Restoration

Chapter Fifteen. Robert

A month has passed. April has come. And it is as if, during this month, since my arrival at Whittlesea Hospital, I have been absent from myself. This morning, however, seeing my reflection in the parlour window I once again caught sight of him: the man you know all too well by this time; the person I asked you to picture wearing a scarlet suit; the Fool Merivel. And I could not prevent a sentimental tenderness towards Merivel from creeping over my skin, causing me to blush both with affection and with shame. It is this tenderness that has led me to continue the story, notwithstanding the dismaying fact that when I passed through the gates of the New Bedlam, I passed from one life into another and thus an ending of some kind has been reached. Under these things you may draw a line: my house at Bidnold, the colours of my park, Celia's face at my table. Neither you nor I will see them again. They have been consumed, not by actual flames, as were my dear parents, but by the fire of the King's displeasure. I must thus imagine them turned to ash, and so must you, for you will not be returned to them.

I have become Robert.

No one at Whittlesea (not even Pearce, whom I must address as John) calls me Merivel and many do not even know that this is my name. I am not even Sir Robert. I am Robert. And this is how you may picture me: I do not wear my wig except at Meetings (these are most strange yet moving things, which I will later describe), I go about my work wearing black woollen breeches and a black woollen shirt which causes a vexatious itching of my nipples. These garments are covered by a leather apron, very heavy, that comes down to my knees.

My boots are low-heeled and of sturdy hide and ever soiled with the mud of Whittlesea, which is like no other mud I have seen, being blackish and slimy and drying – when it does dry – to a sulphurous yellow crust. My belly, grown very fat upon Cattlebury's carbonados and syllabubs, is shrinking on the poor diet of herring, frumenty, spoon-meat and water favoured by Pearce and Ambrose and the other Quakers. Even as a child, I was a mighty eater and the thinness of the food on which I am here forced to live causes me a deal of misery. Two pigeons are roosting in the poplar trees outside the Bedlam gate and I would dearly love to see their plump breasts roasted and set before me on a plate. But such thoughts I set aside, as I must also set aside a yearning (almost perpetual) to saddle Danseuse and ride away from here. For where should I ride to? All paths, outside this place, lead back to the King. This, at least, I have been permitted to understand. And so I remain, having no glimpse of any future.

I am allotted tasks, almost all of them of a menial and repellent variety and having some foul smell to them. But I perform them. The days I dread are those when I must work at William Harvey. Open the door of William Harvey and you are opening the door of hell. Yesterday, in William Harvey, a woman bit off the tip of her tongue even as I lifted her to put fresh straw into her pen and her blood spurted into my eyes and it was like a flame licking me and I felt a contamination of madness. The house is well named. There is an abundance of blood in it. There is blood in puddles on the floor.

There are many rules we must all obey at Whittlesea. One of these forbids any of the Keeping Friends (for so the small staff of the Bedlam quaintly call themselves) to go alone for any reason whether by day or by night into William Harvey. So it was that when the tip of the bitten tongue fell at my feet and I was splattered with blood, one Friend came quickly to my side. It was Eleanor who came, the younger of two sisters – Eleanor and Hannah – who are women of very sweet and sober disposition. She picked up the tongue tip and put it into her handkerchief and with admirable fortitude Pearce presently sewed it on again. But I prefer not to dwell upon that. I will, instead, tell you a little about these sisters and about the other Friends who make up this small company and who have under their care one hundred mad souls.

The Whittlesea Hospital was founded two years ago by Ambrose and Edmund. Its first occupant was Ambrose's grandfather, an old seaman who lost an eye to Spanish pirates and who, when the King returned, believed himself to have died. He lives quite happily in George Fox. He has an eye of glass that he keeps in a wooden box. He daily remarks that he expected the grave to be darker and more silent and is most glad that there should be company within it.

Ambrose, as noted at my first meeting with him at the gate, is large, obstinate, gentle and very hardy, like a plant with a great growth of root and an indifference to frost or heat or hail or drought. If all the world were to die of some epidemic, I do believe Ambrose would die last of all. Without him there would be no Whittlesea Hospital. Without him, Pearce would still be at St Barts in London and the others, Hannah and Eleanor, Edmund and Daniel, would still be waiting for the revelation of what they call "the True Work shown to us through the Seed of Christ, which is in all people".

Edmund is a man of my age who has twice been imprisoned for entering Anglican churches and causing harm to the clergy by the throwing of cabbages to their heads. He has most bright and round eyes and a high voice and is very fond of order and cleanliness, and will, when it rains in great sweeps across the Fens, take off all his clothes except a ragged pair of drawers and run round and round the walls, the while soaping his face and his torso and even his private parts. If Hannah or Eleanor should glance up and see Edmund engaged in these ablutions, I have noticed that they smile at each other and then look away and continue with their work, but that the smiles stay upon their faces for some while. It is as if they find, in Edmund's ritual, some innocent pleasure.

Both are large women with wide hips planted on sturdy legs. They wear sabots. Hannah's eyes are grey, Eleanor's blue. I believe Hannah to be thirty and Eleanor three or four years younger. They love the Lord with a great abundant love and their charity towards His creatures is very bountiful. I do not believe I have ever met any women like them, for they seem to have no vanity at all, but neither do they pity themselves, nor will let anyone speak their minds for them. In the month that has passed, I have once or twice prayed to be ill, so that Hannah and Eleanor might nurse me. But most strangely, given the unhealthy Fenland air and the inadequacy of my meals, I have not been ill one day. I content myself by sitting near them at supper, for I find their stillness comforting.

The sixth member of the Whittlesea staff is Daniel. He is the youngest of them all and his face has that transparent quality of youth – as if only time will give it proper substance. He is no more than seventeen. Having seen nothing of the world, nothing that he sees causes him any fright or revulsion. He is accepting of all things. He does not flinch from what he sees and smells and hears inside William Harvey. And of the six Friends, he is the most accepting of me. There is no disapproval in him. While the others wish to convert me to Quakerism, Daniel does not. Rather, being told that I was once at Court, he asks me to tell him in secret what that world of the Court is and how men speak and how they dress and what things they devise as pastimes. So I find myself describing the game of croquet, and Daniel listens and repeats such explanations as "Red may now, having passed under the hoop, endeavour to roquet Black" with reverence, as if they were the Twenty-third Psalm. And the two of us are momentarily very happy until I remember that I no longer have any rightful place in the world where croquet is played and so would do best to forget its complicated rules. And so I break off and Daniel is, for a mere moment or two, cast down. "Why might we not," he asked me one day, "play a little croquet here, Robert?" I pretend to give this some thought before answering: "The sight of a croquet hoop would make John most unhappy, Daniel."

And so I come to "John", as I must now call my spindly friend, Pearce.

The joy and surprise with which he greeted me were soon enough superceded by a return to the severity with which he always feels obliged to treat me. As I expected, he was neither surprised by my fall from Royal grace nor sympathetic towards my distress.

"When I saw what your life was, in that terrible luxurious house of yours," he said, "I prayed you would be taken out of it."

"Yet I, Pearce, was uncommonly fond of it," I felt obliged to remind him.

"John," he said.

"What, Pearce?"

"Call me John, if you will."

"I am bound, after all this time, to find that difficult."

"You find difficult all that is simple and good, Robert. That is the trouble with you."

This conversation took place in Pearce's room late on the night of my arrival at Whittlesea, I resting my wind-buffeted body on his narrow bed, he lying on a pallet (such as is used by the occupants of George Fox and Margaret Fell) on the floor. I looked at him – my friend and my refuge! He is thinner than ever he was, so that the bones of his wrists resemble ivory bobbins. He is suffering, here in this low-lying land, from a very thick catarrh which causes bubbles of spittle to keep bursting at the corners of his mouth and which has quite silted up his sinuses, so that his voice sounds as if it was issuing from his nose. For this catarrh, he is dosing himself with mithridate which, in turn, has inflamed his eyes. He is, all in all, a wretched sight.

Though Quakers are not fond of sermons, Pearce lying on a straw mattress and dribbling mithridate into his nostrils, earnestly delivered himself of a sermon upon the perfidy of the Stuart Kings. "None of them were," he said, "nor none will ever be worthy of the nation's trust. For the good of the nation is never first with them. What is first is their supposed Divinity that puts them outside or above the law, so that in all their actions they are accountable to no one, neither in their public nor their private life…"

While listening to this sermon, I found myself pondering not the truth or otherwise of Pearce's words, but my own absence of anger in the whole disastrous matter. Wounded, disappointed, afraid, melancholy: these I am. What I do not seem to be is angry. So, refraining from agreeing or disagreeing with Pearce's diatribe against the Stuarts, I simply burst out: "Why do I not feel angry, Pearce?"

"John."

"John. Why do I not feel angry, John?"

"Because you are a child."

"I beg your pardon?"

"A child, punished by selfish parents, does not feel anger. It goes to its little private corner to weep. Exactly as you have done. And if the parents should again hold out their arms, why then the child will come running into them, all glad to be returned and forgiven for something it did only in answer to their greed."

"But Pearce – "

"Just as, if the King were to call you back, you would go running!"

"He will not call me back. It is quite finished."

"No. But were he to do so, you would go. And this is how it is revealed to me that you are still a child, Robert. But, mercifully for you, your state of homelessness brought you to Whittlesea. Our task here is to cure you of childishness just as we are trying to cure the lunatics of their insanity. For the man in you could be most splendid, Robert. I saw the shaping of the man – before you reverted to being the child – and it is that man we shall restore to you."

I glanced down at Pearce. I noticed that by him on the floor, within reach of his cadaverous fingers, he had placed his precious soup ladle. And I smiled.

After that first night, I found that Pearce was not interested in discussing my past life or my loss of it. He wished me to put it out of my mind, as speedily as possible and so from the following day (during which I was given the drab clothes I have described for you) I was expected to join in the work of the Keepers exactly as if I were one of them and a born Quaker.

"Robert is well qualified to help us," Pearce announced to Ambrose, Edmund, Hannah, Eleanor and Daniel over our dawn breakfast of barley and water porridge. "He is not squeamish or frail. He claims to have forgotten medicine, but I know that he has not. So let us give thanks to Christ that He has sent Robert to us and ask Him to sustain him in the work we shall find for him to do."

There followed prayers of touching simplicity. "Lord, send a light to show Robert the way," said Ambrose. "Dear Jesus, be with Robert," said Eleanor. "God in Heaven, take Robert's hand and be at his side," said Hannah. "And even when night comes, still be at his side," said Daniel. "Amen," said Edmund.

I look round at the little company. Alas, I think, they do not know me. I am John's friend, and he has vouched for me and so they have taken me in. But they do not know how afraid I am. They do not know that I have long been parted from God. They do not know there is a madness in me which renders grass and trees as lunatic lines and splodges. They have taken me in to Bedlam, but they do not know that my spirit rejoices in chaos. I am wrong for them and I will do them wrong, and they do not know it. I opened my mouth to begin upon telling them what kind of man I was, but no words came to me except mumbled words of thanks for their prayers, "for which," I told them, "I hope to make myself worthy." And I saw Pearce nod approvingly at my sudden humility.

And so my first day at Whittlesea began. In the company of Ambrose and Hannah I was taken on a tour of the Hospital. The rain I had been spared on my journey was now drenching the featureless plain, swept into squalls by the wind.

As Ambrose unbolted the door of George Fox and it swung inwards, I, all unthinkingly, hurried in to be out of the wet and so drew suddenly upon myself the nervous glance of some forty men lying in two cluttered rows the length of the barn.

At once, a commotion began. Some of the men stood up. I saw one clutch the hand of another, as if in fear. Some laughed. Others moved forward and stared at me, as at a strange exhibit. One rolled up his filthy nightshirt and giggled and bared his buttocks that were covered in sores. The stench of the place was very bad, the night pails being full and all the "Decayed Friends" (as Ambrose termed the mad people) appearing lousy and unwashed. But none was shrieking or crying, as I has been told the mad of the London Bedlam did constantly. None was chained up, but could move freely about the big barn. And they were not in darkness. Four small, barred windows let sufficient light into the place for me to see that at the further end of it had been constructed a gallery, reached by two ladders and on this high gallery stood an enormous loom.

"I see there is a loom," I said to Ambrose. "Do these men weave things upon it?"

"Yes," said Ambrose, rubbing his large hands together. "The loom. Transported by cart from the workhouse shut down at Lynn."

My thoughts, which the man with the naked bottom still sought to preoccupy by jigging up and down in front of me, returned at once to Justice Hogg and my lost role as Overseer. Now, I would never succour the poor but serve the mad instead. But there appeared to be little difference between these two categories of people, many of the faces staring up at me having about them the same look of despair as I had perceived in the paupers gathering sticks near Bidnold.

"What is manufactured on the loom?" I enquired of Ambrose.

"Sail!" he said.

"Sailcloth? For Men-of-War?"

"No, Robert. For the fishing fleet at Lynn. They send us herrings in payment."

Ambrose then addressed the occupants of George Fox. He spoke to them kindly, as to a child, and they were mainly silent while he talked except for two at the further end who began to swear at each other in some of the foulest language I have ever heard. Ambrose instructed the men to roll up their pallets and take their slop pails to the cess pit and to put out the trestles for breakfast. I know now that this same routine is followed every morning, but Amrbose gave the instructions with great enthusiasm, as if he were announcing some happy new tiding. And indeed, when he had finished, one old man, around whose scrawny limbs were wound a great quantity of bandages, began to applaud. And Ambrose nodded at him and smiled. He then said: "And I will tell you now that great good fortune has come to Whittlesea. Behold Robert. He has come from Norfolk to help us all in our work for the Lord. Say his name to yourselves. Say Robert. And keep the name precious. Because he is your Friend."

The company then, to my embarrassment, started to mumble my name over and over again. Almost all were saying it, except one who began to utter a small piercing noise resembling very well the cry of the peewit. I did not know what was expected of me in the way of words, so I said nothing but performed a little obeisance such as I used to perfect before a looking glass in my Whitehall days. And I followed Ambrose out and we walked in the rain to Margaret Fell.

We found Hannah and Eleanor here. The pallets had been rolled away and the night pails emptied and bowls of cold water had been brought, in which the women of Margaret Fell were washing their faces and hands with a blackish soap. They were about thirty-five in number and of all ages, the youngest being no more than twenty or twenty-five.

"Tell me," I whispered to Ambrose, as I was shown the carding combs and spinning wheels with which the women worked to produce a grey lumpy yarn that was made into mops, "how have such young people been brought to madness?"

"By a hundred ways, Robert," he replied. "Madness is brother and sister to misfortune, not to age. Poverty is a prime cause. Abandonment another. We have one here, Katharine, who was deserted by her young husband in the middle of the night and now she will not, cannot, sleep and all her madness is from the exhaustion of her brain and body."

"Which one is Katharine?"

"There, washing her neck. With her clothes very torn. For this is what she does in the night: sits and tears to rags whatever we dress her in."

I looked towards this person. I saw a tall but thin young woman with black hair straggling to her waist and black eyes that reminded me of Farthingale's, except that they were larger and sadder and the skin under them bruised by her sleeplessness.

"There are cures for such an affliction," I said, remembering that at Cambridge Pearce used to chew mallow root and endive to still his moist brain into repose.

"Yes," said Ambrose, "and we try them for Katharine and sometimes she will sleep an hour or more, but a shortness of breath wakes her. She feels herself to be suffocating and speaks to us of weights on her head, pushing her down."

I was touched by the condition of this woman and, as Ambrose once again made the request that the inmates of Margaret Fell ponder my name and say it to themselves, I wondered at the power this word "sleep" has assumed in my mind. Days were coming, I was certain, when I would have to open my case of silver-handled surgical instruments and hold in my unpractised hand the scalpel with the words "Do Not Sleep" upon it. In allowing myself to become Robert I had surely ended what the King called my "dreaming time", and in my state of wakefulness much of what I longed to forget or ignore would now be grossly visible to me once more. And what must I come across on my very first day but a woman who slept not at all and whose wakeful stare – a perpetual, uncourted vigil over all the hours of light and dusk, darkness and dawn – had brought her to madness? Can there be, I thought bitterly, any more terrible exhortation on earth than that which the King had given me? When he gave the words to the engraver, what degree of suffering did he have in mind for me?

As if to answer this question, I soon found myself with Ambrose inside the third habitation of the Whittlesea Hospital, the place they call William Harvey.

"I have already suggested to you that anyone entering here for the first time feels as if he has stumbled into hell. Except that it is not fiery. It is chill and dark and foetid, having only one small barred window in it and no rushlights or candles at all, for fear the inmates might wound themselves with an open flame or set on fire the straw pallets.

The people in William Harvey are kept chained up and harnessed to bolts in the wall and truly the existence of the King's lions in the Tower is more free than theirs. But these are people descended so far into madness that they would, if not clamped into iron, commit obscenity or murder upon each other or mutilate their own bodies which, from the great restlessness of their limbs, appear as if truly possessed by some devilish power.

There are twenty-one of them: sixteen men and five women. All have scars in their foreheads where blood has been let, this and the trepanning of the skull (not practised by the Quakers) being the most fearsome of the supposed cures for insanity. I walked with Ambrose the length of the barn and I looked into their eyes one by one and I remembered that it was of such crazed and suffering people that Pearce had once said "they are the only innocent of the age, which itself is a lunatic age, because they are indifferent to glory". And a familiar shiver of irritation with Pearce went through me, it being the case with him that he believes too excessively in the truth of his own pronouncements, some of which are most wise and profound, but yet others of which are transparently foolish.

"Do you believe," I asked Ambrose (who had made no attempt to persuade the inhabitants of William Harvey to learn my name), "that Whittlesea can cure these people?"

He put his large hand on my shoulder.

"I believe, Robert," he said, "that if Jesus wishes it, they will be cured. Already, we have seen cures in William Harvey." And he then proceeded to tell me the story of the women who had voided "two great worms", the very same tale Pearce had told me on the way to Bidnold churchyard to dig for saltpetre, the tale with which he had sought to convince me of the folly of hope. It had affected me at the time, but now that I was standing in the very place where it had happened, the story produced in me a feeling of revulsion so profound that some bile came into my throat and I believe I would have vomited had not Ambrose spied my distress and opened the door of William Harvey so that I could escape into the light of the damp morning.

