Restoration

Chapter Twenty-Two. A Prophylactic

Not long after our arrival in London, while on an errand to buy ink for Frances Elizabeth, I met a group of men attired in rags and scourging themselves with cruel little whips, like the Flagellants of the Black Death in 1348. We were in Change Street and I presumed they were going up to St Paul 's church to pray for an end to the pestilence. And so, finding myself very curious to know what solace this hurting of their flesh afforded them, I followed them.

I noticed that whatever people we met coming in the opposite direction looked on these Flagellants with great fear, as if they themselves could be the source of the plague germ, and they crossed the street so that they would not come near them. And I thought how a great fear of one particular thing may often create in people the habit of fear, so that everything which is not familiar and comfortable to them makes them afraid. And this thought was followed by the realisation that, because I no longer hold my life to be a lovely and precious thing, I am no longer afraid of anything at all, not even of death. And I smiled to myself for, unannounced, the King walked into my mind. And he looked at this new fearlessness of mine and sniffed and said: "Good." And then, as is his way, he turned and walked away, not deigning to comment any further.

We were nearing St Paul 's. I did not know how long the praying of these Flagellant people might last once they went inside the church, and so, mindful of my errand of the ink, I decided to approach them straight away and ask them to spare me a few minutes before they began their prayers.

Coming up to the group from behind, I noticed how, on the shoulders of two of them, there was a rash of small wounds, as if the skin had been pricked and burst, and that some of these were infected and running with pus. And so I began my conversation with them by saying (quite loudly, so that they would hear me over their wailing): "Let me tell you good people that I am a physician and if ever the pain of your wounds becomes greater than you intend… I could give you a balm for it, to make it less…"

They turned and all stared at me and I saw that their faces were smeared with a white paste they had put on to make themselves resemble skeletons. I understood then that it was their intention to frighten people away and, indeed, they appeared somewhat affronted that I had had the temerity to approach them.

"Our pain," said one of them curtly, "is never greater than we intend, nor is it less, and as for you, the physicians, why do you not punish yourselves?"

I replied that, in my own case, fate had punished me so well that I felt relieved of all necessity to do so and I laughed at my own flippancy, hoping perhaps to elicit some answering smile from the Flagellants, but getting none. So I moved quickly to my question. "Look about you," one of them said in answer, "and you will see, not London, not a city with which you were once familiar; you will see a place come to chaos. The man who must live within chaos will go mad very soon. But we shall not. For we do not see it nor hear it nor smell it. All that we feel, all that we know is our own pain."

I thanked them and left them to go on their way. I walked very slowly towards Cloak Lane, where I hoped to purchase the ink for Frances Elizabeth, provided my ink-man had not died of the plague while I had been away. As I walked, I pondered the words and actions of the Flagellants and asked myself how best I should live in this "place come to chaos" in order to keep such sanity as remained to me. And I decided not to turn my face.away from the sufferings of the city but to try to measure them and define them. I would walk about. I would try to paint a picture of the plague (no, not on canvas!), a picture in my mind of where it was and how it traveled and all the things men and women had devised to make it leave them. And so I formulated a kind of plan with which to confront the slowness and sadness of time. And this making of a plan cheered me.

As Katharine grew heavier with her child, she became very heavy with sleep. And the mother, too, as if in sympathy with her daughter, would nod and doze over her letters in the room kept hot by the fire, and so I would creep out of the house, leaving the two of them to their dreaming, Katharine's white arm trailing down towards the floor, the mother's head fallen onto the table.

They did not ask or seem to care where I was going. They knew I would return, for Katharine had made me swear upon the green slippers never to practise or perfect any Leaving Step. And so I embarked on my "picture" of London, going sometimes north from Cheapside, but most often south towards the river and my old haunts, knowing that in these places every change would be visible to me and all of what I saw I would understand.

I did not visit Rosie. In her very street were two houses marked with the words "God Have Mercy On Us" and nesting near to the water at Southwark I saw a great quantity of rats. Yet you could not say that Rosie Pierpoint was in greater danger of the plague than any in Lambeth or Spitalfields or Shoreditch, because the disease did not seem to follow a traceable path along the ground, but rather to come out of the air, like seeds carried on the wind and falling here and there at random.

There was some noise, still, upon the river, but less than there once was, many of the fops and gallants and their women having fled into the countryside taking all their shrieking with them. I was told that some of the bargemen were starving, for lack of trade, and so made it my habit to have myself rowed some way on the water every afternoon. And for this act of charity, I was rewarded with the gossip of the river and heard how, to add to the melancholy of London, hundreds of poor seamen, sent away from their ships unpaid, had come in to the capital to beg money from the Navy office, and how these, because they had no shelter and no fire, were easy victims of the pestilence "but have no place to die in, Sir, but the street and so do make some disgusting deaths in the gutter."

"Why are they not paid?" I asked the bargemen and all of them gave me the same answer, which was that there was no money, the King "being very wasteful of what the Parliament gives him, as if he believes he has only to feed them false promises and they will shit gold on and on." And so I thought of what the King had said about his "honey-moon" being over. I had not believed him, but I saw now that he was right: he was loved less than before. Except by me.

It was only after several weeks of my wanderings about London that something of great importance became clear to me: I was not merely trying to understand the calamity of the city, I was trying to find for myself some role within it. So I began to ask the bargemen and the vendors of eel pies and the ink-man in Cloak Lane and everybody who would talk to me, "What can I, a trained physician, best do at this time?" But I got no satisfactory answers. Some people spat at me, as if the word "physician" had rendered me utterly repellent to them. Others advised me to go home and close my door and burn cleansing herbs over my fire and wait for time to pass. Others again began taking off their clothes and exhorting me to examine their bodies for spots and swellings. No one told me how I could become useful. And I think I would have continued aimlessly walking, noting, talking and watching if I had not one night woken up beside Katharine and heard in the room and in my mind a silence so profound that it is beyond words to describe because I cannot liken it to anything on the earth. I lay in it and looked at the dark and waited to understand what it was. And after a few minutes (minutes I could not hear passing but only sensed them pass) I knew that what had returned to me was the Silence of Pearce.

It is a thing that I find very difficult to endure, so lonely does it make me feel. I could not continue to lie motionless within it, so I rose and went down to the parlour and sat by the embers of the fire and waited for morning. But it was winter by this time, and I knew that this wait would be long, so to occupy the time I went upstairs again and fetched from under the bed (where I kept my few books and letters in one of the Whittlesea floursacks) the copy of William Harvey's De Generatione Animalium that had been given to me on my day of departure by Ambrose. It was Pearce's copy. It had been read so many times by him that the pages had become as thin and fragile as the petals of flowers, so frail in fact that one hardly dared to turn them. The black leather in which the book was bound was stained and torn, but it had been held for so long against Pearce's heart that it smelled faintly of him and, on putting it into my hands, Ambrose had said, "This was a part of John and is a replacement for the ladle."

I laid the book on my knee and opened it, turning the pages carefully, one by one. Certain of Harvey 's Latin sentences had been underlined by Pearce and on almost every page there were annotations in Pearce's minuscule writing. In the heart of the book, seemingly put there long ago and forgotten, I discovered two pressed primroses and laid into the pages with them was a piece of waxed paper upon which the Greek word meaning "prophylactic" had been written. Beneath this was a list – in English as far as I could decipher it – of ingredients, followed by short instructions as to how they should be mixed.

I took up this paper and brought it nearer to the light and I was able to see that underneath the list and the instructions Pearce had penned several of the ornate question marks with which all his medical books are peppered, the symbol having an absolutely precise meaning to him, denoting always "Absence of Proof". I was about to lay the thing back in the book, when I noted that one of the ingredients Pearce had written down was buttercup-root and my memory told me that, although this fleshy bulb is seldom used these days in any medical preparation, it is and always has been included in every preventative men have ever devised against the plague germ, Pastuerella Pestis. And so I concluded – rightly, as I was about to see – that what I held in my hands was Pearce's own prophylactic against the pestilence.

That Pearce should have written the thing on waxed paper was perverse of him, for ink cannot properly adhere to it and so the writing will soon enough become invisible. Luckily, he had employed a very sharp quill (he was always extremely fussy about his pens and liked them to be thin) and so, when I held the paper in front of the light, the words were magically illuminated, having been scratched into the wax.

And so my little role in London 's great tragedy was revealed to me: I would become a pedlar of Pearce's prophylactic. I would merchandise hope.

The money remaining to me at the time of my arrival with Katharine in London was almost gone. We ate food bought by Frances Elizabeth and kept ourselves warm with coal paid for by her. In return, I helped her with her letters, correcting her spelling mistakes and teaching her some elegant phrasing. She seemed content with this arrangement, but I was not. The notion that all that stood between me and destitution were letters of complaint and supplication (written for poor people who could not truly afford the price of the words) made me uneasy and afraid. And so I vowed to myself I would make a living by selling Pearce's remedy even if, to do so, I would have to have as my customers the relatives of the dead or dying and so find myself entering those houses marked with red crosses and with the words "God Have Mercy."

I paid five guineas to an old apothecary I had known during my time at Ludgate. For this sum, he made up a large quantity of the medicine (it tasted quite pleasant, being infused in Malaga Wine) and sold me a gross of bottles. Hanging on the door of his shop, I noticed one of the strange, bird-like headdresses worn by doctors going into plague houses and I asked him whether I might borrow this from him. "You may keep it, Sir," he said, "for that doctor comes here no more, nor goes anywhere, nor has breath."

I took it down and put it on. It is made of leather and covers the head and face and shoulders entirely. In it are set two eye-pieces made of glass and a long beak through which one is able to breathe with difficulty, it being stuffed with sachets of potpourri, put there to protect the wearer from the corrupted air. With the headdress goes a leather mantle (not unlike the tabards we used to wear at Whittlesea) and thick leather gloves that reach to the elbows. Once inside these garments, I knew that whoever I have now become – whether Robert or Merivel or neither of these or a composite of the two – I had rendered myself completely unrecognisable, even to those who knew me well. I did not even look like a man, but like a duck, and I thought how fitting this was, for in peddling Pearce's prophylactic, the efficacy of which had never been proven, I was about to become no better than a quacksalver.

This realisation, though it dismayed me for a while, did not prevent me, as I walked back to Cheapside wearing my duck garb, from feeling an attack of laughter coming on when I caught sight of myself in the glass of a low window. Not even in my fur tabard nor in my three-masted barque had I ever looked so completely and utterly ridiculous. I laughed for so long and so uncontrollably that all who passed me, I could see from my little eye-holes, shunned me as one gone suddenly mad in the street.

I will describe to you how the winter passed.

In December, I went into a plague house and found a man newly dead from the disease and kneeling by him his wife, holding his dead hand and weeping. I asked her what could I do for her and she told me that no one on earth could help her, for the sneezing and shivering that are the first signs of plague she knew would come upon her within a short time. I was about to turn and leave when I heard myself say (in a voice I did not recognise as mine, muffled as it was by the duck snout): "If no one on earth can help you, why not let one John Pearce, who is under the earth, save you from death?" I then held out to her a bottle of medicine. She looked at it for a moment, but then shook her head and returned to her weeping. Despite my very dire need for money, it was beyond me to ask this brave, grief-stricken woman for the one shilling and threepence I usually charge for the remedy, so I nodded to her and went out, leaving the bottle on her table. Four or five weeks later, this person, who had been seeking me for several days, found me and put her arms round my neck and kissed my beak. She had taken the medicine and the symptoms of plague had never come and so she believed that I had saved her.

From this time, when word of this success began to spread, my business prospered. People arrived at Frances Elizabeth's house asking for the medicine, thus relieving me of the need to go into plague houses in search of customers. Frances Elizabeth banked up her fires and burnt herbs on them and would not go near the strangers at her door. And more and more she and Katharine stayed upstairs in the bedroom, Katharine in the bed (where from time to time I made love to her without telling her that it was a love born of loneliness and need, and not of desire) and Frances Elizabeth in a rocking chair. And the two of them dreamed of the child to come and sewed bonnets for him and knitted blankets for his little crib. Katharine would hitch up her skirts and put her hands round her belly that was grown so large and heavy, by the coming of the new year, she looked like a woman come to full term. And the mother would lay her head gently in the middle of the abdomen, where the navel protruded like a rosebud, and feel the kicking of the baby's limbs. They seemed to long so ardently for the birth that this longing took all their time, so that the letter-writing was neglected and even I, downstairs in the parlour with my bottles, was forgotten so that I had the illusion sometimes that I was free once more, as I had been as a student, and not tied to Katharine or to anyone in the world and that I couild walk out into Cheapside and start my life all over again.

