in what quantities and what colour and quality of silk and satin I required for the linings and furthermore suggesting that I come to London with my staff for individual fittings.

Though I felt most vexed by the delay, I could not behave discourteously to Trench, he being such a trusted friend of my father's. I decided therefore to simplify the operation. I instructed Trench to use only badger skins and to line the tabards not with silk or satin but with a sturdy wool cloth, "such as may be worn even by my groom and my scullery boy." The cost of the tabards was going to be considerable, but so vivid had my imaginary Russians become that I had convinced myself that I at least could not survive the winter without this peculiar garment of fur. The idea, furthermore, that we could wait out the spring dressed as badgers delighted me considerably. No more would I be told I must be quiet to chance upon a badger in the woods of Vauxhall; I would become a badger.

Meanwhile, we waited. Ice formed in the well and the ravaging frost made cracks in the roof tiles. A chimney pot came hurtling down and decapitated a guinea fowl. "How slowly, how slowly time passes," said Celia, warming her hands by the fire. "How shall I endure it?"

There was indeed a kind of sameness to each day. In the mornings, I would persuade Celia to come to my Music Room and sing. My oboe practice had increased tenfold. I would rise at dawn, in the freezing dark and take up my instrument and struggle with scales and arpeggios until the sun crept into the sky but, despite this, I was unable to accompany Celia with any grace at all and, whenever I attempted to do so, she would cease her singing almost at once and pray me not to bother. Thus, there was not, of course, the duet that I had fancifully imagined, but only Celia's voice, singing alone, singing of lost love, while I sat on a chair and stared at her white throat and wondered if time or chance or "the changeful nature of all things" would ever allow me to put my lips tenderly upon it.

At noon, I would dine with Celia, but these meals were becoming irksome to me, owing to the constant presence of Farthingale who was growing more odious and ugly as the days passed, but from whom Celia would seldom permit herself to be parted.

In the afternoons on fine days, I would ride in my park, urging Danseuse to her splendid gallop. Celia's little dog, Isabelle, whom she could not be bothered to exercise, ran snapping at our heels for some of the way and when we outran her would turn and trot home to her mistress who sat dreaming by the fire in her room, reading the poetry of Dryden or doing her eternal petit point.

There was no doubt, Celia was languishing. She was polite to me because she believed the King had made me her overseer. Upon my report of her depended her return to London – or so she understood it to be. But I knew what I was to her: I was a penance she had to endure. I was as irritating to her as my oboe playing, as ugly and discordant. The idea that she could ever love or respect me, I now saw was utterly preposterous. I was on the point of abandoning my ploy to keep her at Bidnold beyond the King's stated time when a most strange incident occurred.

I had spent an evening in my Studio, trying to draw in charcoal the Russians of my unreliable imagination, abandoning my hopeless smudges and scribbles at last towards midnight. I undressed and put on my warmest nightshirt and a nightcap with a little lining of rabbitskin, got into my turquoise bed and fell at once into a heavy sleep.

I woke in some confusion. A hand was pressing my shoulder and a voice was urging me to wake up. I opened my eyes and saw Celia, wrapped in a cloak, bending over me. She was holding a lighted candle and her long hair fell loose about her face, like a curtain.

"Merivel," she said in a whisper of great urgency, "come down. Your bird is dying."

"My nightingale?"

"Yes. You are a physician. It will die if something is not done."

I did not know what time it could be, for I had forgotten to wind my timepiece (if I had been the King, I would have had a diversity of clocks to choose from). I knew only that it was the very middle of the night and so cold that I could see my breath by the light of the candle.

Having given her message, Celia fled from my room, taking the candle with her so that I was left in utter darkness. As I struggled to light a lamp, find my wig and my stockings and wrench a blanket from the bed in which to wrap myself, I wondered why in the world Celia had been looking at my bird at this peculiar hour-she who, with the griping Farthingale, habitually retired to her room no later than nine o'clock. I was more puzzled by this than filled with worry for my bird, until that is I reached my Withdrawing Room at last and saw the poor thing.

Celia had placed the cage on the carpet in front of a fire upon which new logs had been laid. I knelt down.

"Look," said Celia. "It has fallen over."

It was lying on the floor of the cage, its legs in the air, one wing feebly flapping.

"What is to be done, Merivel?"

I looked up at Celia. I had detected in her voice a note of great sadness, of despair even. I was so utterly astonished that she should appear to care so much for something that, I, too, cared about that I was speechless, thus causing her to say once more:

"Merivel, what is to be done?"

I looked again at the nightingale. Its marigold eye, usually such a bright thing, appeared clouded, almost as if a membrane obscured it, but though I diligently searched what remained of my medical mind, I could not recollect what this might signify. I rubbed my eyes. Starved of sleep, wearied by drawings of Russians, I could discover no sensible path to follow.

"I do not know what is to be done, Celia," I said.

"You mean you do not care if the creature dies?"

"On the contrary! I am most attached to it."

"Then try something! Get out your instruments and your remedies!"

I cannot. I cannot. So I wished to say. And yet I understood that I must be seen to do something, that whereas Celia considered me to be inadequate at every human activity from oboe playing to discussions of Dryden's rhyming couplets, from painting to powdering my wig, she wrongly believed that in this one area – medicine – I possessed considerable skill. If, therefore, I could save the bird, I would no doubt earn a little respect from her.

Noting somewhat wryly that this was the second time that some part of my future appeared to depend upon my saving the life of a dumb creature, I took my candle and went to my closet. I returned with a strong physic, a senna and rhubarb preparation dubbed among apothecaries Pill Fortis, some clean linen bandages and the set of surgical instruments so recently sent to me by the King.

"Very well," I said to Celia. "I am going to purge the bird. When I have administered the physic, I shall perform a phlebotomy on the upper leg."

Celia did not flinch. "How may I help you?" she enquired.

"Well… if you would hold it in your hands, stroking its head so that it is not afraid, while I attempt to get the medicine down its throat…"

"Yes," she said. "But shall we not bring a table near to the fire and work upon it?"

"A good idea. And I will lay linen on it."

We thus, in this strange dead of night, prepared the walnut card table as an operating tray and Celia gently lifted the bird from the cage and laid it down. We worked by the light of three candles and, as I saw my poor bird placed before me, I was reminded for a few shadowy seconds of the body of the starling in the coal cellar. How much easier is dissection, I reflected, than cure.

Celia sat opposite me. A stranger entering the room would have assumed we were at cards or dice, except that I was bizarrely clothed in a blanket and Celia in her winter cloak.

"Now," I said, "if you would hold the bird as still as you can. I am going to open its beak and hold it thus with the spatula and with my dropping-glass here dribble some Fortis down its gullet."

The nightingale kicked its legs, but once within Celia's hands did not struggle, only regarded us with its sad clouded eye. It swallowed the physic and we would have to wait upon its passage through the body.

"Very well," I said. "Now I shall do the phlebotomy. The sight of a little blood will not upset you, I hope?"

"No," said Celia. "I am only concerned for the bird, for if it should die, I cannot but feel some misfortune may follow."

"Why so?"

"Because it was a gift to you, was it not?"

"Yes."

"And from the King. And if what the King has given away should come to harm, then I fear for you – and for me."

I was, as you may imagine, about to inform Celia that the bird had been a present – nay, a bribe – from that soi-disant portraitist, Elias Finn, and had nothing to do with the King whatsoever, but then I decided not to. For, unhappy as I was to see my Indian Nightingale so ill, I also recognised that I had begun to enjoy the little escapade and did not wish Celia to desert me in the middle of it.

I began without more ado on the blood-letting, finding at last a faint pulse on the feathered thigh and making a small incision with the scalpel inscribed Merivel, Do Not Sleep. Dark veinous blood spurted out onto the linen. Never having thought to perform a phlebotomy on a bird, I had no idea what quantity to let out before staunching the flow. After some few minutes of seepage, however, Celia looked at me piteously. Some blood had fallen onto her hands, and it was my anxiety to wipe this away as quickly as possible that made me reach for a bandage and begin to bind the wound. Its leg wrapped, the nightingale did look most exceedingly tragic. Celia picked it up and held it close to her face, trying to feel its heartbeat. Then I folded more linen and laid this on the floor of the cage and she put the bird in and I began to clean my instruments with a little spirit and put them away.

"We have done all we can," I told Celia. "By morning, when the purge has worked, we shall see if it appears a little stronger."

"Will you let more blood tomorrow?"

"Possibly. Although I really don't know what quantity of blood is in it."

Celia stood up. "Why are you no longer a physician, Merivel?" she said.

I shall spare you the little discourse that followed, in which I attempted to explain to Celia my vision of her father's skull when he played at our wedding and the despair into which my knowledge of bone and sinew had been ready to let me fall. I knew as I spoke that Celia did not believe me. She accused me of not knowing where my own salvation lay and called me cowardly. Greatly vexed, I was about to retire once more to my bed and was picking up my instrument box, when Celia reached out and touched my hand.

"Pray don't go, Merivel. Forgive me if I spoke of matters that do not regard me."

I did not know what to reply. To Pearce I would have delivered myself of some insult to George Fox or to the soup ladle but, angry as I was, I did not wish to wound Celia. I suggested at last that we retire to our rooms but Celia, it seemed, intended to stay and watch over the bird and wished me to stay with her.

I felt mightily tired. The very act of picking up the scalpel had affected me. I wanted to lie down and dream I was a Russian in a coat of weasel-skin, carefree in the snow. But what could I do? On this peculiar January night, my wife wished to be with me – for the first time since she'd come to Bidnold. I could not refuse her.

I decided at once that we must have food to sustain us through our vigil. I hadn't the heart to wake Cattlebury, so carrying a candle and holding my blanket close about me, I walked the cold corridors to the kitchen and returned with a tray of meats: a cold game pie, a cold roasted guinea fowl and some charred pork sausages – and a flagon of sack.

The card table, so lately an operating theatre, now became a dining trestle. We ate with our fingers and drank the sack from the stone bottle, and the food and the fire banished the ache in my backbone and turned Celia's nose unflatteringly red.

After we had eaten, Celia sang. The song was a lullaby and most beautiful and, when she had finished it, she whispered to me her secret hope, that the King would give her a child. It was upon this subject that she had been attempting to write to the King when she had heard the small noise made by the nightingale falling from its perch. Interpreting this as a sign that what she was doing was dangerous, she had immediately cast her letter into the fire and come running to wake me. I did not know what comment to make upon this secret hope of hers, finding myself most afrighted by it. So I laid my head among the fowl bones and went immediately to sleep and when I woke I heard Celia crying.

I sat up. I saw a grey light at the window, heralding sunrise. The fire was low. Celia was no longer at the table, but kneeling by the bird's cage. "It is dead, Merivel," she said. "It is quite dead."

I knelt. The bird lay in a pool of greenish slime, its terminal evacuation caused by the Fortis. From the rigor of its body, I recognised at once that it was indeed dead, but in truth I gave this very little attention, for, weeping as she was, Celia had let herself fall forwards and reach out to me for comfort. So it was that I found myself holding her, kneeling, in my arms for three or four minutes together. Though I would dearly loved to have kissed and caressed her, I did not allow myself to do this, but only to hold her head against mine and stroke her hair.

Two days later, after we had buried the Indian Nightingale near the grave of my dog, Minette, in the park, snow began to fall. Through this snow, on a fat grey horse a man came riding to my door. His name was Sir Nicholas Hogg. He informed me that he was a Justice of the Peace for the Parish of Hautbois-le-Fallows cum Bidnold and that at a recent Quarter Session of the Justices I had – as Squire of the Manor of Bidnold – been appointed an Overseer of the Poor.

I invited Justice Hogg into my study. My garb that day was muted, Celia having insisted that I go into demi-deuil for the wretched nightingale, and Hogg, it seems, took me for a serious man.

I enquired of him what my duties as Overseer might be and he replied that they would be light, " Norfolk being not at this time disfigured by a great quantity of poor", but that I should bear in mind at all times that paupers were divisible into three categories.

"Three categories?" I asked. "And all fit conveniently into one of the three?"

"They do. For you have in this land your Impotent Poor, your Able Poor and your Idle Poor."

"Ah," I said.

"But it is expected of the Overseers that they will avoid errors in their categorisation, for errors will invariably bring a man before the Justices and thus consume their precious time. So let me warn you that the commonest area of error is in the distinguishing between your Impotent Pauper and your Idle Pauper, for a great many of the Idle will counterfeit Impotence and thus a great quantity of those appearing to the unpractised eye Impotent will in fact be found to be Idle. I trust you understand me?"

"I believe I do."

"This, then, is your most important task: correct categorisation. If, for example, you come upon a person begging by the wayside, how may you be able to distinguish whether the said person is of the Idle variety or the Impotent variety?"

I thought for a moment about this. I was briefly tempted to make some flippant rejoinder to the effect that there were many at Court who would infinitely prefer to be thought Idle (which indeed they were) than to be thought Impotent (which some of them were but went through elaborate performances to conceal). But I truly wished to take my new responsibilities seriously, so I replied at last that I would first cast my eye over the person's person, to ascertain in what condition his body stood, whether mutilated, diseased or wounded, and that I would enquire of him what circumstances of personal misfortune had reduced him to begging by the road.

But Sir Nicholas Hogg shook his head.

"No, no," he said. "An unreliable method. No, no, no. There is but one question to ask him. You must enquire whether or not he has a Licence to Beg. And when he shows you his Licence, you must make sure that it is a True Licence and not a Counterfeit."

"Ah," I said, "and if he has no Licence at all?"

"Then, you have your answer. He is not Impotent, he is Idle. It is really a most simple matter!"

"And how are the Licences obtained, Sir Nicholas?"

"Application is made to us, the Justices. And each individual case is put before us at the Quarter Sessions."

"And what of the man who falls upon hard times, is hurt, say, in a brawl or falls from a tree while picking plums and his spine is crushed, and he can no longer work, and yet finds on the almanac that the next Quarter Session is many weeks off. How is he to live in the meantime, except by begging?"

"This is a hypothetical case, Sir Robert, and I know of no such precedent. At all events, he must not beg. He must find other means."

"Yet I do not know what those means might be."

"Very well. One such means is that he could come to you."

"And what must I do?"

"It is the occasional duty of the Overseer to dispense small sums, on a sixpenny or ninepenny scale, in charity, or, if preferred, dispense gifts in kind, such as a thin hen or a pigsfoot, as and where they think fit. It is for this reason only men of substance are elected to the position of Overseer, so that their own livelihood is not one whit inconvenienced."

Sir Nicholas began lighting up a very foul pipe at this juncture, thus giving me a little time to formulate other questions concerning the condition of the workhouse at Norwich, and the type of work done there, this place being the principal refuge for what Hogg dubbed the Able Poor of the county. I was told that it was a very excellent type of workhouse and that the men, women and children housed there were most merry, seated at their spinning wheels and looms "and thus receiving charity not only for their arms and fingers, which are at work, but also for their undeserving legs, which are idle."

Hogg wiped some black morsels of tobacco from his fleshy lip before he added: "Unfortunately the sick-house there has, mistakenly in my opinion, been converted to an ale house, but I am informed the few sick are cared for in an adequate shed."

I enquired whether, as an Overseer in a small parish, it would be necessary for me to visit the workhouse at Norwich, but Sir Nicholas replied that my authority extended only as far as the boundary of Hautbois-le-Fallows cum Bidnold with the neighbouring parishes of Coote-by-Leyland and Rumworth St James, an authority I shared, he told me lastly, with none other than Lord Bathurst, described as "an excellent Overseer, most generous with rabbits". The notion that Bathurst could be relied upon to tell whether a poor man was Impotent or Idle I found somewhat disconcerting and was about to make some observations on the muddled state of Bathurst's mind since his accident in the field, when Sir Nicholas walked to my study window, looked out at the snow falling very thickly now and declared that he must depart at once or risk to find the highway obliterated and all routes to what he called his "Seat at Hautbois" impassible.