That night (and all the month of nights since the first one), we, the Keepers of Whittlesea, ate a supper of fish, vegetables and bread cooked by Daniel in the kitchen and we spoke of our day which, to me, had been worse than any day I had spent dissecting cadavers at Padua or tending the poor sick of St Thomas's.

In the middle of this supper, I heard outside a wounding, familiar noise: it was the whinny of Danseuse. And of course I was once again tempted, then and there as I tried to swallow some greasy mackerel, to saddle my mare and ride away. But I did not. And Pearce had his eye upon me and seemed to know my thoughts. "Robert," he said kindly, "when you join us in our Meeting in our parlour, try to cast from your mind all old longings, so that you may be filled with the words of Christ and, through Him, speak to us."

"Yes, John," I said. "I will try."

Before the Meetings, the six Keepers (and now I, the seventh) take up lamps and go round the three madhouses being "tender". Our behaviour each night reminds me of King Harry's before Agincourt, except that we are not exhorting the lunatics to fight courageously on the morrow, but to still their souls in preparation for sleep. We inform them that Christ is in them ("as surely," I heard Pearce say, "as if He were the very blood that moves in a circle out from your heart and to it again") and is therefore keeping all safe during the night.

The straw beds are then laid out and the occupants of George Fox and Margaret Fell lie down upon them and cover their bodies, each with his grey blanket. And then we say a prayer over them and bid them goodnight and take the lamps away and they are left in their rows in the darkness. But the men and women of William Harvey are seldom quietened by our "tenderness", some not recognising night from day and seeming to have no knowledge of what sleep is until it overtakes them. And from my room, which is an exceedingly small place somewhat resembling my linen cupboard at Bidnold, I can often hear crying and howling coming from WH.

During the night, what is called a "Night Keeping" is made at two o'clock by two of the Friends together and we take it in turns to undertake this task, for which we must rise from our beds in the darkness and go in to each of the houses and make sure that none of the mad people is hurt or ill or trying some foul deed upon another. I dread the nights when I must take part in a Night Keeping. I dread most particularly the sight of Katharine sitting up and making rags of her clothes. I have made up some ointment of saffron and orris and I smoothe this upon her temples, but as yet it has had no effect on her. It is always past three before I can return to my bed (there being always some malady to attend to or some comfort to give) and then I find myself so truly woken up by what I have had to do that I cannot return to sleep. And it is always at this hour that thoughts of Celia come into my mind. And I find myself wondering, does she still use my name and call herself Lady Merivel? Is Lady Merivel sleeping at this hour, or is she – as I imagine – singing to guests in her lighted rooms at Kew?

On my arrival here at Whittlesea, I made some attempt to justify my love for Celia to Pearce, describing it as a generous love, a love which was "useful", as the King would have it. He did not agree. He told me I was deluding myself. "It was an intemperate love," he said and, quoting Plato, informed me that "the intemperance of love is a disease of the soul," words which I have written down on a piece of parchment and wrapped around my oboe and put inside the sea chest I have been given in which I keep my wordly goods.

For reasons which are not yet clear to me, my mind seems to enjoy its greatest repose during the Friends' Meetings. I am quite silent within them. In the month that has passed, I have not been moved – by God or any other voice within me – to say anything at all. And sometimes very little is said by anyone and all we do is to sit in a semi-circle by the parlour fire.

It is most odd that I should even tolerate, let alone draw strength from such prolonged bouts of silence. At first, I was most restless at Meetings and impatient for them to be ended and felt my thoughts flying away from the room to lost places. One evening, Ambrose passed to me a piece of paper and asked me to read the words written on it and these were they: "Be quiet, that you may come to the summer, that your flight be not in the winter. For if you sit still in the patience which overcomes in the power of God, there will be no flying." And from that moment, I truly tried to be quiet and not to loathe but to love quietness, and so I began to fare better at the Meetings and at last to feel myself revived a little by the affectionate presence of John, Ambrose, Edmund, Hannah, Eleanor and Daniel.

And when they speak, prefacing even the most ordinary observations by "It has come to me from the Lord," I find myself very touched by what they have to say, so that I want to laugh. And this feeling of suppressed laughter is the nearest I have come for a long time to happiness.

I always wear my wig for Meetings so as to spare John and the others the sight of my hogs' bristles. There is a tidiness about the way they arrange the chairs that I don't wish to spoil. With the wig on, however, and with one of my coats (usually the black and gold, not the red) replacing the leather tabard, I resemble very nearly the Merivel of my former life and invisible under this old finery is the Robert of now. He is present, nevertheless. He is grateful for the warmth of the parlour fire and for the voices of Hannah and Eleanor which are so gentle and soothing that, when one of them is speaking, he sometimes finds himself asleep in his chair. But the one great trouble about Quakers is that they are bossy: they do not let you dream.

Chapter Sixteen. The Scent of Flowers

The winds have gone and the air of April is still and quiet and warm. In the Airing Court, the big oak is putting out leaves of a green so succulent it brings saliva into my mouth. I do not precisely wish to eat these leaves but yet want to posses them in some way before the newness of them vanishes.

It has not rained here for some time and through the yellow crust on the mud of Whittlesea new grass is springing up and in the ditch outside the wall there are primroses and violets. Pearce seems most entranced by these flowers, as if he had never seen nor smelled any like them before. Not only does he pick them and examine them; I have observed him lie down on the edge of the ditch and stick his nose into a clump of primroses and not move for ten minutes at a time. I know from the vacant look in his blue eyes that his mind is at work on some experiment with regard to the flowers, but I have not asked him what it might be lest he infer from my interest in the thing a renewal of a more profound interest in biology.

Hannah and Eleanor are in the habit of thanking the Lord for giving us "kind weather", but I have come to the conclusion that to me such a springtime is cruel; in it I feel wanton and idle. I would prefer a return to hard skies and a clamped chill, these being a better accompaniment to the routine of my day, which is a most harsh one that affords me no leisure at all, but rather commits me to many hours of work of the most demanding kind I could imagine, namely work with my scalpel.

There is, adjacent to each of the main rooms of George Fox, Margaret Fell and William Harvey, a small ante-room, lit with oil lamps, in which patients are examined and cures and operations tried upon them. Before my arrival, Pearce and Ambrose were the only two physicians among the Keepers at Whittlesea and so to them fell the task of trying to alleviate madness with the knife. Now, I have been forced by Pearce to "render service to Whittlesea by placing such skill as you possess in the service of the common good", or in other words to join in the cutting and blood letting and to do it without complaint, for Pearce's eye is always upon me, watching and measuring. He knows very well how I recoil before this return to my former vocation. He knows also that were he and the other Friends to put me out from here, I would be at a loss to know in which to direction to ride.

Mercifully, I have not yet been required to perform any large operations, but there is, by those who study insanity, a great faith put in phlebotomy, and this we undertake daily. The degree of suffering felt by a man who must have his head held over a bowl while a scalpel opens a vein in his temple I cannot calculate, but if I am the one who must make the incision I always feel obliged to apologise to him beforehand, and often feel tempted to add (yet do not): "Forgive me, for I know not what I do," for since coming to Whittlesea I have seen not one cure worked by a phlebotomy. As well as from the forehead, we let blood from the cephalic vein and many patients bear in their arms wounds that have been reopened so many times they will not close. Ambrose says of the cephalic phlebotomies: "In the bright blood let by this means, I can smell the choler!" His faith in medical science is no less complete than his faith in Christ and with regard to both practices I know him to be an honest and honourable man. But I can perceive no miracle cure in the opening of the cephalic vein. Invariably, the patients (even those who are violent) are quiet for some hours after the cutting, but soon enough return to their habitual state, the pain of their wounds surely adding to their other sufferings? In short, I am somewhat critical of the methods we employ here. We spill blood and with its flow believe we release poisonous humours, but do not know beyond all question whether we do or not. I remain silent, however. For it can avail me nought (do you note the biblical cadences into which my language has fallen?) to condemn a thing when I have nothing better to put in its place.

I have noticed, however, that there is one shortcoming in our modes of treatment, which are based upon the unspoken thesis that lunacy is a liquid thing, which may, drop by drop, or in a sudden heaving torment, be coaxed out of the body in streams of blood, vomit or faeces. I do not know whether or not lunacy is a liquid thing but, were it to be so, I would try natural as well as unnatural means of bringing about the body's excretions. And this we do not do. I would cause the lunatics to weep (either with laughter or with sadness, it would not matter) and I would cause them to sweat. For the first, I would tell stories; for the second, I would play music and let them dance. Yet neither tears nor perspiration are encouraged. With those who do cry we are stern, telling them to cease their wailing and remember Jesus who never wept for himself, only for the sufferings of others. And of course there is no dancing. The only exercise taken by the inmates of our Hospital is the passing of the shuttle through the warp of the loom, the turning of the spinning wheels and the slow shuffling round the Airing Court. And this overlooking of two beneficial evacuations of nature has begun to worry me, so that it keeps bobbing to the surface of my mind. It bobs up, in truth, so frequently and persistently that I may soon be forced to disturb Pearce's reverie with his primroses by revealing to him my thoughts upon the subject.

Word that I was once at Court has reached the inmates of William Harvey. How it has traveled there I do not know, unless the hand of the King may still be felt in the ice of the scalpel blade. As Pearce has stated, most of those in WH have no remembrance of the word "Court", nor could imagine what manner of thing a Court might be. But there is one, calling himself Piebald, a mutineer on the Valiant Queen, who now takes great delight in telling me that all men on earth with a rank above midshipman are bringers of pox and pestilence and suffering, and should be slain – as he single-handedly slew three officers – "to rid this England of the stink of privilege". Because I was once a "Court Prick", he includes me among those he wishes to kill, and each week he devises a new means of death for me, death and violence being all that occupy his mind, day and night.

And at night, alone in my linen cupboard, I can sometimes feel mortally afraid of this Piebald. Yet quite often during the day I find myself lingering in his pen, his ways of death being so ingenious that I find solace in them for my imagination. That I do this is, of course, most strange. Yet I find myself wondering, do many men of a cowardly disposition not secretly long to meet face to face that other who, without fuss or deliberation, will instantly take their lives from them? Is it uncommon to feel glad to have found him?

Piebald, My Redeemer

This evening, after the Meeting, I took up a piece of parchment to my room and wrote in a pretty script these blasphemous words.

On the morning of the twenty-first of April, finding myself once again staying awhile in WH to listen to Piebald, then noticing, on emerging from the place, that Pearce was walking across the Airing Court holding a bunch of kingcups to his nose, I came suddenly to the conclusion that we two might ourselves be going mad and that it would be possible to recognise in our behaviours – mine with Piebald, Pearce's with the flowers – the first footsteps of our madness. And no sooner had I addressed this possibility than I came stumbling upon a truth about the fate of the insane which had hitherto remained hidden not only from me but I believe from all the Keepers at Whittlesea. And it is this:

The man who is merely ill will seek out, at the first sign or "footstep" of that illness, the services of a physician to help him to a cure; the insane man, on the contrary, is not taken into any Bedlam or Hospital until his "disease" of madness is so far advanced that it may be beyond cure. In other words, though illness may be arrested early, madness never is – for the only reason that all men learn and know what the footsteps of illness may be, but who can say in each or any case what the footsteps of lunacy are?

Though it was almost dinnertime and the smell of broth in the kitchen brought on a little pain of hunger, I forced myself to go to my room and lie down upon my narrow bed and look very squarely at my supposed truth, following Fabricius's motto: "Let certainty be tempered with disbelief." And I imagined the great anatomist's gaze upon me.

At dinner, I was very quiet and pensive, so that Eleanor enquired: "Are you quite well today, Robert?" I replied that I was well enough but had discovered much, that morning, with which to occupy my mind. Ambrose looked at me benevolently and asked me to share my thoughts with the six Friends "if it may bring you help". I thanked him and said: "Alas, Ambrose, there is so little of the philosopher in me that it is very often the case that my mind is furiously at work upon some supposed great matter which, as soon as I try to put it into words, has the habit of flying out of the window." Edmund smiled. Daniel rose and ladelled a second helping of broth into our bowls. Pearce, dabbing at his thin lips with a coarse napkin, cast in my direction a look of disdain. (It has become a humiliating fact of my life at Whittlesea that, no matter what my mood is, Pearce behaves to me as if he were a mind reader, always knowing precisely what I am thinking.)

In the afternoon, it was the turn of the women of Margaret Fell to make their monotonous perambulation round the oak tree and I and Hannah were their overseers, walking round and round with them and conversing with them "on subjects that will gladden their hearts, such as the coming of spring and the sowing of the Whittlesea House vegetable plot with new lettuce and scarlet beans."

I fell into step beside Katharine and asked her how she regarded the oak, whether it was a thing of beauty or comfort to her, and she replied that she found it to be "quite full of a green death".

"What is this 'green death?" I said.

"It is in nature," she answered, "sometimes in a part of a thing and sometimes in all."

"Do you see it in people? Do you see it, now, in me?"

"No," she said. "In you I see a waft of death. But it is not green."

"What colour might this waft be, then?"

She stopped and regarded me, thus causing the women behind us to knock into us. I gently took her elbow and led her on. I assumed that, after she had thought about it a while, she would reply to my question, but she did not. Her mind had moved away from the subject and onto the thing which torments her night and day, her desertion by her husband while she was sleeping. She began to recount to me – for the twelfth or thirteenth time – how, if he had been a small man he would not have got away without causing her to wake, but being very tall was able to step over her body with one giant stride. And so she began to imitate him, lifting up her skirts and taking great huge awkward steps, causing some of the women to stop walking and watch her and laugh at her and point, as at a lying mountebank. I let her stride on. She calls this imitation of the man who betrayed her a "Leaving Step". She says every man on earth has his own Leaving Step and I often try to calm her rage by agreeing with her and telling her that the King, being very plagued by fools from whom he wishes to walk away, has perfected his Leaving Step into a walk of unsurpassed elegance. Several times, she has asked me to "show the walk" to her. But to make a poor imitation of the King is something I cannot bring myself to do.

The day was very brilliant and warm and we kept the women walking around the tree for longer than the allotted hour. When Katharine had tired of doing her Leaving Step, she came beside me again and after a while put out her hand and touched my shoulder and told me that the colour of the waft of death she saw in me was white. Had she said scarlet, which is a colour that affects me very much, as you will already have noticed, I would have been perturbed by the revelation.

But white was of no significance to me and so I immediately put the thing from my mind.

I did not know that on the evening of the twenty-first of April I was going to break my silence at the Meetings. Though very fascinated by the "truth" I had stumbled upon about the world's inability to try any cure upon the lunatic until he is -in all but a few cases – incurable, I had not planned to offer any discourse upon the subject until I had pondered what practical measures might be taken to remedy this situation. Still less had I plotted within myself to reveal to the Keepers my all-too-Merivelian ideas about the efficacy of weeping and sweating in the treatment of poisonous humours.

And yet, all these things came out of me. And the manner of their coming out was most memorable and strange.

I was seated at one edge of the little semi-circle we make at Meetings round the parlour fire. Near me, on an oak table, was a wooden bowl into which Pearce had put posies of primroses. There was utter silence in the room except for the crackling and spitting of the fire, and there is something about a Quaker silence which is absolute, as if Eternity were then and there beginning.

And in this quiet, I heard myself breathing in the smell of the flowers and after some minutes a certainty stole upon me that this perfume was slowly, with each breath of it that I took, being drawn up into my brain and there being alchemised into syllables and words. And it was not long before my brain seemed to be so full of words – as crammed with them as was the bowl with the primroses – that it began to hurt, and I put my head in my hands to try to get the hurt away. But it would not go. And so I opened my mouth and I began to speak, starting with the phrase, "It has come to me from the Lord," and in a perfectly logical fashion I set forth my argument, saying that madness may be born of many things but yet for all except those who are lunatic from their births there was a Time Before, a time when there was no madness in them and that this would be followed by a Growing Time or a Sickening Time, when the madness was coming upon them, precisely as all disease has a Growing Time. "And we," I said, "we the Keepers of those who are very far gone into a mad sickness, do we not all recognise that the men and women of William Harvey are much further from any help or cure than those in the other two houses? Likewise, is it not our daily fear to find an inhabitant of George Fox or Margaret Fell descended into an uncontrollable mad state, so that we would be forced to chain him up and put him in a pen in William Harvey? Thus we daily admit that madness is not a static thing but, just as all things in the world are changeful, so is madness and, like them, may change for the better or for the worse. But what we do not ask, dear Friends, is what were the Footsteps of each case of madness, in other words how it came there and when and in what manner it first showed itself, yet I, when I was a physician, was taught by the great medical minds of our age that few cures are likely to succeed unless each stage and symptom of a malady is understood. And this is what the Lord has revealed to me, that we should try with each one of those in our care to look back into past time and ask them to try to remember how it was to be in the Time Before and what thing or calamity came about to put them into the Sickening Time. And in this way we might discover the imprint of the steps to madness, there just under the surface, as the imprints of past ages lie under the surface of the earth…"

As I delivered myself of this long speech, I was not aware of how the others regarded it or me, but only of my need to get it out so that my brain would be free of it and no longer hurting in the press of words. I deliberately paused at this point and took in several great breaths and once more the scent of the primroses ascended to my brain and recommenced its alchemy and so I talked on, now making proposals, all of which, I said, had "come to me from Jesus Christ", for the questioning of all inmates of Whittlesea by the Keepers so that the Time Before might become visible to us. And I was entirely held now by my words, as if my words had become a liquid and I immersed in them, like a drowning man in a rushing river. So into the stream now poured all my outlandish things, my fantastical things, my cures by weeping and my cures by dancing, my suggestions for story-telling and the playing of music. As I spoke on these matters, I began to feel a merciful diminution of the pain in my head and so I lifted it up and talked on, staring at the fire, and in the flames of the fire I could see a most wondrous picture of Daniel, attired in the clothes of summer, playing a fiddle, and all the women of Margaret Fell skipping and dancing round him, seeming happy like children. And then the pain left me entirely and the picture vanished and I was silent.

I was very boiling hot. I took off my wig and wiped my face and my head with my handkerchief. I felt the eyes of the others upon me, but no one spoke. A full ten or fifteen minutes passed and the time allowed for the Meeting came to an end and Ambrose put his hands into his prayer steeple and mumbled: "Thank you, dear Lord, that in our presence Robert was moved to speak." And this is all that was said.