I did not give the unborn baby a great deal of attention. I thought of him as belonging only to Katharine and to her mother and not to me, as if I had made them a present of him. They wanted their present to be male. They wanted the son who could rise to prosperity in the Office of Patents and they named him Anthony, after the dead father. And one evening, an astrologer was summoned. This astrologer frowned when he learned that I was born under the sign of Aquarius and whispered some words to himself that I did not catch. He predicted that the child would be large and healthy and that, in its infancy, it would learn "a very pretty way with laughter." He set the probable date of birth as the twenty-fifth of February and went away richer by ten shillings, leaving Katharine and Frances Elizabeth disappointed that he had not told them more.

"Of what use is laughter?" sighed Frances Elizabeth. "It has never brought anyone to riches."

My birthday came again. I made no mention of it and there was no rejoicing. I was sullen all day, remembering the foolish Dégeulasse and the false hopes of his wife and daughters. And towards nightfall I thought of Celia, of her grace and sweetness and of her singing.

In the same week, I met, in the apothecary's shop, a man who had been alive for ninety-nine years. He told me that the plague was caused by the tiredness of the earth and that this was but the first stage in the ending of the world. I nevertheless persuaded him to buy a bottle of Pearce's preventative, it being his ardent wish not to die until he had reached the age of one hundred. Before paying for his bottle, however, he asked me what was in the mixture. I told him that it contained crushed rue, sage, and saffron with boiled buttercup-root, snake-root and salt and that these ingredients were infused with Malaga. He smiled and nodded and pronounced the medicine "clever" and left, and as he went out I saw the apothecary bow obsequiously to him.

"Who is that old man?" I asked.

"Do you not know?" said the apothecary. "Do you not recognise the fleshy nose and something in the set of the mouth?"

"No."

"Ah. Well, to me, there is a family likeness. He is the only surviving brother of William Harvey."

For reasons which I do not completely comprehend, I was so affected by this revelation that, instead of returning to Cheapside as I had intended, I walked to a nearby tavern, The Faithful Dray, and ordered myself a small flagon of wine.

I had not drunk any wine for such a great while that a very little of it rendered me categorically drunk and I sat in my corner, foolishly sipping, glad that I was not known in The Faithful Dray and so forced to enter into any conversation. I was about to order a second flagon (having now remembered that solitary drinking can be an oddly enjoyable pastime) when I heard someone say, very meekly and politely: "Good morning, Sir Robert."

I looked up. A man stood before me, so cadaverously thin that his face resembled a skeleton more nearly than the painted faces of the Flagellants. On top of this gaunt visage, he wore a blond wig, once fine but now matted and greasy and clogged with old powder. He had on his back a torn green coat and the hand he held out to me was encased in a green glove. I stared and blinked. And then the knowledge of who he was seeped into me. It was Finn.

If he had not had the courage to apologise to me for spying on me for the King, I would have got up and left him, without any regard for his sorrowful condition. But the first words he spoke were words of apology, and following on these came the story of what had happened to him. And both the apology and the tale were pitiful, the first being very stammering and clumsy and the second being full of suffering and humiliation.

You will remember that, while I was delirious with the measles, Celia left me and returned to the King, taking Finn and the finished portrait with her.

During this journey, Finn began to dream. He dreamed of the King's hand slapping him on the back and pressing a purse full of gold into his palm. He dreamed of all the commissions to come (ah, the beauty of that word "commission" for all the unknown artists and poets!) and all the imaginary arcadian landscapes in which he would place his famous sitters.

After the dreams came the arrival. The portrait of Celia was unloaded from the coach and Finn carried it himself down the length of the Stone Gallery, believing that on this occasion the doors to the King's apartments would be straight away opened to admit him. But they were not. He waited in the Stone Gallery for two days, his mind so enchanted by his imminent preferment that he left his spot only once to eat a little meal of bread and sausage and to relieve himself. He slept with his head on the stone.

On the third day, he was summoned. The King looked down at the portrait (behind which Finn was humbly kneeling). His Majesty ordered lamps to be brought near to it. Then he leaned down from his great height and scratched at the pigment with his nail. A flake of burnt umber came off and adhered to his finger. He examined it and called for a silk handkerchief in which to deposit the flake. The handkerchief was brought to him. He flapped it at the picture. "Gaudy," he said, "and shallow. The antithesis of Lady Merivel. Take it away."

Finn saw the folly of protesting. He saw that to argue with the King would avail him nothing and lose for him the little money he would be given for the portrait, if he remained silent. And yet he protested. He came out from behind the picture and began to describe the pains he had taken with the thing, his care with the background and the fondness Celia had shown both for him and for the portrait. The King turned his back on him and walked away towards his bedchamber. Finn shouted after him that he owed him at least the seven livres promised in the contract and that no man would trust a King of England who did not keep his word. The King stopped in his tracks and called for his guards. Finn was arrested and sent to the Tower.

He languished in the Tower for seven months. He was not charged, he was forgotten. Celia's intercession eventually secured his release. He was ordered never to come to Whitehall again or to any place where the Monarch resided. He made his way to Norfolk, believing that Violet Bathurst would help him, but he found the Bathurst household in dereliction. Old Bathurst had died and been put into his mausoleum and Violet – whether in sadness for the loss of him or for the loss of me one cannot say – courted a daily oblivion in the fine Alicantes her late husband had hoarded in his cellar. She gave Finn fourteen shillings and the stuffed head of a marten cat and sent him away. Going out from her house, he was bitten by one of Bathurst 's hounds desperate for the taste of blood.

And so he returned to London, where he expected to die. He earned a poor living painting scenery at the Dukes Playhouse, but his anger against the King and against a world that would not value him was so great that it gnawed at his body as well as at his mind. It was, literally, wasting him.

All of this he told me at The Faithful Dray. We got so drunk together, we fell unconscious onto the floor and when we woke it was dark and the landlord was throwing a bucket of water over us. We went out into the street and vomited into the gutter. Then I took Finn home with me to Cheapside, and Katharine and Frances Elizabeth looked up from their sewing and stared at his hollowed, suffering face. I invited him to sit down at the table and after a while some knuckle stew with barley was served to us. As Finn spooned his to his mouth, I noticed tears coursing down his cheeks. They dribbled into his bowl of stew, making it more salty and watery than it already was.

Finn slept on a cot in the small dark room where Frances Elizabeth wrote her letters. He liked its smell of ink and paper and sealing wax and, after his first night in it, he asked me if he might stay a month or two ("only until the spring comes, Sir Robert…") at the low rent he could afford as a scenery painter.

Frances Elizabeth agreed. Gradually, her house was filling up with people, but she did not seem to mind. From being a very anxious-seeming and complaining person, she had become calm and enduring, and I surmise that she had found her years of solitude very difficult to bear. She never talked to me about Katharine's madness or about the day she had taken her to Whittlesea, or what had driven her to abandon her daughter. She never said that she believed Katharine was cured. It was as if she did not wish to remember the past – the death of her husband on the very steps of the Patents Office, the desertion of Katharine by the stone mason, the coming of sleeplessness and lunacy – but to savour the present and plan for the future, when her grandson would come into the world and grow to manhood and responsibility and let the women rest.

After the coming of Finn, however, when she heard me addressed as "Sir Robert", she began to write a letter to the Ecclesiastical Courts requesting that her daughter be allowed to divorce the stone mason "who has disappeared into the very aire" so that she could marry the father of her child. I sat down by Frances Elizabeth and gently took the quill from her hand. I intended to inform her that I, too, had a wife to whom the King himself had married me, but then I found I could not say these things to Katharine's mother, so I informed her instead that I did not believe there was any "e" on the end of "air" and that her writing was not as elegant in these letters as it sometimes was and that churchmen "being very fond of show and outward appearance" would be influenced in their decision by the beauty of the hand. So she tore up the letter and started it again, but I did not stay to watch her.

Two things brought me a little solace at this time: the first was the knowledge that Finn had suffered after his betrayal of me; the second was the discovery that, after all we had endured and done, we liked each other. I felt protective towards him. He believed there was some Divine purpose in our meeting in The Faithful Dray and that if he stayed with me his future would be revealed to him, as if he were the sitter in the portrait who one day comes sufficiently alive to turn and see the sylvan glade at his back and so discovers he can step from the dull foreground of the picture into a place of enchantment.

We did not talk very much about the Court, nor about the precarious nature of our two lives. We talked about Norfolk and our mutual fondness for its wide skies and its wet wind and the order and peace of its great parks. We talked about the Indian Nightingale: how, each in our own fashion, we remembered it as a significant thing. And we talked about Katharine and the peculiar ways in which, without meaning to, we sometimes bind ourselves to another person for all eternity.

With Finn in the house, I found that, when I could not sleep at night, I had only to imagine him downstairs on his cot for my loneliness to recede a little and I began to hope that, even after the child was born, he would still be there, lying a few feet from the ink-wells.

As the astrologer had predicted, the breaking of the waters of Katharine's womb occurred in the early morning of the twenty-fifth of February.

I dressed myself quickly and lit rushlights and positioned them round the bed. Frances Elizabeth put coal on the fires and went out to fetch the midwife, who lived in St Swithins Lane. Finn woke up and wandered about the house in his night-clothes, staring.

The midwife was a shy person, small, even dainty. She looked like a flower-seller. I said to Frances Elizabeth, "Perhaps you have fetched the wrong woman?" But I was shooed away. Women are the sole overseers of birth, as if the process of it must be kept forever secret from men.

Before I left the room, I asked Katharine whether she was afraid. She replied that the pain of the body had no terrors for her, only the pain of the mind. "Your leaving of me I fear," she said. "Nothing else."

I breakfasted with Finn upon some chocolate cake and then walked with him to the playhouse where, he admitted to me, he was at work upon some Venetian columns made of thin wood. "Well," I could not resist saying, "your day will be pleasant and easy, Finn, for you have had much practice with columns." I waited for his smile, but it did not come. Indeed, he seemed crestfallen.

I idled my way home, stopping to buy some opium grains from my apothecary, in case Katharine should need to be stilled to sleep after the baby was born and then calling in, as had become my morning habit, at The Faithful Dray for a glass or two of wine. By the time I returned to Cheapside it was past mid-day and as I walked in I expected to be informed that my son, Anthony, had come crying into the world.

But he had not come. The house was noisy with women, neighbours of Frances Elizabeth who had come to help and gossip and wait. They built up the fires to an even greater intensity, dousing the coals with acrid-smelling potions. One of them made a batch of twenty-eight jam tarts. Another, who was a laundress like Rosie, washed all the crib blankets and dried them on a clothes-horse in the parlour. Another sang Scottish songs, one for each of her seven children and one for the eighth child who had died.

From time to time I was given news of Katharine. The labour was slow. Her body, for all that it was large, was weak. It could not seem to help the child to be born. And slowly the afternoon came on and then the dusk and still Katharine laboured, submitting every ten minutes or thereabouts to pain so severe that I could hear her cries even in the parlour where I sat and waited, passing the time by playing arpeggios upon my oboe.

Finn returned and we and the women had a poor supper of the jam tarts eaten with a boiled custard. After this, I felt very sleepy, having been woken so early in the morning, and would have gone to bed except that I had no bed to go to. So I played a little Rummy with Finn, dozing over the cards, so that he won five games one after the other. He went off to his cot in the ink-room and I lay down on a settle and one of the women covered me with a woollen cloak and I slept that fiendish kind of half sleep that is filled with dreams and daydreams flowing in and out of each other.

It was morning, however, when I did wake at last. I pulled my limbs into a sitting position and listened. After a moment I heard Katharine's cry come, but it was a weak, piteous cry, as if she really did not have the strength to make any sound at all.

I crept up the stairs and knocked on the door of the bedroom. It was opened by the midwife and she let me come in. I went to the bed, beside which Frances Elizabeth was sitting, holding Katharine's hand in hers. At that moment, the pain came again to Katharine's body and I saw her arch her back and open her mouth to scream, but, as I had guessed, her exhaustion was so great that no scream came. I looked at her face, and then touched it gently. It was waxy and cold and her lips were white and cracked. "Katharine…" I whispered, but she could not speak or even smile.

"What is to be done?" I said to the midwife.

"The baby is large, Sir, and she cannot push it out of her."

"What is to be done, then?"

"We can do nothing. Only wait and pray."

"And then?"

"If she begins to slip away…"

"What?"

"I have seen the mother begin to slip away, and then there is only one way to save her."

"To cut into the womb?"

"Yes. To send for a surgeon."

I nodded. I looked at Frances Elizabeth, but she did not look at me. She knew perhaps as well as I that to save Katharine the surgeon would sacrifice the child, even cut it out from her body, limb by limb.

I left the room and went downstairs to the parlour. The fire was low, so I put a little coal on it. I knelt before it and did not move.

At half past ten, I heard two of the women go out and I knew that they were going to try to find a surgeon.

Then I got up and went into the kitchen and heated water and washed my hands. I knew precisely what I would have to do.

An hour later, the women returned. They did not bring a surgeon because at this time of plague no surgeon could be found.