I confess I was relieved to bid adieu to him and his odious pipe, yet after he had gone found myself to be in a state of some perturbation with regard to my new responsibility, having no clear picture of what I was supposed to do as an Overseer of the Poor. Was it to be expected that I should ride about the villages on Danseuse trawling for the Idle and sending them packing to the looms, succouring the Impotent with sixpences and chicken legs? I was not in the habit of going very frequently to Bidnold village, except to visit Meg at the Rushcutters and thus could not assess what quantity of destitute people might now be turning to me for succour. Had the snow not been falling, I would have mounted my horse there and then and carried out a quick reconnaissance, but, like Justice Hogg, I did not wish to be lost in the white wastes and so decided instead to note down all that I knew about the Poor which, alas, did not seem a great deal. I took up a quill and wrote as follows:

1. They are numerous.

2. They appear more numerous in the capital, where they throng the wharves and lie down to sleep on the steps of alehouses.

3. They are much prone to sickness, as witnessed by me during my brief time at St Thomas 's hospital.

4. Madness appears present in the eyes of many of them and I suspect that Pearce's Bedlam is choking with them.

5. They are regarded by the likes of the Winchelseas as a race apart, a quite other species of man. It is, however, from the bodies of Paupers that anatomists draw their knowledge and it is nowhere suggested that the liver, say, of a Peer will be any different in its shape, function, composition or texture than that of a Hovel-dweller (unless the organ of the Peer be enlarged by the quantity of claret that has passed through it).

6. Jesus was most fond of them.

7. There is an interesting dichotomy between His belief in their nobility and the Nobility's belief in their inherent wickedness. (And this in a supposedly pious country.)

8. I have not, in all my thirty-seven years, given a great deal of thought to them – until this day, the thirteenth of January 1665.

9. How does the King regard them? In his credo that all should be content with their lot and not get above themselves, what does he say of the Pauper?

10. I have heard that in Bidnold there is a tongueless man, sound of limb but speechless, who begs alms from all who pass him. Is this man Impotent or Idle? Has he a Licence? If he has no Licence, what am I to do with him?

I paused. I could now see from my albeit puny notes that the whole question of the Poor was a mighty complex one – one to which I had never expected to address myself. I put down my pen with a sigh. To whom should I look for guidance on a subject about which I seemed to know so very little and upon which my thinking was most horribly muddled? The answer was, of course, Pearce. So it was with another sigh that I took up my quill once more and prepared to write to Pearce, thereby to solicit a return letter full of criticism and scorn. The task wearied me even before I had begun it – but a sweet sound interrupted me: Celia was singing. I left my Study at once and went to the Music Room, where I sat in silence on a small, spindly chair and let my wife's voice drive from my mind all contemplation of the homeless and the needy.

Chapter Ten. Finn in a Periwig

That same night, I had a dream of some consequence: I was standing on the leads of my house and staring at the winter stars, not through my telescope, which was nowhere to be seen, but with my own inadequate eyes. After some hours of astral contemplation (or so it seemed in the dream) I felt a most terrible hurt in my eyes and a wetness on my face, as of tears. With my coatsleeve, I brushed the tears away, but on glancing at my sleeve saw a red stain upon it and knew that my eyes were bleeding. I was about to descend, to put some sad bandage upon my face, when I saw the King, seated some distance from me upon a low chimney stack and regarding me most gravely.

"Though you bleed, Merivel," he said, "you have not understood the First Rule of the Cosmos."

I was about to enquire of him what this "first rule" might be when I woke and found that my cheeks were wet. Mercifully, they were wet with tears and not with blood, but I was nevertheless most vexed to discover myself blubbing in my sleep and lay for some time in a great perplexity, wondering whence the dream had come and what it signified. For whom, or for what was I crying? For the Indian Nightingale? For the Poor, whose sufferings were now to become visible to my mind? For my own ignorance? For my failure to intuit what the First Rule of the Cosmos might be?

I rose and washed my face, shivering somewhat but aware of a drip-dripping outside my window, suggesting to me that the snows were melting. I then returned to my bed and resumed my thinking.

Near morning, I had decided that, setting aside my hopeless lamentation for my days as the King's Fool, the thing which was causing me most hurt was my failure to play any role in Celia's music-making save that of listener. I longed – feverishly, I now saw – to be her accompanist, her consort, and yet so ashamed was I of the sounds I made upon my oboe that I had almost ceased my practice, lest Celia should hear me at it. How, then, was I to achieve the thing I hoped for? In my mind, I related my problem to the King and waited patiently for his response. I believe I dozed a little on this instant, for I saw very clearly the King take up from his lap a glove made by my late father and put it on, thus concealing several priceless diamond and emerald rings on his fingers. "Voilá!" he said. "You must learn in secret."

How this was to be done I was not able to tell and in the day that then dawned I was not at liberty to ponder, for no sooner had I finished my solitary breakfast than Will Gates informed me that Finn had arrived and awaited me in my Studio.

I had not sent for him. Since Celia's arrival, my new vocation as a painter had not been pursued as vigorously as before. My struggles with my oboe had all but replaced my experiments with colour and light. As I made my way to my Studio, however, it came into my mind that I would like to attempt a painting of my imaginary Russians in their snowbound wastes. Bits of snow still lay upon the park, so I should begin immediately upon the landscape (mostly white with a heavy sky of slate grey) and come later to a rendition of the people, using as my models Cattlebury and Will Gates, dressed in the fur tabards I still awaited from London. Thus, Finn's arrival was most timely. He would help me to plan the picture, showing me how the figures might be grouped and where, in the uniform white, to suggest light and shadow. To any pretentious request of his for a background of broken statuary I would peremptorily retort: There is no broken statuary in my vision of Russia; the frost has made it all crumble to shards.

I opened the Studio door. The light in the room seemed more than ever northerly and cold, but Finn within it was dressed not in his outlaw's ragged green but in a garb of lustrous crimsons and golds, with handsome buckled boots on his feet and – strangest of all, so that I scarcely recognised the face beneath it – a blond periwig on his head.

"My dear Finn!" I exclaimed.

The artist smiled and I noticed that a blush crept to his cheeks, which still appeared somewhat gaunt and underfed.

"Good morning to you, Sir Robert," he said. "Your eye has discerned an alteration in my appearance, I see."

"There is not an eye in Norfolk could fail to discern it, Finn," I replied. "And from it I deduce some measure of prosperity."

"Well," said Finn, "I have not yet got the place at Court on which my heart is set, but I believe I am almost there, for I have been given a commission by the King."

"Ah. So you have had an audience with His Majesty at last?"

"Yes. It was brief, I confess, but nevertheless an audience."

"Bravo, Finn!"

"After many days and nights of haunting the corridors of Whitehall and being advised at last that I should put on new clothes if I hoped to be summoned in to the presence."

"Hence this most excellent attire?"

"Yes. And it cost me all the money I had in the world, save the coach fare from London to Norfolk. So you see before you a Pauper. I have nothing in the world, Sir Robert, not one penny."

"I see. So you have come to resume your role as tutor, or am I to commit you to the workhouse?"

Finn, not knowing of my discourse with Justice Hogg, was of course unable to understand my little jest and thus did not smile, but continued with gravitas.

"One painting," he said, "one portrait lies between me and a position at Court."

"Ah," I said, "and what painting may that be?"

For answer, Finn put one of his thin hands into a braided pocket and took out a scrap of parchment much creased and thumbed, like a love letter kept day and night about a man's person. He handed it to me and bid me read. I saw at once the King's elegant hand, and this is what was written:

This paper sets forth and commands to be executed by one, Elias Finn, painter, the following commission: a noble and beautiful portrait of Celia Clemence, Lady Merivel, of Bidnold Manor in the County of Norfolk. This portrait to be delivered, complete and finished in every detail, no later than the twelfth day of February 1665. This portrait not to exceed twenty-five inches carrés, that it may comfortably be hung in our closet. This portrait, if found to be well-executed and pretty, to earn for the artist the sum of seven livres. This portrait, if found to be most excellent and true to nature, to earn for the artist promise of a small place at Court.

Signed, Charles R.

I looked up at Finn, who now had an insufferable grin upon his face. I handed him his paper, feeling myself invaded as I did so by a most unruly anger. Gone instantly was my little excitement for my painting of Russians. Now, I would be forced – in order not to displease the King – to give food and lodging to this impoverished artist while he spent hours in Celia's company, embellishing her with silly fans and draperies and daubing in some puffing cherub above her head, receiving for his pains both Celia's admiration and a position at Whitehall, while I struggled on alone with my oboe, exiled still from Court and possessing no power to make my wife regard me with anything but disdain, save only in moments of distress such as the night of my bird's unfortunate demise. Any sympathy I had once felt for Finn had now departed from me utterly. I both despised and envied him and knew only too well what a burden his presence in my house was going to be to me. It is fortunate, however, that at such moments of sudden anger (infrequent in my nature) I seem not to be without some cleverness and cunning. Adeptly concealing my rage, I shook my head gravely and said:

"Alas, Finn, you must not depend upon this for your future."

"Why so?" said Finn, staring anxiously at his paper.

"Why? Because such commissions are numerous. I wager the King puts out no less than two or three per diem. And already portraits of my wife have been done, but none have been paid for and the poor artists are, as far as I know, still wandering the land like the Idle Poor or decaying in their rags on the steps to the King's barge."

I was earnestly hoping that these words would cast Finn into the Nordic gloom that fits his features so well but, much to my irritation, he smiled condescendingly at me.

"This one will be paid for," he said, "because I will make a portrait too beautiful to be resisted. I have heard your wife is a pretty woman and I will improve, even, on what nature has created."

"By surrounding her with flowers and harps and foolish garlands, I suppose? But these will not improve your chances."

"No. Not by embellishment, but by succeeding at what you attempted, Sir Robert, and failed to achieve: the capturing of her essence. I will capture it and the face will be a magnet, drawing all eyes and hearts towards it."

"I wish you luck," I said acidly. "But let me warn you: much of what the King commences he does not finish. The clamour about him is so noisy, so colossal, he cannot for long remain attentive to any one thing. So beware, Finn. You may arrive with your picture and he will not even set eyes upon it."

"But I have my paper…"

"Paper! Do you not know the First Rule of the Cosmos, Finn?"

"What 'First Rule'?"

"That all matter is born of fire and will one day again be consumed by it."

Having delivered myself of this piece of questionable wisdom and before Finn could deny its relevance to the piece of parchment in his hands, I quickly changed the subject.

"Concerning your lodging here," I said, "I suppose the King gave you money for this?"

"No, Sir Robert. As I told you, I have not one farthing…"

"I am to feed you and house you as a favour?"

"As a favour to His Majesty."

"For which I shall be rewarded how?"

"He did not say. But I am a person of modest appetite…"

"Not so, judging from your clothes."

"That is mere outward show…"

"As much as life proves to be. But God sees into your heart, Finn, and would He wish you to be a parasite?"

"I am no parasite. I work hard for the meagre living I make."

"And will do so here. In return for your board, you will concentrate such talent as you have upon my work. I wish to begin some new pictures. You will help me with questions of perspective and light."

"But what of the portrait?"

"My wife is most busy with her music and her attempts to comprehend the work of Dryden. She will not spare you more than an hour a day."

Finn began to protest and, seeing his dismay, I felt my anger abate somewhat. To Meg, when I next saw her, I would tell the story of a poor mendicant who is given a little plot of ground and sees an end to his poverty if he can but till the earth and sew some seed before the beginning of spring. He goes begging for tools – for a plough and a mule and a hoe. He returns with these, but he is too late. He did not see the spring come and yet, when he gets back, it is already there. He had forgotten with what stealth change occurs and time passes.

I found myself in the attic room at the Jovial Rushcutters sooner than I had intended: I lay there that very night.

The day of Finn's arrival passed most disagreeably and I was in such a lather of fury by suppertime that all I could think of was escaping from the house, so I shouted for my horse to be saddled and rode through the slush to the village. On my way, I chanced upon two poor people collecting sticks, of which I shall write more presently.

What so vexed me was Celia's treatment of Finn. Hearing from his thin lips that the King had commissioned him to paint her portrait, her eyes grew bright with joy. She summoned Farthingale and told her the merry tiding (the two of them reading into it excessive hopes for their imminent return to Kew) and they then began to fawn upon the artist, requesting to see his work and professing to find it most marvellous and brilliant and I know not what, and then bringing forth dresses and sashes and headdresses for him to choose from for the picture, the while utterly ignoring me and behaving as if I was of no account in the matter, which, alas, is true.

I observed Celia closely. Her beautiful smile, which I had seen so often given to the King, but scarcely ever to me, was almost constantly upon her lips, thus rendering her most infinitely pretty and sweet. Hers is the kind of sweetness which, once glimpsed, makes my heart tender – as if towards a child – and my manhood cruel – wanting to possess and abuse that very same childlike thing. I saw that Finn was utterly captivated by her. I saw also that Celia knew him to be captivated and did not mind, indeed allowed herself to flirt a little with him. And this last observation created in me a bitter yearning. Why – when she was my wife – could she not behave so charmingly to me?

I sat and watched her until I could endure it no longer, then went to the Music Room and played some foul blasts upon my oboe and kicked over my music stand, then threw the instrument down and went calling for my groom. On my way to the stables, I met Cattlebury who informed me that he had come by two dozen thrushes for supper. I told him curtly that I was not hungry but that he should serve up the wretched birds in a pie "for my wife and her new friend, Mr Finn". By the time they sat down to table (Celia's smile rendered all the more irresistible by the soft candlelight, no doubt) I had already consumed several flagons of ale and was conversing with a roofing man upon the abundance of rats to be found in thatch. "What if they are plague rats?" I asked. "Then death will come by the roof." And the old man nodded. "Widow Cartwright says the plague will come to Norfolk. Round and about springtime."

I went to Meg's bed very late and categorically drunk, after pissing in her fireplace and dousing what small warmth there was in the garrett. Once I held her in my arms, I went to sleep instantly, with my ugly head on her breasts.

When I woke, burdened as I knew I would be with an aching head and the smell of my own foul breath, I found myself alone, it being one of Meg's duties to rise early and sweep the floor of the tavern and air the place before the arrival of the first peasant for his cup of small beer. Ill as I knew myself to be, I rose immediately and went to the low window and looked out for, to my great chagrin, I now remembered that Danseuse had not been stabled the previous night and had spent it tied to a post under the cold stars. In what condition of cold and suffering I would find her, I did not know.

I could see almost nothing from the small window, except that a beastly drizzle was falling, dense like a mist. It is on such inhospitable mornings that the memory of midsummer causes my brain sudden suffering. My Merivel ancestors, haberdashers of Poitou, never endured an English winter. It is their blood, undoubtedly, that has made mine so susceptible to weather.

Meg found me kneeling at the window, and apparently thought I was at prayer, for she said, with a peevish coldness: "Prayer will not save you, Sir Robert."

"I am not praying, Meg," I said, "but scanning the environs in search of my horse."

"Your horse is in the stables," she said curtly, set down a pot of coffee and a dish of apple fritters on a table, and went out, each one of her words and gestures conveying intense displeasure. I remained kneeling, like a penitent. My life is a very muddled occurrence, I remarked to myself.

Finding no forgiveness or yielding in Meg that morning, I had no choice but to set off for home, a little restored by the coffee and fritters and mighty glad that my horse had not perished by my neglect, but my spirits at one with the weather. The thought of returning to be met by Finn in his ludicrous wig was so distasteful to me that I considered riding directly to Bathurst Hall, but found that the memory of Violet's party and the jokes about my ignominious role as cuckold still pained me. Furthermore, I felt no desire whatsoever for Violet, her demeanour and her coarse language now striking me as intolerably vulgar. I could do little, therefore, but return home, planning as I rode to soothe my body with soap and hot water and then to persuade Celia to sing for me alone, contriving some laborious task (such as the stretching of canvases) for Finn and banishing Farthingale to her room.

It was at this moment that I found myself at the place where I had seen the poor people grovelling for kindling. I reined in Danseuse and sat looking about me. There was no stirring anywhere, only the silent rain and the dripping of the trees.