Mercifully, it was not my turn that night to take part in a Night Keeping, for as soon as we rose from our circle by the fire, I felt a shivering in my knees and a pain of exhaustion in my belly and I went to my bed and slept a deep, thick sleep from which I did not stir till morning.

When I woke, however, I felt in me a lightness of heart, such I has not experienced since my casting out from Bidnold. I could not account for it, but was most grateful to find it there. (I have, since I arrived here, found myself pondering the thing we call happiness, for which, the King once told me I had a gift. I now recognise that my supposed "gift" was much less of a thing than, say, Hannah's and Eleanor's, they being two of the most contented women I have ever met.)

It was my task, that morning, to work in the vegetable garden with Pearce, together with some six or seven men from George Fox. (I report in passing that Pearce is so fond of this plot, so proud of its drainage ditches and of the infant pear trees he is trying to grow en espalier on its southerly wall, that he likes to oversee all work done there and becomes very vaporous with irritation if his seedlings are not planted in absolutely straight lines.) The sun was once again shining and I would have found my duty in the garden quite pleasant had it not been for Pearce's behaviour towards me that morning, which was most irksome. He acted as one who wished to have nothing to do with me whatsoever, separating himself from any task in which I was occupied and replying most curtly to all my attempts to speak to him. Watching him from a distance planting beans, swooping down on a freshly raked patch of soil like a long-necked bird, using his long white fingers as a dibbling-stick, burying each bean most lovingly and moving on, I remembered how on our angling expeditions near Cambridge this mood of dislike for me would sometimes come over him. Then and now, I find it most hurtful and difficult to endure, particularly as I can seldom fathom what it is I have done to offend him. On this morning, however, I could only conclude that my outpouring of the previous evening had not been to his liking. Some hours – or even days – would probably pass; then Pearce would dissect my thesis with his clever pecking mind and lay it in ruins before me.

Meanwhile, as I plucked weeds from the onion bed, I began in a low voice, lest Pearce hear what I was doing, to talk to the man called Jacob Lowe who was working alongside me and to enquire of him what thing he most clearly remembered before coming to Whittlesea and whether, in his past life, he had some trade or calling. He told me he was a butcher and slaughterer. He described to me the ease with which he could split a calf's head and take out the tender brains. "But I was killed by a whore," he whispered. "I died of her foul cunt. And this is my second life on earth."

I requested him to describe his "death" to me. And he told me that his testicles had swollen and burst "being full of the pox" and out through these burst cods had poured his life.

I looked up at Jacob Lowe. His face was ruddy, his musculature good, his nose prominent and not one whit decayed. From these external signs, I felt it possible to conclude that, if he had once suffered from the pox, he was now cured of it. Such cures are rare but where they occur they have depended – in all cases I have witnessed – on the giving of mecurius sublimate, of which the chief element is mercury itself, that capricious metal to which I once likened the King. And mercury is, if the dose is not most carefully measured, a poison. I saw a man at St Thomas 's die of mercury poisoning and he died screaming and raving, as if a madness had suddenly come upon him. I smiled to myself and looked over to Pearce's stooping back. In the time it had taken me and Jacob Lowe to weed the onion patch, I had retraced the primary footsteps to this one man's lunacy.

Neither at dinnertime nor during the afternoon did any of the friends make reference to my speech of the evening before and Pearce's lack of charity towards me seemed to confirm that he at least had been most displeased by it. I thus kept quiet to myself my conversation with Jacob Lowe and waited for the Meeting to see if Ambrose might pass judgement upon my theory. But he did not mention it, and I confess I felt somewhat cast down to think that what had appeared to me as a revelation appeared to the Keepers of Whittlesea as a thing of no consequence at all. It was only some days later that I was to discover that their way with knowledge is a quiet way. They do not snatch at it or gobble it down; they take it into themselves slowly like a physic and let it course a long time in their blood before making any pronoucement upon it.

Meanwhile, Pearce emerged from his state of foulness towards me and bade me go with him one morning in search of yet more flowers. Not far from the Whittlesea gate we came upon some pale, sweet-scented narcissus, which Pearce instructed me to pick.

"You see," he said, as I gathered the flowers for him, "I am in a most troubling state of unknowing, Robert."

"Are you, John?" I said.

"Yes. For I vowed that in this springtime I would find an answer to a question that has vexed me for many years, namely, what is the scent of flowers? Why is it there? Do plants exhale? Is the scent no more than this exhaled breath? And if there is no exhalation, then in what part of a flower resides the scent?"

"Why do you wish to know this, John?" I enquired.

"Why? Because I do not know it. There is undoubtedly some Divine lesson hidden in the mystery, but until I have unravelled the mystery itself, I am shut out from knowing what it might be."

I held out my bunch of narcissus to Pearce and he took it delicately from me, like a girl. I was tempted to say that the smell of the primroses had led me to knowledge I believed more useful than any he might derive from the study of flowers, but I did not.

Chapter Seventeen. Visitors to Bethlehem

Last night I had a dream of Will Gates. I was in London, and walking to the Tower, and I came upon Will, in rags, begging at the Tower gate. I put some beans into his begging bowl and pretended I did not know him.

When I woke, very dismayed by this dream, I turned my attention to the struggle my mind was undergoing with regard to the word "oblivion". I do not need to remind you of all that I was endeavouring to forget when I was at Bidnold. Now, much of what I had consigned to darkness I am obliged to bring once more into the light. At the same time, back into oblivion must go my turquoise bed, my candlelit suppers, the Red Deer of my park, Celia's apricot ribbons, and of course the smell of the King's perfume which, according to Pearce, I only loved because it was the smell of power. Alas, all these things seem to have been carved into the very tissue of my mind, like graven images. Though many hours may pass during which I do not think of them, I do not believe I will ever succeed in forgetting them completely.

My bird, also, my Indian Nightingale, is very frequently in my thoughts. I know now that I was duped. The creature was a mere blackbird. But the strange thing is that I do not mind. For while it was alive, it gave me pleasure and the realisation that I was deluded only makes me smile. It is a fact about Merivel – and about many in this age – that they do not always wish to know the truth about a thing. And when the truth is at last revealed to them they cannot entirely dismantle all fiction from it. Thus, the blackbird will for ever in my mind have about it the aura of an Indian Nightingale, which species itself does not exist in all the world, but is an imaginary thing. The King was right when he said that I was "dreaming".

To assist me in my task of forgetting, I have begun to pass some time each day with Katharine, it being my conviction that if I could help but one person at Whittlesea to a cure and see them walk out from here, I would start to feel useful and in this new-found usefulness confront my future, whatever it is to be, and not look so enviously at my past.

Though she is sometimes very confused, believing herself to be in Hell, Katharine will often share with me some secrets of her old life, describing to me how her husband was a stone mason and how, before he left her, he once took her with him to the dark, dusty space between the vaulted ceiling of a church and its roof and there committed with her acts of great profanity. She is able, also, to describe her symptoms to me, how, when she lies down to sleep, a pain comes in her abdomen and a great suffocating pressure on her head and how, if she falls into a state of almost-sleep, some spasm of her heart will put her body into a convulsion.

I have understood why Katharine tears her clothes: she is making what she calls "windows" for her limbs to see through, it being her belief that all of her mind and body must be watchful at all times, lest any come near her to do her harm or betray her. If her arms and trunk and legs are covered up, she has the notion that her body has become "blind."

Washing herself, I have observed, solaces her, particularly the washing of her feet, over which task I have seen her fall into a kind of trance. At one Night Keeping, I discussed this last phenomenon with Ambrose. The next day, he told me that he had spent the rest of the night awake, reading his medical books and had come upon something that he had half remembered – that the rubbing of the soles of the feet with black soap may succeed in drawing down from the brain the noisiness within it and so still it and let it rest.

This cure, then, I have begun to try upon Katharine. I sit by her and put her naked feet upon my lap, a cloth under them, and some warm water near me in a bowl. And I immerse the black soap in the water and hold her ankles with one hand and with the other chafe the soles of her feet with the soap. Always, she sits quietly while I perform this somewhat strange task and watches me intently, as if I were some work of ancient art recently excavated from a tomb.

My arm and wrist tire easily. I have not the stamina for this task of foot rubbing that I would like. But if I can continue with it beyond twenty minutes, I am rewarded by seeing Katharine's stare fade and her eyes blink and her head begin to fall onto her chest. Three times, she has truly fallen asleep for several minutes without any spasm or convulsion coming upon her, but the moment I cease my rubbing with the soap, she wakes. And now I feel most vexed that Ambrose and I have discovered a thing which is and yet is not a cure.

Still no opinions have been offered upon my outpouring at the Meeting. Pearce has informed me that the Friends are pondering my ideas, "somewhat forward and arrogant though your speech was, Robert", but this is all. But I am privately pursuing my search for the footsteps of Katharine's madness, in the expectation that these, when revealed to me, will help me to make her well. And it has been made plain to me through this search that Katharine is a woman of a most loving yet childish nature. So, together with Eleanor, who is gifted at sewing, I have made Katharine a doll out of rags (its face painted in oils by me with a small brush) imagining that if she were to grow to love it, it might comfort her at night, just as a doll or toy will comfort a child. It is a very crude thing, having no hands nor feet nor hair and dressed in a simple smock which, immediately the doll was given to her, Katharine removed and tore in pieces. She stared at the doll for a long time. After a while, she pulled some straw from her mattress and made a kind of nest of it on the stone floor and then laid the doll in the straw and called to the women near her to see what she had done. They pressed round her. One laughed a high squawking laugh, another tried to talk, but could only drool and dribble. Katharine looked from them to the straw and to them again. " Bethlehem," she said.

Now, at night, she says prayers to the doll, which she does not touch, but which has become the centre of her vigil. She believes it to be a little replica of the infant Jesus. The fact that its face – if it is like a human face at all – more nearly resembles the face of Rosie Pierpoint than that of a newborn Christ is of no consequence to her. It is the Jesus of her imagination that she sees.

With the coming in of the month of May, news came to us from Earls Bride that the plague, whispered about for so long, had taken hold in London, "so that there is a weekly tally of deaths now that is above seven hundred."

We were told "on the good authority of some upon the staging coach" that the King had removed himself and his Court to Hampton Court but might not be safe there for long. An outbreak of such virulence, said the people of Earls Bride, would creep outwards on the waterways and on the wind and the people themselves, fleeing the city, would bring it into all the shires upon their breath.

The Keepers of Whittlesea sat down by their fire and folded their hands and asked Jesus "not to sew the poisoned seed of the Black Death among us, that the suffering we daily witness here be not added to."

It was then proposed by Edmund (whose eyes and beard shine with such health that it is most difficult to imagine him laid low even by an ague) that the gates of Whittlesea Hospital be closed, allowing no one in except those from whom we buy straw and wood and flour and meat.

Since we are a forgotten place, few people ever make their way here and I remarked therefore that Edmund's proposed precaution was scarcely necessary. It was Ambrose who reminded me that from time to time the relatives of those incarcerated here make the journey from London or Lynn or Newmarket to visit them, bringing provisions, money and clothing. "And it is these," he said, "whom we must – for as long as the epidemic may last – turn away."

Eleanor, Hannah and Edmund nodded in agreement. Daniel rose and made an arch of his hands in front of his mouth and started blowing into it, like someone trying to teach himself to whistle. Pearce sniffed and took from his pocket his little phial of mithridate. He then delivered himself of his opinion that these visits of relatives "are all that defines time for certain of our Decayed Friends. If we prohibit them," he said, "we shall lose many of them to vacancy and so to despair."

I have noticed that the Keepers of Whittlesea are very courteous to each other in argument, Pearce alone among them being given to fits of sulking. And so it was that the closing of the gates to visitors was now discussed in a most amiable way, each one putting forward an opinion and listening politely to those that countered it. Only Daniel remained outside the argument, now and then through his cupped hands making a very peculiar noise a little resembling the hoot of an owl I used to hear from my bedroom at Bidnold. No one paid this any attention at all.

I found myself on the side of Pearce. I knew, for instance, that Katharine's mother had promised to visit her in the summertime and that she longed for this day and hoped her mother would put her arms around her. The notion that, because of our own fear, we would turn this woman away made me feel most uncomfortable. But Ambrose was very passionate in defence of Edmund's proposal. Better that some here should suffer deprivation and loneliness, he declared, than that we should perish and the Hospital fall to ruin. "For where," he asked, "would the survivors go then but to the London Bedlam, which is the saddest place on earth? And there, in all probability die from the very pestilence from which we are trying to protect them!"

Being a large man with mighty lungs, the voice of Ambrose is very big. To me, it appeared to fill up the small parlour so completely that when Pearce spoke again his voice sounded faint and reedy, as if there was no room for it.

And so it was decided: from that very night, the gates would be barred and under the inscription "I have refined thee in the furnace of affliction" would be posted a bill, giving notice that in time of plague no visitors whomsoever would be admitted to Whittlesea. Provisions or money could be left in a basket and would be given to the one for whom they were intended. The well being or otherwise of any inmate could be ascertained by means of a letter to the Keepers.

Pearce was most unhappy with the decision, his disquiet causing a copious running of phlegm from his sore nostrils. And it made me feel afraid. I fell prey to the notion that all the world I had known and loved outside Whittlesea would sicken and die and that we and our hundred tormented souls would be the last beings left alive in England.

And so May came in, hot and still, and the light on the flat horizon danced.

So little rain had fallen since my arrival that we were forced to get water from our well to irrigate our vegetable plot and the nodules of fruit on Pearce's pear trees began to appear wizened, like the cods of an old man.

The primrose season was past and the grass in the ditches was brown and dry. Though Pearce talked of making us nosegays to sweeten our air and drive away the plague germ, he could find no flowers but a few late jonquils with which to make them.

Edmund who, as I have told you, loved a deluge for washing in, declared the heat to be "foul type of weather, ripening nothing but disease" and took to wearing his hat at all times.

I remembered the winter and the snow on my park and my thoughts about Russians, but these things seemed so very distant, it was almost impossible to believe that they had ever been.

The air of the nights seemed not much cooler than that of the days and in them I found sleep difficult, so it became my habit to get up many times in each night; sometimes only to stare out of my window in the direction of Earls Bride and then lie down again; sometimes to tuck my nightgown into a pair of breeches and put on my shoes and go quietly out to Margaret Fell and see whether or not Katharine was sleeping.

I had continued daily with the rubbing of her feet with black soap and I had begun to have some hope for this cure. I could now pause in the task or cease altogether and she would stay asleep for an hour. And whenever I looked at her sleeping thus, I would feel very moved by my own success.

So now, if I found her awake in the hot nights, talking to her doll Jesus, pulling her nightclothes or braiding and unbraiding her hair, I would sit down on the floor beside her pallet and bid her lie down, and then I would place her feet in my lap and begin rubbing them, not with any soap but only with the palm of my hand, and in not many minutes I would see her eyes close and a merciful wave of sleep come over her.

One night, being very tired out of this wakefulness of May, I too fell asleep on the floor of Margaret Fell while rubbing Katharine's feet and when I woke up I saw that Katharine had laid her blanket over me. I might have stayed some while at her side if there had not begun all around me an early morning clamour of the women to piss, so that everywhere I looked they were squatting down on their buckets and the smell of urine quite overpowered me and drove me out into the dawn.

I went to visit Danseuse_, who is most plagued by flies in this hot weather, and I laid my head against her neck and thought about the early morning coming slowly to the Thames, unseen by Celia asleep with the King at Hampton Court. And I remembered Celia's longing for a child and began to wonder whether, in her, the King would create yet another bastard, while with his own Queen he could not produce an heir. These reveries are interrupted by the stamping of Danseuse who, since we rode inside the Whittlesea gates, has been restless and prone to fear. If she were not the only precious thing I own, I would open the gates and let her gallop away.

Some days after this, a great storm moved in over the Fens and the hard earth of Whittlesea was turned once more to mud. Pearce called all the Keepers together in the parlour after our mid-day broth to offer up thanks for the rain falling on his lettuces and his beans. These prayers done, Edmund took up his soap and undressed himself and went out into the deluge but returned, very agitated, a moment later to announce to us that two visitors were at the gates, an old woman and her daughter clamouring to be let in.

"Ambrose," said Pearce, "will you leave these people out in the storm?"

Ambrose went to the window: "The storm is moving east," he said. "It is passing."

"They must not come in!" said Edmund.

"No," said Ambrose, "they must not come in. And they will not. They will read the bill we have posted and they will leave."

"How if they cannot read?" asked Pearce.

Ambrose hesitated a moment before replying. "One of us will go to the gate and talk to them through the grille."

"I shall go," offered Hannah.

"No," said Ambrose calmly. "Edmund will go. He will go directly, for he does not mind the rain."

I watched from the door of Whittlesea House as Edmund, naked except for his frayed under-drawers, jogged out to the gate, soaping his chest as he went, and stuck his head into the small iron grille inset into the heavy portal. I could not hear what he said, for the drumming of the rain on the earth and on the buildings was very loud. Nor could I, from this vantage point, see the visitors, but it appeared they were very insistent for Edmund was so long at the gate he had succeeded in washing all of himself except his legs while he parleyed with them.

He at last came away and bent down to soap his knees and his calves. By this time, however, the storm had indeed moved off in an easterly direction and there was not enough rain falling to rinse off the lather he had made. Edmund threw his head back and glared angrily at the clearing sky before making his way to the pump, where he completed his ablutions. Only then did he return to us and tell us that the visitors had been the mother and sister of my would-be murderer, Piebald, and that they had come out from Puckeridge, some way north of London.

I went up to my room, which is indeed more of a room to me now and less of a linen cupboard, and looked out over the wall that surrounds us to the Earls Bride marshes. On the road to the village, I could see two figures walking, dressed in the clothes of very poor people. Every few steps, they turned and looked back towards us. Then the younger woman put her arm round the shoulders of the older one and they walked on until I could see them no more. Only after they had disappeared from my sight did I "see" that the younger of the two, Piebald's sister, carried a basket that appeared heavy. No doubt they had come with provisions and, being turned away by Edmund, had not thought to leave these at the gate.

It was this knowledge – no less, perhaps, than the knowledge that these women were Piebald's kin – that made me swiftly descend the stairs and inform Ambrose that I was going to ride after the visitors to retrieve the gifts they had forgotten to leave.

"Very well," said Ambrose, "but do not go so near them that you breathe their breath."

"They do not have the plague, Ambrose. There is no plague at Puckeridge."