Finn, who had no columns to paint that day, came and looked at me. His face was green.

"Merivel," he said (for this is how he addresses me now). "What are you going to do?"

"Finn," I said, "I am going to prevent a death."

He swallowed. Then he took up the woollen cloak under which I had slept and wrapped it round himself, and stood huddled inside it, as if it were old Bathurst's cowshed – a place of retreat.

Then I began to give my orders. I told the midwife to wash Katharine's abdomen and to put clean linen under her. I sent two of the women to fetch pledgets and bandages; to another I gave the opium grains and told her to pound them and mix them with water.

Meanwhile, I fetched my scalpel and my suturing needle and cleaned them. In my heart, I felt not fear, as I should have done, but a welling of excitement that seemed no less intense than that which I had felt in the coal hole of my parents' house when I dissected the body of a starling.

I went up to the room. Katharine's eyes were glazed and staring, her breathing shallow like the breathing of the little dogs I had once tended.

There were six women in the room. When a little of the opium mixture had been dribbled into Katharine's mouth, I positioned them like sentinels – two to hold down her upper body, two to hold her legs and two (including the midwife, for whose small careful fingers I was about to be grateful) to help me.

The day was bright. Light shone into the room and glimmered on my hands on the scalpel blade.

I said a prayer, not to God, but to my mother and to Pearce. Help me now, I asked.

Then I cut.

I cut into the skin. Beads of blood appeared, like the strand of a necklace laid on the belly from the navel to the pubic hair.

I cut into the tissue and the bright blood flowed over the belly. Hands holding the pledgets reached out and the lint began to soak it up.

I cut into the peritoneum and so into the abdomen. In a calm voice, I instructed the midwife and my other helper to put their hands into the two sides of the wound and hold it open. This they did and I laid down the scalpel and took more lint from them to staunch the bleeding. And as the bleeding lessened, I saw revealed to me the coil of Katharine's bowel and the sack of her bladder and the wall of the womb itself.

I wiped my hand on some linen. I did not look at Katharine's face nor allow myself to imagine her suffering. All of my attention was concentrated in my hands.

I cleaned the scalpel, wiping blood off the exhortation "Do Not Sleep." I positioned the blade above the lower third of the womb and I cut transversely across it.

Again, blood flowed. Onto my hands. Onto the folds of the bowel. I laid the scalpel aside. I put pledgets on and saw them fill with blood. I removed them and pressed clean ones on. I felt a single droplet of sweat slide down my forehead and sting my eye. I could hear my own heart beating and, for one tiny vessel of time, no longer than a single second perhaps, I lost all consciousness of where I was.

But I did not faint or falter. I parted the lips of the incision I had made in the stretched wall of the womb and felt pressing against my fingers the head of the baby.

"Help me now," I said to the midwife, "for my hands are too large to go in. I will hold open the abdominal incision. Put your right hand under the head like a shoe-horn and, not wrenchingly but gently, lever it out."

So I came to Katharine's side and the young midwife I had likened to a flower-seller reached into Katharine's womb and took out the child, first easing out the head, as I had instructed, then putting her small hands under its armpits, and pulling forth the little slippery body.

It was alive.

But it was not Anthony. It was a girl.

Chapter Twenty-Three. A Light on the River

In Genesis, we are told that before Adam's flesh was opened and the rib taken out to be made in Eve, "the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam". I have always considered that this was most thoughtful of Him, for it spared Adam a great amount of pain and, as a physician, I have many times wished that I could bring such oblivion upon my patients before hurting them. Fabricius once talked about a certain Arnold of Villanova, living in the fourteenth century, who had discovered the secret of a sleep that would not be broken by pain, but no record was ever made of the ingredients of the secret and so it has never been whispered to us down the ages. My wish, then, has not been granted, and when I took up my scalpel to make the incision in Katharine's belly, I did not pray for any oblivion for her, knowing it to be an impossible thing; I prayed only for myself – for my own skill.

When I cut into the abdomen, however, she passed into a sudden and profound unconsciousness. It was not caused by the little dribble of opium we had put into her mouth, for opium works slowly and stealthily. I decided at first that the great agony given to her by the wound had made her faint. But several hours passed and she did not come out of her coma. Her breathing became stertorous, like the breathing of Pearce in his last illness. And so I did not know what this sleep could be, unless it was the sleep of coming death.

I could not sew up the slit in the womb, the wall of it being stretched so thin that the sutures would tear it, so I left it to heal and close of itself in its own time. The abdominal incision I stitched together and sprinkled with a little Pulv. Galeni and had the women put lint on it and bandages that encircled the buttocks to bind it. All this I did without Katharine being aware of what was done to her body or even that her child had been brought out of it living like Julius Caesar and like the good Macduff of Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, the story of which had been told to me by Amos Treefeller in his back room smelling of polished wooden hat-stands.

The baby was taken away by the midwife and the other women to be washed and examined and then bound in swaddling. They told me that the infant's head was covered with a soft down "of a reddish colour" and that it was a well-formed child "with a good and lusty cry." And they held it up for me to see its face and I saw that it had a little flat nose like my own. Then they asked me: "What shall we call the baby? What name had you in mind?" And I replied that I had no name in mind, having been told that my child would be a boy and christened Anthony.

The women looked at me reproachfully and snatched the child from my sight. And when they had gone, I sat down and rubbed my eyes and for the first time told myself that I was the father of a little girl, breathing and alive. I put my hands together in the kind of prayer steeple Ambrose used to make and asked for kindness from God and the world towards my girl. "Let her have playthings, as many as I can afford," I added, "but let her not be a plaything for any man." And as soon as I had whispered these thoughts, I decided upon the name Margaret, which was my mother's name and thus to me a serious and precious word. So I got up and went to the women and told them that the baby would be christened Margaret after my mother and after Margaret Fell. They nodded their approval and from that moment, when the child cried and they comforted it, I heard them saying, "Hush, Margaret, all is well."

Yet it was not true. After some hours, during which Katharine did not stir nor move any of her limbs, the midwife uncovered one of her breasts and pinched the nipple, trying to make the milk come, but despite the great heaviness of her breasts there did not seem to be any proper milk, only a little weeping from the teat, which, when the midwife touched it and then licked her finger, had a bitter taste like bile.

"Put the baby to the nipple nevertheless," said Frances Elizabeth, who stood by her daughter and combed her black hair over the soft pillow, "and it will make the milk come."

So Margaret was laid on Katharine's stomach, above the bandaged wound, and her little mouth tickled until it opened and the teat put into it. She began to suck but quickly spat out the teat and screamed and would not, no matter how the midwife tried to persuade her, stay on the breast and suckle. She was put back into the crib and covered with the blankets and quilts made for Anthony. I ordered that a wet-nurse be found.

I sat by Katharine. I picked up her hand, which felt hot with a fever, and held it in mine. I looked at her face – not as the face of a poor woman towards whom I felt utter indifference but as the face of the mother of my child. I wanted to love the face and feel tenderness towards it, but I could not, so I got up and went downstairs, being afraid that Frances Elizabeth would look at me and read my thoughts and my feelings.

I found Finn sitting by the fire in his undergarments, sewing patches onto his Lincoln green. His raggedness has become very dire and, had I the money, I would buy him a new suit of clothes. Nevertheless, the sight of him mending his things made me smile and I could not resist saying to him: "Ah Finn, a new profession, I see: tailor."

He had the wit to laugh. Then he said: "I do not know what to do, Merivel, about how poor I am."

"Well," I said, "why do you not paint my portrait?"

"What?"

"You heard me, Finn. But do not paint me as a rich man, dressed up in satin or with a sea battle going on behind my head; paint me as I am, in my old wig and in my shirtsleeves and in this simple room."

"And how is that to gain me any money?"

"I will pay you what I can. But then, if the picture is good, you will take it and show it round in the coffee houses and in this way get more commissions, not from the fops but from ordinary citizens – clerks at the Navy Office, silversmiths, lawyers, haberdashers and so forth. They will not pay seven livres for a picture, but they will pay something because there is no man alive who does not feel his status improved by a portrait of himself upon the wall."

I presented this suggestion to Finn as if I had been giving the idea very close thought for some time, when, in reality, it had only that second entered my mind. Having offered it, however, I saw that there might be something in it and so did Finn, for he put down his sewing and looked at me and his look was bright and full of hope.

On the evening of that day, Margaret was lifted out of her crib by the midwife and wrapped in shawls and blankets and taken to the house of the wet-nurse. I accompanied them, because I wanted to see the woman, to make sure she was not diseased nor her house dirty.

It was the house of a money-lender. It was tall and narrow and overhung the river. In one room of it the broker did his transactions and wrote out his accounts; the rest of it seemed filled with children – eight or nine of them – from all the ages of two to twelve, and when the wet-nurse greeted us she held in her arms a tenth child, a fat baby of six months or so.

She showed us into a parlour. I saw a good fire burning and smelt the familiar smell of herbs being burnt upon it to keep away the plague germs. She laid her own baby on a little rug before the fire and took Margaret into her arms. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-five with a gentle smile that reminded me of Eleanor and Hannah. She put a finger to Margaret's mouth and she began at once to suck on it. Then one of her children, a little boy dressed poorly but with a healthy colour in his cheeks, came into the room and stood by his mother and peered at Margaret's round face.

"She looks like a flat little button," he said.

"Hush," said the wet-nurse. "See her eyes? Colour of cornflowers."

We did not stay long, for the impression I formed of the woman was good. She told me that her milk was plentiful "and not sour, for I shall never eat any soft fruit nor drink cider" and that she was "a very wakeful person, attentive to all my little ones." When I gave her some money, I wondered if she would be allowed to keep it for herself or whether she would have to surrender it to her husband, who would lend it out at interest.

We walked back along the wharves. "It is strange," I said to the midwife as I looked at the water, "we did not really have any winter and now here is the spring already."

That night, I lay on the floor beside Katharine's bed. The midwife had been called away and the other women had gone back to their families, so the household returned to what it had been before the birth, except that Katharine's voice was no longer heard within it; only her snoring and her sighs.

When I dressed her wound in the early hours of the morning, I saw that blood was seeping constantly from it and that blood flowed very freely out of her vagina into the linen under her, and I did not know how this haemorrhaging could be stopped or why the wound was not beginning to clot and knit together. Then I remembered that at St Thomas 's we once performed a cephalic phlebotomy on a man bleeding from his anus and that this making of an external cut staunched the flow of blood inside the bowel.

So I took up her arm. It was cold, with a damp sheen to the skin. I found the vein and cut and let a little blood drip into a basin. And at this moment, Katharine opened her eyes. She stared at me, into my face and into my mind. The stare did not falter. It remained. It saw all that I had done and all that I had tried to feel and could not. I turned away from it, looking round at the empty crib. I thought that when I looked again the stare would have softened and become forgiving. But it had not.

So I put my hand out. That is all I did. I did not whisper any last blessing or say any prayer or utter any words at all. I only put out my hand and closed the staring eyes.

Frances Elizabeth wept for the death of her only child and Finn, who has the heart of a gazelle, wept for Frances Elizabeth, remembering her kindness in saving him from destitution with a knuckle stew and a canvas cot in the letter-room. But I did not weep at all.

I walked out of the house and went and sat in a coffee house and drank bowl after bowl of sweet coffee. And the talk and smoke and laughter of the place, though I was not a part of them, I loved exceedingly for they had the smell of life returning.

Then I had a great mind to shit and found a place and did it, and even this I found pleasurable and after it felt very cleansed, as if I had been given a new body.

I passed all the day walking about the city considering what I might do with the next bit of my life and by the time the dusk started to gather around me, I had decided what it was.

Then I returned to Cheapside. On my way I bought some white violets from a flower-seller. I bought them for Katharine – to put into her hands or to lay upon her wound – but then both the flowers and the gesture of putting them on the body seemed to me to be dishonest things, and so I threw them into the gutter.

Katharine was put into the ground in the churchyard of St Alphage.

I wrote to the Keepers of Whittlesea and in this letter I said: "She is at rest now, in the sleep of eternity," but I repented afterwards for putting down so sentimental a thing.

I made a vow. I vowed I would never again be moved by pity. For I see now that in my "helping" of Katharine I was not acting unselfishly (as I believed) but only trying to do some good to my own little soul.

The night of the burial, two seamen from the Royal James knocked at the door. They asked Frances Elizabeth to write on their behalf to the Duke of York, to beg that the wages owed to them be paid. I told them she could not do it "having today buried her daughter", but that I would write it for them. They thanked me and asked me to tell the Duke all their miseries and hunger, but to "set them down in no more than six lines, Sir, for this is all we can pay for."

I went to the letter-room to begin on the thing and there I found Finn stretching onto some wooden slats a piece of canvas he had stolen from the Playhouse. It had been painted upon already. It appeared to be a small part of a building -a castle or a tower.