I dismounted and tied the mare to a spindly ash. On the right of the lane was a small wood, to the left common land where the cottars of Bidnold grazed their sheep and goats. I had some vague notion of searching for the two Paupers, not with the intention of asking anything from them or indeed endeavouring to place them with one of Justice Hogg's three categories, but merely of regarding them face to face and seeing what state of misery or despair I could determine in them. In the near darkness, one of them holding a small lantern on a pole, they had struck me as people in terrible need, their faces cadaverous, their eyes fearful. In their masses, I beheld, unmoved, such poor folk in London, yet the sight of these two, a man and his wife in rags, had troubled me sufficiently to send me wandering into the wood in search of the hovel in which I supposed them to live.

I found nothing. Indeed the air in the wood was so still, it was difficult to imagine it disturbed by any living breath. After tearing my stockings on some briars, I abandoned my search and returned to my horse. As I re-mounted, I told myself that, were I in a condition of wretchedness, I would not seek out the Overseers in their wigs and wanton finery, but rather be at pains to conceal myself from them by whatever means I could devise.

At Bidnold, just as I feared, I found Finn at work upon the infernal portrait.

Celia, in a dress of cream-coloured satin, had been seated upon an ottoman (removed without my permission from the Withdrawing Room and placed near the Studio window). She held a lute in her lap and by her side sat her trembling Spaniel, Isabelle.

"Finn," I said, "you have positioned my wife in a draught. See how the dog is shivering."

To my delight, the artist looked momentarily dismayed, but Celia, without moving one half inch from her pose, informed me brusquely that she was not in the least cold.

"Ah," I said, "but you will surely catch an ague if you sit long there. I suggest we adjourn to the Music Room, where a fire has been lit."

"What time is it?" said Celia.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What hour is it?"

"I have no idea. I could, if you wish, consult the handsome timepiece given to me by – "

"I believe my guest will arrive at mid-day."

"Your guest? What guest, pray?"

"Am I not allowed guests, Merivel?"

"Naturally. I only wished to enquire – "

"He is my music teacher. At my father's request, he has agreed to make the journey from London."

"Ah."

"Thus my days will not be as tedious as they were. I will have the pleasure of sitting for a fine artist and the pleasure of singing for an inspiring Musikmeister."

"I'm sorry you have found the days 'tedious'."

"It's not your fault, Merivel. I don't belong in such a life."

"Happily," interrupted Finn, "you will soon be back at Court."

"Yes," said Celia. "Once the portrait is done, you will have to let me go, Merivel. Though it has been difficult for me to practise my singing without an accompanist, that is now remedied, thanks to my father. I am thus doing as you suggested, trying to come to a clearer understanding of my destiny through song. Thus, you must report that I have done all that the King requested."

"We shall see, Celia…"

"No. We shall not see. If you will not make a good report of me to the King, I shall return to London nevertheless. For the portrait changes all."

"How does it change all?"

"You are obtuse, Merivel. Would the King commission a portrait of a woman he did not intend to see again?"

"Very possibly," I replied. "In remembrance of former times, now departed – as a mere souvenir."

Celia shook her head and glared at me coldly.

"No," she said, "I know the King. He would not do this."

I was on the very verge of revealing to Celia what I had seen that strange night upon the river, the lights in her house, the revellers at the window. But I hesitated. Not only was I unwilling to hurt Celia so cruelly, but the night in question had taken on the colours and insubstantial quality of a dream in my mind, so that I could not now swear I had seen what I thought I had seen or merely dreamed it because I wanted it to be so. Likewise, on that early morning of the death of the Indian Nightingale, had Celia clung to me as she cried? Had she let me stroke her hair? Since then, she had been colder with me than before and I now foresaw a time when, surrounded by an entourage of Finn and the music master, she would forget me entirely.

I sighed and left the Studio, aware as I did so that there had been a strange sweetish smell in the room, most cloying and odious, which I knew must come from the powder adhering to Finn's wig.

Tired to my marrow, I feel. So tired, I feel the pain of exhaustion in my anus. But here I am at supper, attired in blue with a yellow bow on my lace collar, eating venison with Celia and her Musikmeister, whose name is Herr Hummel. His family is from Hanover and he dresses like a Puritan and complains of chilblains on his feet. "Musikmeister Hummel is a person of great refinement," Celia has informed me, but his refinement appears least in evidence at the table for a very slight paralysis of the lower lip has occasioned a tendency to dribble. I try to guess the man's age and deem it to be about fifty. His English is excellent, heavily accented but quite without fault. I find his presence moderately agreeable.

We are drinking a good claret. The pains of exhaustion fade somewhat. I am conversing with Herr Hummel on the subject of madrigal harmonies (about which I know very little but he a great deal, thus sparing me the effort of talking) when I suddenly remember my dream of the King on my roof and how, when asked how I was ever to master the art of oboe playing, he had advised me to "learn in secret". I interrupt Musikmeister Hummel to propose a toast to the King. We raise our glasses and I drink with great relish, aware that, though the arrival of Finn is most irritating to me, the arrival of Herr Hummel may prove most fortunate. For around his temporary habitation in my house I am now constructing a plan.

I glance at Celia. Warmed by the wine, she is smiling, but not at me, of course. I lower my gaze and for a few brief seconds allow myself to watch the rise and fall of her breasts.

Chapter Eleven. The Unknown Known

My birthday is approaching. I was born under the constellation of Aquarius, the eleventh sign of the Zodiac, the sign of the water-butler, that humble but indispensable slave who fetches from wells and rivers the element so vital to the structure of human tissue. I imagine this Aquarius as an old, stooped man, his spine warped by the weight of a wooden yoke from which hang a pair of brimming pails. On he staggers, day after day, year after year, with his precious burden, but his strength is waning, he totters and stumbles and, as he moves through time, more and more water is spilled, thereby engendering in the bellies of the ancient gods an irritation stronger even than thirst. They long to give the slave's skinny buttocks a vengeful kick. They would, if they dared, send a rod of lightning to pierce his ragged neck. And yet they must not. Hopeless as he is, they cannot do without him.

Despite my birth date, the twenty-seventh of January, I have never, I think, held any notion of my own indispensability. As a child my mother looked at me lovingly and would no doubt have wept a while had I been eaten by a badger in the woods of Vauxhall. But this is all. She would not have died without my hand to hold. As a student of medicine, I prayed that my knowledge and skills might one day lie between a man and his death, but I cannot recall now that they ever did. In my brief delirious sojourn at Whitehall, I verily believed I was becoming indispensable to the King, but time has shown me that here I deceived myself utterly. More recently I have longed for Celia to esteem and value me and hold my life to be of prime importance, but much of the time she behaves towards me as if I was not there. Since the arrival of Finn with his commission for the portrait, she no longer regards me as her overseer. With her picture done, the King will, as she suspects, call her back and that will be the end of it. The duet of my imaginings will never be played. And yet I go on trying to please her. Her voice still moves me more than I can express. When seated near her, before the fire in the Withdrawing Room or at the supper table, I long to reach out and touch her. When she returns to Kew, I know that I shall mourn her loss. I may even write foolish letters to her, saying what I do not dare to say to her face. For I am a paradoxical thing: a dispensable Aquarius. I lie foolishly sprawled in the gutter of the via della vita. My pails, brimming not with water but with my own appetites and vain pleas, have toppled me; I have not been kicked.

I am to become thirty-eight years old. I shall note the arrival, duration and waning of this day in the following manner. I shall sleep late, hoping to dream of tennis (a sport which used to make me strangely happy). I shall pass some hours of the morning with Musikmeister Hummel, pursuing my secret plan, the unfortunate venue of which appears to be the summer-house. In the afternoon, I shall paint Russians. In the evening I shall devise some merriment, pay some musicians, invite Mister James de Gourlay ("Monsieur Dégeulasse", with whom, in that society mocks him for his pretensions, I now feel some kindred affection) and his wife and daughters to supper and to dancing. I will give Celia a good quantity of champagne in the hope that it will make her kind.

As the day approaches, the weather has turned very pretty, the fine frost of the mornings cut like diamonds by an unclouded sun. It is most pleasant to walk in my park with the Musikmeister and hear him agree to collude with my plan, which is that during the time when Celia is sitting for the portrait we shall retire together to some place where we shall not be overheard (I suggested the cellars, but Hummel is mortally afraid to set eyes on a rat there, so we have agreed upon the summer-house) and he will teach me, in secret, to master my instrument. I have impressed upon him that there is not much time, that before this spring comes I expect my wife to have returned to London. "But it is my dearest wish," I told him, "before I lose her and do not set eyes upon her again for months, or even years, to play for one of her songs – and just the one will satisfy me – a perfect accompaniment. If you will help me to do that, Herr Hummel, you will have my lasting gratitude."

The Musikmeister looked me up and down, as if expecting to find somewhere on my unpromising person some infinitesimal piece of evidence of musicality. Finding none, he had the courtesy to smile (where the uncouth Finn would have sneered) and promised me that he would do all he could. I see now that my first opinion of him was accurate: he is an honest and agreeable man, as indeed one might expect any friend of Sir Joshua's to be. And so I fall to pondering the truth of my own words to Celia. Does music teach wisdom? Does it civilise the soul? If all the men and women of England were plucking at strings and lisping into reeds would the mind of the nation be quieter and more comfortable with itself?

This, then, is the night of the day of the twenty-seventh of January 1665, my thirty-eighth birthday, and I will tell you of certain disturbing things that came to pass upon it. (I note for you in parentheses how agreeable I find the phrase "came to pass" which I do not believe existed in the body of the language until King James's mighty scholars sat down and alchemised it from ancient sacred tongues and put it there.)

The day did not begin as I had imagined. I did not lie under my turquoise canopy dreaming sportive dreams till mid-morning, but rose early to find myself wondering whether I could hope for any gifts. I am childishly excited by presents, however insignificant they may be and always feel most grateful to the giver. The notion that I might pass the day without receiving one gift whatsoever depressed me not a little. At such moments of despondency, I long not merely to see the King, but to be the King, surrounded as he is by people pressing one upon another to lay offerings at his feet.

Knowing such thoughts to be most silly, I rose and washed my eyes and face, put on a brocaded gown and descended to my kitchen, where it amuses me sometimes to concoct for myself the kind of unskilled meal that I once made upon my fire in my rooms at Ludgate. My breakfast, then, consisted of a dish of eggs coddled with cream, upon which I laid some salted anchovies – a rather excellent invention, which I ate by the kitchen range.

Will Gates found me there and informed me that a carter had arrived from London, bringing "a quantity of furs", these of course being the tabards made of badger pelts by old Trench. There were ten of them, each very adroitly sewn, with a badger's snout rearing up on either shoulder and a row of tails forming a black fringe around the hem. Having examined them (Trench, as instructed, had used a good woollen cloth for the linings), I persuaded Will to put his on. He protested at first, saying that he would not feel nimble nor ready for work in such a garment. "Will," I said, "do not be pettish. They have been designed to leave the limbs free and agile." Alas, Will did look somewhat awkward and hampered by his tabard. He is a very short, thin man and the garment appeared both too wide for him and too long, so that the badger tails trailed upon the floor and the badger snouts hung off his shoulders somewhat dejectedly. I could not suppress a little attack of mirth.

"Alas, Will," I said, "I think your particular tabard will have to be altered."

"It's not worth the expense, Sir," said Will, heaving the thing over his hard little head, "for I shall not wear it."

"You will wear it," I declared. "This entire household will keep these things upon them until springtime, thus preventing chills and agues and all manner of ailments."

"Forgive me, Sir Robert," said Will, "but I shall not."

"You will, Will," I said feebly, but though I am master of my house and Will is an excellent servant, I could plainly see that upon this subject there is going to be some conflict between us.

Having dressed myself and put my own tabard on, I went in search of the Musikmeister, to whom I would offer to lend one during our chilly hours in the summer-house. Though my tabard feels, I admit, somewhat heavy, it imparts to the body an immediate and agreeable warmth. Furthermore, I look outlandish in it and require only some bizarre hat or headdress of fur to resemble very nicely the Russians of my dreams. And then a teasing thought entered my mind: Would the King not be amused by such a garment? Should I dare, on this my birthday that promised to be empty of gifts, to despatch one to Whitehall? Was it possible that my imagination could be father to a new Royal fashion? How excellent it would be if, when Celia returned to Court, she found all the fops and gallants hung with badger fur and the words "tablier Merivel" upon all their laughing lips!

Determining to give the matter some deep thought (the King had sent me his gift of surgical instruments; would he be offended by some return gift from me?), I got my oboe and went to the room of Herr Hummel and from there we made our way, unseen by any, to the summer-house.

The place was indeed cold and not a little triste, the windows latticed over with cobwebs and the floor strewn with downy feathers, as if a dove chick had flown into the humble habitation and exploded in mid-air. I apologised to Herr Hummel, who had wisely put on his tabard, informing him that in summer the place was very pleasant and expressing my hope that he would return to visit me during that kinder season. He thanked me and suggested we begin upon the lesson straight away, before our fingers became too numb. He requested that I play a few scales for him, followed by "some short piece of your choice". This could only be Swans Do All A-Swimming Go, it being the one thing I could play from beginning to end without fault.

He listened. His face betrayed no scorn or dismay. When I had finished, he did allow himself the ghost of a sigh. "Very well," he said. "I think we must begin again. You are self-tutored, perhaps?"

"Yes, entirely."

"And, alas, the fingering is awkward, Sir Robert, and the position of the lips upon the reed too forward. You must whisper to your reed, you see. Not kiss or suck it."

"Ah."

"But you will learn quickly, I think. You have the zeal to learn."

"Yes. Zeal I have."

"So."

Here, Herr Hummel gently took my instrument from me, blew away my spittle and raised it to his own mouth, making some strange contortions with his lips before allowing them to settle in a hesitant-seeming posture around the reed. He then bid me watch carefully the fingering he employed for the scale of C, his hands seeming hardly to move at all. I noticed that his fingers are white and slender, as if the bone had coloured the flesh, whereas mine are somewhat red and plump. Clearly, I have not been fashioned to be an oboe player. I determined, however, that this would not make me lose heart. Music – that plaintive song at my wedding – had made me turn my face from medicine. For all those lost years of work, it owed me some recompense.

This first lesson lasted for the best part of an hour, during which time our breath clouded the glass panels of the summer-house and my feet seemed clamped into iron shoes, so achingly chill did they become. Did I make a little progress? I do not really know. And so cold was I by the end of the hour that I did not care. Such is the burden of our human clay: our spirits soar to some icy heaven while our bodies creep back to the tame hearth.

My invitation to Dégeulasse and his family had been accepted with alacrity and (still giftless towards two o'clock, no one at all having made any reference to my birthday) I was comforting myself by planning my soirée when a village boy rode up my drive on a donkey bringing a message from the vicar of Bidnold, the Reverend Timothy Sackpole. I was requested to come at once to the church.

"Why?" I enquired of the boy.

"I do not know, Sir."

"How like a clergyman, not to give a reason!"

"Except that it be dire and urgent."

"That is not a reason, lad. That is a tick of the ecclesiastical mind."

As my horse was being saddled, this thought assailed me: had the conceited Sackpole somehow found out that this day saw the dawn of my thirty-ninth year? Did he foresee some divine punishment for this stumbling Aquarian if he were not brought before an altar before the sun set? Being only a little past the shortest day of the year, the sun was indeed going down already – hence the supposed urgency of the message? Though it amuses me to go now and again to hear a sermon from Sackpole, I am not seen at church as often as I should be, preferring to send my prayers to God in the quiet of my room or (as already described) in the company of a lardy cake. It was thus quite possible that this clergyman, who strikes me as a petulant person, should wish to deliver himself of some reprimand, the tone and substance of which I could already hear in my mind. He would begin by asking me to what I had given any thought on this the anniversary of my birth. I would reply that my mind had circled vainly about an empty table on which I had imagined Celia placing the gift of an embossed music case or a handsome picture frame. He would answer that such preoccupations will bar me from the Kingdom of Heaven…

But it was not to be thus. When I arrived at the churchyard, I saw in the light of the declining sun a small throng of people grouped about the gate and heard the sound of voices and weeping.