"That we cannot know, Robert. The germ has come north to us from Southern Europe and so may still be moving in a northerly way."

"Very well. I will not go near them, but call out to them to put down their offerings, which I will then retrieve. Are you content that I should do that?"

"Yes."

"And say," intervened Pearce, "that we are sorry for their wasted journey."

"I will, John."

And so I went out to put a saddle on Danseuse whom I had not ridden for a long time. The storm had quite gone and, in the bright sun once again shining on us, the inmates of Margaret Fell were assembling for their airing, but I gave them no thought, my mind being intent only upon overtaking the visitors.

At the sight of a saddle, Danseuse gave a whinny of joy and her flanks shivered as I tightened the girth. And immediately I had mounted her, she began to trot very fast towards the gate, thus causing some fright to the women walking round the oak tree. I tried to rein her in, but she pulled so hard with her head that I was jerked forward and almost lost my balance. Then Daniel opened the gate for us and we were out of Whittlesea and at once my splendid mare began to gallop like a chariot horse and in no time at all we had reached the straggle of poor houses that is Earls Bride.

I had expected to overtake Piebald's visitors before reaching the village, but there was no sign of them. Managing to slow Danseuse to a quiet trot, I passed through Earls Bride and out the other side of it, where the flat, muddy track led on towards March. Because of its flatness, I could see some way down this road and there was nothing and no one visible on it. I persuaded my horse to stop. I dismounted and looked back at the village. As I have informed you, it is a place without an inn or hostelry of any kind, so I could not guess where the two women might be. It was as if the bright air that still smelled of rain had made them vanish.

Leading Danseuse by the reins, my hand close to the bit, I endeavoured to turn her round so that I could return to the village and knock on the door of one Thomas Buck (who is a thatcher and the only jovial man in this sad community) and enquire of him whether the two women had asked for shelter or rest in any of the houses. But Danseuse would not let herself be turned. She showed me a white, angry eye and reared up, jerking the reins from my hands. I stepped back, involuntarily. She is a large and powerful horse and, discomforting as my life is, I did not wish to be crushed by her hooves and thus lose it altogether on this lonely Fenland causeway.

But I see now that instead of stepping back, I should have tried with all my might to catch hold of Danseuse's bridle. For I was about to lose her. Once out of the Whittlesea gate, she had smelled her freedom in the sunshine. Now, she saw the straight, flat road before her and she took it. She kicked up her heels in a final little dance of joy and then she bolted away, faster it seemed to me than I had ever ridden her, faster even than on our night journey to Newmarket, and I was left with one foot in the ditch, staring stupidly after her.

Collecting myself, I did the only thing that came to my mind: I ran after her, shouting her name, the while knowing this action to be futile, as if a chicken tried to fly after an eagle. But then, at my side, appeared two boys, very ragged and with no shoes on their feet, aged about ten or eleven.

"We'll catch 'im, Sir!" they said and without waiting for permission from me, hurled their thin bodies down the track, calling: "Answers! Answers!" which they thought, from hearing my shouting, to be my horse's name.

I stopped and took a handkerchief from the pocket of my breeches and wiped the sweat from my face. Then I stood and watched. The speed of Danseuse had not slackened at all, but the boys did not seem to understand how easily she would outrun them, for they bolted gamely on, racing with each other to be the first to get to her and bring her back. I saw one of them stumble on the road made muddy by the storm, but he quickly recovered his balance and charged on. Seeing their determination it was tempting to hope, just for an instant, that if I waited patiently, I would, late in the afternoon, see them return, leading my mare between them. Yet I knew this would not happen. Danseuse would run until night fell. She would run until she was lame. She would never return to Whittlesea.

In less than five minutes, Danseuse and the boys passed out of sight. Feeling very stupid standing in the road, and remembering at length the errand on which I had come, I walked to the cottage of Thomas Buck. The thatcher was not at home. His scrawny wife, who is like a pullet with no flesh on her bones, informed me she had seen two women pass through the village but now they were gone along the road to March. I thanked her and she closed her door in my face. I had a great longing to sit down.

Recollected now, that day when I lost Danseuse, that day when Piebald's mother and sister and their basket of provisions seemed to vanish into the air, was one of the most momentous of recent time. For in it I passed from being a kind of visitor to Whittlesea (one who, whenever he heard the whinny of his horse always imagined some future hour in time when he would ride away, back into his old life) to a state of belonging. Since that day, with the stable once occupied by Danseuse empty, I have surrendered to Whittlesea. When I imagine my life passing, it is here that it passes. I shall change utterly. I will no longer be too "restless and dazzling" for fishing. I will be a quiet, brown person. And my skills as a physician and Keeper I shall allow to grow. And I am most moved by all this. For I see that all of it will come about because of Pearce's love for me which allowed me to come here and which – although I really do not know why this should be – is the greatest love I have ever been shown by anyone.

But I must tell you a little more about that day. Another event of importance took place upon it.

The urchin boys did not return for an hour, during which I sat on a pile of willow planks and counted the money that I had upon me, which was fourpence exactly.

They were very disappointed that they had not been able to catch the horse, both for my sake and for theirs, for they clearly understood that there was reward in the thing and when I handed them the two pennies apiece they looked long at the coins, as if willing them to turn into silver.

I thanked them for their gallant chase and asked them, if Danseuse should return to Earls Bride, to bring her to me at Whittlesea. They nodded and one of them asked: "Why is he called Answers, Sir?" to which question I could think of no reply but the feeble pun, "Because he answers to that name and no other." The boys appeared downcast by this, as well they might, so I left them to go in to their suppers of corn porridge and samphire and walked slowly back to Whittlesea, remembering deliberately as I went along all the daring and brilliant rides I had had on Danseuse since she was given to me from the King's stable; and then, upon arriving at the Whittlesea gate, putting them from me for ever and going in with a sprightly step, as if the loss of my horse was nothing to me.

I went into the kitchen of the Keepers' house, it being my turn to help Daniel prepare our supper, and there found Ambrose seated at the scrubbed table looking most grave and troubled. He asked me to sit down and I could sense that some news of a terrible kind was going to be given to me. Daniel, scraping potatoes in a bowl, looked from Ambrose to me and then to Ambrose again and said softly to him, "Robert is not at fault in this, Ambrose," and Ambrose nodded.

There was a long pause, during which Ambrose arranged his hands into their habitual steeple beneath his beard. He then told me, in a most sorrowful voice, that an incident had taken place that afternoon in Margaret Fell while I had been absent. The woman Katharine had bitten and torn her blanket into shreds and with these shreds knotted together a rope and with the rope endeavoured to hang herself from a crossbeam of the roof.

"Most fortunately," said Ambrose, "the screams of the other women brought us all running and we cut her down before she choked and died. But we cannot run any risk that she will try such a thing again and so, for the time being, we have had to put her in William Harvey."

The silence of the kitchen was broken only by the scraping of Daniel's knife on the potatoes grown by Pearce. I wished to speak, but felt a great choking in my throat. To hear these things about the one person I had believed I was helping caused such a shock to my mind that I was quite unable to speak. And the revelation that followed was the most terrible of all: when asked by Ambrose why she had tried to kill herself, Katharine had replied simply: "Because Robert has left me. He has ridden away."

That evening after supper, while the others assembled for their Meeting, I went into Margaret Fell and retrieved from Katharine's place the doll she called Jesus of Bethlehem. Then, breaking the rule that no Keeper must go alone into William Harvey, I went in there and found Katharine who was chained by one foot to the wall. She was sleeping. She had been dosed with laudanum and the smell of it was on her breath. I put the doll into the straw beside her and then came away.

Chapter Eighteen. A Tarantella

I could not sleep that night. Near one o'clock, I rose and lit a lamp, being suddenly very tired of the darkness. And in the yellow lamplight I examined my hands, which is a thing I do sometimes when I am troubled, and in consequence I know the appearance of my hands extraordinarily well. My fingers are wide and red and the ends of them very flat, with flat nails. My palms are moist and hot. On the backs of my hands are a few hairs and some freckles. They are Merivel's hands, not Robert's, yet when they take up the scalpel they do not tremble and they do not err.

It was not my turn for a Night Keeping, but at two, I heard Ambrose and Edmund get up, so I pulled on my breeches and my boots and took my lamp and joined them. On our way to William Harvey (where, in truth, I hoped to find Katharine awake so that she could see me and know I had not abandoned her) Ambrose whispered to me: "The diseased mind, alas, is more prey to violent affections than that which is well."

I smiled. "I know that well, Ambrose," I said.

"Whereas," continued Ambrose, "the true saint loves all men and yet none in particular. And this is a vow that we, the Keepers, have taken at Whittlesea – to emulate the love of saints."

He said nothing more, only strode on very fast, but I knew that I had been reproached. I turned to Edmund, who still walked in step with me. "It was pity for Katharine, for her condition – which touches upon several unanswered questions in my own life – that moved me to help her, Edmund," I said.

"I neither gave to her, nor sought from her, any promises of love."

"I believe you, Robert."

"But we cannot, each on our own, help all of them…"

"Although it is precisely this that we must try to do."

"And I believed that if I could just help one…"

"What did you believe?"

"That I would know at last that I was useful."

"Useful?"

"Yes."

"And why should you assume you were not already useful?"

"Because… it was once told to me."

"By whom?"

"By whom does not matter. That I believed him is what has counted with me."

"But it should not trouble you now, Robert. You are 'useful' to Whittlesea. All I would counsel is that, from now on, you stay away from Katharine."

"And yet…"

"Ambrose would say there can be no 'and yets'."

"I was so near to a cure for her!"

"Perhaps that is somewhat arrogant. Cures are not performed by us, Robert. Only Jesus cures. And we are his agents."

We were at William Harvey by this time and Ambrose had already gone in. Familiarity with this most wretched place has not lessened my loathing of it. Piebald knows how much I fear it and likes to play upon my fears. "Does it swallow you?" he asks. "Is it like the grave to your little soul?"

Mercifully, he was asleep that night with his snout in the straw, but as I passed him I noted, as if for the first time, how sinewy and fleshless are his neck and his limbs and I thought of his vanished provisions and then of the probability that if, one day, I unlocked Piebald from his chains and asked him to kill me with his hands, he would no longer have the strength.

Despite Edmund's advice, I went at once to the stall where Katharine was lying. I bent over her. She had woken from her laudanum sleep, but the opiate was still in her blood and she lay without moving. When she saw me, she attempted to sit up and in trying to move her leg found herself held down by the iron cuff on her ankle. She opened her mouth to cry out, but no sound came from her. I was about to reach out and put a hand on her forehead to calm her when Ambrose came into the stall. He knelt down and lifted Katharine a little and held a cup of water to her lips and she drank, but she did not look at Ambrose nor at the cup, but only at me and as she lapped the water her eyes filled with oily tears. "Speak to her," Ambrose said quietly. "Tell her you are not leaving Whittlesea, for your life is here now."

I endeavoured to do this. "My horse has ridden away," I said, "so there will be no more going out of the gate. And I shall be – "

I could not finish the sentence. Ambrose finished it for me: "With us all," he said. "Robert is with us all."

And I nodded. And Ambrose took away the water cup and lay Katharine down. And into my mind came the image of the husband, the stone mason laying his wife down on the bowed backs of the vaults and unbuttoning himself and asking of her acts of submission in the very roof of God's house.

Two days later, Katharine was returned to Margaret Fell. Ambrose instructed me in what he called "new ways" of caring for her. I could visit her only once each day and not at all during the night, except when it was my turn for a Night Keeping. The duration of my visits to her should not exceed half an hour. I was permitted to continue rubbing her feet with soap, "but only with the soap, Robert, and not with your naked palm", and told to show her no more attention that I would show to any in George Fox. "In this way," said Ambrose, "her affection for you will be held in check, but beware above all, Robert, that you do not let it flatter you and so seek it out."

I replied, as truthfully as I could, that I sought nothing from Katharine at all, only to find a cure for her sleeplessness.

"A cure!" said Ambrose. "I know of no other word that so beguiles us. Yet you, as a physician, know that certain states and conditions are not susceptible to cure – unless there be some intervention from God."

"I accept that," I said. "But with regard to sleep, I have recently begun to comprehend some of its mysteries…"

"I know you believe you do, Robert. Yet it may be that you are not yet as learned on the subject as you think yourself. Time will tell you, no doubt."

I sighed, being crestfallen by Ambrose's severity.

"Time!" I said moodily. "I was once told I was a man of my time, but at some moment – and I could not precisely say when – I think that my time and I parted company, and now I do not belong to it at all, indeed I do not really belong anywhere…"

"Beware your very vast self-pity, Robert," said Ambrose, "and bend your thoughts and your energies instead towards music."

"Towards music?"

"Yes. John and I and the others have now pondered long enough upon some words you spoke at a Meeting in spring. And we concede that to organise a little dancing – on midsummer's day perhaps? – might have some beneficial effect upon us all. So what do you say? Will you play for us?"

I looked up at Ambrose. His large face had a large grin upon it. I cleared my throat.

"I am not… as marvellous a player as I would like to be, Ambrose," I said. "Before I came here, I was getting some oboe lessons from a German teacher, but they were curtailed."

"Well, we are speaking of simple tunes, are we not: a polka, a tarantella?"

"Yes…"

"Will you do it?"

"If there was any among us who played a string… then the sound would be somewhat better and more rounded."

"Talk to Daniel. He has learned the fiddle and the two of you can rehearse your pieces in the parlour."

Ambrose left me then and I sat down in the kitchen, where this conversation had taken place, and began to imagine the women of Margaret Fell and the men of George Fox coming out into the sunshine and hearing music and looking about them stupidly, some of them being uncertain whether the sounds were there in the air or only there in their minds. The thought made me smile.

I took a radish from a bowl on the table and ate it and the harsh taste of it reminded me of my curing of Lou-Lou and, in the midst of my contentment about the forthcoming dancing at Whittlesea, I had a moment's longing for the sight of the old noisy river.

That evening, after spending my allotted half hour with Katharine (who, when I am with her is, in five minutes, soothed and calmed by my touching of her feet, so that she falls asleep with a strange smile on her face) I went to my room and unwrapped my oboe from the words of Plato, inserted a new reed into the mouthpiece and began to play a scale or two with the correct fingering taught to me by Herr Hummel. To hold the instrument in my hands again gave me a feeling of peculiar happiness. I did not in the least mind the monotony of the scales, but rather delighted in them, endeavouring to play them faster and faster and finding my clumsy fingers almost adequate to the task.

I then paused, dried the reed, and embarked upon Swans Do All A-Swimming Go which, notwithstanding that my instrument was a little out of tune and my tuning skills very paltry, I declare I played more sweetly than I had ever done in the summer-house at Bidnold. As I finished the piece, there was a knock on my door. I opened it and found Eleanor there. "Robert," she said, "may I come in and listen to you? May I listen for a short while?"

"Well," I said, "you are welcome, but the while will be exceedingly short, for that little song is the only piece I know!"

As I have told you, Eleanor is a person of great good nature and, although I knew her to be disappointed at the severe limitations to my repertoire, she did not show her disappointment, but only said brightly, "Why then, play that one again." So she sat down on my bed (a cot it is rather, not a true real bed) which is the only place where one is able to sit in my linen cupboard, and I played the Swans for her a second time and when I had finished, she wiped her eyes with her apron and pronounced the music "most sweet."

Now, this week, with midsummer approaching and the stifling weather still with us and all of Whittlesea plagued by flies, I pass much of each day with Daniel who, just as I had imagined, is quite adept as a fiddle player and whose goal it now is to teach me to play on my oboe simple accompaniments to three or four sprightly tunes for which he possesses sheets of music so seemingly ancient and yellow and bedraggled it is as if they had once been dredged from the sea by Sir Walter Raleigh. One is called Une Tarentelle de Lyon and was composed by a person who signs himself Ch. de B. Fauconnier, and this piece is so fast that firstly, I cannot keep up with it on my instrument and, secondly, I wonder if Ch. de B. Fauconnier did not go mad in the writing of it and end his days in a Lyonnais asile. As I muse on this possibility, Daniel chides me gently for "having the habit of talking too much."

The anniversary of my wedding, the seventh of June, has come and gone. It is most strange to reflect that, when I put on my purple garb and my three-masted barque, I imagined that here was a new beginning that would bind my life ever more firmly to the life of the King; and to understand now that my wedding day began for me nothing at all but a year of great loneliness and striving and ridicule.

Though determined not to dwell upon any memory of my wedding, I did find myself waking very early on the morning of the seventh of June and recalling how I had gone out from the feast and flung myself on the lawn of Sir Joshua's house and cried, there to be found by Pearce, to whose life I do indeed seem to be bound and without whom I would truly feel myself to be very alone. And it came into my mind to thank Pearce, there and then, for his friendship, to tell him how, in my least action, I try to measure in my mind how he would see the thing and judge it. And how in this way -though I sometimes rail against it – he is present in all that I do, so that for as long as I live (whether here with him or elsewhere) he will always be with me, like Jesus Christ is with the true believers. But I did not stir, only lay on my little bed and watched the sunrise, and thought of my friend asleep, holding his ladle.

In my struggles with Une Tarentelle de Lyon and the other dances, I soon pushed from my mind my wedding day thoughts. Daniel, being a far less condescending teacher than Musikmeister Hummel, has succeeded in teaching me a great deal in a short while and I feel, in the making of this music, some of that uncontrollable excitement that afflicted me when I did my wild, splodged painting of my park. Hours pass and we play on, struggling always for a faster tempo, and these rehearsals of ours have brought great jollity to the house, the Friends clustering round us and clapping their hands and Edmund unable to restrain himself from skipping about.

"Music!" thunders Ambrose after grace one suppertime. "Why was music not always with us at Whittlesea?" And I look round the table at the faces which all nod in agreement and I marvel suddenly, that these Quakers, who love plainness in all things and loathe and detest the sung services of the High Church, should be so taken with the mad gallop of Ch. de B. Fauconnier that when at last we strike up our tarantella for the inmates of our Bedlam I am certain that Ambrose and Pearce and Edmund and Eleanor and Hannah will be the leaders of the mad revels.

Very seldom do letters arrive at Whittlesea, it being a deliberately forgotten place. The mail coach goes to Earls Bride and no further, so that any letters for Whittlesea are brought out to us by the village children and a penny given to them for each one delivered.