"What is this, Robin?" I said. "The foundation stone of your new mansion?"

"Yes, it is," he replied. "For I am going to paint your portrait over it and your portrait – as you have suggested – is going to begin for me a new life."

When he had finished stretching the canvas, he propped it up against some books on the very table where I worked on my letter for the seamen, thus casting an irritating square shadow onto my paper. I said nothing. I watched him take up a brush and palette and put onto it some white pigment. He then began to cover the entire canvas with this white, obliterating the piece of castle. And seeing all this white go on as a prelude to the painting of my face, I remembered a thing to which I had given no thought for a long while and that was the white "waft of death" that Katharine had seen in me in the time of her madness. It sent into my belly a little worm of unease, so I put it at once from my mind and concentrated upon my letter. I wrote it in the stylish, neat hand with which I used to write my epistles to the King. I said, "If England does not cherish and care for those who have fought in her wars, what is to become of them and what is to become of England? Surely, Sir, they will both sicken?"

Then, being in the mood for letter-writing, I took up the quill again and wrote to Will Gates, telling him all that had happened to me and requesting that one of the grooms ride my horse to London. And when I thought about Danseuse, I marvelled at the notion that so swift and fine a creature could still belong to me.

Some weeks passed, during which Finn's portrait of me began to emerge (like a face coming out of a Norfolk mist) from the white canvas. In it, I appear somewhat grave – as if I were a reeve or a librarian – yet my eyes are filled with light. Finn wishes to title the picture A Physician, thus rendering me anonymous, but I do not mind. The only nuisance was that I had to sit still for several hours at a time with my hand uncomfortably poised in the act of taking up the scalpel from my box of surgical instruments.

I watched the picture carefully for any signs of fiction and untruth. But I am glad to say there were none. Behind my head is no imagined Utopia, but some plain, dark panelling. I congratulated Finn. I told him this was the best work he had ever done and saw a very foolish grin break out over his face.

In these weeks of the portrait, we offered to leave the house in Cheapside, and indeed I was anxious to leave it for I did not like sleeping in the bed where Katharine had died. But Frances Elizabeth wept and begged us to remain, so I replied that I would stay until summer. Finn, I suspected, would remain longer than that, so fond did he seem to be of the room where he slept and where he now worked upon the picture, thus forcing Frances Elizabeth to do her letter-writing in the parlour. But she never complained about this dispossession. She was ready to make any sacrifice to keep at bay her widow's loneliness.

In late spring the portrait was finished and in the same week Danseuse was returned to me.

I was much moved by both things.

I was not flattering Poor Robin when I told him the picture was very fine. It was no gaudy piece of work: it was sober and dark. Yet the face of A Physician, lit by a cold watery light, reveals the warring complexities within him – his love of his vocation and his fear of what it reveals to him.

I gave Finn seven shillings for it, one tenth of what he might have got from a rich man, but almost all the money that remained to me after I had paid the groom for his journey with Danseuse and found stabling and oats for her.

She was in excellent condition. Her rump gleamed. Her saddle and bridle had been soaped and polished and in the saddle bag was a letter from Will, which ran as follows:

Good Sir Robert,

It was a mighty joy to me to get a word from you and know you are in London, where God keep you safe from the Plague.

I am sending a Boy with your mare, she has been galloped a little every day and fed good hay so do not fear we have put her out of our mind.

I can report this same bad Pestilence is come to Norwich where most terrible for all. Except, on getting a smell of this news, the Viscomte de Confolens has gone back to France and is no more seen here, which is not terrible but mighty excellent, for I and M. Cattlebury we did Detest and Loathe him. Pray he will not return.

We are glad your life goeth on and we send you our blessings for your little girl Margaret which is a name well loved in my family and in all Norfolk I do think as well.

Your servant, Wm. Gates

Having read Will's letter which – as his letters always do -made me remember him very fondly and brought to my mind my easeful life at Bidnold of which he had been a part, I was impatient, suddenly, to get up on my horse and be reminded of what it was to ride about the streets, instead of tramping through the mud and dirt of them on foot.

I rode first to Shoe Lane, to the little dark shop of an engraver that I used to pass when I had my rooms in Ludgate. I went in there and ordered to be made a small brass plaque with the words R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. chased into it.

I then remounted and turned Danseuse round and put her to a pleasant trot. And, trotting all the way, we went along Blackfriars and crossed the river at Southwark Bridge and so came in a very short time to the house of Rosie Pierpoint.

I will not deny that what followed was very pleasant. If I had once believed that my desire for Rosie had been snuffed out by the loss of other, more precious, things, I now saw that, after all that had passed, its vital flame still had a little breath.

While I have become thin on Quaker porridge and widow's stews, Rosie has prospered and grown fat and the sweet dimples above her bottom are deep and when she smiles there is a fold of flesh under her chin. And these things delight me.

She told me that, since the plague came to London, there has been "a craze for washing and for the boiling of pillowcases in lavender water" and that she could not remember a time when her business had "blossomed out more."

No longer did she eat meals of fish and bread: now, she was able to buy chickens and pies from the cookhouses and cream from the dairies. She worked hard but, as a reward, she spoiled herself. She believed that her fires and her cauldrons of perfumed water and the good food she ate kept her safe from the plague "for it is the poor and the cold who die from it, Sir Robert, and not the likes of me."

We lay in her bed all afternoon and I told her the decision I had come to, which was to set up in London as a doctor and surgeon once again and to make my living in this way and no other. And she sat up, leaning on her elbow, stroking the moths on my stomach with her fat little hand and said, "Everything, then, will be just as it once was, before you went to Whitehall," and I was in no mood to contradict her, so I nodded and replied, "Yes. As if the time between had not existed."

I left her towards evening. As she put a wet farewell kiss upon my mouth, she told me that the King had returned to London. "But take care," she said smiling, "that you do not go near him, for you do not want your life to go round in a circle!"

I did not go near him. Of course I did not.

I borrowed two shillings and ninepence from Frances Elizabeth to pay for my brass plaque and I nailed it to her door, under her own sign, Letters Written.

As the summer came on, the plague appeared to be dying down and, because people believed that it was leaving them, they had no cause any more to despise the physicians. And so the sick and the hurt of Cheapside and its neighbourhood began to come to me – some sent by my old apothecary friend, some because they had seen my sign, and some cast upon my doorstep by the tide of rumour and gossip that washes through the coffee houses and the taverns.

Most often, I would be fetched by some relative or neighbour of the sufferers and so would treat them in their homes; sometimes, they brought their wounds or their pain to me and there was no other place to receive them and tend them than the parlour, so that in time it became an operating room like those we had had at Whittlesea and Frances Elizabeth, chased out of her letter-room by Finn, was now deprived of her parlour by me. Even now, she did not complain. She bought a little escritoire and put it in her bedroom and wrote her letters there, her hand and her phrasing becoming more and more elegant and assured as time passed and her fear of solitude diminished.

On Tuesday afternoons – as was my old habit – I would visit Rosie and we both grew very comfortable with this arrangement, neither of us wanting more from the other than these few hours could give. I no longer gave her money, but I would take her gifts of food: a dressed capon, a jar of mincemeat, a pat of butter. And sometimes we would eat a little supper together, sitting at her table by an open window and listening to the sounds of the water.

"You can hear the noisiness of it," she said one evening, "coming back."

It was coming back everywhere. It was as if London had decided to chase away death with laughter. In the coffee houses, Finn found a great clamouring of people ready to pay twenty or thirty shillings for a portrait, because they believed in the future again and could even foresee a time when these same portraits would hang in the houses of their grandchildren on grander walls than any they would ever live to own. And so they came, one after the other – merchants, barristers, schoolmasters, drapers, cabinet-makers, clerks – and sat where I had sat, near the empty ink-wells of the letter-room, and Finn gave them their immortality on stolen canvas. I watched them go out with the finished pictures and no matter how coarse were their features I saw them softened and made glad by this image of themselves that they held in their hands. The next stage was that they would send their wives, to have a twin portrait hanging the other side of the fire. And when Finn saw that this was happening, he fell into his old ways of wanting more than he had and so the price of the pictures went up to thirty-five shillings and then to forty and then to forty-five.

One Tuesday evening, I returned home to find a third plaque on the door. Elias Finn, it read, Portrait Painter to the Rising Man. When I went in, I found him drinking Alicante with Frances Elizabeth and he was dressed from neck to foot in new clothes. Apart from the shirt and the shoes, they were all green, even the stockings. "Ah," I said,. "I see you have been back to Sherwood Forest." But he only smiled thinly. The thin smile said: "The day for those old jokes has long gone, Merivel."

I can report to you that during this summer of 1666 I began to feel comfortable with my life, for the first time in a very great while, as if it and I were once again in step. When I am old, I shall remember it: The Time of the Three Plaques Upon the Door.

Then there was a June morning that came and after that morning almost all of this comfort that I felt went away.

It was a Sunday. I woke very early. I looked out of my window and saw that the sun was not yet up and I had (I really cannot say why) a sudden desire to see it come up over the river – something I had not witnessed for a great while.

I dressed and crept down the stairs and went out. The streets were silent. I heard the bell of St Alphage toll four o'clock. The air was cool, almost cold, and I began to think that, after all, there would be no visible sunrise. Yet I walked on. And when I came to the water, I sat on some little steps where tilt-boats and barges land their passengers and waited. Lying on the river was a white mist, so thick that I could not see the further bank.

The sky began to lighten and now I could see that there were no clouds in it at all and that, but for the mist, the sunrise would be as perfect as those I used to see from my Whitehall chamber.

I stared at the mist, or thought that I was staring at it and then I suddenly found that it was all around me and that I and the steps and the few boats moored by them were all become invisible within it. I looked up. I could no longer see the sky. Yet I did not walk back up the steps nor move any of my limbs. I knew that something was about to happen. It was as if time had stopped or held its breath.

I waited. I could feel my heartbeat very heavy in me. Once again, I sensed a lightening of the sky. I felt cold and put my arms around myself. Then, coming near to me, I could hear the splash of a pair of oars and heard the water at my feet begin to slap against the river wall and the steps.

The mist rose. As the sun came up over the housetops, it began to lift off the water and disperse.

And then I knew what I was about to see…

His back was towards me. He was skulling upriver and the sun, as it fell onto the river, caught at his jewelled sleeve and glinted there.

His skiff drew level with the steps. He was so close to me now that I could hear his breathing. I put a spread hand in front of my face so that he would not recognise me, but I need not have done so, for he did not look in my direction but only at his pathway on the water and at the sunlight making it gleam.

He went past me, but I did not take my eyes from him. Through my fingers I watched him until he went round the curve of the river and was out of sight.

Chapter Twenty-Four. The Haberdasher's Wife

As I have told you, my life just prior to this June morning had become an ordinary, industrious and quiet thing and I found myself at peace within it. I believe that if, during this time, I had been able to go fishing with Pearce instead of being visited by his Silence, I would have conducted myself like a true angler and not frightened away the trout.

From the moment, however, when I glimpsed the King on the river, my old foolish desire to see him and be returned to his favour began to possess me so completely that I could no longer feel at peace with anything at all. I became curt with my patients. At mealtimes, I was silent and morose. The joys of Tuesdays seemed less than they had been. And instead of going to the coffee house or the tavern to drink and talk, I would embark on solitary walks to the river and sit where I had sat that morning and scan the water for the sight of the little skull-boat, and write, in my mind, innumerable drafts of the letter telling the King of my usefulness.

As the summer progressed, the contents of this letter changed for I had thought up a new ploy (beyond the simple mentioning of my own diligence) to get the King's attention: I would write to suggest that because I was now a mere physician, with little money and no estate, His Majesty might come to feel that it was no longer fitting for me to continue to hold the titular role of Celia's husband. In which case, should he so decide, I would offer no obstacle to an annulment of the marriage, believing as I did that it was Celia's right to be married to a man more honourable than I could ever be…

I did not send this letter. I recomposed it fourteen or fifteen times in my head and one evening, while Finn played cards with Frances Elizabeth by the parlour fire, I sat down in the letter-room and wrote out a very elegantly phrased version of it, putting particular emphasis upon my return to medicine, my daily usage of the King's gift of the surgical instruments and my great repentance for my foul behaviour towards Celia, "a sweet, innocent woman who deserved much better of me than I gave and for whose happiness I say a daily prayer."

I folded the thing (after reading it so many times, I soon knew it all by heart) but did not seal it or put the King's name upon it. I went up to my room and took down Pearce's battered copy of De Generatione Animalium, put the letter inside it and returned it to the bookshelf.

I said to myself: You have written it now, Merivel, so let the writing of it quieten your mind, so that you can return to where you were and be happy, once again, with what you had. And after the writing of the letter, I tried to bring this about. But I did not really succeed. And the yearning that I had to see the King was as deep and immovable as the yearning of a lover.