"Whatever is it?" I enquired of the boy on the donkey, but he did not reply; he was staring at the scene with some alarm.

I dismounted. As I did so, the Reverend Sackpole came towards me.

"Ah," I said, "what have we here, Vicar?"

"Thank you for coming, Sir Robert," Sackpole said courteously, thus putting from my mind the suspicion that he was about to lecture me upon my lack of faith. "It seems we have need of a medical man and Doctor Murdoch is not to be found."

"Sackpole," I said, "I was once a student of medicine, but my studies were never completed. I am not equipped – "

"No great skill is being asked of you. Let us step aside a little from these good people – the boy will hold your horse -and I will explain what has happened."

"Assure me first that you do not expect me to start saving lives."

"What is requested of you, Sir, is your judgement."

"My judgement? Well, let me tell you, Vicar, that that is not perhaps as sound as it once was. I am most prone to error."

"Not one of us is infallible, Sir Robert, but this may prove to be a simple matter for you. Come."

I followed Sackpole and we passed through a small door into the vestry of the church. The place was dark and smelled of hayseed. Sackpole closed the door and laid his hand upon my arm.

"There is," he now whispered, "a most horrible suspicion come among the village people: the suspicion of witchcraft."

"Witchcraft? In Bidnold?"

"Yes. I shall tell you the tale as briefly as I may. The people outside, many of them weeping, as you heard, were mourners at a burial I performed at noon. The deceased was a young girl, Sarah Hodge, not seventeen years old and died in a sudden and terrible manner."

"What manner was it?"

"I shall come there, Sir Robert. The matter before us is this: Was there some Devil's work done on Sarah Hodge – as now some of those parishioners outside maintain – or was there none at all?"

I looked at Sackpole. I saw that the clergyman was uneasy and would not hold my glance. Clearly, he was preparing himself to ask of me something mortally not to my liking, in all probability the examination of the corpse of the dead girl. I opened my mouth to pre-empt this request by telling Sackpole that the last post mortem examination I had witnessed had been upon a bull toad in the King's laboratory and that I was no longer able to interpret correctly the imprimatura left by death upon the human body, but Sackpole went imperiously on: "The matter is a difficult one," he said, "and…"

I held up my hand at this point and requested that the Vicar go no further with his tale until he had contradicted my assumption that I was being asked to make a medical judgement upon a corpse. Somewhat to my surprise, he informed me that the body of Sarah Hodge would remain undisturbed in the ground. He then, in a manner altogether nervous and afraid (somewhat confounding my view of him as a man of impenetrable conceit) told me the following story.

An old widow woman, known to all as Wise Nell, had for many years acted as midwife to the parish. She was also a healer and primitive apothecary, cultivating her own physic garden and said to have some power of healing in her hands, this power coming to her through her faith in God, or so she claimed. For some months now, Wise Nell had not been seen at church. She protested that a rheumatism in her knees prevented her from walking there. But the people of Bidnold began to notice a change in her demeanour (where, before she had been quiet and calm, she now seemed agitated) and in her hands, particularly in the feel of her hands! The skin had become hardened and calloused; the pressure of her palms now brought to the head or limbs of the sufferers a moment's icy chill. And the whispers began to be heard: Wise Nell is wise no longer, her love of God has been replaced by love of the Devil, the power in her hard, cold hands is the power of Satan…

"You must know," said Sackpole at this point, "what infinite terror is felt by a God-fearing people at the idea of witchcraft. And it is to the clergy that men come with all the tales of devilry, saying so-and-so is a veritable witch and such-and-such is the proof and now there must be a burning or a drowning or I know not what terrible persecution to be played out. And yet the entire matter, to my mind, is one of great difficulty and complexity for proof of innocence and proof of guilt may both be manufactured, and I have come to believe that in most of these cases only God sees to the heart of the thing. For this reason, I hoped never to hear the word 'witchcraft' uttered against any in Bidnold. And I will not deny it, I am afraid of what may follow."

Sackpole took from his sleeve a somewhat grimy handkerchief and blew his nose. Still ignorant of what my own part was to be in this story, I waited for him to prise from his nostrils two small fillets of hardened mucus, and then asked him to continue.

"Well," he said, "we come now to the matter of Sarah Hodge. She was, as I have told you, a young girl with all her life before her and yet, it seems, had fallen into a dull melancholy, occasioned, some say, by that she had cut off her hair – of a rich chestnut brown colour – to sell for a few shillings to a wig-maker. I cannot say, Sir Robert, whether a young woman might so mourn the loss of her hair that she could weep for it for two months or more, but weep she did and would not eat and grew thin and weak and declared a loathing for all things."

"Her parents are poor cottars and ignorant and had no knowledge of how to help her, but yet in the end sent her to Wise Nell, begging the old woman to do anything she could to revive in her some joy."

"I am told Sarah Hodge was three hours with Nell. She was given a potion to drink which, she was told, contained the blood of swallows, birds of summer and symbols of man's ease."

"When she came out from Nell's cottage, her cheeks were flushed, I understand, and her body most hot all over. She felt well, she said, with the blood of the birds inside her and wanted to dance. So her brothers, glad to see her happy again in spite of her shorn head, took up some tambourines and a pipe and played a tune for Sarah and she lifted up her skirts and began to hop about and kick her feet and would not stop for half an hour or more, her face growing more and more hot until the cheeks were a dark wine-red and still she danced on, tearing open her bodice and showing her breasts that were flushed like her face, on and on until suddenly she bent over and out of her mouth came a fountain of black vomit and she fell down and began to rave that she had drunk poison from a nipple in the Devil's own neck, and within some twenty minutes she was dead."

There was a hard bench in the vestry. I sat down upon it. I had not expected to be listening to talk of black vomit and Devil's nipples on my birthday.

"It now seems," Sackpole said, "that, among the other changes in the person of Wise Nell, the village folk have noticed the appearance, on her neck, of a brownish spot she claimed to be a wart, but which has grown in size, the skin around it becoming puckered and discoloured, so that it now resembles in every way a dug or teat. And you know, Sir Robert, that such an outrage to nature is commonly held to be sure and certain sign of the presence of Satan within the soul. And this is why – to calm the people's anger and gain for myself both time and knowledge in the matter – I sent for you. What I am asking of you is that you go with me to the cottage of Wise Nell and there conduct an examination of this thing upon her neck and tell me, to the best of your knowledge, which I hear from Mistress Storey and indeed from Lady Bathurst is considerable, whether it be a proper nipple or merely some other growth such as a wart or a cyst."

I paused a moment before replying. Then I said: "And if I find this thing to be what you believe it to be, what will happen to Wise Nell?"

"As I informed you, we do not expect you to be the sole arbiter in the case, but only to give one medical opinion, after which the woman will be examined by others."

"Such as Doctor Murdoch?"

"Except that he has not been seen since the death of Sarah Hodge."

"By whom, then?"

"We shall send to other villages for their medical men."

"And if they find 'proof of the Devil?"

Sackpole drew his fingers across his lips.

"I do not favour persecutions. Yet I cannot be seen to harbour the Devil in my parish."

"She will be killed."

"Or driven away. I shall try to see to it that she is driven away."

It is now the twenty-eighth of January. A cold, sunless morning. I grew too tired last night to finish the story of what happened upon my birthday, but I shall continue here. I am older by one day and wiser, I fear, by a good deal. For I have had a glimpse into my future.

Though I would have preferred to return home to do a little painting and supervise the arrangements for my supper party, I had no choice but to accompany the Reverend Sackpole to the low, thatched dwelling where this unfortunate Wise Nell leads a most strange crepuscular life, so dark is her house, so low its ceilings and small its windows. I am not tall, but I could barely stand up straight in her little parlour. So this, I thought, is one among many persecutions endured by the poor: they are persecuted by their own rooms.

Though Sackpole announced our arrival in a voice of good cheer (does an executioner employ such a jovial tone when he asks a condemned person to lay his head upon the block?) I could see by the glimmer of a single rushlight that Nell, seated upon a rocking chair with her arms folded round her body, was most horribly afraid of what was about to happen. Her eyes, which appeared to me vast and bulging, like the eyes of a bulldog, stared pleadingly at the Vicar and she began to mumble that she was servant to no one but God and the King and that she knew of no reason why Sarah Hodge should have died. There was a foul smell in the room, as of a rich fart. I was considering what this might be – whether the smell of swallow corpses and the like to be used in Nell's medical remedies, the smell of a poor meal of tripe left in the air too long, or the smell of fear itself which I know to be an actual phenomenon occasioned by the malfunction or over-function of certain glands.

Most profoundly did I long to be out of this hovel, but knew that I would not be allowed to leave until I had performed my examination, for at the door to Nell's cottage were pressed the parents and brothers of the dead Sarah, their mouths full of accusation and cries for justice, and accompanied by others of the village, all having an unmistakable air of poverty and wretchedness upon them and thus causing me to wonder if they – who looked to me today for a judgement – would look to me tomorrow for sixpences.

Hoping to get the matter done with as speedily as I could, I approached Nell and told her, as gently as I was able, that I accused her of nothing, but, as sometime physician at Whitehall (I did not tell her my patients had been dogs), I was there "to look at this small thing upon your neck and see what manner of fleshy matter it truly is."

Nell turned upon me, then, her dog's eyes, pulling her shawl up round her chin, as if to bandage a wound. "Succuba… Devil's Woman… what words they lay upon me! Words from the very hell of their own skulls. But God knows my heart and I have done no evil spell in all my days…" Nell ranted on thus, her eyes staring the while at my badger tabard, in which, slightly to my surprise, I found myself still attired. Sackpole repeatedly tried to interrupt Nell's protestations of innocence, but what I now began to perceive was that Nell was so fascinated by my furs that thoughts about them (and indeed their wearer) were distracting her so that her speech was slowing and the words of her defence gradually being forgotten and I guessed – correctly – that she would soon enough lapse into silence.

I understood then that, if I applied a small amount of cunning, I would be able to calm Nell sufficiently for me to look at her neck without having to restrain or frighten her, the idea of which repelled me. I thus whispered to Sackpole that he should withdraw a little, to observe the proceedings from a corner of the dank room, but talk no more to Nell until the examination was over.

Sensing, no doubt, that Nell was less afraid now, he did as I requested. I approached Nell and knelt down by her chair, forcing myself not to gag, for the smell from her body was indeed very odious.

Fumblingly, from her shawl, she reached out a bony hand and laid it very tenderly on the badger's snout at my left shoulder then began stroking the head. I watched her closely. Her head was nodding, as if in recognition of something. For a long while, I said nothing and did not move. Nell's hand now moved to my right shoulder and touched the badger's nose there. When I looked again at her eyes, I saw that much of the fear had left them. Now, I thought, I will move the rushlight nearer and ask her to unbind her shawl and lay her head back, so that I may see the growth. But just as I was about to reach out to move the light, Nell began to speak again. "I dreamed of this," she whispered. "A man wearing an animal. He was not my accuser, but I his."

I said nothing.

"I his," Nell repeated.

"Of what did you accuse him?" I asked quietly.

"Gone from me," she said. "Forgotten."

"But he had done some wrong?"

Nell nodded. "Some wrong. And a long fall would be the way of it."

"In your dreams, he fell?"

"Yes."

"From the Lord's grace?"

"From all grace. And into confusion."

I was silent. My hand was out, about to take hold of the rushlight and yet I could not complete this simple action, so perturbed did I now feel. I could no longer look at Nell's face. My heartbeat had quickened. My hands were clammy. I tasted bile in my mouth. If she can see into my future, I began to tell myself, then it is certain she possesses some kind of devilish power. But then I reined in my thought, knowing it to be a judgement born only of fear and reminding myself that there are many kinds and species of bewitchment in mortal existence, of which fear may be the most terrible and love the most everlasting. That she had made this pronouncement about my life troubled me awesomely, the more so because it was my birthday. Part of me wished to question Nell further, to "Know the worst" as the saying has it, yet the other, cowardly, part wished to know no more whatsoever, being in no way equipped to conduct itself courageously should "the worst" turn out to be very bad indeed. The notion of a "fall into confusion" was quite frightening enough.

I heard, at this moment, a knocking on Nell's door and some shouting from the crowd, and Sackpole, whose presence in the room I had all but forgotten, whispered urgently to me that I should proceed with the examination "now, at once, Sir Robert."

Thus, with my hand still shaking, I moved the light towards Nell and asked her to show me her mark and tell me what she thought it to be. "For it is your mark, Nell, and you alone know when it first came there, and whether any have touched it and of what kind, if any, is the fluid or matter that comes out of it."

But Nell did not speak or move. With the light upon her face now, I could see on her cheek a number of large moles or warts, of the disfiguring kind that so distressed poor Oliver Cromwell, our sometime leader and chief of the Commonwealth. It is common medical knowledge that a body, once afflicted by these things, is very often host to terrible flowerings and crops of them, as if they grew from spores of themselves like mushrooms, and I fully expected, as Nell at last unwound her shawl, to see another such a one upon her neck.

Revealed eventually, however, the growth, seated below the ear and on the pathway of the jugular vein, did not resemble a wart. It was the size of a small coin and of a liverish brown colour, the skin being most raised towards its centre. I had seen nothing like it during all my anatomical years. Had the skin not been discoloured, I would have pronounced it to be the puckered vestigial scar of some boil or fistula, but the pigmenting of the skin was most pronounced, whereas scar tissue becomes white over time. The thing that it most brought to mind was indeed a small nipple, such as one might see upon the half-grown breasts of a child of twelve years.

Most crucial in my inspection of the thing would be my touching of it – to see what reaction this could cause in the old woman and to determine whether any issue came forth from it.

Nell stayed still, one hand always caressing my fur, but I now felt her body wracked by a violent trembling. At my back, the thumping on the door and the shouts from the village people became more impatient.

"Well?" hissed Sackpole. "What do you find?"

And I faltered.

A moment ago, I had felt disgust, then fear. I had bid myself to be calm and go about my task with the alert yet passive mind of the physician. But now as I tried to take the nipple (or whatever the thing might prove to be) between my finger and thumb and I felt the intensity of the fear in Nell's being, I was prey to a most sudden and profound feeling of sorrow and despair. For one last moment, I remained kneeling, regarding the hard, cold, knotted hand of Wise Nell on the badger snout. Then I stood up. I turned to the shadows where Sackpole waited.

"To the best of my knowledge, there is no matter out of the ordinary here," I said. "The thing is a simple cyst."

And I fled from the place, pushing my way out through the throng of people who snatched at me – with hands and words – and then breaking into a run.

I have no recollection of what I did next. Presumably, I found my horse and mounted and rode home, but I do not remember doing this. The next memory that I have is of lying in a hot bath and being stared at by Will who had noticed several welts upon the skin of my shoulders, as if something or someone had scratched me there. "Badly, Sir," he says. "Very badly."

Then I am readying myself for my soirée. My shoulders are bandaged. I feel, in my stomach and in my mind a deep unease.

I go downstairs and I hear myself tell the musicians, who have just arrived, that my party has been cancelled. I give them money and bid them go home. I then call Will and instruct him to ride to de Gourlay's house and tell the family that I am ill and that there will be no musical evening.

At this moment, Celia descends the stairs. She is wearing a dress of dove grey taffeta, its bodice laced with apricot ribbons. In her hair, newly curled into ringlets, are more ribbons of this same bewitching colour.

I cannot move. Down she comes, down towards me, and for once she is smiling and I know that this smile is for me, and I feel the beauty of it, right to my bowel. And so at last, at the end of this most troubling day on which I have been told that my life is edging towards a great fall, I admit to myself what I have known since the night of the Bathurst's party, that I have done the one thing of which the King believed me to be incapable: I have fallen in love with my wife.