Since my coming here, I have written only one letter – to Will Gates whom I presume still to be at Bidnold. In some very inadequate sentences, I thanked him for all his pains on my behalf and apologised to him for the change in my fortunes. I asked him to keep for himself the painted cage of the Indian Nightingale and to be assured always of my affection for him.

I had received no reply, nor expected any. Writing words on paper is not one of Will's gifts. However, one day before the dance, as the Airing Court was being swept, an urchin arrived at the gate bearing a letter for me. It was from Will. It read thus:

Good Sir Robert,

Your servant W. Gates is most thankful of your kindnesses, one and many, to him. He is well sorry for your departing. You are in his memory in the cage, kindly given. And will be therefor always.

The tiding is your house has passed and land and all to a French noble, Le Viscomte de Confolens, and a most forwardy, ticklish man preferring to regard his own wig and nose and Beauty Spots in the glass than to note any good thing at Bidnold.

Merciful thanks Le V. is not much visiting here. But when he comes, comes with a retenue of ladies, all French. Some very common seeming and shrieking out in their language and showing their feet.

I am and M. Cattlebury to be kept hired here and so too the grooms and maids, according to Sir J. Babbacombe.

But we are not paid our money. We have no wage from Le Viscomte, Sir Robert, and I have writ to Sir J. Babbacombe to tell him this.

My Lady Bathurst did arrive here in May and says to me 0 Mister Gates what is to become of this place! And truly I did not know what to answer. And she then weeping. And as I am a Norfolk man and so backward in grace could not stop myself weeping also. But I am sorry for it. So keep you well, Sir and Mister Pearce also. And if you can write me any letter, I will be happy.

Your still remaining Servant,

Wm. Gates

I folded this letter after I had read it once and stowed it away in the sea chest, thus hoping to put it out of my mind, for I do not deny it made me feel sad. Pearce, as it chanced, came seeking me on some errand just as I was putting the thing away and saw at once (for nothing that I feel can I seem to conceal from him) that some portion of my past was once again preoccupying my mind, which should have dwelled only and entirely on my great Cure by Dancing that was to be tried the next day. He stood at the door and regarded me and without asking me what my letter had contained, he said, in his sternest voice: "I presume you are familiar with the Act of Praemunire, Robert?"

"No," I replied, "I am not, John."

"Let me enlighten you then. The Act of Praemunire permits the confiscation – immediate and without redress, upon the presentation of a warrant of Praemunire – of property, goods and chattels as a punishment for Non-Conformity. Hundreds of Quakers have lost their houses and their land under the terms of this loathsome edict. The suffering caused by it has been beyond what you could imagine. So do not believe you are singled out, Robert. You are merely one of many. The King has behaved towards you as towards a Quaker, and this is all."

Before I could make any answer to this, Pearce had turned and walked away leaving behind him in my room a faint smell of the mithridate with which he continues to dose himself, his cold and catarrh yielding to no cure at all, not even to the hot, dry weather.

When I woke the following morning, I was aware of a strange sound in the room, a sound with which I knew myself to be familiar, yet could not for a moment interpret.

I lay and listened. I knew it to be very early, for the light at the window was grey. And then it came upon me what I was hearing. I sprang out of my cot and drew back the hessian drapes at the window and I saw that I was not mistaken: a great sheeting rain was coming down upon us and upon all the preparations we had made for the dancing. The Airing Court, baked to a hard, yellow dryness by the sun, was to have been our dancing floor. Now it was already returning to slimy mud.

The Keepers (who are not usually cast down by any occurrence) seemed sad – every one of them including Pearce – at the cancellation of the dance. Into this sadness I cast a question that had been troubling me for some time: "When we at last begin the music and the occupants of George Fox and Margaret Fell come out, what is to happen to those in William Harvey?"

"They cannot dance, Robert," said Pearce.

"We cannot unchain them," said Edmund.

"But they will hear the music," said Ambrose. "We will open the doors of William Harvey so that the sounds reach them."

I was forced to be content with these answers, but was vexed to find a terrible pity for the men and women of WH coming over me, such as I had never felt before, not even upon my first sight of them in their rags and straw. And I remembered my journey to Kew with the tilt-man, how I had passed Whitehall and seen light at the windows and heard laughter and yet myself been outside on the flat, dark water; and I knew that what I detest about the world is that one man's happiness is so often another man's pain.

It rained for two days and in that small bit of time Daniel and I, to divert ourselves, invented some sweet harmonies and variations to my old tune, Swans Do All, so that it was transformed from a dull little song into music of great prettiness. And after supper of the second day, we got our instruments and played it in the parlour for the Keepers, and the thing which pleased me about our playing was that I could tell that Pearce was very moved by it, though he would say no more to me about it than, "Progress, Robert. You are making progress."

So it was on the last day of June, just past the summer solstice, that we opened the doors of Fox and Fell and led out the people. On a trestle table were three pails of water and some cups and ladles, and I watched how some of the men, before any dancing had begun, started to ladle water over their heads and laugh. And then others joined them and this playing with the water seemed to preoccupy them utterly, as if it was the thing on earth they most loved to do. But then Daniel and I began on a polka and slowly all the group clustered near to the wooden podium on which we stood and stared at us, their mouths gaping and some putting their hands over their ears. It was most difficult to play with this press of people on us. And then I saw Katharine push her way from the back of the group to the front, and she stood so close to me that I had to turn aside a little for fear of poking my oboe into her eye.

We finished the polka and I wiped my brow and some of the people applauded with their fingers splayed out like children and some laughed and some went back to the water buckets.

Ambrose then came and stood with us on the podium. Addressing the multitude of mad people, he said: "Today, instead of walking round the tree, we are going to dance. Robert and Daniel will play and we are going to skip or gallop. What steps we do, what patterns we make, do not matter. We can dance in a square or in a circle or each on his own like a dancing dot. Your Keepers, all of us, will dance with you. And now we are going to begin."

Ambrose stepped down and he and Hannah and Eleanor and the others each took one man or woman to be their partner and so we struck up another polka and the press of people turned away from us a little to watch those now skipping about, among whom was Pearce who had not the least idea how to dance a polka but was jumping up and down, holding the hands of an elderly woman, as thin as he, who began to cackle with a laughter so violent that she could scarcely breathe.

After the third or fourth time, perceiving that only a few joined in any kind of dance and many only stared about them in confusion and outrage, I saw that my experiment risked turning into a lamentable failure. Katharine had now sat down on the ground and was holding onto my boot, thus causing me to feel as if I was chained to the floor like those in WH, from which building we could now hear shouts and cries and a loud banging on the wall.

I felt very sick with embarrassment. "It is not working," I whispered to Daniel. "They do not understand what to do."

Daniel put down his fiddle and took off his waistcoat. His face was red and sweating. Then he picked up the violin again, twanged the A-string to tune it and said to me, "Try the tarantella."

I sighed. I thought of all the hours we had spent rehearsing the difficult Tarentelle de Lyon. They seemed utterly in vain. I blew some spittle from my reed, then I bent down and took Katharine's hand from my foot and lifted her up. And I spoke out to the so-called dancers:

"We shall play a tarantella for you," I announced. "This is a whirling dance. So why do you not whirl and turn and jump, or do anything you will? Pretend you are leaves flying, or children skipping."

There was some laughter at this. I smiled, trying to pretend I was very pleased and happy, then prepared myself to play. As I lifted up my instrument, Katharine reached out and caught hold of my arm and said to me, "Dance with me."

"I cannot…" I said.

"Robert cannot," said Daniel. "Robert is the music!"

"Dance with me," said Katharine again, and she began to pull at me, so that I was nearly toppled from the podium.

But Edmund was at Katharine's side now, having seen what was happening to me.

"Come," he said to her. "I shall show you a proper tarantella." And she let herself be led away.

"Save us from this, Daniel!" I whispered.

And he smiled that smile of his which is like the smile of a child.

So we began on the dance. The heat of the afternoon and fear of the failure of the venture made us play it as fast and urgently as we had ever done and, as we entered upon the second rondo of it, I began to have cause to give thanks to Ch. de B. Fauconnier, whoever he may have been, for he had indeed written a strange and stirring piece of music. As we neared the end of it, I whispered to Daniel that we should recommence and keep on because I saw that it held the attention of almost everyone assembled and that in their uncoordinated ways they were struggling to move about.

We played the tarantella five times without stopping and the sweat poured down my forehead and stung my eyes so that the scene in front of me became shimmery and lit with a strange bright winking light like the étincellement of a star. But I knew by the end of the fifth tarantella that everyone was moving, trying to spin and whirl and clapping their hands and some trying to sing and some wailing and some shrieking like the devil.

I have never seen nor heard nor been any part of any thing that was like this hour. And when it was over and we stopped playing and wiped our faces, I felt for the briefest moment of time that I was no longer merely myself, no longer Merivel, nor even Robert, but joined absolutely in spirit to every man and woman there, and I wanted to make a circle with my arms and take them in.

That night in William Harvey, Pearce and I, at the hour of the Night Keeping, found a dead woman.

The clamour and agitation in WH was terrible to witness and I knew that the music had caused it.

As we covered the dead body, on whom, Pearce informed me, we would perform an autopsy the following day, I said to him, "For two or three we have helped in George Fox and Margaret Fell we have sacrificed one here." He nodded. "None of us," he said, "gave this sufficient thought."

We administered a dose of belladonna to every inmate of WH who allowed himself to swallow it (Piebald spat his into my face) and left them to a misery that none of them had words to express.

It was a great relief to come out of WH and to go into Margaret Fell where, notwithstanding a very strong stench of sweat, there was a feeling of calm in the place and we saw at once that all the women were sleeping. Katharine, alone, was awake. She was sitting up and holding the doll to her breast – which was naked and out of her torn robe – as it might be to suckle an infant.

"Stay with her a few minutes," said Pearce, "and I will go on to George Fox. It's getting towards morning and your tarantella has made me tired, Robert."

It was my vow, these days, never to be left alone with Katharine. Ambrose and Edmund had helped me to see what harm I had – all unintentionally – done to her by causing her to feel for me an affection (a love even?) that I could not return. Since understanding this, I had stayed more aloof from her, sometimes getting Hannah or Eleanor to take over the task of rubbing her feet and once telling her that I was too busy to stay and listen to the stories of her past.

On this night of the tarantella, however, I did sit down beside her and took her feet in my lap and began rubbing them, being once again very moved by her condition of sleeplessness.

She sat quite still and watched me. After a few moments, she set her doll aside, then slowly, with a self-caressing hand pulled aside her nightgown and exposed her other breast to me. She licked her lips and regarded me, and in her exhausted eyes I could discern a slow, sleepy, all-enveloping lust. I let go of her feet and made as if to get up, but she reached out and held me, and moved the heel of her right foot up into my groin where, to my great shame and fear, I knew she would find me hard.

I prayed.

I prayed for Pearce to return.

I prayed to God to give Robert the strength to walk away and not let Merivel do as he wished, which was to lay the madwoman down beneath him.

And after a moment or two, in which I did not move, I heard a voice calling me softly from the door. "Here I am, John," I said. And I got up and followed my friend out into the cool air of four o'clock.

Chapter Nineteen. In God's House

At the back of WH, enclosed by a low fence, is a graveyard. I was not shown this when I first came to Whittlesea, but discovered it for myself soon afterwards. There are at present six graves in it and I have been told that they were dug by the men of George Fox, "one of whom in his life before he came to madness was a grave-digger and can dig a very perfect and neat grave."

I asked Ambrose whether, when a man or woman died at Whittlesea, the body was not given back to relatives for burial in some place that might have once been their home. Ambrose replied that if the relatives came and asked for the dead person the corpse would be put in a coffin and given to them, "but few do ask, Robert, it being the case that very many of those here are deemed by their families to have died already." It was this remark of his, upon which my mind has often dwelled, that has helped me to believe in the death of Merivel and his replacement by Robert. Alas, however, Merivel now and again finds the grave an excruciatingly boring place and clamours to come out of it. I fear he may never be entirely quiet and obedient to death until he is actually buried (here at Whittlesea?) and the only sound to be heard near him is the sound of the Fenland wind in the grasses.

As Ambrose, Pearce and I began, then, on an autopsy of the woman found dead in Willian Harvey, a grave-digging party, under the care of Edmund, set out with picks and spades. The day was once again hot and I saw that as they assembled in the Airing Court, a cloud of flies gathered round their heads. These flies made me feel depressed. In what had remained of the previous night, I had had a dream of Fabricius at work in his little anatomy theatre. He had been in an angry, difficult mood and had told us, his students, that we preyed on his knowledge – having so little of our own – like flies on a cadaver.

Towards ten o'clock, the body of the dead woman was laid on the table in the operating room in Margaret Fell. (There is, as I have told you, such a room in all three houses, but very few operations are performed in that of WH, the noise coming from the stalls of the inmates being too disturbing and distracting.) Ambrose, Pearce and I, wearing our leather aprons, slit open and tore away the ragged clothes that covered her and then we stood silently for a moment, each looking at the body and taking note of what we saw of external wounds and marks.

The woman was old, of more than sixty years, and the skin greyish and wrinkled and the muscles of the limbs and of the stomach seeming wasted and slack. The hair on her pubis was sparse and white and there was some of this same hair sprouting on her chin and on the aureoles of her nipples.

Ambrose began to record all abnormal things he found upon her, such as a red soreness of the naval and a bruising on the area of the sternum and Pearce wrote each thing down. I went to her head and took the jaw in my hands to open it and examine the teeth, which were very black and decayed and reeking of putrefaction, and so I reported out loud on my findings to Pearce. But I was so affected by the sight of the body that I could not refrain, at length, from saying: "Does it not strike you as a most terrible but true thing, that men in this world and age can come by fortune in many ways and have many currencies with which to barter, but that women have only one, and that is the currency of their bodies, and when this is spent they must all, high or low, depend upon the charity of some overseer or other?"

"In a Quaker house," said Ambrose, "all are equal before God."

"I know," I said, "but not in society. In society, all women who come to forty come to an impoverishment of a certain kind."

"For this and a thousand other reasons," said Pearce, "have we turned our back on society. Neither Hannah nor Eleanor will ever be 'poor' in the sense that you mean."

"No," echoed Ambrose, "they will not."

"So be glad that you are here, Robert, and not where you once were."

In this way, adding a sniff that was like a neat full-stop to his sentence, Pearce declared the subject I had raised to be closed. Many of my utterances he believes to be a waste of my breath-"and we are allotted just so many breaths, Robert, and no more" – and indeed this one was a digression from the main purpose of the morning, which was to ascertain how the old woman had died.

None of us had been aware that she had been suffering from any illness, only a debility coming on her with old age and the ravages of her madness. Upon the opening up of her chest, however, we found the organ of the heart to have an encrusted and scabby appearance and the blood of her arteries and veins to be dark and sticky like treacle; and it did not take Pearce long to conclude that death had come with the cessation of the heart's pulse, the blood being too heavy to move. Ambrose and I nodded our agreement and I, for one, was relieved that we did not have to proceed to an examination of the liver or bowel. The autopsy concluded, Ambrose left Pearce and me to sew up the incision we had made and to clean and wrap the body for burial. I took a suturing needle from my box of instruments and Pearce was measuring for me a length of gut when he suddenly declared: "I am afraid of death, Robert."

I looked up at him, surprised. Towards the great subject of mortality Pearce had always shown an enviable indifference. When, on one of our angling trips near Cambridge, he had fallen from a little wooden bridge and almost drowned in the blanket-weed, he had shown neither fear of death nor gratitude towards me for saving his life by thrusting towards him a landing net with which I towed him into the bank. I had always believed that he thought of death as a kind of reward for his earthly goodness and abstemiousness and that in his hard-working life he sometimes found himself looking forward to it.

As I began to sew up the dead woman's chest, I now said as much to him. "You of all people I did not think would be afraid of it, John," I said. And he nodded. "Until recently, I was not," he said, "but for a month now – and I am telling this to you, Robert, and to no one else, for I do not want to trouble the others – I have felt certain symptoms come upon me, certain symptoms…"

"What symptoms?"

"Well… this catarrh of mine…"

"It's no more than a catarrh."

"And a very cold sweating on the crown of my head…"

"Just part of the rheum or catarrh, John."

"And a violent coughing and choking at night, with much pain in my lung."

"Pain in your lung?"

"Yes."

"How great is the pain?"

"Sometimes so great that I want to cry out."

The flesh of the dead woman, pinched between my finger and thumb for the suturing, was icy cold and I now felt slide into my heart a cold worm of fear.

I stared at Pearce. "Are you telling me that it is pain in your lung that has given you thoughts about dying?" I asked him.

"Yes. For it does not seem to go away. Nor this cold sweating of my head, despite the hot weather."

I said nothing. I finished sewing up the wound and together Pearce and I washed the woman and inserted wads of flax into the damp orifices of the body and put the winding sheet round it. Then I said: "Let me come to your room after the Meeting this evening, and I will examine you."

"Thank you, Robert," said Pearce. "And you will tell no one?"

"No. I will tell no one."

"Thank you. For they are such good people, are they not? I would not have them lose any sleep on my account."

I had been troubled all morning by thoughts of Katharine, my lust for her being of that most loathsome kind, where the very feelings of loathing seem to excite rather than to repel.

Now, hearing that my friend was ill, everything went from my mind, and I wished only for the day to pass so that I could make my examination of Pearce and allay his fears and mine by discovering in him some ague that would soon leave him – and nothing more.

The Meeting, however, was longer than usual that evening. After some moments of silence, Edmund stood up and said that he wished the Lord's forgiveness for what he was about to say, that he knew that the agitation he was in was unworthy and childlike, but something of great magnitude had begun to trouble him and that was the loneliness of Quakers.

He paused for a moment. No one asked him any question, but waited in silence for what he would say next. Then he took out of his pocket a crumpled piece of parchment and read some words as follows: "The Lord showed me, so that I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people's hearts; for both Stephen and the Apostle Paul bore testimony that he did not dwell in temples made with hands, not even in that which he had once commanded to be built, since he put an end to it; but that his people were his temple, and he dwelt in them."

After this and in some distress, so that his rodent's eyes began to brim with tears, he said: "It has come to me, not from the Lord, but in some very fearful dreams I have had, that for every other kind and condition of worship there is some steeplehouse or temple or shrine or actual place where the faithful can go in, as if going to God's house like a visitor and where, outside of himself, he can feel the presence of God, his host. But for the Quaker there is no such place and if- as I have felt in these dreams of mine – he has some sudden perception that God is not there within him any more, where shall he go to find Him? He cannot go to God's house, for what he is is God's house! So what shall he do? Please tell me my good Friends, how shall he overcome his isolation and his loneliness?"