Sometime towards the end of July, I went one evening into Finn's studio (for so the letter-room was now designated) and saw on his makeshift easel the portrait that he had painted of me.

"I suppose you are going to obliterate me by painting over me, is that it?" I asked Finn. "You put me over the top of a piece of pretend masonry and now you are about to white me out- the seven shillings notwithstanding."

"No," he said calmly. "Not at all. I am very fond of my portrait of you."

"What is my face doing on the easel, then?"

Finn came over to the easel and took down my portrait and lifted onto it a newly-finished picture of a woman, aged about fifty-five, dressed in a little lace bonnet and a black dress of puritan simplicity.

"See?" he said. "An identical pose to yours. The same attitude, the same concentration upon the hands, the same cold light on the face. The moment I saw her come in, I decided I would position her exactly as I positioned you. I had your portrait on the easel because I was trying to compare the two."

I looked at the woman, whose face had been finely rendered by Finn. It was a face of great gentleness, which reminded me very forcefully of my mother. And when I looked down at the hands, I saw that Finn had placed between finger and thumb a small feather, dyed red.

"Who is she?" I asked.

"I forget her name," he answered. "She is a haberdasher's wife."

I looked up sharply at Finn. He shrugged his green shoulders, as if to say "this is all I know". I then looked back at the portrait. The resemblance of this person to my mother seemed now so remarkable that I found my thoughts wandering away to a place where they had never before been: Supposing it was my mother? Supposing she had not died in the fire? Supposing the woman Latimer had tried to rescue had not been my mother, but the maid?

I knew that I was in a Place of Impossibilities. I left it as quickly as I could, but still fell to wondering in a more general yet fanciful way why the likeness was so profound and whether – in a world so tormented by fashion – there was some unlikely connection between haberdashery and gentleness of spirit, between the measuring of buckram and a soft heart.

That night, because she was in my mind all evening, I had a dream of my mother. She came and looked at my portrait. She put her hand up to the canvas and scratched away at it until she had obliterated a bit of my forehead and revealed the white pigment underneath. Then she said: "On the surface, he is whole, but beneath the surface, he is filled with a most peculiar broken light." And then I woke and remembered the words of Wise Nell, the so-called witch in Bidnold village, how she had said that I would suffer "a long fall", but had not said what would come after it, whether there would be any end to it or any after, or whether I would go on and on falling deeper and further into confusion.

Some moments passed. Then I rose and lit a taper. And, stealthily and secretly – as if I imagined faces beyond the window looking in and observing me and sneering at my weakness – I took down Pearce's book, lifted out my letter to the King and read it through. Then I wrote the King's name upon it, melted some sealing wax with the taper flame and sealed it. "It cannot be helped," I whispered to the anonymous faces outside in the dark, "for I shall have no peace nor be cured of my yearning till I have some word from him…"

The next day, I delivered the letter to Whitehall and hurriedly came away.

While waiting for the King's reply – to take my mind out of the waiting – I went to the money-lender's house to visit Margaret.

She was asleep in her crib. Only her sleeping eyes and her flat nose were visible to me, but I could tell from her pink colour and her regular breaths that she was not ailing or sickly and the wet-nurse informed me that she sucked well and cried with great strength "and seems altogether very likely to live, Sir". And so I felt a sudden piercing joy in the realisation that this baby, whom I had brought into the world with my own hands, would grow to childhood and beyond childhood and that I would watch her growing and come to love her and take her on Sundays to the Vauxhall woods to look for badgers. And these thoughts were quite new and strange to me, so that it was difficult to believe that it was I who was thinking them.

I gave the wet-nurse some money.

"How long until she can be weaned?" I asked as I left the room.

"A good year, Sir," she said. "I do not let any of them go until then." She smiled and lightly tapped her breasts, as if showing me riches of which she was modestly proud. Behind her, two of her girls, both with pretty ringlets, smiled and giggled at me and then dropped each a little cheeky curtsey. I bowed to them, feeling my face flush.

As I trotted back to Cheapside on Danseuse, I thought what an unlooked-for pleasure it would be for me to have a pretty daughter. I imagined hiring for her a maid, who would wash her petticoats and curl her red hair into ringlets. But then I remembered that Margaret appeared to have my features (not the straight, thin nose and dark eyes of her mother) and so she would never be pretty. Indeed, she would probably be categorically ugly and so come to the only future that these times allow to ugly women – unless they be famously rich – which is a future of loneliness and low estate. So I began to consider how I might prevent this, by getting for her teachers of music and teachers of petit point and scholars who would guide her not only through the poetry of Dryden but through the work of all the great poets from the beginning of time, so that her accomplishments and her wisdom would get her a kind husband if her face did not.

For some while, as I rode, my thoughts turned upon Margaret's future and upon the great unfairness in society (once noted by me at an autopsy at Whittlesea) which allows men to prosper by many means and women by one means only. Until I turned into Cheapside, I felt most vexed, on behalf of my daughter, at the great unkindness and stupidity of this, but then the sight of my plaque upon the door drove everything from my mind but the expectation that, during my absence, an answer to my letter to the King had arrived. I dismounted and hurried in. There was nothing for me.

"Why do you ask?" said Frances Elizabeth. "Are you waiting for some news?"

"No," I replied, "it is only that my apothecary said he would send word when a curative I asked him to prepare for me was ready. He lacked some of the essential ingredients…"

I do not remember how many days passed before a letter arrived. What I remember is that time began to move very slowly once more and that I spent a great deal of it imagining myself grown old and the King grown old, and in all the years that passed no answer ever came, yet my expectation that it would did not diminish and so all that filled my life was a waiting that never ended.

I became very prone to error. A patient came to me with a pain in his gut that I diagnosed as a bleeding. I performed a "sympathetic phlebotomy" to stop the haemorrhage, but a day later he returned and showed me an iron nail brought up out of his stomach by means of a vomit, prescribed by a rival physician. My diagnosis had been so faulty as to put the man's life in danger. He made me take the nail in my hand and advised: "Put it where you can see it each day, so you are reminded of your error- that this mistake will drive out others."

I did as he advised, being very chastened by this incident of the nail (though how a man could come to swallow such a thing I could not fathom, unless his wife or his cook had wished him harm and concealed the object in a pie). But this did not prevent me from making other, smaller errors and from becoming very forgetful and absent-minded, so that, during this time, I won not a single game of Rummy, lost my purse in a tavern, stuck my eye with a quill pen, fell off Danseuse when she shied at a pigeon in the street, missed a Tuesday afternoon (thus incurring a fierce slap to my face from Rosie Pierpoint) and began to fall behind with this, my story – as if I understood at last that I was not truly the author of it, but that every twist and turn in it had been set down by the King.

And indeed, the next episode in it had his controlling hand upon it: he invited me to supper! He did not acknowledge my letter so many times perfected, nor make any reference to its contents. His note was short and curt. It read thus:

Merivel,

Why do you not sup with us upon Sunday Next? We shall expect you here at our chambers at nine o 'clock.

Charles R.

I received it on the morning of Monday, the twenty-seventh of August, towards ten o'clock. I was in the middle of cauterising a thigh wound when it was brought in to me and I burned my hand with the cauterising iron in my haste to break the familiar seal. And then, when I had read it, my next thought was the thought of a vain man: that I had no outfit fine enough to wear.

The tailor I went to was an old friend of my father's. He made the suit in five days out of affection for him, not for me. The material I chose was silk and the colour navy blue, braided with cream. It was neither fussy nor gaudy and I was most pleased with my choice.

I then went to a shoemaker and ordered a pair of shoes with heels modestly high and buckles of pewter, burnished to resemble silver. Thence to a milliner's in Crofter Lane. The hat I commanded was black with two soft blue plumes upon it.

And so to my wigmaker. He looked at me long. He had not seen me for many months. "Sir Robert," he said, "if I had not known it was you, I would not have known it was you," which puzzling sentence made me laugh and it was in my laughter that he recognised me, for then he said, "But now I see you. Now I see that the change in you is not entire."

He is very fond of sack. He likes to pour himself and his clients a good few thimblefuls of it while he measures their heads and displays his different styles and quality of wig for them to see. So we sat down together in his shop and he talked about the world ("for the world, though seeming big to some, is of course very little, is it not, Sir Robert, being really no larger than the shadow cast by the Palace of Whitehall?"), and who had found favour and who was out and what were the fashions of the summer, and I learned from him that the King had a new mistress called Mrs Stewart who outweighed all the others in beauty. "And they say," said the wigmaker, "that his old loves are gone from his mind to make room for this new one, even Lady Castlemaine herself."

"And my wife?"

"Ah, your wife, Sir Robert. There is a mystery! For she has not been seen anywhere for some time and the gossip goes 'either she is a-bed with child or else she is a-bed with Sir Fancy Newlove or else she is a-bed weeping', but I can tell you that no one seem's to know for certain which kind or condition of bed she is in!"

It was almost suppertime when I left the wigmaker's shop, with the hot sun beginning to go down. I walked-home slowly, leading Danseuse by the bridle, and what came to my mind were some words of Sir Joshua Clemence, that to get the King's love he believed his daughter would sacrifice everything and everyone in the world, including her mother and father. I sighed as I remembered them and the voice of quiet resignation in which he had uttered them.

These moments I will not forget until I die:

I am not left to wait in the Stone Gallery. I am shown into the Royal apartments as soon as I announce myself to the guards.

I enter the familiar rooms. Though it is a stifling evening, a fire is burning in the grate of the first chamber.

William Chiffinch, the King's most trusted servant, bows to me and tells me that His Majesty, being very hungry on a whim, has begun his supper which he has ordered to be served in the small room where all the clocks are kept.

I follow Chiffinch and, as we near the room, which is no bigger than a closet, I hear once again the riotous ticking and jangling of time, by which the King is so fascinated and moved.

I go in. The King is wearing a cream-coloured coat, but tied around his neck is a scarlet dinner napkin.

Though I am sweating and my heartbeat is as noisy as any of the clocks, when I see the dinner napkin I smile. And so it is my smile that the King first sees when he lifts his eyes from the chicken leg he is devouring. And it is as if this smile of mine has some magical property to it, for the King lays down the chicken leg and stares at me and it is the stare of someone spellbound. He brings the napkin to his mouth and wipes his lips, but does not take his eyes from me.

I bow very low, sweeping my new hat before me and when I come up from this obeisance, I see that the King has risen and moved out from the little table on which his supper has been set and is now walking towards me. At my back, I hear Chiffinch close the door.

His Majesty stops, two feet from me. He reaches out a gloveless hand and puts it under my chin and tilts my face up, examining, it seems, every crease of it and every pore and even the shape of the skull beneath, so intently does he look at it. Then he shakes his head, as if in great sorrow at something, and yet over his face spreads a smile of such infinite kindness that I know on the instant that not one vestige of his anger with me remains and that, even if on the very morrow his mood will again turn against me, on this particular evening, the second of September 1666, he feels for me nothing but affection.

I begin to speak. "Sir…" I stammer, "I am so glad to find you well…"

"Hush, Merivel," he commands, "say nothing. For as you know, I see it all and understand it all. N'est-ce pas?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Exactly!"

And then he laughs and brings my face to his and smacks a kiss upon my lips and orders me to sit down and eat.

"It's a picnic," he says. "This is what I thought we would have: a picnic. We may eat as messily as we please, so go on, Robert, put a chicken on your plate and some eggs and there is a little cold salmon here and Chiffinch will return in a moment, as I have instructed, to pour you some white wine."

I have no appetite. I tell the King I have been living very frugally and do not think that I can consume an entire hen.

"Well," he says, "they are Surrey hens – very noisy while they lived, we are told, and very succulent in their flesh, so why do you not take up a little thigh and taste it and then, as you eat, your appetite will come back to you."

I do as instructed and, indeed, I do find the taste of the chicken thigh as delicious as any meat I have ever eaten. Chiffinch returns and some cold, fruity wine is poured for me and I sip it slowly and feel its sweetness entering my blood and moving round me, making me feel calm and serene. The noise of the clamouring clocks, of which there are above two hundred, seems to diminish after a little while and it is as if the King, too, has noticed this diminution when he looks up from his food and says: "Time has waited for you, then, Merivel. As I believed it would."

I only nod, not knowing what comment I am expected to make upon this statement. The King puts his jewelled hands into a finger bowl and rinses them and wipes them on his napkin and continues: "So that now you can teach me something instead of being my pupil: you can teach me about madness."

I hear myself sigh. "Sir," I say, "there are so many kinds of madness and folly – of which love, perhaps, is both the sweetest and the most fearful – that I hardly know where to begin. However, one evening when I was in this Fenland place, which is a place quite outside the world that we inhabit here, I did find myself moved – by the scent of some flowers, it seemed to me! – to speak my thoughts about the Footsteps of Madness. These I could relate to you, if you wished, for it was a most strange thing to me that they were never heeded or commented upon, it appearing to me quite as if my listeners did not hear them, or could not hear them. And what I now wonder is whether no one in my life can ever hear them or understand them, except you."