Chapter Twelve. A Drowning

I am ashamed to set down what happened on the evening of my birthday, yet I will try to do so, in the hope that the act of writing will assuage my guilt somewhat and allow me the rest that has eluded me for two nights.

I was not hungry and the thought of the elaborate meal I had had prepared for Dégeulasse and his family disgusted me. All I wanted was to be alone with Celia.

Taking her hand (I tried to make this gesture a gentle and affectionate one, but I fear it was rough and peremptory) I said: "Celia. It is a clear night. Come with me to the roof and we shall look at the stars through my telescope and try to read our futures."

Celia protested that she would feel cold upon the roof and that our absence would be discourteous to my guests.

"There are no guests," I said. "No one is coming."

At this moment, Finn appeared in the hall, dressed in his scarlet and gold attire and his blond wig. He looked reproachfully at my hand gripping Celia's wrist. "You may take off your silly garb, Robin," I said acidly. "There is to be no evening."

(My jealousy of Finn is like a tumour on my liver. It spreads and I grow jaundiced and sick.)

So I climb up to my roof, pulling Celia after me. We step out onto the freezing leads. I stare up at the sky and there is the crowded Cosmos, infinite and beyond measure. Of all the conflicting rules that govern its existence, I am ignorant, even, of the first one, or so I discover.

Celis is shivering. I take off my coat (a black camlet thing, frogged with gold braid) and put it round her shoulders.

I put my eye to the telescope. As I scan the sky, I see, at first, only the meaningless dust of the heavens. Then I notice that the planet Jupiter, with its little girdle of moons, is very bright tonight. "Ah," I say, posing as a man who knows his way about the planets and the stars, "voilà Jupiter. Uncommonly bright. Excellent. A good portent. Jupiter being of course the reigning planet of all earthly Kings. So we are smiled upon from on high."

I guide Celia to the telescope. Despite the little warmth afforded by my coat, she is still trembling. I am reminded of the fear of the afternoon. The knowledge that Celia is afraid dismays me. I must soothe and quieten her. So I put my arms around her. She cannot pull away from me, for we are on the very precipice of the roof. "No, Merivel!" she cries out. But I cannot let her go. I cannot. I have not the will. I turn her towards me. She tugs her head away from me, just as Wise Nell tried to do so that I would not touch her teat. It is not my hand that reaches for Celia's neck, but my lips. On the very place where a witch may suckle her creature, I begin to kiss her. She struggles and cries out again, but I do not let go. And now I am no longer satisfied with the smooth flesh of the neck. I want her mouth. Using all my strength, I bring her head towards mine. I feel her breasts against my chest. My head is throbbing and my breath coming in short gasps. And I force upon her a lover's kiss.

Not for one moment does she yield, but struggles every instant to be free of me. I am hot now. As heated as a boy with wanting. Celia arches her back, frees her mouth from mine. In place of the lost kiss I smother her with words. I beg her to think no more about the King. "If he is not weary of you now, then in one year he will be. For have I not said it, he is mercury and cannot be held or kept. He will never give you the child you want, Celia. Never! But I could give you a child. Have my son! For I am your husband and all I ask of you is that you allow me to love you!"

And then she spat at me. She spat in my eyes, blinding me for a brief moment – long enough for me to slacken my grip and for her to stumble towards the window through which we had climbed, letting my coat fall from her shoulders. When I turned, she was clambering in and screaming, screaming for Sophia, the odious Farthingale.

I could have followed and caught her. I could have thrown her down on the attic floor.

I did not. I wiped her spittle from my eyes. I damned God and damned my parents for my foul nature. I cursed a world in which I had no one to love me but whores and courtesans. I kicked violently at the base of the telescope, thus cruelly bruising my toe.

Though shivering very grievously, I stayed upon the roof for a while, as if trying to fill my being with the icy night.

I do not know what time it was when I crept back inside the house. I closed the window. As I walked through the attic towards the stairs, I noticed a sweet but sickly smell which I knew to be familiar, yet I could not remember what it was.

I have slept a little. How many days have passed now since my birthday, I do not know. I seem to have lost hold of time.

I had a diabolical dream. Finn, naked but for a green singlet, made love to my wife up against a wall. I killed him. I shot him in the buttocks with twenty-nine arrows.

When I woke, I remembered where it had come from, that sweetish smell in the attic: it is the smell of Finn's wig. And so I conclude, he is a spy. Either of his own making, or sent here by the King. There is no doubt he saw all that passed upon the roof, and will report it to Whitehall, thus causing me to appear, not merely silly, but grievously misguided – an opinion of myself I find it most easy to share.

And I enquire of this sottish Merivel: "How have you arrived at this state of affairs? (You, who thought yourself to be utterly indifferent to quiet Celia, liking only women of vulgar plumage.) Is vanity the key? On your wedding night, the King lay with your wife, while you plunged to oblivion with a village jade; have you, since that night, aspired to replace the Monarch in Celia's heart?"

It is beyond my comprehension. Love has entered me like a disease, so stealthily I have not seen its approach nor heard its footsteps. My mind recognises the folly of it and yet I still boil and burn with it, precisely as with a fever.

To whom or what shall I turn in order to be cured? From his damp habitation, I hear Pearce make a Pearcean reply: he does not pause or hesitate before instructing, "To yourself, Merivel."

I am composing, upon paper, an apology to Celia. I have set down that "certain events occurring upon my birthday so troubled me that my brain was prey to a sudden spasm of madness, causing me thus to force myself upon you so odiously", but seem unable to proceed with my letter further than this, causing me to wonder whether the lies and fictions underlying all human discourse may be a primal cause of the impenetrable silence we hear within our own skulls.

I sit and stare at my piece of vellum. I brush my lip with my quill. My anus aches with a fidgety tiredness, likewise my right leg. My hand upon the paper is chill. I cannot lie to myself about how ill I feel. I conceive the idea that I may be dying and feel cheered by it, releasing me as it does from the burden of declaring myself to be mad. My thoughts, as you will have discerned by now, are in a boiling muddle. To add to my discomfort, I have found lice in my hogs' bristles, which vermin plague me with an unendurable itching. I have instructed Will Gates to prepare a head bath of vinegar and guaiacum, a remedy I patented myself while at Cambridge and for which my fellow students, unwashed and lousy as they were, came eventually to thank me.

Until I have finished and despatched my apology to Celia, I do not wish to be seen by her, so I do not stir from my room, eating my meals off a tray, like a convalescent. I thus have no idea what is occurring in my house – whether my servants are wearing their fur tabards as instructed (Will Gates is not), whether the portrait is nearing its consummation (in the rendering of a Scottish glen, perhaps, bathed in sunlight behind Celia's fair head?), whether Finn has informed upon me to the King. I sense myself to be in danger, but cannot determine from whence it will come. The visage of Nell the witch returns very often to my mind. The welts on my shoulders are slow to heal.

Today, Will brings me a letter. But this is no Royal summons. It is a poor illiterate note, written by one calling himself Septimus Frame, Merchant Seaman. The handwriting is so vile and shuddering, it gives the appearance of having been written at sea in a Hebridean gale. The tidings it relates, when at last I am able to decipher it, are dramatic. This is what is says:

Most Kind and honourable Sir,

I write upon request of the widow Pierpoint, who has not the gift of any alphabet.

She begs me to inform you how that her husband, George Pierpoint, Bargeman, was drowned this Wednesday last under London Bridge while leaning from his boat to catch a haddock and falls into the boil about the stanchions and is gone down, lost.

She requires me to say to you she knows you to be a Person of Kindness. She begs you to remember that she must buy coal for her irons and her washing cauldrons or else come to a poor end which may be the Workhouse.

In sum she requests me to ask of you the gift of thirty shillings, in consideration whereof she blesses you and declares you to be a most Proper and Charitable Man.

From A Humble Servant of the Nation,

Septimus Frame, Merchant Seaman.

So Pierpoint is drowned! The wise river will hear no more of his knavery and cheating and foul language, but has taken him to her deep. And Rosie eats her little suppers of bread and whelks alone…

I feel momentarily cheered by news of this death. I imagine for a moment the jumping haddock slipping through Pierpoint's rough hands and, as he falls, his barge going away on the current. Aloud I whisper, "There was no Overseer," but cannot determine precisely what I mean by this. All I know is that I have no feeling of pity for Pierpoint: I am glad his life has ceased.

In times other than these, it would have been my first thought, upon receiving such a letter, to make my way speedily to London, to press into Rosie's hot hand the money requested and cheerfully usurp her husband's place in her bed for a number of rumpled nights. As matters stand, however, I feel too ill, contrite, confused, lovesick and afraid to stir out of the house. I am shipwrecked here with my passion. In the distance, I can easily imagine I hear guns of a great Man-of-War. I must go to work again upon my apology…

Now, I perceive why I cannot write it. I cannot write it because it must end with a promise I cannot make. I construct the sentence: "On my honour, I vouchsafe never again, as long as you do not wish it, to touch you or impose upon you declarations of feelings I know you to find most loathsome," but I know, even as I write, that I will not be true to this. I know that, such is my nature, it will on some future occasion explode with the very words my wife does not wish to hear. I sense the stuff of this explosion already gathering about my heart, like pus. Does an unrequited love, in time, make a corpse of the lover? Shall I see the drowned Pierpoint before I ever lie with my own wife? (How much I despise my own self-pity.)

Sweet Rosie, I write, knowing she cannot read, but desperate at last to speak my thoughts to a friend. I shall send, with this collection of Merivel's ramblings, a Japanese purse containing thirty shillings. The purse itself has some value and is yours to keep or sell as you will.

I am sorry for the drowning of Pierpoint. To die for a mere haddock is most lamentable.

I would journey to London to console you for the loss of a husband except that I appear to have tumbled into a very profound melancholy and unease of body and mind so that I find myself unable to move from my room. Where I stay wrapped in badgers' pelts staring at a grey and solid sky. In short, I am not Merivel, but a mopish phlegmatic and futile person I do not like at all. My old self, though most outlandish, was amusing company. This new man is loathsome. I have asked him to leave and never more return, but there he sits, scratching, fidgeting, blowing his nose, sighing,yawning and doing a little paltry writing. I wish he would get into his grave.

This person – whom I shall rechristen Fogg – recently had a dream of the King, in which His Majesty asked him: What is the First Rule of the Cosmos? Fogg, in his solitude, finds his mind tormented by this question. It adheres to his thinking like a mussel to rock and yet cannot be prised open. Last night, however, on hearing of the dying of Pierpoint, it began to yield a little to his probing. Thus, Fogg set this down as a probability; that the First Rule of the Cosmos is the Separateness of All Things. As each planet and star is entire of itself and not joined to any other planet or star, so must every person upon earth remain separate and alone, even in death. Thus in impenetrable solitude did Pierpoint die.

But whereas the planets are serene in their separateness, knowing any collision with one another likely to destroy them and return them to dust, Fogg remarks that he, along with very many of his race, finds his Separateness the most entirely sad fact of his existence and is every moment hopeful of colliding with someone who will obscure it from his mind. Yet what he now perceives is the folly of such a collision. Collision is fatal because it transgresses the First Rule. In collision, Fogg is split apart. In collision, he turns to jealous gas, to heartless dust…

At this inconclusive (and somewhat incoherent) point, my scribbles to Rosie were interrupted. Will Gates came up to my room and informed me that Mister de Gourlay had arrived and urgently requested to see me.

"Look at me, Will," I said. "I can see no one until I am well again."

"He asks me to tell you that he has brought with him something to make you well."

"Ah," I said, "the blood of swallows, perhaps."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"I would prefer to remain alone, Will. I have much to think about."

"He is very pressing, Sir."

"There's the reason he is not popular. He has not grasped that life is a quadrille, necessitating backward as well as forward pas."

Upon saying this, I immediately reflected that my apology to Celia was one such backward pas, without which I would not be able to resume any dance whatsoever, unless perhaps a Dance of Death. Thus, while Will was further pressing Dégeulasse's suit, I quickly laid aside my letter (if such it was) to Rosie Pierpoint, took up a clean sheet of vellum and wrote the following simple message:

Fair Celia,

I am mightily sorry for my foul behaviour. I beg you to forgive me this transgression, that I may remain your friend and loyal protector.

R.M.

I then instructed Will to bring Dégeulasse to my room and, having done so, to deliver my short note to Celia.

I put on my wig. The anxiety within me had lessened by a small measure, seeming to cause a sudden drop in the temperature of my blood. Whereas I had been boiling and burning, I now felt chill. I reached for my tabard and put it on and sat with my arms tucked under its apron. What, I wished to enquire, as I waited for my guest, had happened to my painting of Russians? Was it ever begun anywhere but in my mind?

Dégeulasse's arrival interrupted me before I could find an answer to this. The sight of him relieved me of worry about my appearance. He is one of those people who is most horribly and voluptuously ugly, but whose ugliness one seems to forget the moment he leaves one's sight, only to remember it more forcibly again the next time one lays eyes upon him. (I do find myself wondering whether he appears thus to his wife and children, so that his family like him most when he is not with them.)

To compound the fleshy grossness of his features, Dégeulasse has upon his left cheek a very virulent psora he is in the habit of trying to conceal with his hand. It pains me to see him do this. There must be some remedy, I found myself thinking, but of course I had forgotten what it was. It was he, at all events, who had come to play the role of physician, not I. He appeared honestly concerned that "since the night of your intended party, it is reported you are not much yourself" and proceeded to put before me a bottle containing some green cordial. "Got from a mountebank, a regular quack!" he announced. "Not worth the threepence charged!"

"Ah," I said. "Then why do you bring it to me, Mister de Gourlay?"

"Because it is the most efficacious cure for melancholy that has ever been distilled."

"And yet you said it was not worth the small sum you expended…"

"So I did! And which do you believe, Sir Robert? Is it valueless or is it beyond price?"

"I believe neither…"

"Very wise."

"Until I have taken some…"

"Precisely. Thus, you have invested it with no expectation? You are neutral?"

"Yes."

"You believe in equal measure that its properties are worthless and that it may also work a wonderous cure?"

"I believe less in the cure."

"Yet you admit it to be a possibility?"

"Yes."

"Excellent. And you will promise to take some before sleeping?"

"I will."

"Perfect."

De Gourlay sat down. He was beaming. I have noticed this about human beings: secret knowledge makes them smile. It is the smile of power. It is invariably irritating but, on this occasion, I found myself intrigued that Dégeulasse was playing a little game with me. I was wondering what, precisely, the game was about, when Dégeulasse gave his large belly a comradely slap and declared: "Expectation, you see! Reason's whore! And there she clings round all our necks, n'est-ce pas?"

"You may be right."

"I am right. Consider your soirée, so lately cancelled. I cannot describe to you with what expectation of happiness and lasting consequence my wife and daughters had invested it, I cannot describe to you!"

"I am sorry…"

"No, no. Do not apologise. No one had informed my wife that great and influential men from Court would be there, who would, in the space of that one evening, advance our fortunes by three thousand livres per annum. No one had promised my daughters that at your table they would meet the sons of Marquises or young nephews of Prince Rupert. And yet this is what they expected of it! And when informed the party was cancelled, do you know what they did, all three of them? They fell to weeping!"

"Well," I said, "I regret that no eminences from Court or kindred of Rupert had agreed to come to it."

"As I did not believe they would, or at least, I did and did not believe they would in precisely equal measure and so stored up for myself no hope whatsoever."

"Most wise, I would venture."

"Precisely. Now do feel at your ease to confide in me what has happened to you, if it pleases you to do so. I am a man of absolutely no wisdom at all. Then again, my mother believes me to be one of the most clever people ever to reside in Norfolk."

Dégeulasse laughed heartily. This was the first time I had heard laughter in very many days and it reverberated in the room most curiously, like an echo or like a sound coming from under water. Then it ceased and there was silence, and, in the silence, my gaze fixed upon the crusty, enflamed skin of de Gourlay's cheek, the remedy for the psora returned to me and I said: "Alas I do not know what has happened to me. Thus, I can confide in no one. On the other hand, I know what will cure the suppurations on your face."