Edmund then sat down and blew his nose and as he fumbled for his handkerchief, his piece of parchment fell to the floor and for some reason this letting go of a thing that was precious to him, more than his anxiety or the words he had spoken, made me feel a great kinship with him and I would have stood up and tried to answer his question if I had had any notion of what the answer might be.

Some more silence lay on us then, but it was broken after a few minutes by Ambrose who reminded Edmund that Fox had warned us not to rely upon dreams and had said "except you can distinguish between dream and dream, you will mash or confound all together." And so a discussion of dreams began which lasted some while: how there are three sorts of dreams, one kind being caused by the business of the day and another being the whisperings of Satan and a third kind being true conversations between God and man.

Because I am still plagued with dreams of my past, with dreams of Celia in fact and of course of the King, I began privately to wonder in which category these dreams fell and so lost the thread of the meeting for a while. When I once more gave it my attention, I saw that it had become very passionate with, not only Edmund crying, but Hannah also, and Eleanor kneeling and taking up her Bible and declaring to us all that to enter the Book was like entering God's house and to begin to read from the Apostles was to feel a welcoming hand taking us in and guiding us and offering us nourishment "as we would offer cakes or broth to a visiting Friend."

This reminder to Edmund that if God mysteriously went missing from him, he could start to find him again in the Scriptures seemed to cheer and comfort him somewhat. I thought that the Meeting might end then, but it was Eleanor's request that we should spend five or ten minutes each seeking out some verse of the Gospels that was and always might be of particular comfort to us. And so we each went to fetch our own Bibles and then sat round in our semi-circle and made little readings from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All the Quakers, including Edmund, found passages most appropriate to what had happened during the Meeting about Jesus loving especially the poor and the childlike and saying, "Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden" and, "Suffer the little children" and so forth. But when it came to my turn, I chose the verse from Luke, Chapter Two, which describes the mortal fear of some common shepherds at the sight of God's messenger angel: "And lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid…"

I do not really know why I chose it, except that I seem to have known it by heart all my life and that I wanted to say to Edmund that God surely frightens us and makes us feel lonely just as often as he comforts us. Such fear, as in the case of the shepherds, may be a prelude to a revelation of great importance, but then again it may not be. In my own case, it is usually fear of suffering and death and a prelude to nothing at all.

I bade goodnight to all the Keepers. I went to my linen cupboard and lit my lamp and I took this with me to Pearce's room, so that we had two lamps by which to work. I also took with me my surgical instruments, cleaned meticulously these days, with their silver handles polished.

As Pearce sat down on his narrow bed, I said: "I'll wager you have caught a summer chill and this is all."

"No," said Pearce, "I have had chills before and this is not one."

"Well, let us see…"

I began by taking up a tongue depressor and looking down Pearce's throat, which did not appear inflamed though I noted that his tongue was a little swollen and coated and that his breath was foul. I then examined his neck for swellings and found none. Then, guided by his hand, I put my hand on that part of his head that felt cold to him and through his thinning hair felt it to be moist, as if there was a sweating there.

This done, I asked him to take off his coat and shirt and to lie down on his bed, so that I could listen to his heartbeat and his breathing.

While he undressed, I made notes about the strange moistness of his head, the cause of which I could not at first fathom. Then I looked up.

Pearce stood before me, folding his shirt into a bundle, wearing only his frayed black breeches and stockings. I thought back to the last time I had seen his arms and chest unclothed, which was during my vigil at his bedside in the Olive Room at Bidnold. He had been as thin then as he always was as a young man, but now the change in his appearance was distressing beyond words to behold, for he was like a veritable skeleton, with his chest quite concave and every rib visible to me, seeming to have no covering of soft warm flesh on him at all, rather his bones appearing held together by his white skin.

"Pearce…" I stammered, forgetting in my shock at the sight of him, his constant entreaty to me to call him John.

"Yes," he said, "I know. I am grown a little thin."

"A little!" I blurted out. "What has happened to you? Have you been fasting?"

"No, I eat what is put before me. I do not know how this weight has been lost."

"Lie down!" I snapped.

Obediently, Pearce set aside his bundle and lay on his back on his bed. I brought the two lamps as near to him as I could and looked down at him and, truly, I wanted to cuff him about his head for allowing his body, invisible to us all inside his baggy clothes, to waste away to this degree.

I took up his wrist and felt his pulse and was relieved to find it quite strong. Then I bent over him and put my head on his chest and heard his heartbeat against my ear.

"It is the lung you should be listening to," said Pearce.

"I know," I said crossly. "Inhale deeply and exhale as slowly as you can."

The intake of breath was not smooth. It had a kind of spasm to it, as if there was a sobbing in the body.

"Inhale again and keep on with slow breaths until I tell you to stop," I instructed.

I listened for several minutes, moving my listening position a little after every second breath, then I told Pearce to turn over and I put my ear to his back, which is a most wretched part of the man, being very scabby with pimples, and all of what I heard made me afraid, for I was in no doubt that the lungs were in distress, having in them a quantity of mucus or phlegm which, if it is not got out, will in time fill all the lung tissue and bring the sufferer to a cruel death like a slow drowning.

"It is a poisonous congestion, is it not?" said Pearce, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, which I now saw were very heavy with tiredness.

"Yes," I said.

"And the sweating and coldness in my head?"

"Probably a beneficial evacuation. A means by which the matter is endeavouring to come out."

"And if it does not come out?"

"We will bring it out. But you must rest, Pearce."

"John."

"John, then! But you will be neither one nor the other and no name will matter one whit, if you allow yourself to die!"

"I cannot stay in my bed, Robert, when there is so much work to do here."

"You must stay in your bed, or the remedies I shall prescribe will have no help from you, only hindrance."

"No, I cannot. For we must reveal nothing of this to Ambrose or the others."

"Pearce," I said crossly, "please do not make me lose my patience! Have I not, a hundred times since we met at Caius, allowed you to command me and let you be wise and done this or that thing at your bidding? I have! So do not even consider contradicting me on this score. For I am determined you will do this one thing that I am ordering you to do, and that is to stay here in your bed and let us care for you and not to stir from this room till you are well. And if you do not do this, John, you will no longer be my friend or any true Friend to Whittlesea. You will be in your grave!"

Pearce then allowed his head to fall back on his pillow and he nodded. "Very well," he said, "but only for a little time. What will you prescribe?"

"Syrup of roses to warm your blood and soothe your coughing. A burdock poultice or a bread poultice for your head."

"And for the slime in the lung?"

"Sal Ammoniac."

"And a balsam?"

"Yes. We shall try several, dissolved in boiling water and inhaled."

"Good. It has all returned to you then, Robert?"

"What has returned?"

"The right knowledge for the right time."

"Perhaps."

"As of course it had to. For we can never truly unknow what we have known or unsee what we have seen, can we?"

"Probably not, John," I said. "Now please do me the favour of taking off your breeches and putting on your nightshirt."

Two weeks passed, during which I wished to turn all my thoughts and all my strength to the cures I was trying upon Pearce. But they were weeks in which I found myself subjected to a great clamouring from the people of George Fox and Margaret Fell who, whenever I went among them, begged me to let them come out and dance once again, informing me that dancing was the only cure for them and that all their madness was caused in the first place by the absence of music.

I laid the problem before the Keepers, but none had any solution. That the tarantella had had some beneficial effect on those allowed out that afternoon seemed certain; what was also certain was that, in those we had kept chained up, the music and clapping and shrieking had engendered feelings of rage and despair that took many days to subside.

Suggestions were made. Edmund declared it might be feasible to chain the inhabitants of WH one to another and lead them out across the Earls Bride causeway, out of earshot of the music. Hannah ventured that we could give them opiates to drug them to sleep. But we held back from approving either of these ideas, the reason being that both of them made us feel uneasy.

And so the clamour for the dancing went on and with it a clamour of another kind, which was from Katharine, who truly believed herself in love with me and whom I could not approach without she entreated me to touch her. The sight of her black hair, her strong legs and her full breasts began to occupy my mind to such a horrible degree that even as I sat at Pearce's bedside and covered his head, while he inhaled my balsam preparations, or I laid poultices on his crown, I would feel this clamour of Katharine in my body and I would grow hot and sometimes breathless and sick in my stomach. Then, silently, I would curse the day I had taken pity on her, and feel scorn for myself in the realisation that even in this action I had been moved by words once spoken to me by the King, so that even at Whittlesea – far, as I thought, beyond his reach – I was not yet entirely free of him.

Several visitors to Whittlesea were turned away by us during this time, our fear of bringing in the plague still being very great. One of these visitor's was Katharine's mother. She had brought her daughter a honeycomb and a pair of green slippers with some fine embroidery on them. When Ambrose informed her that she could not come in, she grew very angry and declared that all who care for the mad and the sick, though they pretend to be charitable people, are the greatest deceivers of the age, their only aim being to line their own pockets. She walked away still cursing Ambrose so violently that she, too, appeared to be touched with madness.

Eleanor gave the honeycomb and the green slippers to Katharine. When she knew that her mother had been turned away, Katharine began to cry. She told Eleanor that a cure for her condition existed in the world but that we were all too blind to see what it was.

July came in and, in this month, three things of importance took place.

The first of these things was the arrival of another letter from Will Gates, informing me that my horse, Danseuse, had walked in through the park gates at Bidnold "a little lame in her left hind leg and with no bridle on her, but only a saddle, twisted round." Will asked me to write to him, to tell him I was alive. "If you are alive, Sir,^" said the letter, "I will continue to keep and hide your horse from the V. de Confolens, so that you can get her for you again. But if, as I fear, you are dead, I will send W. Jossett, your groom, with her to the King, so that His Majesty can know of your sad end."

This letter, if I had not been so very preoccupied by the condition of Pearce and by the behaviour of Katharine, would have gladdened my spirits a great deal, not only because it made me laugh, but also because the news of Danseuse's return seemed to me miraculous and therefore to portend some good. As it was, there did not seem to be adequate space in my mind for the tidings that it contained.

Keeping an afternoon vigil by Pearce's bed, while he slept his snarling invalid's sleep, I wrote a short letter thanking Will and enclosing money to buy oats for my horse. "I do not know," I said in this letter, "how or if ever I shall come again to Bidnold, so if I have not come there in the space of one year from now, please return Danseuse to His Majesty the King and say that I am no longer in the world."

The second thing of importance was the beginning of a recovery in Pearce. I confess I felt not only relieved that my friend seemed to be retreating from a premature encounter with death, but also gratified that my syrups and balsams, my insistence upon rest and good nourishment (I had devised for Pearce a very good diet of coddled eggs, boiled meat, chicory and malted bread), were the means by which he seemed to be returning to health. When I listened to his breathing now, I could still hear a wheezing in the lungs, but the balsams and the Sal Ammoniac had helped him cough up a great quantity of phlegm from them and the burdock poultices had turned the moist patch on his crown to a dribbling sore, from which much foul matter was able to come out.

After three weeks, in which he slept every afternoon and was content to let us bring him his meals and to wash him and comb his sparse hair and generally care for him like an infant, he began to protest that he was cured and ready to resume what he called his "proper task, which is not the comforting of myself, but the comforting of others." So we let him get up and helped him to put on his clothes that were still very much too large for his thin body, despite the eggs and the malted loaves, and he came downstairs and went out into the sunshine and asked me to walk with him to the vegetable garden so that he could see his pear trees.

It is a feature of Pearce's character, as I think I may already have told you, that he believes himself to be the only person upon earth capable of carrying out certain tasks, one of which is the cultivation of fruit trees en espalier. It was thus that he expected, after three weeks' absence from them, to find his trees dead and shrivelled, and when he saw that they were not, despite the great heat of the last month, he assumed at once that it was God who had saved them and he knelt down in the vegetable garden and gave up thanks to his Maker when, in reality, he should have given up thanks to me and to Edmund who had spent many tedious hours watering the wretched trees, aware as we were of Pearce's wrath and sadness if we should let them die. I was tempted to inform him of this, but I did not. I stood and watched him praying and I knew that, as always, my irritation with him would not last, it being so diluted by my affection for him that it is like a single drop of aloes in ajug of mead. So, instead of reproaching Pearce, I, too, found myself conversing with God, who seems nearer to me here that He ever seemed at Bidnold. I asked Him to bring my old friend back to perfect health and I added: "I will remember to call him John, Lord, if you will remember to put some flesh on his bones."

And so to the third event of this month of July which, of all the things that have happened since I came to Whittlesea, is the worst thing, for now it haunts me continuously and I know that the shame it brings upon me is so great that were the Keepers to know of it, I would be sent out from here – my long friendship with Pearce notwithstanding – and ordered never to return.

It took place on a hot night which seems to have been so short, it was as if there was no darkness at all, but only a fading of the sky and then a lightening of it again.

I woke not long after midnight, having slept for only a few minutes. I felt full of trouble and fearful dreaming. Every part of me was sweating and filled with such an aching discomfort that I knew I could not lie another minute in my bed.

I stood up and looked out of my window and all that my eye would light upon in this particular pale midnight was the door of Margaret Fell and I knew that my struggle against my lust for Katharine was lost.

I put on a thin shirt and some breeches and then I let myself quietly out of my room and paused and listened in case any of the Keepers was stirring, but the house was silent except for the sound of Pearce's snoring.

Once out in the night air and feeling its sweetness upon my face, all fear of what I was about to do left me, so that I did not go to it with trepidation, as I should have done, but with a false joy, pretending to myself that it was an honourable thing and a thing that would bring peace and rest.

I opened the door of Margaret Fell and went in, closing it behind me. I did not move, but stood in the darkness until I could see the two rows of sleeping women. I looked over to where Katharine lay with her doll and her green embroidered slippers that she now also cradled to her and to which she sometimes spoke, as if to a child.

She was sitting up and looking over to where I stood. I did not go to her. I waited. She put down the slipper she had been holding and got up and came towards me. I saw the woman lying next to Katharine wake up and stare at her and then at me, but I paid this other person no heed at all.

As Katharine came close to me, I reached out for her with my left hand and with my right hand I opened the door to the operating room of Margaret Fell where only a short while ago I had helped perform an autopsy and wrapped a dead woman in her winding sheet.

The floor of this room is stone and on this stone I knelt down and pulled Katharine down by me and kissed her mouth and then her breasts. And both of us tore from the other our clothes, being very full of greed and readiness. And naked together we crawled into the dark space under the operating table. And there, it seemed, Katharine imagined herself once again above the vaults of a church, for she began to whisper to me that at last we were together in God's house. And though God may never forgive me for this, I confess I was excited by this blasphemy, and I did with Katharine in the space of an hour everything she asked of me and more that my own mind could devise. And this was no simple Act of Oblivion, but a love of the most Profane kind.

Chapter Twenty. John's Ladle Almost Taken from Him

This night began what I now call my Time of Madness at Whittlesea.

There had been a Time Before. In the Time Before, as I have shown you, I believed that all my dealings with the Keepers and with the inmates were true and honest. I did not dissemble. I took out my lost skills from the darkness to which I had consigned them and laid them at the service of the community. I had been renamed and I strove to become worthy of that name. And if the old Merivel sometimes reappeared, sighing over his lost past, he also tried to make himself useful, as on the afternoon of the tarantella. As Pearce said of my oboe playing, it was evident to all that I was "making progress."

That "progress" could not continue after I entered the operating room of Margaret Fell with Katharine, for from that moment I became addicted to my own foulness so entirely that my mind, instead of contemplating the work of each day, was filled up with it and I entered willingly on the most terrible deceptions just to come to it again.

When I woke, on the morning after that first night, and remembered what I had done, I felt mortally afraid. I knelt down by my bed and confessed to God: "I have suffered a contamination of madness and now I am unclean and full of the Devil, but I will not do those things again, if you will help to drive the Devil from me!"

When I went down to breakfast in the kitchen, Hannah remarked that I looked pale, and I admitted to the Friends that I did not feel well that morning, it proving very difficult for me to swallow the porridge set before me, or even to hold my spoon because of a trembling in my hands.

I did not shun the work of the day, however, which included an airing for the inhabitants of William Harvey – always a most difficult and lengthy task, for before they can be brought out into the air all of them must be washed, some of their own excrement. And as the day progressed, the fear and shame by which I had been overcome upon waking gradually went from me and were replaced by a most acute longing to go into Margaret Fell and seize Katharine roughly by the hand and push her before me into the dark room and begin again on the shameless acts I had promised that morning to renounce.

And so began the pattern of each day during the Time of Madness: each morning, I vowed I would never, as long as I lived, touch Katharine again nor let her hand seek me out; each night, I lay and waited without sleeping for the moment when I could slip out into the darkness and go to find her.

It was soon known by the other inhabitants of Margaret Fell what kind of acts we performed in the operating room and the women would sometimes cluster by the door, listening, and when we came out some of them would claw at me, at my mouth and at my sex, and beg me to take them also. And this longing that they had and their knowledge of what I was doing made me feel very sick and afraid, for I knew that sooner or later some behaviour or word of theirs would betray me to the Keepers and I would be sent away. I was deceiving Pearce (perhaps for the first time in my life, for I had never before pretended to him that I was leading an honest life when I was not) and I was deceiving Ambrose and the others, who had taken me in and tried to make me one of them. But more terrible, perhaps, than either of these deceptions was my deceiving of Katharine who, finding herself in love with me, asked me to swear that I was in love with her and that, if the day came for me to leave Whittlesea, I would take her with me. And so I swore. But the truth was that I did not love her at all. Pity had drawn me to her, and my own lust, suddenly a most overpowering and demented thing, kept me there with her in the darkness. And when I asked myself whether, in time, I would grow to love her, I knew the answer: the possibility of my growing to love Katharine was as remote as the possibility of Celia growing to love me.

I had gone on, undiscovered in the Time of Madness, for about five weeks when, returning one night to my room near one o'clock, I heard a voice call out, "Merivel!"

I stood on the landing, shivering a little, certain that Robert had been found out at last and was being summoned as Merivel to be given his punishment. I waited and the voice called again, "Merivel!" And then I recognised it as Pearce's voice and I moved slowly towards his room.