"Most probable. Relate them, then."

And so I begin. I do not merely set out for the King my thesis upon the tangled pathways to madness and the great reluctance of the world to explore the reasons why each one is taken, but lay before him everything I have learnt about my own foolishness and everything I have done to cure myself of it. In short, I anatomise my heart. I reach inside myself and take hold of it and lay it before him. And all the while, he listens sometimes grave, sometimes smiling, as if – even though he "knows it all and understands it all" – the story that I tell him is new and full of extraordinary things that have never before been told to him, neither in the Clock Room nor in any other place in his Kingdom.

Presently, it grows dark and Chiffinch brings lighted lamps and positions them round us.

We eat grapes, spitting the pips into a silver spitoon.

And the King comes at last to the subject of Celia, intertwined with which is the subject of his new love, Mrs Stewart, for whom, he whispers to me, "I have a most maddening folly, Merivel, so that were I with her upon a certain parapet, and supposed to be showing her the planet Jupiter, I would turn my back upon the entire starry universe just to cup her breasts in my hands."

We burst out laughing and this laughter turns into the kind of giggling we used to indulge in on spring afternoons on the Whitehall croquet lawns. And so the whole question of Celia is accorded no seriousness at all, as if she were a toy we had once thrown about from one to the other and had long grown tired of.

"I do declare," says the King at last, "that your idea of an annulment may be very useful, for then I shall be able to compensate Celia for the loss of my person at Kew by giving her a new husband: a young, handsome one this time! What do you think? Will this console her? What about Lord Greville d'Arblay's son, who is a very beautiful boy?"

I reply that I cannot – knowing Celia the little that I do -make any guess about who or what may compensate her, but the King, suddenly serious, shakes his head and says quietly: "That is not so. For we both know that nothing in the world will make up for what she has lost."

"Yes, we know it," I reply, "but it is Uncomfortable Knowledge."

"Precisely. So where shall we consign it?"

"I do not know, Sir."

"Yes, you do."

"Where, then?"

"To oblivion, of course."

And so we change the subject, and the great matter of my wife, the King's mistress, seems to pass out of my life entirely, so that my memory of Celia's face and of her singing voice fades and floats away into silence. And I feel a profound peace coming upon me, a peace such I cannot remember since I was a child and sat in the quiet of Amos Treefeller's room while my mother stroked my hair and told me it was the colour of sand.

In this state of quiet and content, I decide that I will tell the King about my child. And I discover that the story of Margaret moves him very much and he, in turn, tells me what a great love he feels for the first of his bastard children, the Duke of Monmouth, and advises me not to neglect my child "but let her into your life, Merivel, and give generously of your self to her."

I nod and promise that I will and then, because I am thinking about Margaret, I turn my head and look out of the open window eastwards along the river. And this is what I see. I see a great patch of orange light in the sky. I turn back to the King. "Sir," I say, "look there! If I am not mistaken a great part of the city is burning."

No sooner had I said this than we heard voices in the chamber beyond us and then there was a knocking at the door. The King rose at once, his mood of kindness leaving him on the instant, so that his countenance appeared suddenly dark.

Men began to crowd into the chamber. One I recognised as the clerk from the Navy Office, with whom I had once learned about the patience of a marble cutter. And it was he who now related to the King how an easterly wind had sprung up within the hour and was now blowing the fire "along a great pathway half a mile in width."

Forgetting me entirely, the King went with this man and the others into his Drawing Room and I heard him command them to fetch out the Lord Mayor and give him orders that all the wooden houses in the path of the fire be demolished, "this being the only way we can employ to halt it and put it out." The men went away in great haste and I heard the King shout to Chiffinch to go tell his brother, the Duke of York, what was happening and to send for a groom to saddle a fast horse.

And then he went rushing out of the great doors to the Stone Gallery without any word to me or any backward look and I was left alone in his apartments and the only sounds were the chiming and pinging of two hundred clocks, each in their own time beginning to strike the hour.

I remained where I was for several minutes, with my thoughts in a most tangled condition. Then I saw all at once what I had to do: I had to reach Margaret. I went down into the courtyard and asked for my horse. While waiting for her to be brought to me, a gust of wind blew off my hat and sent it spinning away into a flower bed. I retrieved it and held it in my hand. Then I mounted Danseuse and rode out of the gates and turned eastwards in the direction of the moneylender's house, which, as far as I had been able to determine from my sighting of the flames, lay in the very heart of the fire.

The wind was indeed fierce and blew into my face and ruffled Danseuse's mane. As we got near to the City, I saw countless pieces of charred matter, lighter than air, being carried on the wind and falling softly like snow all around me. And then I could smell the burning and with every breath seemed to breathe the smell more deeply into me, so that it made me choke and gag and I spat on the cobblestones.

The streets, now, were very packed with people, some moving with me into the stench and the smoke, carrying ladders or hauling handcarts, some in their nightgowns, just standing about in the street and staring, others giving way to fear and calling on God and the King to put out the flames.

I turned northwards up St Anne's Alley. I gauged that westward of London Bridge everything along the river was burning, so that to get to the money-lender's house I would have to skirt right round the fire. But the smoke now began to creep down into the streets like a fog and having turned north, then east, then north again and then east again I found myself in a street I did not recognise and with all sense of direction gone from me.

"Where am I? What street is this?" I asked about me, but no one seemed to hear me or pay me any attention, so all I could do was to press on, turning north, then east, then north again, trying to judge from the smell of the fire whether I was moving round it or still towards it and searching every narrow street for some name or landmark that would tell me where I was.

I was about to make another northward turn when I heard straight ahead of me a great commotion of people and then I saw through the smoke that a single tongue of flame had swept down upon the roof of one of the houses causing a sudden mighty panic with people rushing from doorways into the street and looking up at the flame that was beginning to spread out along the eaves, then running back inside to try to save their children and their possessions before the fire came to them. For they had not expected it so soon. The great front of fire was still many streets away. But some burning thing -a sheet of music, a plumed hat, or I know not what – had come out of the sky and fallen on this one house, and all around me I imagined the fire travelling thus, carried on the wind, on pieces of silk, on love letters, on lace collars, swirling and leaping and floating down at random and immediately catching hold.

The calamity come upon this street was such that I did not feel able to turn my back upon the people's plight. Had I been close to the money-lender's house, I might have done so, but I was still far, far from it and I now understood that my effort to reach Margaret was a futile thing. I had begun it too late. By now, my daughter would either have been saved or have perished in her wooden crib. I could not alter what had already happened. So I decided to dismount. I tied Danseuse to a post and took off my coat and went to give what help I could towards the saving of worldly goods and piling them onto carts and barrows, going into the rooms of strangers and taking up whatever I could carry: chairs and candlesticks and pictures and cushions and piles of bedding and chamber pots and ink-stands and toys.

I was aware, for the first time, of the approaching heat of the fire and stood still for a moment in the street, wiping my brow and watching the roof of the house that was beginning to catch alight. My eye moved downwards, to try to see how and where and how fast the flames traveled, and it was then that I saw, above the door, a sign painted on iron and rattling backwards and forth in the wind: Arthur Goffe Esquire. Milliner and Haberdasher. But this was not all that I noticed. I saw, too, that the door of this house was closed and that it was the only one in the street from which people were not coming and going, hauling clothes and furniture.

And so I threw down whatever I had been holding (and I do not know what it was or whether I broke it when I hurled it away) and ran towards the haberdasher's and beat upon the door and shouted, but heard no answering shout. One other man, then, left the saving of his own goods and saw with me what was happening, that in the very house where the fire had come in people were still sleeping. From his piled-up cart he fetched an axe and gave some blows to the door so mighty that it fell off its hinges. We stepped over it and went in, but found ourselves at once surrounded by pitch smoky blackness, so that, before we had reached the stairs, a foul choking and sickness, caused to us by the smoke, forced us to turn round and come out again into the street.

"Who is in there?" I asked the man, who was spitting into the gutter, "how many people?"

"Only her, Sir."

"Who?"

"Goffe's wife."

"Just her?"

"Yes. The haberdasher's gone to France to buy some special Frenchy thread, or some poxy thing."

"We cannot let her die. We must go in again."

"We can't get to her through that smoke. We shall die ourselves."

"No. We must try again. If someone could bring cloths soaked in water to put round our faces…"

"No, Sir. We cannot do it."

"Bring cloths! Someone find water and a cloth!"

"You'll die, Sir. You'll veritably perish."

"And let us call and shout to her."

"Will do no good. Stone deaf she is."

"Deaf?"

"Stone. As my prick to a Sunday sermon."

So I saw her in my mind, then, lying in her silence, lying neat and straight in her bed as my mother had lain and downstairs in the workroom all the boxes of buttons and cards of lace and drawerfuls of braid waiting to burn…

"Please!" I shouted. "Someone fetch me a wet rag or napkin!"

I do not know who heeded my shout. But, in the next minute, a soaked cloth was put into my hands and without hesitating at all, I tied it round my face and went back into the house at a run and hurled myself at the stairs and then a muffled voice behind me said: "All right, Sir. I'm with you. Try not to breathe."

We groped our way up the staircase. On the landing, a flickering light from the flames now beginning to touch the window revealed us to an open door and lying wedged between it and its frame with her arms outstretched was the body of the haberdasher's wife. We both saw it at the same moment. Without wasting precious breath upon speech, we crawled to it and each took hold of one of the woman's hands and tugged her towards the stairs. Then, my large companion nodded to me to let go the hand that I held, and he stood up and lifted up the haberdasher's wife and put her over his shoulder like a sack and I passed in front of him and guided him down the stairs and out into the street and he carried her thirty paces away from the burning house before he laid her down.

Coughing and retching so violently that a gobful of chicken returned itself from my stomach to this London street, I knelt down by the woman and turned her over on her side until she began to splutter and to draw air into her lungs.

"Alive, Sir, is she?" asked the man.

I nodded. Then I looked down at the face of Mrs Goffe, wife of the milliner and haberdasher, and I saw that the features of it were very pinched and thin with the mouth turned downwards and mean and that she did not resemble in any way either my mother or the woman in Finn's portrait. But it did not matter, for those were the faces that had driven me on.

Two women came out to us. They wrapped Mrs Goffe in a blanket and laid her on a cart piled up with sacks and bedding.

One of them brought water in a bowl and held a ladleful of it to my lips and I drank. The haberdasher's wife did not speak or even cry out as the flames engulfed her house; she only stared and began to chew upon the lace ribbons at her throat. I wondered if this terrible night would send her mad, so that her life had been saved only to be squandered away in a Bedlam.

A great weariness now began to come upon me and I knew that I could not continue with my attempted circumnavigation of the fire. I would return to Cheapside and then begin it again the following day. I put on my coat and untied Danseuse from her post, where she was prancing and sweating with fear, and was about to mount and join the push of carts and people going westwards when one of the women came to me and thanked me for helping them and asked me for my name, "So that tomorrow I can include it in my list of them I pray for, Sir."

"Well," I said, "my name is Merivel. I am a physician. If Mrs Goffe does not quickly get well, bring her to me." Then I handed the woman one of the little calling cards with R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. engraved upon it that I keep in a pouch on Danseuse's saddle. She took it and put it into the pocket of her apron. "I cannot read, Sir," she said, "but I will give the card to Mrs Goffe and she will remember you."

Chapter Twenty-Five. Margaret Returned to My Mind

Neither Frances Elizabeth nor Finn believed that the fire would travel as far as Cheapside. Between it and the main body of the flames a gap had been made, thirty or forty feet wide, by the hasty pulling down of houses, as instructed by the King, and it was thus that almost everyone living west of this gap imagined themselves to be safe.

On the morning of Monday, I went and looked at the gap. And then I looked up into the air above the fire and saw the blazing debris that was still being hurled upwards and whipped onwards by the wind and I knew then that the flames would cross the gap and come to us.

I returned to the house and told Finn to start packing up his canvases and Frances Elizabeth to bring down her escritoire and beg some room for these things and anything else they wished to save on a neighbour's cart. But they paid me no heed.

"Why has the gap been made if it is not going to protect us?" Finn asked stupidly. I gave him no answer. I went into the parlour, where Frances Elizabeth was calmly stoking her coals as she did every morning, and took up all my surgical instruments and cleaned them and laid them neatly in their case. Into a large box I put all the powders and remedies and lint and bandages that I kept in the house. I took them to Danseuse's stable and strapped them onto her back. Then I returned and dragged from under my bed the sack containing my oboe, my letters from the King and other remains of my "burning coals." Into this sack I put my new clothes and wig – all now blackened with smoke and stained with sweat – and fastened this also to my horse's saddle.