"No!" said Dégeulasse quickly. "Do not say you know! Say you know and yet you do not know."

"Very well. There are two remedies. Either of these will help the infection, or neither will help it at all. The first is plantain water mixed with a little loose sugar; the second is a treacle posset. These will or will not cure you."

De Gourlay thanked me and laughed again and seemed impatient for me to join in the laughter. But I could not. Now I saw that, by believing in the cleverness and wisdom of his own game, he was in fact rendering himself rather foolish. For what was the game but another self-deception: by juggling negatives and positives he expected to be able to protect himself from pain, yet it was clear to me that he craved as much from life as any man. For what was the insertion of the "de" into his surname but a declaration of hope?

Night seemed to have come by the time de Gourlay left my room. Though I had put a taper to my fire, I felt distressingly cold. A bath, I decided, was the only thing that would warm me.

I called for Will. He informed me that he had delivered my note to Celia.

"How is my wife?" I asked him.

"Listless, Sir. Impatient for the return of Mister Finn, so that the portrait may be finished."

"Finn has left?"

"Yes, Sir. The day after your cancelled party. On Whitehall business, he boasted."

So, I was not wrong. Finn had been appointed (or had made himself) the King's spy.

As I sat in my tub (my head lolling and somewhat uncomfortable, so that it occurred to me to design a chin-strap for myself such as I had imagined for the people of the River Mar) I tried to determine what consequences this spying would have for me. Knowing the King as I did, supreme as he is in his power over every person living in his Kingdom, I was prepared to wager that he would be amused by the folly of my love for Celia. "Well, Merivel…" I could hear him say, "what a clumsy, impersonation of Romeo you do make! Tussling with Juliet upon the balcony! In future, do try to remember which role has been given to you. You are Paris." I smiled. So perfectly could I remember the inflections of the King's voice that I could almost believe him to be present in the room, just beyond the steam rising from my bath-water.

I closed my eyes. Will was ladling hot water over my shoulders and stomach, yet I was starting to feel cold again and it was the coldness of a fever. "Bring more water, Will," I instructed, "and let it be piping hot."

"This is hot enough, Sir. You will vaporise."

"Do not argue. Go, heat more water. I am drowning in cold."

I was left alone, then, in my tub. Outside the window, I heard the shrieking of a nightjar. I thought of Nell's prediction of my fall. I thought of Pierpoint's fall from his boat. And of Rosie, alone in her laundry, waiting for thirty shillings to fall into her palm.

Chapter Thirteen. Royal Tennis

I remember that Will half carried me, dripping and trembling from the bath. He dried me and put over my head a clean nightshirt and lay me down in my bed and I instructed him to pile furs upon me and I could smell the badger skins; they smelled of earth.

I burrowed down. I burrowed into sleep. And when I woke in the middle of the night, I knew that I was most horribly ill, with a pain in my forehead and at the base of my skull such as I had never imagined, unless it were the pain of death itself.

I vomited copiously into a basin. The sounds of my retching woke Will, who had laid himself to sleep on the floor of my bedchamber. He took the basin away and brought me water. "Sir," he said, holding the cup to my mouth, "I see some red patches or blotches upon your face."

I lay back, the pain in my head causing me to whimper like Celia's neglected Isabelle. Will held a mirror to my nose. I squinted at myself. It was an afflicting sight, one that I may long remember. I had contracted the measles.

I will not describe for you the discomfort of this illness. It will suffice to set down that I was very vexed with pain for several days, a pain relieved only by the frequent doses of laudanum which I prescribed for myself and which, in turn, sent my brain into a kind of delirium so that I no longer recognised my room, nor Will within it, but believed myself to be, variously, at Whitehall, in my parents' workshop, in Wise Nell's stinking parlour and on a tilt boat.

When the pain at last lessened and I was able to lie still without groaning, I knew that what was now stealing upon me was a sleep so profound it was like a swaddling of death. It held me for some fifteen or sixteen hours at a time. Then I would wake and find Will or Cattlebury at my side with a little cup of broth, which I would try to sip. Then I would piss feebly into my pot and lie down again and in minutes re-enter this velvet sleep, at one moment remarking to myself that, if it resembled death, it also resembled infancy and musing foolishly on the possibility of being reborn in a more handsome and serious guise.

This, of course, did not come about. I was "reborn" two weeks later, weak as a mole and covered with scabs. I sat up and saw Will sitting in a chair, wearing his tabard. "Thank you, Will," I said. "And for caring for me so well. Without you, I would have been in a sorry mess."

"Are you better, Sir?"

"I believe I am. Though I feel somewhat puny and hollow…"

"Are you recovered enough for some news?"

"News?"

"Yes. About your household."

"Meaning you and Cattlebury and the other servants?"

"No, Sir. Meaning your wife and her maid and Mister Finn and the music master. They are all gone. Gone to London."

"Celia has gone?"

"Yes, Sir Robert. And taken all her dresses and fans and so forth."

"But the portrait…"

"Finished. And the day it was, the King sends one of the Royal coaches, and they all get into it and are gone."

I lay down again. I stared at my turquoise canopy. "That is the end of it, then," I heard myself say. "Now, she will never return. What date is it, Will?"

"February, Sir. The twenty-second day."

One week later, as I sat by my fire, staring vacantly into the flames, Will brought me a letter. It was, as I knew it would be, from the King. Or rather, it was not from him but from one of his secretaries and set out the following summons:

His Gracious Majesty, King Charles II. Sovereign of the Realm commands:

That Sir Robert Merivel present Himself at Whitehall Palace no more days hence than four, upon receipt of this Royal missive.

Signed: Sir J. Babbacombe. Secretary

"So," I said to Will, who had brought me the note, "Finn did his work."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"Never mind. The King calls me to London, Will. And it will not be to praise me."

"You're too weak, yet, to go to London, Sir."

"Needs must, Will. I shall not ride, but take the coach. Perhaps you would be good enough to accompany me?"

"Willingly, Sir Robert."

"We shall leave tomorrow morning, then. Make sure my black and gold coat is clean and my gold breeches."

"Yes, Sir."

"And fold up the tabard I had intended my wife should wear. We shall take it to the King as a present. Though I fear – "

"What, Sir?"

"That no offering of this kind will be enough."

I shall not dwell upon the details of our journey, except to record that, as we came to Mile End and Will saw in the distance the tower and turrets of London, he grew most childishly excited thinking of the marvels he was about to witness for the first time, he having passed all thirty-nine years of his life in Norfolk. And when it dawned upon his Norfolk mind that he might, in all probability, set eyes upon the King in his palace, he began to blub, thus causing me in the space of five minutes more delight than I had experienced in as many weeks. (I have grown, in my time at Bidnold, most fond of Will Gates. If he is now to be taken from me for ever, I will remember him often.)

We rested two nights on our journey, arriving at Whitehall towards mid-morning of the third day. We traveled wearing our tabards, but at our last lodging in Essex I dressed myself in my black and gold suit and put powder on my face, it still appearing rather poxy with some measle encrustations upon it. I did not wish the King to imagine I had the King's Evil.

Taking Will with me (he most neatly attired in a beige coat and grey leggings), I entered once again the Stone Gallery where I had been so overwhelmed, one auspicious afternoon, by the near-presence of Majesty that I had betrayed all my father's hopes for my future. As on that first time, the Gallery was noisy with people walking up and down and I knew that many of them would be petitioners and suitors for small favours who, tonight, would be sent away with nothing and yet tomorrow would return and the next day and the next.

I gave my name to the guards of the Royal Apartments and was told to wait. An hour passed, during which time I grew very weary from standing, so that I thought, at one moment, I would fall over. Will held onto my elbow and leaned me against a pillar. I could see that his mouth was agape at some of the gallants and their women who passed us. Even on my croquet lawn, he had never seen such plumes and buckles; even at my dinner table, no such pearly dresses. "I warrant, Sir," he whispered once, "these folk have even more money than you."

"Yes, Will," I replied, "I warrant they do."

At length, a message was brought to me: I was to return at one o'clock and go to the second of the King's tennis courts, known as his Favourite Court, where His Majesty would meet me. I looked up, in some dismay, at the messenger. I was about to request that he inform the King of my recent illness which had left me so feeble that I was hardly able to walk unaided in his Gallery, let alone compete in a set of tennis, but the man turned rudely and walked away from me, and I did not want to make myself foolish by shouting after him. I shrugged. "All we can do," I said to Will, "is eat a little meat and hope it may strengthen me."

By mid-day, then, we were at the Boar Tavern in Bow Street, where I ordered for Will a dish of oysters and some pigeon patties and for myself a carbonado cooked with marrowbone and stout, a most fortifying dish. We drank a little ale and Will sucked in his oysters and gobbled his patties, but I could not manage more than two mouthfuls of the carbonado, having no real appetite at all. Will duly ate it up, while I took my timepiece from my pocket and in silence watched the hand move towards the quarter hour.

"I am about to die, Will," I said suddenly. "I feel it. This afternoon I am going to die."

Will wiped his mouth with a crumpled napkin.

"Die how, Sir?"

"I do not know yet."

Well, you know me intimately by this time. You do not need reminding how painful and yet how wondrous it is for me to come into the presence of the King. I become very flushed and hectic and beside myself with joy and yet at the same time filled with a most sad longing to make time itself (upon which the King keeps such a glittering eye) move backwards, so that I can be what I once was, Merivel the Fool.

My love for Celia – love being by its nature a possessive thing – might well have diminished my desire for the company of the King, her lover, yet it did not seem to have done so, and when he stepped out into the empty cloistered court a cold sweat of adulation and fear broke out upon my brow.

The King was accompanied by two Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, one carrying the cloth-lined shoes he likes to wear for tennis, the other two tennis racquets, the wooden handle of the King's own racquet being bound with scarlet ribbon. Though my fear made me lurk in the shadow of the side penthouse, the King saw me at once. It is often remarked by those who have known both the sunshine of the King's affection and the frost of his indifference that his mood is discernible from his very first glance, for he is not a dissembler. Even with his Parliament (towards whom some say he should show more tact) he seems to be incapable of concealing his frequent displeasure.

Leaving Will to wait outside the court, I had taken with me my gift of the fur tabard, prettily wrapped in yellow linen, and this I now held in my arms as I executed my bow, hearing as I did so my hip joints click, like the joints of an old man. I looked up. The King, who seemed to have grown taller even than he was before, regarded me from on high with a look of unyielding severity, such as those most frequently cast upon the unruly German students by Fabricius. I had anticipated displeasure but I had not fully imagined how weak it would make me feel. I felt myself tilting. I reached out and held fast to one of the columns of the penthouse. I could not allow myself to fall.

"What is the matter with you, Merivel?" said the King.

"I have been ill, Your Majesty."

"Yes. You appear ill. But this does not surprise me. When a man transgresses the proper order of things, first his mind, then his body are bound to suffer."

I did not know how to reply. I nodded merely, and held out my gift.

"What is that?" asked the King, regarding my bulky parcel with some distaste.

"A present, Sire. An invention of mine. Designed to be of comfort in winter weather."

"It is almost spring, Merivel. Or did you not notice?"

"No. I did not notice. I have been confined to my room."

"Show it to me nevertheless."

In a clumsy, fumbling manner, I unwrapped the tabard and held it up, as I have seen Farthingale hold up dresses against her own body for her mistress's approval.

"Ha!" At the sight of the sewn-together badger pelts, the King let out a sudden explosion of laughter. His two Gentlemen also began to giggle. I wished, like some intrusive street vendor, to regale the King with the virtues of the tabard – its versatility, the freedom of movement it allows the wearer, its vital warming of the blood flowing to lung and kidney – yet suddenly found that I was a little ashamed of my product, its lack of elegance being its chief and most damning fault.

"Is it intended to be worn?" asked the King.

"Yes, Sir. My household have, by the wearing of these, been free of ague and cold…"

"But you have not?"

"I had the mischance to catch a measle."

"How Merivelian! And you look poxy still."

"I know, Sire."

"You do not need furs, Merivel. And nor do I, if I can warm myself by other means. The exercising of the body will keep disease away far more efficaciously than badgers' coats. So, come. We shall play a set of tennis. You used to show more skill at this game than with the games of the heart. And may still. Unless you are altogether disintegrating."

The King turned away from me and put on his shoes. I draped the tabard, which most evidently he did not want at all, over the cloister wall of the side penthouse. The badger snouts hung mournfully down. And I thought, with some amazement, what kind of mind could invent such an odd garment? The mind of a mad person. And only a madman would think of offering a thing of such eccentricity to his King. Merivel, I told myself, as I removed my black and gold coat, you are losing hold…

A racquet was put into my hand. Hastily, I tried to recollect what cunning I had once employed at this fast game and recalled that my best shot had been a low sliced thing to the dedans wall, usually missing the dedans, but bouncing so low my opponent was not able to scoop it up upon the first bounce, thus provoking a "chase". If you are familiar with the game of Royal Tennis, you will know that very many points are won or lost in a "chase" and His Majesty, though hitting the ball with a deal more power than almost all his opponents, can often be beaten by shots that cut the ball and so make it die, almost upon its first bounce, and land close to the back wall. The King's strength lies in accuracy. In any set, he will win a number of points outright by shots to the winning gallery and the dedans. Among some players at Court he used to be known as the Bell Ringer, with reference to the little bell that jingles when a ball slaps hard into these winning spaces.

So, in the cold February light, we began to play, the King placing himself, as of right, in the service court. I noticed that the net had grown in splendour, being, in my time, a mere piece of string but now an ornate braid hung with tassels.

No sooner had one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber installed himself in the marker's box than the King dealt me a most brilliant service that seemed to flutter by me almost before the ball had bounced, as if we were playing not with wads of hair and cloth but with a flight of wrens.

I remembered from a previous time that, although His Majesty likes to win at tennis, he does not like to win easily. He likes a fight. He likes the other man to run and run and never give up. What I tried, then, was to put out of my mind all knowledge of my recent illness and to play as nimbly as a lizard, scuttling forward and back, chasing every shot. Unfortunately, all out of practice as I was, my play was most horribly wild and inaccurate, one of my balls flying straight at the marker's box and smiting one of the Gentlemen in the eye, another going so high that it soared up and over the penthouse roof- to bounce, perhaps, at Will Gates's feet as he sat and digested the carbonado and waited for his first glimpse of his Sovereign.

My play was, in short, very lamentable and we had concluded but three games when I found myself feeling most horribly sick, my mouth suddenly filling with bile. I dropped my racquet, so that I might kneel for a moment on the pretence of retrieving it. I took some great breaths of air. Then I heard the door to the side penthouse open and I wondered all at once whether Celia had come to preside over the contest and smile her sweet smile upon the King's certain victory.

But it was not Celia. It was a footman come with lemon juice and sugar for us. "Lemons from Portugal in February!" said the King. "Grown under glass especially for my dear Queen." So a little respite was granted to me, albeit indirectly, by that placid and good-natured woman who seemed to be so often absent from the King's thoughts. I believed her to play no part in my story at all, yet on that day she undoubtedly saved me from casting up my meagre dinner onto the stones of the tennis court.

To my immense relief, I was able to win the fourth game. I was on the service side now. From the left-hand section of it, I managed one strangely brilliant service and three sliced shots to the tambour which the King adroitly retrieved but then pitched the ball under the net. In the next three games, however, such strength as I had had drained from me. Sweat poured down my face, mixing with the powder with which I had hoped to cover the ravages of my measles. I could not run any more, but only stagger. Shot after shot sped past me into the dedans or the winning gallery. Never send to know, I thought, for whom the bell jingles. It jingles for thee, Merivel. And then I thought of Pearce, whose favourite poet John Donne is. And I asked Pearce to remember me now and give me strength to face all that was still to come.

"As I foresaw," said the King at the conclusion of the set, "you have become slow."

"I know, Sir…" I mumbled.

"Very slow. And the game, of course, is a fast one."