I opened the door. He had lit a rushlight by his bed and was lying on his side with his face very near the taper and he held one of his thin hands out towards me, palm upwards, in the gesture of a beggar.

"John," I said, "what do you want?"

"Merivel…" he said again, and his voice sounded thick with his old catarrh, "I was waiting for you…"

"Waiting for me?"

"To come in. I heard you go out and I waited for you to return, so that I could call you and not wake the others."

"Yes," I said. "I go and walk in the air sometimes at night, if I cannot sleep…"

"I heard you."

I went nearer to Pearce. I know him so well that I can discern anger on his lips before he has uttered a word and I looked hard at him to see if it was there or not. It was not there, and the relief I felt was very great. What I could see, however, as I approached his bed, was that his face was running with sweat and that his cheeks (usually of such translucent whiteness it is difficult to believe that Pearce spends any of his time in the open air, let alone a great part of his day hoeing and pruning in his vegetable garden) had a hectic bright redness to them, the two things announcing to me at once that he had a high fever.

I went to him and laid my hand on his forehead. My hand burned.

"John…" I began.

"Yes. Very well. There is some fever. I was about to tell you that. I did not call you to repeat to me something I already know."

"Why did you call me, then?"

"I called you because…"

"What?"

"I cannot find my ladle. I think it has fallen and rolled under the bed."

I knelt down and felt about in the dust under his wooden bed, but could not discover it. I moved round and round the bed, searching under it as far as my arm would reach, but the thing was not there.

"I cannot see it, John."

"Please find it, Merivel."

"Why do you call me 'Merivel'?"

"Did I call you that?"

"Yes."

"When in truth you are… who? I cannot for just this one moment remember your other name."

"Robert."

"Robert?"

"Yes."

"And yet tonight, since this fever began… that name Robert seems to have slipped away from my mind and what I remember is Merivel and how we once together witnessed a very miraculous thing and that was a visible beating heart. Do you recall that?"

"Yes, I do, John."

"And you, because I could not, put your hand in and touched it."

"Yes."

"Yet the man felt nothing."

"He felt nothing."

"So pray for me, that I might become that person."

"Why?"

"To feel no pain in my heart or anywhere."

"Are you in pain?"

"Have you found the ladle?"

"No. It does not seem to be under the bed."

"Please try to find it."

"I do not know where else to look. Where shall I look?"

"Ssh. Don't raise your voice. You will wake the others."

"I shall wake the others unless you tell me about the pain. Is it the pain you had before, in the lung?"

"Could anyone have stolen my ladle?"

"No. And I will find it for you. Where is the pain, John? Show me or tell me. Where is it?"

Pearce looked up at me. His faded blue eyes, in this dim rushlight, looked a darker colour than they were. He withdrew his hand and placed it, in a hesitant way, against his chest.

I stood up. I told him I refused to continue my search for the ladle until I had listened to his breathing. Then I gently helped him to turn onto his back and folded back the bedclothes and laid my head (which a mere half hour ago Katharine had taken in her hands and forced to suckle her breast like a baby) first on his sternum and then lower on his diaphragm.

I found Pearce's ladle under his pillows and handed it to him. I told him I was going to boil water for a balsam inhalation, then I left him for a while and went to my room and washed myself, for the smell of Katharine seemed to cling to every part of me. I put on a clean nightshirt and combed my hair. Only then did I go down to the kitchen and begin to prepare the only remedies I and all the world of medical science could offer for my friend's condition, knowing as I worked that this time they would not be strong enough to make him well.

What I began that night and what we, the Keepers of Whittlesea, continued between us for ten days and nights was a constant vigil at Pearce's bedside.

On the fifth or sixth day, the pain of his breathing became so great for him that he whispered to me: "I would not have imagined longing, as ardently as I do, for my last breath."

We gave him opiates and as these entered his blood (there to be circulated to every part of him, as proved by his beloved mentor, WH) he seemed to fall, not into a sleep, but into a kind of dream of the past, so that he babbled to us of his mother who had been a widow for twenty years and who said prayers every day of her life for the soul of her dead husband, a barber, who had left her nothing but the tools of his trade with which, as soon as her son had been accepted into Caius College, she cut her own throat. She was buried not in the churchyard beside her husband, but "at a crossroads, distant from the village; a place where people on foot or on horseback or in carriages went this way or that, but did not stop." He told us how, if we opened his Bible at Matthew, Chapter Ten, we would find "the imprint of a bird across the writing." He said he could not remember what species of bird it was, only that it was small and that he had found it "freshly dead when I was a child and my mother still living." He seemed very anxious that we should see this imprint, so I took up his Bible and searched for it and found eventually – not in Matthew, but across two pages of Mark – a brown greasy smudge, such as might have been made by the accidental placing on the Holy Book of a hot cinnamon pancake. I showed it to Pearce. "Is this it, John?" I asked. He stared at it, his dilated pupils having difficulty focusing upon it. "Yes," he said at last. "The viscera were removed, for I did not want to pollute the words of Jesus. And then I laid the bird in and opened out the wings and closed the book and put weights upon it and pressed it like a flower."

I looked up at Hannah, who sat on the other side of Pearce's bed, bathing his brow from time to time with lavender water. She shook her head, showing me that she did not think this story about the pressed bird could be true, both of us being obliged to imagine the stench of the dead creature as it decayed in its tomb of sacred words. Had Pearce been well, I would have made the observation that the scent of death in a vertebrate does not resemble at all the scent of death in a flower, but, very far from being well, Pearce was by this time so weak that he could barely raise his head from the pillow, onto which what remained of his thin hair was gradually falling out.

The knowledge that Pearce was going to die was, during those ten days, like something draped round me, something that I wore but refused to take into my mind. And I do not think that this refusal was based upon any false hope that Ambrose or I could save him. What I had understood, I believe, is that no amount of knowing in advance that I was going to lose my friend could adequately prepare me for the actual loss of him when it came.

On the seventh or eighth day of Pearce's sickness, both the pain in his lungs and his fever diminished for a while. He asked me to lift him up and prop him with cushions "but not any with tassels or jewels on them or any gaudy ones such as you had in your house." I smiled. I put my hands gently into his armpits (where there seems to be no flesh any more, only a webbing of skin) and pulled him towards me while Daniel set some pillows at his back. I asked him if he would try to eat a little broth. He said he would and Daniel went down to fetch it for him (there is broth always ready in this household, the boiling of bones with onions and greens being a very frequent sight in the kitchen), thus leaving me alone with Pearce.

I sat down beside him, just within reach of his breath, which smelled of sulphur. He began to talk, quite lucidly, just as he once did at Bidnold, about the theory of spontaneous generation, in which he has never truly believed but which seems proven by the appearance of the living maggot upon dead matter. "Is it possible, Merivel," he asked, "that the maggot is not spontaneously generated but – as has been hypothesised – emerges from an egg so small it cannot be seen by the human eye?"

"I think it is possible, John."

"And thus, it would follow, if the human eye cannot see these infinitely small things, there may be other pieces of matter of whose existence we have not yet the slightest perception, would it not?"

"It would."

He sighed. He was silent for a long while. Then he said:

"It troubles me to take with me to my grave so much that I do not know."

"I would rather you did not talk about the grave, John," I said.

"Of course you would," he said acidly. "There are many matters, ever since I met you, on which you would have preferred me to remain silent. But that has not been my way. And now, there is one uncertainty I do not wish to carry with me. And that is what is going to happen to my things."

"What things?"

"Those few that are precious to me. You once called them my 'burning coals' in order to mock me."

Daniel arrived at this moment, thus sparing me the humiliation of having to compose yet another apology to Pearce, the syllables of which I find so difficult to pronounce, when what I longed for was for Pearce to beg my forgiveness for the thoughtless act he was about to commit: the act of leaving me.

Daniel set down a tray, on which had been placed a bowl of broth and a spoon and by the side of this a greenish fruit that Pearce immediately recognised as one of his own pears. He picked it up and felt it in his hand, then held it to his sore nose and sniffed it. "The perfume of pears," he said in the rapturous voice that always brought back to my mind our river excursions and Pearce's excess of joy at the sight of a mayfly, "I have loved for years."

Daniel grinned at me, then sat down beside him to help him sip the broth. Somewhat to my surprise, Pearce asked him gently to leave so that he could talk to me alone. The boy got up at once, passing me the spoon, and went out.

The broth was hot. I did not want Pearce to burn his mouth on it, so I took up a spoonful and blew upon it before guiding it to his lips. Silence descended upon us for a few moments as we both concentrated on the task of the spoon-feeding. But the effort of taking in sustenance seemed to weary Pearce very quickly and he told me to take the tray away and fetch pen and ink and paper instead.

What I wrote – although I do not have the paper before me, having been instructed to give it to Ambrose – I can remember very exactly, for it was perhaps one of the shortest wills ever made, Pearce's burning coals having diminished, as it were, to a mere few cinders. He bequeathed all his books, including his Bible, to Whittlesea House. His clothes – those threadbare garments that he wore without the least tremor of embarrassment or shame – he offered "to the inmates of our Hospital, so that they may put on the garments of a true Quaker and be tender towards each other", and the ladle he left to me, "this fragile thing perchance being of comfort to him sometimes." And this was all. The last line I was ordered to write stated that "John Joseph Pearce, Quaker, possesses of his own no other thing or things upon earth."

When I had written down everything (in the careful script I am capable of if I take extreme care with the position of the quill in my hand) I gave the paper to Pearce and helped him to sign his name. I made no comment upon his gift to me of the ladle, being so saddened and troubled by it that for a short while I could not speak. When I found my voice again, it was to offer Pearce a taste of the green pear, which he declined fearing, he said, that it would give him a pain in his teeth.

Since the night when Pearce had called out to me on my return from Margaret Fell, I had not visited Katharine. I had made a bargain with God: I would not touch her nor let her come near me again if He would give me Pearce's life.

I knew it to be a futile thing. I knew that Pearce was dying. Yet I kept to it. And Katharine, finding herself abandoned by me, came up to the house from the Airing Court and beat on the door with her hands and screamed out for all the world to hear that I was her lover. And that night, the ninth night of Pearce's illness, I and the Keepers sat quietly at supper, they looking at me sadly but saying nothing until the end of the meal when Ambrose spoke. "When the time is right for Robert to speak to us," he said, "then he will speak to us."

And I nodded. And we all rose and began to clear away the plates and dishes.

They knew that I could not leave Whittlesea until Pearce was gone.

He died in the quiet time between the Night Keeping and the dawn of the eleventh day.

I was with him, alone.

I closed his mouth. I took up his thin, white hands and folded them across his chest. And into his hands I put the ladle.

"Look," I whispered to him, "the ladle will not be taken from you."

Then I closed his eyes. And I sat down. And it was then that I was aware of the silence, and I knew it would be there for ever, and that whenever I thought of my friend or spoke to him in my mind, I would hear it again, and where before there had been answering words or messages of guidance or sniffs of disapproval, there would henceforward be only this: the Silence of Pearce.

I sat on the hard chair, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees, and cried. I did not try to stem my tears nor mop them up with any handkerchief or striped dinner napkin, but let them fall onto the floor and onto my thighs and run down my legs.

When I looked up again, there was a milky light at the window and Ambrose and Edmund and Hannah and Eleanor and Daniel were there with me in the room, standing by the bed with their palms pressed together in prayer.

A coffin was made for Pearce that day by two men from George Fox. It was too large for him, but we put him in it and packed his body round with branches of pear.

We held a wake in the parlour and this wake took the form of an all-night Meeting, during which, as and when we were moved to do so, we spoke of him or said prayers for his soul.

I tried, without saying any words, to gather into me what I could remember of his wisdom and what came to my mind was his despair at the greed and selfishness of our age which he believed was like a disease or plague, to which hardly any were immune, not even the poets or the playwrights, "because, Robert, even the creative spirit is whoring, and Piety, the mother, has given birth to Luxury, the wanton Daughter…" And these thoughts comforted me a little because through them it came to me that the things which Pearce had loved about the world had been so few – the tenderness of Quakers, the wisdom of William Harvey, the memory of his mother, the growing of trees en espalier, the light on a trout stream -that, though he declared himself to be afraid of death, he must also very often have longed for it.

I was trying very hard to imagine him in Paradise (I have frequently tried to envisage my parents here, but all my mind is able to conjure up is the Vauxhall Woods and I am inclined to doubt whether, if Paradise exists, it would resemble a place where Londoners go to have picnics), when Daniel suddenly said: "It has come to me from the Lord that John Pearce taught me many things by the example of his life and the greatest thing that he taught me was never to be blinded by affection, because it was his way to judge most harshly those he loved most, and so his loving of them never hurt them but only helped to strengthen them." I looked up and saw that Daniel was looking at me, and Ambrose, too, glanced at me, as if the two of them were waiting for me to speak.

I felt very hot, just as I had at the Meeting where I had suggested the story-telling and the dancing, and so I suspected that some words were going to come out of me, but did not know that when I spoke them they would reveal to me something that I had not, until I uttered it, understood. I wanted to stand up, but my legs felt very weak, so I continued sitting down and then I said: "In the silence which has fallen since John died this morning, I have listened and waited. It is as if I have been waiting for some word, not from John, nor from God, but from myself to myself and now it has come…"

Still, I did not know precisely what the supposed "word" was or what I was going to say next. I paused and took out a handkerchief and mopped my brow, and then I said: "In this quiet, I have understood one thing. And it is this: that all my love for women which, before I came here, was a very trumpeted and tempestuous thing, and even all the love I thought I had for my wife, Celia… all these loves were mere deceptions and not love at all, but only vanity and lust, for which I am ashamed. And in all my life I have truly loved only two people on earth, and these two are John Pearce and the King."

At the shock of hearing the King's name put beside Pearce's, all the Friends raised their eyes and cast upon me their sternest looks. I opened my hands in a gesture of helplessness, "You will straightway say," I continued, "that my love for John Pearce is worthy and my love for the King unworthy and that I should, as indeed John often told me, cast it out from me. But it seems that I cannot. For whatever I do and however far I travel from my former life, I still find it there. But it is no longer a greedy love. It asks nothing. It is like the love for a dead man; it is like my love for John. For I will see neither man ever again. I will never be with them. All I understand tonight is that these two people I have truly loved – wisely in one particular, unwisely in the other – and that no one else on earth has ever counted as these two have counted with me. And for this knowledge, which may have come to me from the Lord or from some other place, I feel grateful."

The flush that had come into my face and body subsided after some minutes, despite my awareness that the eyes of all the Friends were still upon me. The air was very close with their displeasure and I expected them to start speaking out against me. But they did not. And I imagined each one of them wrestling with his or her anger and conquering it for the sake of quietness and for the sake of John.

And so the night went on and became morning and at six o'clock, we drank some chocolate and ate some biscuits which seemed to me to taste most strangely of charcoal.

Towards midday of the tenth of September, Pearce was put into his grave and the yellow clay of Whittlesea packed tightly around and above him. I had made certain that the ladle was put into the coffin with him before the lid was nailed down.

But at the graveside I found myself remembering how, at Cambridge, some cunning thieves calling themselves "Anglers" had tried to steal it and all Pearce's possessions from him. They worked with a long pole, on the end of which was a hook made of wire, and such a pole had been thrust through Pearce's open window one night while he slept. He had woken up to see a chair moving in a glimmer of moonlight three feet off the floor and floating out through the window. "It was only," he told me, "when the pole came back into the room and I saw it move towards my ladle that I understood there were villains at work and not ghosts. And so I cried out angrily, and my shouting frightened them and they ran away." He laughed when he had told me this story and then he said: "Perhaps it is always easier to frighten away the living than it is to frighten away the dead? What do you think, Merivel?" But I cannot remember what I answered.

Chapter Twenty-One. Katharine Asleep

As you will have noticed by now, I have no great gift for solitude. After the death of Pearce, however, a longing to be alone began to possess me.

If I had still had my horse, I would have ridden out of the gates of Whittlesea and turned northwards and gone on until I came to the samphire fields and the dunes and the sea. What I would have done when I got there, I cannot say. Perhaps I would have sat down on a jetty smelling of tar and looked out towards Holland and turned my mind to the King's war for which my house and lands were helping to pay. Perhaps I would simply have sat down and remained sitting until I was mistaken for one of the Idle Poor and sent by an Overseer to a workhouse.

At all events, I could not get to the sea. I walked vainly out along the causeway to Earls Bride, but the sight of this sad place made me turn back. On my return, I had a waking dream of the empty, circular room in the West Tower at Bidnold. It was a dream of a place of light.

I returned to my linen cupboard and lay down on my cot and there was a silence in the house which soothed me for a little while. But then I began to hear all the accusations and lamentations to come, and I put my hands over my face. When I thought about Katharine, I felt cold and sad in all my limbs. She repelled me. No longer did I pity her, even, because it was for her sake that I was about to be driven away from Whittlesea and put back into a world where I had no place. And I had begun to believe that she – no less than those lost to a violent insanity, such as Piebald – was indeed corrupted by devils and that the evil in her had infected me and made me play the beast with her and that when I did these things I was not myself, but a man possessed by Satan. Pearce, by dying, had made me turn aside from my foulness. He had saved me. What I longed for now was to be quite alone with the memory of him; yet what awaited me was Katharine's pleading for one kind of love and the Friends' sadness at my betrayal of another.

I got up off my cot. I went out into the soft soundless rain. I walked to Pearce's grave and stood and looked at the letters of his name which have been burnt into a thin cross made of willow wood which, as the seasons pass, will surely warp and bend and become pale and so start to resemble his actual body. "John," I said, "I do not think that I shall ever find peace."

Some days after the burial of Pearce, I told the Friends, at the end of a Meeting, that I was ready to speak about the sins I had committed, but I requested that I should be allowed first of all to talk to Ambrose privately. There was some opposition to this, it being the Keepers' belief that secrets are very venomous things, "likely to bring illness and even death to any group or corporate body where they are permitted to breathe." But they had seen how greatly I had been affected by Pearce's abandonment of me and so granted me what I asked, out of sorrow at my weakness.

The parlour fire was lit, the autumn evenings now seeming chill. Ambrose seated himself before it and I knelt on the hearth rug like a penitent, warming my hands.