And then I came to Finn and Frances Elizabeth and said: "I am going now to find Margaret, so I shall say goodbye to you."

They both stared at me. "Are you telling us," said Finn, "that you are not coming back?"

"Yes, Finn, I am," I replied, "for there will be no house to come back to."

Moments after I had uttered these words the first sliver of flame fell upon the first house in Cheapside and so the word was carried from house to house, " Cheapside is lost! Save what you can and then go. Go west and go fast, for the speed of the fire is very great."

So then the panic in our house had no equal anywhere in London, Finn and Frances Elizabeth suddenly intent upon saving every last thing in every room. And though I wished to walk away from them, I could not do it, so I fetched my horse and allowed her to be loaded up like a mule with canvases and brushes and cooking pots and sacks of provisions and dresses and I know not what else. Finn would have put his truckle bed onto her if I had not stopped him and Frances Elizabeth her escritoire, because no cart could be found to take them, and even as the fire came closer and closer the two of them held onto these things and refused to be parted from them and when we set off at last, with Danseuse staggering under her heavy load, they attempted to lift them up and carry them and for a long time I heard them behind me, puffing and groaning and saying to each other, "We can do it, we can do it."

We were in a great herd of people and had to keep moving on or have them fall on us and trample us, but for a brief moment I did pause and look back and it was then that I saw that the fire had gone from the top of our house to the bottom and all that still stood was the front door in its frame with the three plaques upon it. The sight of this affected me more than I had anticipated. I had thought myself to be more or less indifferent to the place, but I was not. And I remembered on the same instant that one precious possession of mine had been forgotten and was now burnt to ashes with the house and that was Pearce's copy of De Generatione Animalium, the only remnant of him that I had.

When we came to Lincoln 's Inn Fields, we stopped and sat down there on the dry grass, as did everyone else going out of Cheapside and its lanes and alleys. And by late afternoon a vast multitude of people had come there and for every one of them crying and lamenting there were four or five beginning to laugh and gossip and sing songs and share food around, as if they were on a picnic outing with no cares in the world. From Frances Elizabeth's kitchen seven jars of plums had been saved and some bottles of ginger wine and a white cheese in a bag of muslin, so we supped on these and on other provisions given to us in exchange for them and began to make instantaneous friendships with everyone around us.

The talking and the eating went on far into the night, when the fire once again lit up the whole sky and it was all, in the strangest of ways, an enjoyable thing. Near two or three in the morning, I heard Finn begin to tell everybody round that he was a portrait painter and to offer to paint portraits then and there for twenty-five shillings, notwithstanding the fact that not one person there had any wall on which to hang them. The knowledge that, even in adversity, his commercial heart could now beat so strongly made me smile and I think it was with this smile still upon my face that I fell asleep.

I parted from him and Frances Elizabeth the following morning. Neither the escritoire nor the truckle bed had got as far as Lincoln's Inn Fields, so I was now forced to set down on the grass beside them all the things they had loaded onto Danseuse, and the sight of them surrounded by half-finished portraits and copper saucepans and pairs of shoes would have been somewhat sad had it not been for their great cheerfulness. I had anticipated that the loss of the house in Cheapside would put them into despair, but it did not. For what they seemed to have discovered was that it had not only housed them and their little fledgling businesses; it had also harboured their mutual liking and affection. And I was certain, as I left them, that when I found them again it would be in some place together and I imagined them in a low room smelling of oils, lying side by side in bed and doing their sums.

It took me all of the day to skirt round the fire, going as far north as I could to avoid the smoke, but by evening I had reached the Tower and could see from there that the cluster of tall houses among which was the money-lender's house still stood and had not been touched by the fire, so I whispered into the hot air a prayer of gratitude.

When I arrived at the house, it was the money-lender who greeted me and I went with him into his Accounting Room and he showed me some new scales and weights of which he was very proud, "precision", he said, "being my great passion, for everything in the world can be weighed and measured in some form, can it not?"

I was about to open my mouth to say that I did not believe that it could be when his wife came into the room carrying Margaret, who was wide awake and not bound all in swaddling as she had been when I had seen her last, but dressed in a pretty bonnet and wrapped in a shawl.

The wet-nurse began to talk about the fire and how she and her husband and all the children had knelt down in a long line and prayed that the direction of the wind would not change. As she recounted this to me, she put Margaret into my arms. This was the first time that I had held her or indeed held any baby at all and I did not know if I should lay her in the crook of my arm or put her little face over my shoulder, or what. So I sat down on the hard chair where the clients of the money-lender sat and laid Margaret on my lap and looked down at her. She had grown very much and her face was as round as the moon. Her eyes, I now realised, were very large and clear and she looked up at me gravely for a while, then began to kick her legs inside the shawl and to blow little frothy bubbles out of her mouth.

"See her hair, Sir?" said the wet-nurse after a while. "Colour of fire, it is." And she bent down and eased back the rim of the bonnet and I saw some soft red curls there. I touched them gently and felt, under my hand, the living warmth of her head.

That night I spent with Rosie Pierpoint.

This being Tuesday and I not coming to her in the afternoon, I flattered myself that she would have become anxious for me, imagining me burnt alive or crushed beneath falling timber. But when she saw me, she seemed neither relieved that I was still living nor even particularly pleased to find me there, but preoccupied only with the film of soot and ash which, having been thrown up into the air, was now falling and settling on everything and turning grey every piece of linen that she washed and ironed.

Her house was stifling. She had closed all her windows and sealed every crack and draught in her efforts to keep out "the poxy grime." "But it still comes there," she said. "No sooner do I hang up a sheet to dry it or spread out a kerchief to press it than it comes there, see?" She held up some items to show me the dirty streaks upon them, then threw them back into the soiled pile and screeched: "How am I to get any work done or make one penny while this goes on? I shall starve, that's what I shall do! I will die a slow death by starving and I would have preferred a quick one in the flames!"

I took her into my arms and tried to quieten and soothe her with kissing and after a while her crossness did begin to wane sufficiently for me to tell her that I had no home or place to sleep any more and that I would pay her a good rent if she would let me stay with her for a time, until I could find some rooms and make yet another new start upon my life.

She pulled away from my embrace and looked at me squarely. She put her hands on her hips.

"For how long?" she asked.

"What?"

"How long will you stay? A week? A month?"

"Well," I said, "I cannot say. It may be difficult to find rooms, for I will not be the only one seeking them."

"Then I must have compensation, Sir Robert."

"Compensation for what?"

She sighed and turned away from me, busying herself with the lighting of a lamp.

"Can you not guess?" she said.

So then I understood. It was not merely the "craze for washing" or the perfuming of pillow cases with lavender that had caused Rosie to prosper. With Pierpoint gone, she had resumed her whore's antics with a ready will and it was the money got in this way that had enabled her to buy capons and cream and all the rich foods she could no longer live without. And I thought how strangely my mind had worked, over the years, with regard to Rosie Pierpoint. I had known from the start that she was a drab and a jade but, whenever I had needed her, I had put this knowledge from me, liking to imagine her on her own, doing her work and eating her meals and rising at dawn to perform her little ablutions that I had once witnessed, and never ever picturing her with other men. It is the same thing, I said to myself, as the story of the Indian Nightingale: I have believed what it pleased me to believe.

I crossed to Rosie and put my hand out and stroked her hair. "Of course," I said, "there will be compensation. But now let us go to bed and love each other and drive from our minds everything but this – even the smut and the soot."

I found two cold, airy rooms above a lute-maker's shop on the south side of the river. The sounds of the lutes came up through the cracks in the floor, stretched and fragile and thin.

Autumn rain fell onto the blackened city and turned the ash to paste and bloated the river so that all the half-burnt wharves fell away and floated on the water to the sea. I looked out of my high windows and tried to rebuild London in my mind as it had been. But I found that I could not remember how it had been, so that it was lost to me entirely and this realisation made me so moody and sad that I fell into the habit once again of staring for very long periods of time at the backs of my hands as if I vainly believed that I, Merivel, could remake the city.

I was not alone in feeling this sadness. For every person that I treated for burns in the months following the fire, another came to me with an ailment he could not name except to call it "a melancholy of all the body and mind." I laid red balsam and barley water on the burns, but I did not know what to lay upon the melancholy. More than once my thoughts returned to Wise Nell and her blood of swallows. In short, I began to wonder whether all cures of sadness do not have within them some element of magic that is beyond my understanding.

Listening to the lute maker, and the skittering of rain on my windows I, one evening, turned my hands round and began to trace the lines on my palms, to see whether I could read a future there, but I could not, for no one had taught me how to interpret the creases. I noticed, however, that the love-line – particularly that of my left hand – divides very soon after starting and becomes two. This discovery not only made me smile, it also encouraged me to believe that other accurate knowledge was indeed written on my hand if only I could read it correctly and so began, in an indolent sort of way, a search for a chiromancer which I soon abandoned, it seeming to be the case that full half of everyone left in London professes and calls himself a chiromancer and for small sums of money will snatch up any hand and claim to see in it some glorious destiny. One told me that I would discover a cure for old age, another that I would be saved from drowning by the eating of a quail pie "because that you inadvertently ate the feathers too, Sir, and so it is they will buoy you up above the waves", and another that I would be remembered for ever for a deed I had not yet done or a journey I had not yet made. I was at first very adept at pretending to believe such predictions, but then this pretence suddenly wearied me and I became indifferent to all versions of my future and able, as the autumn passed and the winter came on, to live each day for itself and not to waste too much time dreaming.

I had no word from the King. I did not expect any, for after the burning of the house in Cheapside he had no immediate means of finding me, no way of knowing, even, that I had not perished in the fire. I could have written to him, but I did not. For it seemed to me, as my fortieth birthday approached, as if I had spent so much of my swiftly passing existence composing letters to the King in my mind that I had run out of words.

And this is what I believed: I believed that if, one day, the King wanted to find me, he would find me. I did not know how. I could not even imagine how. I only knew that he would. And that it would not prove to be very difficult for him, for such is his power that surely no corner of his Kingdom is invisible to him and no person within it beyond his reach?

One day in early spring, being invited to a little supper party by a lawyer I had cured of an ulcer, I took down my navy blue and cream coat (cleaned and restored by Rosie to its former smartness) and the matching silk breeches to put them on. Having no looking glass in my rooms above the lute-maker, I had become somewhat neglectful of my appearance, only now and then catching sight of myself reflected in a window pane. Thus I had not seen what I now saw in putting on my suit: I had grown most peculiarly thin. The waist of the breeches was too large for me by more than two inches, so that the wretched things would not stay up, and, when I put the coat on my back, it hung out from my body like a cape. I pulled up my shirt and regarded my stomach. It appeared shrunken and a little wrinkled and all the moths on it, having lost so much of their territory, were crowded up together in a dense mass.

I sat down upon one of the four chairs with which these rooms are furnished (a chair so delicate and spindly I often wonder whether the lute-maker did not manufacture it himself as a diversion from hollow things) and tried to read my altered appearance, like the reading of a palm, for what it signalled and what it portended. For in the whole of my life I have never been thin. I was a podgy baby, so my mother used to tell me, and the moire suit I wore as a boy was always stretched so tight across my chest that I remember minute buttons exploding from it sometimes when I laughed. Even as a student I was fleshy and by the time of the fifth beginning to this story I was, as you will recall, very comfortingly fat. Now, all the flesh was falling away and every bone in me being slowly unsheathed and made visible. It was impossible not to think of Pearce wasting to stick and sinew inside his clothes, and so as I sat there – a thin man on a thin chair – I began to consider the possibility that I was dying.

I examined my memory for aches and hurts. I listened to my own heartbeat and to the noise of my breathing. I got up and pissed a little into a pot and stared at my urine, looking for cloudiness and beads of blood, then smelled it, like a connoisseur of wine, sniffing for acid and putrefaction. Then, forgetting entirely about the lawyer's supper party, I took off the too-large clothes and lit a quantity of candles and placed them near to the window and so was able to see myself mirrored in it. Anyone on the river looking up would have chanced upon a most hilarious sight: Merivel, as nude as Adam, peering at parts of his anatomy – his tongue, his armpits, his nipples, his nose, his groin and his knees – for signs of swelling or discoloration, shivering a little in the cold March evening and appearing altogether as scrawny and fanatical as the original naked Quaker of the burning coals.

I could find nothing wrong with me. My heart sounded strong, my body was unmarked, except by its loss of fat and by time itself. I put on my nightshirt and lay down on my narrow bed and thought of everything that had happened to me since the fire and I saw that my life had become a somewhat solitary thing and that within it there was one abnormal phenomenon which was that now and again I would see and hear things that were not there. One of the things I heard was a dog yapping on the stairway. Once, I had been so certain that the creature was there that I had opened my door and expected it to come in wagging its tail, but there was no sign of any dog whatsoever. And the things I saw were no less troubling and inexplicable: I saw, growing on the slimy steps by Southwark Bridge, a clump of primroses which appeared so real to me that I bent down to pick one, but there were no flowers growing there, only a pale yellow handkerchief carelessly dropped by a fop pirouetting into a boat. Another time, I saw in the hand of one of my woman patients a lump of black soap, but when I uncurled her fingers her palm was empty.