I followed the King into the garden where I had left Will and where he still stood in his grey leggings. The King walked at such a swift pace that I had to scurry to keep up with him and had no hope of getting his attention to ask him to turn upon my servant, however briefly, his majesterial glance. But I could not afford to worry too greatly about Will. I knew that my beating at tennis was but the preliminary to a more bitter scourging.

I was led into a little summer-house, not unlike the one at Bidnold where I had briefly attempted my secret oboe lessons with Herr Hummel. The place was swept and clean, but in the fading light of the winter afternoon a somewhat chilly habitation. I put on my black and gold coat. The King blew his nose then turned his face towards me. So close was he to me that I could see clearly the fine lines that gathered at the corners of his eyes and at the edge of his lips. It seemed to me that he had aged since my last meeting with him in his laboratory and the observation distressed me, as if I had believed that in a changeful world the King alone was outside the reach of time.

"So," he said at last, "you did not play by the rules, Merivel."

"In the tennis, Sir?"

"No. Not in the tennis. With regard to your wife."

I looked down. I noticed that there was blood in my shoe, but did not know from what part of me it could possibly have come.

"I do not know what rule I have broken, Sir," I said quietly.

"I am surprised. Why were you chosen as Celia's husband, Merivel?"

"Because you knew that I would do anything you asked of me."

"That is true of very many people in our Kingdom. No, it was not for that. It was because, at one of our earliest meetings, you told me the story of the visible heart you had seen at Cambridge. You told me you knew that your own heart had no feeling whatsoever. And I believed you. Yet now I see that I should not have done, for it is by no means true."

There was a long silence. Silence, when one is in the presence of the King, seems a most fearful condition, and I felt hot and faint.

"Love was not asked of you, Merivel," the King said at length. "Indeed, it was the only thing forbidden you. But so soft and coddled and foolish have you become, you could not see that in the breaking of this rule you would, like old Adam, drive yourself out of Paradise."

"Out of Paradise?"

"Yes. For what is your role now? You cannot play Celia's husband any more because she refuses to set eyes on you ever again. Thus, in trying to be the thing you were charged with pretending to be, you have rendered yourself useless."

I looked out at the afternoon dusk that was settling upon the garden. Near a stone bench, I could make out the shadowy figure of Will, who, when darkness descended, would find himself lost.

"I had not intended…" I stammered, "… to love Celia. I loved her voice first, her music. And I do not know how this love was transformed into a love of another kind. I do not know how."

"It happened because you allowed it, Merivel. You became futile. You had too little work and too much dreaming time. And then you indulged your dreams. You thought you could re-cast yourself. Voilà tout. And now you are no more use to me."

The King looked away from me, and for a moment I thought these words signalled my dismissal. But they did not. He had more to say to me yet.

"Happily for you, Merivel," the King continued, "I have enough affection for you to wish to make you useful again, if not to me, then to the people. I fear it will take some time, for look at you! How wretched you have become! But we must try, must we not?"

"Yes, my Liege."

"Very well. Then hear what I have in mind. I am, for the time being, content with the arrangements of my own life. Celia is returned and appears to have learnt some wisdom -perhaps from you, although I doubt that this is so and she certainly denies it. At all events, she is returned to Kew and I am happy that she should be there. But in most other matters, I am not so fortunate. I have the impression that the 'honey-moon' of my reign is over."

The King again turned a little from me, so that I saw his face in profile and was struck, not for the first time, by the length and fineness of the Stuart nose, which is so very unlike my own. I was about to suggest that the King's love affair with his people would surely last as long as he lived, but before I could speak he cut me off.

"I lack money," he said. "We are engaged in a war of trade with the Dutch, yet I lack the means to fit out our ships. This poverty is a foul humiliation, Merivel, and must be remedied. I have been too generous, too profligate with gifts of land and estates. But now comes a reckoning. Now comes a time when I must pay attention to arithmetic."

And so at last the King came to it, to what he called his "arithmetic". He was taking Bidnold from me.

He was "repossessing" it, just as he had repossessed Celia. For, like Celia, it did not belong to me. All that I owned had come to me from him and now he was taking it back. Some French nobleman would purchase it from him, house, lands, furniture and all, and the money thus acquired would be used to buy hemp and tar and sailcloth and rigging. Bidnold would thus "become useful" again. Land would be translated into ships by the King's arithmetic and those ships would be ships of war.

And what of me? How, dear Lord, was I to be made useful again? By being forced, now that I had no land, to return to the only profession that would get me a living: medicine. I was to awake at last from the sleep into which the King had seen me fall. No longer would I be able to dream away my time under the Norfolk sky for henceforth – from this very night, in fact – I would own nothing save my horse and my surgical instruments, the only things which had been "gifts of affection" and not "gifts of expediency".

Plague was coming. Plague, as I had once before been reminded, rouses men, not only from sleep, but from forgetfulness. They remember Death. I, too, would remember that Life is brief, that Death creeps over it as surely as the dusk now falling around the summer-house. And with this remembrance would come another: I would remember anatomy. "And so, Merivel, you will once more be doing and no longer dreaming. You will have become useful."

I believe the King smiled at me then. To him, no doubt, the taking of Bidnold from me was a clever and satisfactory plan, killing, one could suggest, two birds with one stone by rendering me "useful" once again and furnishing the King with a small amount of money. The terrible degree to which I myself felt "killed" by the severity of my punishment the King could not begin to imagine. I had known, from the moment I understood Finn's role as spy in my household, that my behaviour towards Celia might quench any affection the King still had for me, but it had never entered my mind that he would take my house from me. I had believed that Bidnold was mine for ever. I had now and then imagined myself growing old there – with Violet as my companion perhaps, if Bathurst should chance to drop dead of an epilepsy – and being buried in Bidnold churchyard. And now that I was to lose it, together with Will Gates and Cattlebury and the carpet from Chengchow and my turquoise bed and all, the profound nature of my affection revealed itself to me. I had made it mine. In every room I saw some part of my character reflected. Bidnold was Merivel anatomised. From my colourful and noisy belly you ascended to my heart which, though it craved variety also favoured concealment, and so to my brain, a small but beautiful place, occasionally filled with light and yet utterly empty. In his repossession of my house, the King was taking me from myself.

In all my dealings with my Sovereign, I had hitherto been obedient and accepting, doing without question or barter whatever I was commanded to do. But now, as I looked at my vacant, houseless future, I felt moved to plead with the King. I knelt down on the flagstone floor of the summer-house. I put my hands together, as if in prayer.

"Sire," I said, "I beg you not to remove me from Bidnold. I am not, as you would believe, idle there. I have embarked upon a new vocation as an artist. I am learning to play the oboe, I am endeavouring to make sense of the stars and I have taken upon me a new responsibility: I am an Overseer of the Poor."

The King stood up. As always, I was moved by the beauty and elegance of the legs before which I was kneeling.

"An Overseer?" he said. "You seem fond of the term, for you used it to Celia. But an Overseer should be impartial, distanced and kind, and you were none of these to her. Will you now abuse the Poor of your parish as you abused Celia?"

"No, Sir. And I cannot say too many times how sorry I am for what I did to Celia. I loved her and this was my mistake. I do not love the Poor, only pity them."

"What are you doing, then, for those you pity?"

"I am learning about them, Sir, their whereabouts, their collecting of sticks and other pitiful tasks, their work at the looms in Norwich…"

"And how is this to help them?"

"I am not precisely 'helping' them yet, my Liege – "

"And yet, before I met you, you were. At St Thomas 's, you were helping them – with the only skill you have ever possessed."

"I cannot use that skill any more, Sir. I cannot."

"Why?"

"I cannot…"

"Why, Merivel?"

"Because I am afraid!"

The King, who had been pacing about the summer-house, now stopped and rounded on me, holding up an admonishing finger clothed in a glove made by my late father. "Precisely!" he declared. "And do not imagine I have not known this! But this age is stern, Merivel, and those who are afraid will not survive it. Those who are weak will not survive it. You, if you remain as you are, will not survive it."

"I beg you to let me remind you, Sire, that it was you who took me from St Thomas 's. You gave me the Royal dogs. You liked me for my foolishness…"

"And for your skill. For the two, then, were in you, the light and the dark, the shallow and the profound. But now your skill has fallen away and you are all one foolish mass."

So it was in vain that I pleaded. The King had made up his mind. For a moment, I considered prostrating myself before him, but I know that this King is not moved by supplication; it merely irritates him. And, as for the dispossessed, he has no sympathy for them, for he was once one of them and had to wait years for his restoration.

What could I do then but accept my fate, the while finding it unjust and cruel, with as convincing a show of bravery as I could put on?

The King now moved towards the door of the summer-house and made to leave. Before he went, he looked down upon me one last time and informed me that I could return to Bidnold for one week, "there to make preparation for your departure. The keys of the place must then be given to Sir James Babbacombe, who is to act as my agent in this matter. And so au revoir, Merivel. I shall not say adieu, for who knows whether, at some time in the future, History may not have another role for you?"

And then he was gone. And as soon as he had stepped outside the summer-house I saw servants come with lamps to light his way. They had been waiting and watching for the moment when he would walk away from me.

Chapter Fourteen. Not with Silver…

Some days have passed. I am at Bath. I have put up at an Inn called The Red Lion. I have come here in the hope that the sulphurous waters will wash my mind of some of its despair. My landlady is given to singing as she beats mattresses and empties pots. I catch myself listening for some ghostly accompanist.

I have not returned to Bidnold and do not intend to do so. I have sent letters to my staff apologising for my misfortune, which in turn becomes theirs. I have requested that one of my grooms saddle up Danseuse like a packhorse with a few true possessions and trot her by slow stages to London. I, who scoffed at Pearce's "burning coals" now have little more to call my own than he. Should Danseuse step with her sweet daintiness into a pothole and break her leg, I shall be forced to purchase for myself some horrible biting mule.

My dreams are inhabited by Will Gates. He is weeping. His brown squirrel's face is squashed. He resembles a baby struggling to be born. With his fists he tries to wipe away his tears. And then he gets up onto my coach, sitting beside the coachman, and is driven away.

Will Gates. I loved you most dearly, Will.

When Will had gone, I begun to walk quite fast away from Whitehall and in an easterly direction, as if vainly trying to follow the coach. The winter night had come on and the streets were black and I was soon lost. But then, hurrying on down narrow street after narrow street, I saw in front of me the great bulk of the Tower. I had had no intention of arriving there, but my distracted mind perceived it all at once as a place of refuge. To the guards I announced that I had been sent by the King, to cast my eye upon the lions and leopards that he keeps chained up there, and they let me go in.

I knew my way to the dungeon where the animals were penned. I took a torch from an iron sconce and followed my own shadow down into the damp bowels of the Tower where, even at midsummer, no light falls on the stones and where, it is said, the ghosts of the dead Kings of England find themselves paraded with hundreds of their ancient enemies, as in some circus they did not expect. And there I saw the lions, who have the names of Kings, Henry and Edward and Charles and James, pacing round, the flesh of their shanks very meagre and their great fur collars mangy. And it was at that moment and not at any moment before (neither upon leaving the King's garden, nor upon saying adieu to Will and my coachman) that I felt the full terror of my fall.

I stood quite still a great while. I watched the lions, but they never once regarded me, not even to growl or snarl at the torchlight. I thought: I would rather be one of you in this pen than be Merivel. I thought: You have no memory of Africa or sunlight or a Time Before. So I would rather be you.

Quite late, with the streets silent save for the shouting of a trundle of drunks, I arrived at Rosie Pierpoint's door. I knocked and heard my knock like an echo. And as I waited, I remembered the Japanese purse and the thirty shillings and the half-written letter I had never sent.

When she came to the door, she held a shawl round her and she looked afraid. Pretty Rosie. With her I had first discovered the sweetness of oblivion.

But then she grinned. "Sir Robert," she said, "where is your wig?"

I had lost it. So it seemed. I had no recollection of taking it off.

I woke when she rose, at the first faint tracing of daylight. And I understood this small matter: that the poor use time differently from me. They are unable to prolong day with manufactured light, the cost of candles and oil being too great.

I lay on my truckle bed and watched her. She poured cold water into a bowl and took up some rags and washed herself, her face and her breasts and her belly and her cunt and the backs of her knees. And this secret toilette in the half light moved me very much. I wished to be of use to her (having been none that night in bed), so I got up and pulled on my stockings and my shirt and went down to her laundry room and broddled the fire of her stove and tipped in fresh coal, yet performing this task lamentably, sending chunks of coal skittering onto the floor, which I was then compelled to retrieve one by one with my hands. And I remembered – from my time at Cambridge and my rooms in Ludgate – how the black dust of coal is not like a dust but like a paste, moist and sticky, and if you keep in a coal fire you must be forever washing.

The sun got up above the river, but lay flat behind a mist. Rosie made a milk porridge and I tried for her sake to eat some of this stuff, but it and the tin spoon made a grey tableau before me and I heard in my mind the sobbing and lamenting of the old Merivel for the colours and brightness of things now lost.

We had not spoken to Pierpoint, only of me and my troubles. But now, eating her porridge greedily, she began, to my astonishment, upon a little eulogy for her dead husband, telling me how strong a man he was and how indifferent to rich people and how loyal to the river and the other river men. While he lived, I wished to say to Rosie, you scarcely had a gentle word for him and lived in fear of his drunken rages and other cruelties. But I did not remark out loud upon this, only noting privately to myself that death can work most extraordinary changes to a person's reputation and all that we have wished someone to be while they lived, they become, the moment they are dead. And so I wondered, if I had been brave enough to throw myself to the lions in the tower and let them eat me for their supper, would the King's exasperation with me be turning now to fond sadness, Celia's loathing of me to a small retrospective love? While Rosie talked of her drowned bargeman, I meditated upon this. Pierpoint had died trying to catch a haddock with his hands, or in other words getting food; in my imagined death, I myself would have become food. Is either death noble, or are both ridiculous and laughable? Could a person of Celia's refinement feel affection for a husband who has been turned first to meat and thence to dung? I did not know. My mind, though very cluttered with questions, had no answers to anything at all. Like the porridge in front of me, my intelligence seemed to be growing cold.

I could not stay with Rosie. Our old amours had been fiery. Now, they, too, were out. I think that all we felt for each other was a sad tenderness. I gave her thirty shillings (I would not lack for money for some while, if I was prudent) and she gave me a little kiss on my cheek that was still mottled by the old imprint of my measles. And we said adieu.

And so I am come to Bath.

The most strange thing about the pain of the individual man is that the world, knowing nothing of it, behaves as if it was not there, going shrieking on and applauding itself, making sport and promenading and telling jokes and falling down with laughter. So, as I enter the Cross Bath and immerse myself, wearing nothing but some unbleached pantaloons, I see that round and above me in the stone galleries fully-clothed people are strolling with a superior air of contentment, gossiping and giggling and fanning themselves and looking upon the bathers with an elegant nonchalance. They know nothing of what has befallen me. They could not imagine that in these waters, which smell most curiously of boiled egg, I am trying to cure myself of being Merivel.

I look round at my fellow bathers. The Cross Bath is divided: men on one side, women on the other. In my line of men, I see one elderly creature with his wig still unwisely in place on his head. If he has come for a cure for vanity, he is already inhibiting its efficacy.

Opposite me, the women appear most strange. For modesty, they wear peculiar yellow garments made of stiff canvas which, the moment they are submerged, inflate like balloons. I cannot take my eyes from them. I imagine them so filled with air that they will begin to bob about and then come floating towards me, helpless on the bubbling current of the bath. I can even feel the press of them round me, these balloons of women, and I fashion for the King (as my mind is so much in the habit of doing) some second-rate joke that plays on the word "prick".

But then I see that not only with my joke am I in error: I have perceived the women wrongly. Their skirts and bodices are not filled up with air, but with water. They are not light, but heavy – so heavy they are tethered to their seats, as if by an anchor. If we all stayed in the Cross Bath till nightfall, the women would ever remain separate from us. Unless, of course, the King were to come down and get into the water. Then, I believe the women would break free like minnows from their birth sacs and come wiggling towards him.