Though very filled with a nervous sickness, I began to speak with a strong voice. I told Ambrose that it was in my nature to be immodest and lecherous and how, as a young man, I had neglected my work at St Thomas 's to go in search of women in the park and take them back with me to my rooms at Ludgate. "My fall from the King's favour, the very thing that made me take the road to Whittlesea," I said, "was caused by lust. Though I had promised never to lay hands on my wife, my desire for her became so great and importunate that I could not stop myself from trying to touch her, thus making myself utterly ridiculous, causing her a deal of distress, and bringing the King to a great fury. So you see, Ambrose, that this greed I have to possess women has been a bitter enemy to my prosperity and indeed to my reason. There have been times when, recognising this, I have found myself lamenting the fact that women had ever been created!"

I paused. Ambrose nodded. This nod of his made me want to ask him whether he had ever had a similar thought, but I did not, it seeming very unlikely that this immovable crag of a man ever suffered the torments of this kind of temptation.

"When I came to Whittlesea," I went on, "I believed that all of what I had been in my former life I would no longer be. I thought Whittlesea could re-make me."

"And has it re-made you, Robert?"

"It has re-made parts of me. John understood this when he told me I had made 'some progress'. And perhaps – though he never spoke of it – he knew that I would be tempted by Katharine and that I would resist, but that eventually my resistance would falter."

"And if he had seen it falter, he would have felt betrayed by you Robert."

"Betrayed?"

"Yes. For it is understood by the Keepers of Whittlesea that we stand towards those we protect as parents towards children. And for the parent to lay any hand on his child for his own pleasure and satisfaction is a betrayal of the most horrible kind."

I sighed. I was forced to admit to myself that this was indeed how I had thought of Katharine and it was for a "child" that I had made the doll, and thus the Time of Madness with her now appeared to me more foul than ever and Ambrose's sternness with me entirely justified.

I had not seen Katharine for several days, having been asked by Ambrose to stay out of Margaret Fell. He now described to me how – since my betrayal of my trust -Katharine could not be induced by any means, save the giving of laudanum, to sleep and how, day and night, she repeated my name and asked for me and shrieked and sobbed and touched herself indecently and how my very name had become synonymous with her madness so that the women of Margaret Fell told the Keepers she was suffering from a "lunacy of Robert, a most terrible derangement."

This description made me feel so afraid that all strength went out of my voice and I longed to curl up into a cowardly heap at Ambrose's feet (remembering for a fleeting moment that I had once lain thus before the Royal footstool) and be covered by absolute silence and darkness. Aware of my fear no doubt, Ambrose reached out and put his large hand on my shoulder.

"I know," he said, "that you are sorry for what has happened. We love you and we forgive you, Robert."

"Thank you, Ambrose."

"But I also know that you will want to make amends, and it has come to me from the Lord how you are to do this."

"It has come to you from the Lord?"

"Yes."

"What has He said? What am I to do?"

"You are to leave Whittlesea."

"I know. I knew that I would have to do this."

"But not alone. You are to take Katharine with you."

I looked up at Ambrose. I swallowed. I put my fists together and held them out in an attitude of supplication. "Ambrose," I began, "please do not ask me to do this…"

"I am not asking. The Lord is commanding."

"No! He would not…"

"Did He not hear you say that if you could cure one of them and see him walk out from here you would feel useful again?"

"Yes. I said that – "

"And He heard you. And now He has made it possible for you to achieve the thing you hoped for."

"But Katharine is not cured…"

"Not yet. But the means have been found. You have found them and only you hold them. The means are you."

"No, Ambrose!"

"Love is the means, Robert. If you love her, she will sleep and when she has learned to sleep she will no longer be mad."

"And besides, she is yours entirely now, for she is expecting your child."

That night, I did not sleep.

What passed through my mind I cannot remember. All I know is that I was filled with a dread of the future so profound that all my life until that moment appeared to me to have been filled with a happiness I had never perceived. When George Fox first heard the word of God, coming directly to him, he declared that from that moment "all the creation was given another smell under me than before", and now I felt as he had felt, except that he had begun to smell the newness and freshness of things and what I had begun to smell was despair.

When Ambrose told Edmund and Eleanor and Hannah that "Robert is not shirking his responsibility towards Katharine," they were very tender in their behaviour, smiling sweetly at me and promising to pray for me. Only Daniel looked at me sadly. "It's a shame," he said, "that you were never able to teach us the game of croquet."

During the days that remained to me at Whittlesea, I tried to decide what road I would take when I went out from there, whether north to the sea or north-east to Norfolk or south to London, but I had no appetite for any journey nor for any arrival; I was filled with a loathing for my life. And so I chose the road to London, remembering the plague there and imagining that in the pestilence resided the ending of my story – an ending I had brought upon myself.

The Keepers fetched Katharine out from Margaret Fell. They bathed her and washed her and combed her hair and put a clean dress on her. And they gave her Pearce's room to sleep in, promising her that I would come to her and comfort her "with the tender love he feels for you and the child", and that, so comforted, she would indeed sleep.

And so I was forced to go in to the room where my friend had died and there was Katharine sitting quietly on the hard chair where Pearce used to sit and read, his knees neatly together, the book held up to his nose, like a fan, the words of Harvey circulating so sweetly in his brain that it became oblivious to everything else.

When Katharine saw me, she rose from the chair and came to me and put her arms round my neck and began to sob and say Robert, Robert, Robert, twenty or thirty times. I held her. The dress she wore was made of clean linen and so the smell of Katharine was not the smell of her that I remembered. And for this change I was grateful.

I told her that we would be going away from Whittlesea. I told her that I loved her and that I would not abandon her.

That evening, she supped with us in the kitchen. She ate with a spoon in her right hand and with her left hand kept a hold on my arm. And that night, as Ambrose and the others had predicted, she went to sleep and did not wake till dawn.

The money that remained to me in the world was twenty-four pounds and three shillings.

With this, with my clothes and possessions put into two flour sacks, and with Katharine dressed in a woollen cloak waiting for me outside, I stood in the parlour of Whittlesea House, in the room of all the Meetings, and the Keepers came, one by one, and took my hand and bid me adieu.

The sorrow and disappointment that I beheld in their faces was a very terrible thing to endure and I wished for this leave-taking to be over quickly. But it could not be so, because there was a corner in each of their hearts that did not want me to leave and would rather have had me stay, my crime notwithstanding. And so they reminded themselves how the Lord had sent me to them "out of the windy sky", and how, in coming to Whittlesea, I had brought a great gift and that was the gift of my hands, which had helped them for so many months in their tasks of healing.

"How shall we manage?" asked Ambrose. "Now that mine are the only physician's skills? Pray for us, Robert, for life will be hard for us – without John and without you."

"Yes. Pray for us, dear Robert," said Hannah.

"And pray for me," said Daniel, "for if ever there is to be more dancing or skipping about, I will be the only musician."

"I will pray for you all," I said, "and remember you for ever, how you took me in and how it was never part of any plan that I had to betray you or make you ashamed…"

When Eleanor came forward to take my hand, as she spoke the words, "The Lord keep you, Robert," her eyes filled with tears and she looked down at my hands in hers, as if they were something precious to her.

"Do not cry for me, Eleanor," I said. "Please do not cry for me."

But she shook her head. "We will all weep for you sometimes, Robert," she said, "just as we will weep for John. For you are both lost to us."

So I walked out of the parlour for the last time and then out of the house and the Keepers came and stood in a cluster by their door and watched me go.

A cart had been hired for us. I threw my flour sacks onto it, then I took Katharine's hand and helped her up and got in beside her. I told the driver of the cart, a lumpish man with the fat buttocks of a woman, and his hair tied in a greasy bow, to make haste. I wanted to be gone now and not to look back. But the cart-horse was sluggish. We proceeded almost at a man's walking pace. And so, before we had gone very far out of the gate, I did look back. I turned and saw it all: the iron door with its inscription from Isaiah, where I had first gone in, the three great barns named by the Keepers after people who were sacred to them, the house that had contained my linen cupboard, outside of which the Friends still stood and watched me, and, beyond the walls, the cemetery where Pearce would lie for all eternity. On the day I had arrived there, I had believed myself the unhappiest man on earth. Now I knew that my unhappiness then was as nothing to my present sorrow, so that everything that I could remember about my time at Whittlesea seemed touched with a comforting light, as if it, no less than my time at Bidnold, was part of the day and what was falling upon me now was the night.

The actual night overtook us on our cart as we entered the town of March. I paid the man off. I knew I could not endure the sight of his fat rump for another day. He deposited us at an inn called The Shin of Beef and we were given a room that smelled of apples, a quantity of them being stored in it on damp trestles.

I knew we were in a poor place, badly run and neglected, but Katharine, having been out of the world for so long, believed it to be grand. She thought the apples had been put out for us to eat (there being no supper available to us, not even the poor cut of beef after which the miserable inn was named) and so she ate them greedily, one after another, until she vomited up a mess of them into the bed. In the cold of one o'clock a maid no older than twelve or thirteen came and took away the foul sheets and put on some that were clean but damp and in this cold dampness Katharine clung to me and kissed me and some of the devils that were still in her came into my blood on her saliva and so I took her at last but with my eyes closed, so that I could not see myself or her, and with my hands covering her face. And with her breasts pressed against my back, she went to sleep. But I could not sleep, for the cold and smell of the place and for the great choking of misery that was in my heart.

We were forced to wait in the town of March for two days for a stage coach that would take us to Cambridge and so on to London.

On the first of these days, a Tuesday, a market began setting up at dawn outside our windows and so I took Katharine out and we walked among the stalls selling honey and fruit and candles and skeins of wool and beeswax and we found a man who, for threepence, would imitate the cry or growl or squawk of any animal or bird. And this person mystified and delighted Katharine so much that I was forced to keep paying him money for one imitation after another and soon felt very foolish standing in a gawping crowd and listening to a man pretending to be a chicken and a hog and a capercaillie and a new-born lamb. After almost a quarter of an hour, I said to Katharine:

"We have heard enough now. Let us move on before he begins on all the beasts of Africa," but she begged me to let her hear one more thing and said: "You have not chosen any animal or bird yet, Robert, so now it is your turn." And so I took out another three pennies from my purse, and the man held out his leathery palm for them and said: "What is it to be, Sir? A screaming peacock? A howling wolf? Or – two for the price of one – an old sow and her suckling piglets?"

"The pigs," said Katharine, "tell him to be the pigs."

"No," I said, "not the pigs. A blackbird."

"A blackbird, Sir?"

"Yes."

"Well then we must have silence round about, we must have quiet among you good people. For the sound of the blackbird is a little thing and I cannot make it loud."

He persuaded the cluster of people round him to cease their chatter. He then cupped both his hands to his lips and through his fingers I could see his mouth making some ugly contortions. I closed my eyes and waited. And then the sound came, perfect and pure, and I knew at once that tears were coming into my eyes, so I quickly took out my handkerchief and blew my nose loudly, thus interrupting the blackbird imitation so rudely as to cause an outbreak of laughter in the little crowd. I then nodded to the man, who was scowling at me, and, taking Katharine firmly by the wrist, I led her away.

There being nothing whatever to do in March, I hired a rowing boat in the afternoon. The day was warm, like a day from summer suddenly come again, and I rowed downstream on the River Nene towards a place called Benwick. "It is too insignificant a village to attract to it any bird imitators," I said with a smile. But Katharine was not listening to me. She had put her hand into the water and seemed hypnotised by the sight of it and by the flotsam of leaves and waterweed that swam into her fingers. Her mouth hung open and she did not notice that her long hair had begun to trail in the river. Then suddenly she came out of her trance and laughed, and her laughter, which I had seldom heard at Whittlesea, sounded exactly like that of a child. But instead of feeling kindness or pity for her childishness, I felt only a great weariness with time which, with Katharine as my only companion, seemed to pass so slowly that it was difficult to believe that the day's sun would ever go down or the night's darkness ever break into morning. I tried to comfort myself by imagining that, if time had slowed down, I would not get to old age until long after I had passed it. But this little conceit brought me a mere moment of solace, for I knew that I no longer minded about growing old or indeed cared much about whether I lived or died.

That night in the apple room, when I lay down on the bed, my shoulders and my back aching from my afternoon of rowing, Katharine came and stood by me and lifted up her skirt and told me to put my hand on her belly and complained peevishly that I had never done this nor wanted to do it and that therefore I did not love the child inside her.

I turned my head and looked at her belly and I said that I found it most difficult to love anything in advance of its being. But she did not understand what I meant by this and I had no will to explain it, so I soothed her by stroking her belly and she began to tell me everything she would do for the child when he was born and how she would let no one but me ever take him from her, for what she feared now was the jealousy of barren women who would come when she was asleep and steal her baby "and leave me with the nothing that I had." And so, to comfort her, I said – as if telling one of my Tales of the Land of Mar to Meg Storey – we would build a fortress round the child, we would put him in a high tower and let no one near him except ourselves, "so that not only will he be safe, he will neither see nor feel any of the unkindnesses of the world, nor its scheming, nor its ugliness, for everything he will see from the window of the tower will be beautiful…" And Katharine was so entranced by all this nonsense that she fell asleep standing up and so I got off the bed and lifted her up and laid her on it. And then I did not know where to put myself, not wanting to lie down beside her, so I sat down on the hard chair that had been placed near the window and thought I would look out at the stars and see whether I could find Jupiter and its little girdle of moons, but the window was grimy and all I could see was my own reflection in it and I saw, suddenly, how I had aged a great deal in a short time and how my face, which I still thought of as wide and smiling, had become gaunt and worried.

And my thoughts turned to Celia. I do not know if it was my search for Jupiter that brought her to mind or the changes I observed in an appearance that had always been so distasteful to her. I thought of my famous Letter of Apology to her which I had spent so many hours trying to compose, but which had never been written, a pathetic short note being sent in its place. So now, I wrote it in my mind. I told her I had understood that love puts reason to sleep. I told her that it was my misfortune now to be the object of a love I could not return and that the furies of guilt and the furies of loathing hounded me day and night and that the pain of these was as cruel as the pain of love itself. "And so I can measure now," I concluded in my imaginary letter, "how much I made you suffer, Celia, and for this suffering caused by me, I ask you to forgive me."

For reasons which I do not completely understand, this Apology to Celia took away from me sufficient of my anxiety for me to be able to fall asleep in the chair. But it was not a contented sleep, for during the night I had a sad dream of my mother, in which I went to speak to her in Amos Treefeller's old room but found that she could neither see me nor hear me and so, believing that I was not there, put on her bonnet and went out, leaving me alone.

The warm weather that had returned the previous day accompanied us on our journey to London and I noticed, as we came near to the city, that the grass beside the road was brown and parched and all the fallen leaves dry and brittle, as if no rain had come for a great while. I could see a little cloud of flies and insects outside the window of the coach, moving with us, so I enquired of our fellow passengers, "What has the weather been in London since the summer?" And they told me that you could not say what it had been "since the summer" for the summer had never truly gone, but stayed on "most sultry and horrid" and that no cooling breeze nor fresh shower had come to the capital for months, "so that the smell of the place is getting very foul and all who are wise are journeying out of it and not into it."

Once begun, then, on the subject of the weather, the people in the coach now became very talkative on the subject of the plague – as if they had longed for days and nights to describe it and dwell upon its horrors but had lacked any audience to listen to them. (I have often noticed how it is in the nature of many men and women to revel in tales of horror and misery, but I find it to be a very odious thing, and I know that one of the traits I admired in the King was the way he made light of his past sufferings and did not bore anyone with them.) It was told to us how, when plague came into a house, every person in it but the sufferer ran out of it, mothers abandoning their children, servants their masters, wives their husbands, "so that hundreds die alone each day and then they are not found and so their flesh rots and is preyed upon by rats who carry the germ back to the streets, and the stench of the dead in some parts of the city is beyond what you could imagine…"

I was tempted to say that, being a physician, I was quite familiar with the smell of corpses, but then I was glad that I had not made this reply, for our fellow travellers began to reveal to us the hatred that was felt for everyone in the world of medicine – from the surgeon to the apothecary – for their inability to find any means of prevention or any cure. "Doctors," announced a loud-voiced woman seated opposite me, "are become the people most despised in England." And she sucked on her teeth, loving the taste of the venom in her mouth.

We came at dusk into Cheapside, where Katharine's mother lived. We got out of the coach and the two sacks containing my worldly goods were handed down to me.

I stood still and took my first breath of the city. The scent of the air did not seem to have been altered by the presence of the plague. What I did notice at once, however, was a strange quietness in the street and beyond it, which was like the quietness of snow. It was as if the city had fallen into a trance, or else become a place that I was not really standing in, but only saw and heard from a long way off. I looked all around me. I could see a group of children running after the coach. I could see two women standing on a doorstep, one holding a baby. A cart, loaded with barrels, passed and I could hear the hooves of the cart-horse, but very quickly this sound and the sound of the children shouting faded and died and there was silence. I bent down to pick up one of the flour sacks. As I did so, I saw Katharine lift her skirts and squat down to piss into the gutter. "When you begin to carry a child," she said, "you do your business wherever you can and you cannot wait." At that moment, her mother came out of the house. She put her hands to her mouth and stared at the daughter she had given to the Keepers of Whittlesea, then crossed herself, as if in fear. Katharine, red in the face from the exertion of emptying her bladder, looked up at her mother and began to laugh. And I do not think I have ever witnessed – between two people long parted from each other – a more awkward meeting.

The mother is a tall, fleshy widow of forty or forty-five. She likes to be called by her two Christian names, Frances Elizabeth, as if they were joined together to make one name. She makes a living by writing letters for those who cannot read or write, but I have seen her writing and it is an ugly hand and her spelling is poor. A little sign by her front door reads: Frances Elizabeth Wythens. Letters Written. One penny per line. She learned to write, not from any school or teacher, but from her dead husband, who was a clerk in the Office of Patents. "He was," says Frances Elizabeth to me on our first night in her house, "a most conscientious scribe."

The house is narrow and dark and over-heated by the fires she keeps burning, one upstairs and one down, as a prevention against the pestilence, which has already visited two families in Cheapside. The place smells of smoke and of old varnish and camphor, and the windows are narrow and grimy. The room we have been given reminds me a little of the room I had long ago at Ludgate, which is only a short walk from here. In my bed there I knew oblivion of the very sweetest kind, but in this one I cannot seem to come to any unconsciousness or any forgetting. I lie awake and listen to the silence that has fallen upon London. It is Katharine who sleeps. Her tangled hair falls onto my shoulder and her arm is laid across my breast.