I pass very long hours sitting still in the water; I try to feel the process of cleansing occurring. I force myself to visit, in my mind, all the rooms at Bidnold one by one. I stand in each doorway and watch as all my possessions are removed and then the furnishings and the carpets and the wall-hangings so that the room has no hint of my presence in it anywhere. And then I imagine the waters of Bath flowing into it and staining it a sulphurous yellow and then withdrawing like the sea on an ebb tide. And so the room is no longer a room, but only a washed and empty place.

When I can stand the stench of the waters no longer, I retire to my room in the Red Lion. The innkeeper's name is John Sweet. His wife, Mistress Sweet, sings on with no accompaniment and no listeners except herself and Merivel. She alone knows that I am sickly, for the food she sends up I cannot eat.

I dreamed, last night, a most infamous dream. I was in a high chamber at Whitehall where a clutch of gallants and their women, together with the King and his Queen, were assembled. "Why are we all come here?" I asked one I recognised as Sir Rupert Pinworth. "Why," said Sir Rupert, "for the wedding. Naturally."

At that moment, the crowd moved to make a pathway for the bride and groom. I craned my neck to see them. They walked sedately, arm in arm, to the end of the chamber where a priest stood ready to read his prayers over them. The groom wore a villainous sulphur-yellow coat and breeches, the bride a white dress, very pretty, yet stained here and there with the sulphur colour.

And then I saw their faces. The groom had the face of Barbara Castlemaine and the bride the face of Celia. And when the priest had said some prayers and they too murmured some assents, they there, in front of all the people, began to take off their clothes and throw them away impatiently. And I saw now that it was indeed the two women whom the priest had "married" and who now began to play in earnest the groom and bride, kissing each other and touching all indecently each other's parts while the King and his Queen and all of us looked on, applauding now and then, as if at a play. And Sir Rupert leaned over and whispered in my ear: "You see what marriage is become. It is become anything we make it be."

And I woke up, very hot and troubled. And, for poor comfort, put my hand upon my prick.

Knowledge that I should hope for very little from the waters of Bath stole upon me after that night. I felt, not cleansed by the place, but sickened and suffocated by it. The sight of the bodies of the men, many old and palsied, some poxy-seeming, did not help me to love the water. And I was soon weary of watching the women squatting down in their yellow balloons. They appeared to me utterly foolish and pathetic. Rosie Pierpoint has more grace than they.

So I paid John Sweet and bowed to his wife and complimented her on her singing and left, paying threepence a mile for post-horses to return me to London. And when I came there, I saw a thing to which, at Bath, I had paid no heed: the spring had come. In the garden of the Leg Tavern, there were fat buds on a chestnut tree and celandines in the grass and the air was no longer chill as it had been the night I walked to the Tower. Visiting my bookseller, I saw on his almanac that we had begun on the month of March. "Where I shall be at the month's end," I said to him, "I do not know."

I had only to wait two days at the Leg before my groom arrived with Danseuse.

Both man and horse seemed tired and somewhat stiff, but my joy at their arrival was so great I felt, for a few hours, returned to something like contentment. That night, however, I laid out on my bed all the possessions left to me in the world and when I saw what they were, I felt a sweating of fear on my neck, for I knew that no man could depend upon them for his survival. This is what I now owned: my case of surgical instruments, my oboe, some sheets of music, some paint brushes and some boxes of pigment, several suits of gaudy silk and taffeta, a quantity of coloured stockings and lace shirts, three periwigs, four pairs of gloves, made by my father, my set of striped dinner napkins, a quill pen, given to me by Violet Bathurst, some nightshirts and a nightcap, a pair pairs of high-heeled shoes, two letters from the King, tied with a ribbon, my Bible, much thumbed and annotated, a recipe for lardy cake, splodged with Cattlebury's tears, a single fur tabard, two purses: one Japanese, containing thirty shillings, one leather, containing forty-seven sovereigns,

Thanks to my clothes, I would not yet appear poor and, unless I was robbed of the sovereigns, I would not, for some while yet, know poverty at all. And yet there it was, spread out before me, the inevitability of my eventual destitution.

Other men, contemplating such a fall from grace, have made of their low state a springboard from which to jump up and make some new beginning. But in this age, no fortunes are made except at Court. All endeavour – even the labours of a humble glovemaker like my father – is made or marred by favour or dislike at Whitehall. Even common bargemen -like the late Pierpoint – feel, in the new, bustling commercial life upon the river, the touch of the Royal hand. And Rosie at her washing cauldrons: in the jabots and cuffs and collars of Brussels lace worn by the Cavaliers she sees a way to her own prosperity. And I, if I should try some new thing, where would all strivings lead me, but back to where I once walked and waited with my father – to a place so heavy with the King's presence I could not breathe?

What, then, was left to me? If any, I told myself, has made himself immune to the Royalty in all things, from him would I learn best how to live from now on. And no sooner had I convinced myself that at last a thought that was not entirely foolish had entered my head, than I knew at once who that person was. And I said the name of my old friend out loud. "Pearce," I said, "let me come to you."

Since my last glimpse of Pearce on the speckled mule, I had not given him a great deal of thought. He does not love or condone my follies. My behaviour towards Celia would have made him weep with shame. Thus, it was not comfortable to think of him while I was at the same time giving him cause for embarrassment and grief.

Now, cast out from Celia's life, and knowing I would soon saddle Danseuse and make my way to the Fens, I was able once again to set his palid visage before my mind's eye. It is a face most dear to me, yet one which creates in me – in equal measure – feelings of sorrow, irritation and tenderness. "Tender" is a word of which Pearce makes considerable use, it being a Quaker term applied to those tolerant souls (and there are not very many of them, if Pearce is to be believed) who do not, at the sight of a Quaker, spit in his eye or demand that he take off his hat. I am "tender" then. In our past together, I occasionally stood between Pearce and his antagonists, not because I am courageous, but because Pearce has about him some innocence of a child and I do not like to see children hurt and insulted. Yet for all these acts of gallantry, Pearce is harsh with me. He once likened my life "to a poorly done sampler, Merivel. Showing a variety of stitches, yet making up a most incoherent picture." He is a man who, for all his rapturous speech, cannot bring himself to make visible the secret affections of his heart. I know that he loves me very dearly; he, I believe, does not know that he does. And yet, when I arrive at his wretched hospital, he will run (or at least increase the speed of his gait somewhat) to greet me. When he sees me, he will be glad.

There is little in our lives, since the day I went to Whitehall, to bind our friendship. And sometimes it appears to me as a ghostly thing, a thing which had its proper life in Cambridge in the years of the King's exile. These "ghosts" were to be found very often together late at night, putting coal onto small fires, eating plum cake, trying at the same time to digest Descartes' theory that the ethereal human spirit was connected to the "body machine" by the pineal gland; then giving up at last and spitting it out and giving in to laughter.

The ghost Pearce was sentimentally fond of fishing and in summer would take the ghost Merivel with him on his angling trips. "The Apostles," Pearce would say fancifully, as the two of them sat watching for mayfly, "were fishermen. Fishing is a contemplative, devotional thing and not entirely suited to you, Merivel, who are too restless and dazzling." And it is true, Pearce was the luckier angler. The brown trout came to his hook on the evening rise. Merivel got only the muddy grayling. But the ghosts stayed on the river, content with each other, content with the sport, till the air cooled and a thin mist began to sit on the water and they became shadowy in time. I can remember that returning to my room in Caius from these fishing expeditions was like returning from another world. And the memory of them, coming sometimes to my mind when it is vexed with trouble, has always been soothing.

So, endeavouring to put from me the devastations of the recent time, consigning to darkness the smell of the King's perfume, the sound of Celia's voice, the touch of the King's hand upon my nose, the sight of my own lust on my starlit roof, I looked at my remembrance of Pearce very closely, as it might be through a microscope, allowing that which had become invisible to be seen once more in clear definition. In this way, I prepared myself for my journey.

For my decision to go to the Fens ran some way ahead of my ability to do so. In short, no sooner had I said the word "Pearce" out loud than I knew myself to be afraid. My friend's company I knew would be beneficial to me; the company of a hundred lunatics could afford me nothing but pain. Thus, I tarried at the Leg. From the ghosts by the trout stream, I begged courage.

The date of my setting forth was the tenth of March.

I passed the first night at Puckeridge and the second in Cambridge, where I took myself to Caius and stood on the dark stairway outside the room that had been mine. From inside the room came the sound of soft, serious voices. It occurred to me that none in that room, however studious they might be, could know that the organ of the heart has no feeling.

On the third day I rode on towards Willingham and I saw how the landscape became, as it were, less and the sky more and how the creatures most numerous were the birds, who had their existence in both elements. A wind got up, making Danseuse nervous, so that she became for a while a dancer indeed, shying at gusts. But the birds rode on the wind. I watched them glide and plummet on the eddies. I saw bustards, and dottrels and wild geese.

And I observed how, in this Fen land, the crust of the earth appears thin, allowing water to seep and ooze upwards so that it is possible to imagine there are fishes and not worms in the soil. And it is a landscape of thin things – feathery marsh grasses and bullrushes and bending willows – so that I smiled when I thought of Pearce within it, thin and threadbare, and I also began to sense how I, with my wide, flat face, my fleshy lip and my soft belly, was not at one with it at all.

Though the wind seemed unable to cease (as if the vast cloudy sky held the wind trapped, as under a dome) no rain at all fell on me in all my journey and for this blessing I found myself giving thanks to the silent God of the lardy cake. And so in this way let my thoughts dwell upon the very simple credo that informs Pearce's life and which makes him immune to all the spells under which I had fallen. Despite much evidence to the contrary, he and his Quaker friends believe that the Apostolic age is not over, that God and his Son have much more to say to us yet, but will not choose persons of worldly authority through whom to say it. "The Seed of Christ, Merivel," Pearce had informed me many times, "is planted not in the souls of Priests or Kings, but in the bosom of The Commonest He," thus causing whole hundreds of proud citizens to quail with fear at the idea of God's word passing through the likes of Cattlebury or the late Pierpoint and so to denounce Quakerism as an utter heresy. Strangely, the King (who does not appear to quail at anything, even death) is tolerant towards Quakers – more tolerant of their discourtesies than he has been towards mine. Were Pearce to come into the King's presence and refuse to remove his hat, I do not think he would have his house taken from him. I could imagine, even, that the brazen gesture might be rewarded with that gift I once held to be more priceless than any other, the Royal Smile.

So, with my incoherent thoughts turning always in a circular fashion back towards myself, I trotted on towards the village of Doddington, and stayed my third night in the little town called March, where I slept a most disconsolate sleep, being full of trepidation about my imminent arrival at Pearce's Hospital.

The New Bedlam, or Whittlesea Hospital, has been founded in a place with the poetic name of Earls Bride, but which I saw at once to be really no proper place at all, but a thin straggle of poor cottages, having no forge or ale house or dairy or any means that I could see of purchasing provisions. It is like a drowned place, a shipwrecked place. Those few who cling to it must endure a life of most fearful monotony, their only visitors being the birds and the buffeting wind. Upon my first sighting of Earls Bride (is there the ghost of a true bride in the name or has it corroded in the damp air, being once Bridle Way or even Bridge?) I had this most perverse thought: that the penning up of one hundred lunatics in their midst had brought some entertainment to the inhabitants of this God-forsaken place.

As we approached the Hospital, which is a cluster of barns built around a lime-washed low-roofed house such as might house a yeoman farmer, Danseuse stopped dead and, though I kicked vigorously at her flanks, she could not be persuaded forward. I dismounted and looked about me and listened. I could hear nothing except the huffing of the wind, but I note in passing that, since my meeting in the King's summer-house, my hearing seems to have suffered a most inexplicable loss, and I could tell from Danseuse's stubbornness and from the way her ears were pricked that she had heard a sound that made her uneasy.

Around the buildings has been constructed a flint and clay wall, like a bailey round a castle except that this structure was, I presumed, designed not to keep enemies out but to keep the mad folk in, lest they go roaming about in the flat land and drown. An iron gate had been let into the wall and it was towards this that I led Danseuse, having put a comforting arm round her neck.

The gate was locked. I knocked and waited and then turned and looked at desolate Earls Bride on its little causeway. It was the look of one who, suddenly feeble of spirit, wishes to turn round and retrace his steps homewards. And I know that, had Bidnold still been mine, I would have done this. I would not even have stayed to greet my old friend. I would, in short, have run away.

A tall man, large in every respect, with a great barrelled thorax and very mighty hands, opened the gate to me and stood smiling enquiringly. He had red curly hair, very thick and abundant, and a red beard, under which he made a steeple of his fingers.

"How may I help you, Friend?" he asked.

I nodded to him, the while noting a distressing shivering in the neck of my horse.

"I have come to see my friend, John Pearce and… well, in truth I really cannot say why else I find myself here, unless it is in the belief that I could be of some use…"

"Please enter. We will get oats for your horse. It is not a glad place you have come to, but a place of suffering. I expect you noticed our words from Isaiah upon the gate?"

"I saw some words, but did not read them."

"Ah. Then read before you come in."

The large man now returned his hand to the gate and pushed it to a little, as if making to shut me out. Had he closed it entirely, I do believe I would have turned my horse round and cantered away, but he did not.

I peered at the inscription beaten into the metal: "Behold, I have refined thee but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction" Isaiah 48.10.

"Very well," I said. "I have read the words."

The gate moved again to admit me. I felt Danseuse's head push up against my restraining arm and she jangled her bit.

"Please follow me, Friend," said the red-haired man who, I now noticed, was wearing a leather tabard over his black coat and leggings. The tabard was very stained and blackened with use, like a worn saddle. I looked down at my own clothes. I was wearing brown velvet breeches and a brown coat edged only a little with carmine. The lace at my wrists and throat was limp. My own good sense told me that, for all their relative modesty, these garments were not sturdy enough for the days that were coming.

I stepped inside, tugging my horse, and the gate closed behind us. We stood in a kind of courtyard with a floor of cinders, very patchy with moss. A single tree, an oak, grew in the middle of it.

"This," said the man in the tabard, "is the Airing Court. We believe in the healing property of air."

"This is where they walk?"

"Yes. Round the tree and then round again, and so on, round and round, but the tree is not dull. It is a most restless and changeful tree. You see?"

"Yes. And now the spring is – "

"My name is Ambrose Dyer. I should have mentioned this at very first, for names are important with us."

"I am glad to meet you, Mr Dyer."

"And you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your name?"

"Ah. Robert Merivel. Pearce and I were medical students together at Cambridge."

"John. We do not call him Pearce. He is John. And I am Ambrose."

"I believe, to me, he will always be Pearce. As he, in turn, addresses me as Merivel."

"Here, he is John."

"So I must be Robert?"

"And I am Ambrose. Now I shall name for you our buildings. The house itself we call Whittlesea House and this is where we, the founders and keepers, six in number have our rooms and where we eat together. And the three barns or asiles, meaning places of shelter, are called George Fox, and Margaret Fell, and William Harvey."

Despite the trepidation I was feeling, I smiled to myself. Even here, in this lonely place with its one oak tree, Pearce had remembered his mentor, for of course it was true that he carried the great WH with him everywhere in his circulating blood.

"Which barn is called William Harvey?" I enquired.

"The smallest," said Ambrose, "to the left of us, here. Where those very deep into their madness are put."

At that moment, as we walked towards the house, Pearce came out of it. When he looked up and saw me he appeared to gasp for air like a fish. And then, as I predicted he would, he broke into a stumbling run.

That night, I slept on Pearce's bed, with Pearce lying on a pallet on the floor not far from me. My mind seemed to inhabit a place much stranger than the room, so that I did not feel as if I slept but only fell in and out of odd, dreamlike trances. Each time I believed myself to be near to sleep I heard an echo of the King's voice, repeating the same words again and again: "I have refined thee, Merivel. Behold, I have refined thee. But not with silver. Not with silver…"