I lay and considered what this hallucinatory tendency might portend – whether a weakening of my brain or the unlikely arrival in me of visionary powers. But I could come to no conclusion about it and after a while, with my eyes half open on the flickering candlelight, I fell into a dream of Bidnold, believing myself to be there, lying on the carpet from Chengchow and smelling woodsmoke and sunlight and the perfume of wealthy women. And the whole of this dream was filled with such magic that when I woke from it, to see all the candles dripping grease onto the floor, I did not move one muscle of my body, but only closed my eyes and tried to dream it again.

And after this night, what took hold of me was not any illness or sliding towards death, but a colossal epidemic of dreaming, so that night after night I floated into Bidnold and landed light as a plume and brushed the surfaces of things -the polished tops of tables, the stretched brocade of scarlet sofas, the milky satin of cushions, the tooled leather spines of books, the dented pewter handle of the coal scuttle – and then was carried by the wind out into the sky and hung like a ghost above the park, filling myself with colour so that I became fat with it, with the purple of the beeches and the lush green of the grass. There were no people in these dreams, yet they were dreams of the most sensual kind from which, when the morning came, I did not want to be parted. So I began to prolong them into the day, rising later and later, long after the lute-maker had begun work and the noise on the river had reached to its morning crescendo. I was addicted to them, as to an opiate, and went about my physician's round drugged by the memory of them and by the great quantity of sleep I was inflicting upon myself. I knew that I should be trying to shake off this sickness of dreaming, but I did not seem to have the will to do it.

One evening in April, the lute-maker came up to my rooms to show me an instrument he had made, the sound of which, he said, was the sound he had heard in his mind all his life but had never achieved until then.

To celebrate this new perfection, he brought with him a flagon of sack and, without noticing what we did, we consumed it all, little by little, so that the hour grew very late and our minds utterly addled and foolish. And in my drunkenness, I told this lute-maker about my dreams of a place that had once been mine and how every night, now, I returned there like a spirit and how I did not believe this dreaming would ever end. He looked at me with his eyes that are nervous and bright like the eyes of a buzzard and said to me: "Why do you not go there, Doctor Merivel? Why do you not see it again and then this seeing of it in your dreams will cease."

The next day, I wrote to Will Gates.

I told him that I had been possessed by a great longing to return to Bidnold, just for a brief time, no more than a day and a night, so that I could remind myself what it looked like and see with my own eyes "certain combinations of colour and light, Will, that I do not think exist anywhere in the world but there." I said I would be content to sleep in one of the servants' rooms, or even in the stables with Danseuse, because all that I wished to do was to visit the place "like someone invisible and not in any way to pretend it is mine or try to possess it again except in my mind."

While I waited for Will's reply, my dreaming of Norfolk was interrupted one night by a dream of Whittlesea and when I woke from it I decided that if indeed I was going to make the journey to Bidnold, I would not return directly to London, but go on to the Fens and tell the Keepers about the death of Katharine and the survival of Margaret and beg of them some other small relic of Pearce to replace the book consumed by the fire. And once I had decided upon this second visit, I no longer thought of this pilgrimage into the past as a foolish and self-indulgent thing. It seemed, on the contrary, to be a journey of the utmost importance: until I had made it, I would not be able to begin upon the future set down in my palm or indeed upon any version of the future whatsoever or come at last to any ending of this story.

I did not have to wait very long for a letter from Will and when it came it woke in me the same mirthful delight I had once felt in a stage coach at Will's first sighting of London.

0, Sir Robert, said the letter, You cannot know how much we are all here every one of us who remember you filled with joy at this Great Coming Event which is your Arrival at Bidnold.

Please, Sir, be assured we will make all very fit and nice for this fortunate Returning, viz- M. Cattlebury will bake a lardy cake and one of his Carbonados and all the Dust Sheets which do cover things since the V. de Confolens comes no more here will be taken off. And do not think you must have any poor bed in a stable. You can sleep in a Comfortable Room, viz- The Olive, where once we tended on Mister Pearce.

Send us merely some word of the day of your Arrival -for reasons of M. Cattlebury's purchasing the beef and seasoning it for the Carbonado. Which word he awaits with great Eagerness, as do I,

your servant Wm. Gates.

The date I decided upon was the twenty-ninth day of April in this year of cold spring rains and fitful sunlight, 1667. Because I wanted to ride to Bidnold on Danseuse, the journey would take me several days, but I knew that I would savour each stage of it, no matter what weather I chanced upon, and that when I found myself at last under the enormous Norfolk sky, I would lift up my head and shout.

It rained on the day that Danseuse and I left London, but after that, as we went north-east, we came upon cloudless days.

As we traveled, I asked myself what changes I expected to find at Bidnold and I knew that what would be most visible to me would be the emptiness of the place, its lack of belonging. The Viscomte, as far as I could determine from Will's letters, had only ever used it as a place of entertainment and seduction. He had never inhabited it fully or bothered to grow fond of it and now he never visited it at all or paid the staff their wages. Will and Cattlebury had remained, paid by Babbacombe I assumed, but I imagined the gardeners and the grooms and the chambermaids and the scullery boys all drifting away, so that little by little the house and the garden and even the park would be falling to neglect and decay. I thought of Will's sadness at this. I saw his brown, creased face. I saw him plead with me to do something to halt the decline of a place that he loved as much as I, and heard myself inform him that I could do nothing at all, it being out of my hands now and quite outside my life.

I did not let these thoughts cast me down. In the whole journey I had hardly a moment of sadness and whenever we stopped for the night I lay long asleep, dreaming myself already there.

So we trot down into Bidnold village, past the Jovial Rushcutters and past the church, and then we make the left turn into the park through the great iron gates and Danseuse flicks her tail and gives a snort and the speed of her trot increases.

There is a fresh breeze and the shadows of fast-moving clouds sail across the grass. The chestnuts are in full candle-burst. A cluster of deer grazes under them and, as we come on, the animals raise their heads and look at us.

We round the curve in the drive and there it is: Bidnold Manor in the County of Norfolk, the house snatched from the Anti-Royalist, John Loseley, and given to me in return for my role as cuckold, the house where all my foolishness was contained, Merivels house.

I rein Danseuse in and slow her to a walk. We are now at the very spot where, one freezing morning, I began to run after Celia's coach and fell down on some ice and tore a pair of peach-coloured stockings. The parkland is moated here and beyond the moat is the south lawn with its great cedar trees and as we walk sedately forward I notice that the lawn is neatly clipped and edged and that round the cedars have been put carved stone benches.

My eye is on the front door now. I remember the heaviness of it and the gladness I always felt when it opened for me and I went in and heard it close at my back – as if I had known all along that the house would belong to me for only the briefest time.

The door opens now. Will Gates comes out and is followed by Cattlebury and the two of them stand side by side and look towards me with dazed expressions on their faces, as if they had been brought forth to witness the passage of Halley's Comet or some such peculiar wonder. This sight of them makes me smile and I call out: "Will! Cattlebury! Here I am!" but my voice does not carry to them for, although I think I am smiling, I am in fact crying like a child and cannot seem to get any hold upon myself to stop my tears which fall so fast and so abundantly that the whole scene before me trembles and moves and it is difficult to keep my balance on my horse.

She halts and I climb down and I see Will and Cattlebury hold out their hands, so I take them in mine, one in each, and hold very tightly to them and force out from my choked heart a burst of my old laughter.

"Sir," says Will, "you are got very thin."

I nod. I am endeavouring to speak.

"We will remedy it, Sir Robert," says Cattlebury, "with carbonados."

"Yes," I say. "We will. With carbonados."

I was mistaken when I imagined neglect and disrepair.

Though empty of any owner, each room at Bidnold appears clean and dusted and perfumed, as if in readiness to receive one.

Little remains of my vulgar decoration. The carpet from Chengchow is still in place upon the Withdrawing Room floor, all its colours cleaned and bright, but the walls are no longer red and gold; they are hung with a dove-grey damask and the scarlet sofas are gone. Yet the room is grander than before. Above the fireplace is a gilded Italian mirror. Every chair and footstool is upholstered in peach silks and Prussian blue velvets. Equestrian portraits (from which Doric columns and Sylvan glades are not entirely absent) grace the walls. There is a card table of maplewood, a chequer table of ebony and ivory, a spinette made by the Frenchman, Florent-Pasquier. At the windows the brocade drapes are heavy and rich.

"I did not imagine," I say to Will, as I look round this beautiful room, "that the Viscomte was a person of such exquisite taste."

Will looks embarrassed. "Me," he says, "I liked all your scarlet and pink, Sir Robert."

I laugh. We go on into the Dining Room, scene of my candlelit suppers with Celia. My oak dining table is still in place, but the walls have been panelled and the ceiling carved and embossed and painted yellow and blue. It reminds me of a state room, forbidding almost in its formality, and again I remark to Will that the picture of the Viscomte I put together from his letters does not match that which I am forming of him now.

"Well," mumbles Will, "it probably would not, Sir, because in a letter you cannot tell all there is. You have to leave out a great deal, owing to briefness or lack of words."

"True, Will," I reply, "but you led me to believe he did not really care about the house, and in this I see that you were mistaken, for he has furnished it very finely."

Will shrugs his shoulders, upon which hangs a new rust-coloured coat. "He does not come here any more," he says, "and I hope he will not."

"Then what is to become of all these furnishings?"

"I do not know, Sir Robert."

"They are to lie shrouded in dust sheets for all time?"

"I cannot say."

"What, Will?"

"I cannot say whether they will be shrouded for all time."

"What were the orders given?"

"Beg pardon, Sir?"

"What orders did the Viscomte give regarding the furniture?"

"He gave none."

"None? He just left without any word?"

"Without so much as a word, Sir."

"Then he surely intends to return. He might return today, tonight, at any time."

Again, Will shrugs. His squirrel's eyes do not look at me. "He might, Sir. But I do not think that he will."

I abandon this conversation and I go with Will to the Olive Room, which is absolutely unchanged in every detail from the day when I sat in it for thirty-seven hours and watched over Pearce's sleep. The thought that I will sleep one night in it between cold linen sheets under the green canopy with its scarlet tassels is a very affecting one and I sit down upon the little window seat and thank Will for making this room ready for me. I feel tired suddenly and I know that in my tiredness I have, once again, begun to see and hear things that are not here. On the stairway, when my glance fell onto the hall, I fancied I saw a footman wearing livery glide silently from the door of the Morning Room to the kitchen passageway, and now, as I turn and look out at the sighing trees and flying shadows of the park, I seem to hear, very far off, the same whimpering of a dog that had once caused me to open the door of my rooms above the lute-maker and peer down into the dark.

It is the middle of the afternoon. I tell Will that I will rest for a little while. So he leaves me and closes the door. I do not sleep, or even shut my eyes, but lie and listen to the wind and marvel at where I am.

Though I feel somewhat solitary and foolish, Will and Cattlebury insist that supper is served in the Dining Room.

I have put on my blue and cream suit. I am not placed at the head of the table, where I used to sit, but at my right hand, as it were, as if I were my own favoured guest.

The room is lit by numberless candles.

"Blow some of them out, Will," I say. "I do not need a hundred pieces of light to eat a carbonado." But he refuses. "You were fond of light, Sir Robert," he says. "You used to tell me that."

The meal that Cattlebury has prepared for me is very rich and I disappoint him and Will by being unable to eat more than a few mouthfuls of it. I see these two men look at me and think, He is not like his former self, and it touches me to know that the old Merivel – so despised by Pearce and by Celia and causing such irritation to the King – was to them a person of substance.

The Burgundy wine I am offered smells of summer fruit, yet has so strong an effect upon my blood that when my meal is ended, I can hardly rise from the table, so heavy do my limbs feel.

"Lord," I say to Will, who helps me up, "it is as if old age had come upon me in the space of half an hour."

"You are tired, Sir, after your journey, that's all."

"Either that, Will," I reply, "or I'm dying."

"Well, Sir Robert, you cannot die in the Dining Room. It would be most horrid. So let us get you to your bed."

I tell Will that what I wish to do is to go out into the park, above which the clouds have sped away and uncovered a round white moon, and walk all round the house and take some breaths of the spring night. He looks at me and shakes his head, as if he believes the air will pierce my lungs like a knife, but I stumble out into the hall towards the door pulling him with me. "Come on, Will," I say, "for this is all I have, this one night."

I see the door open and then I stare out and I see a cold light falling across the lawn and I smell the earth. And then I do not remember anything more at all.

I wake under the green canopy. In the scarlet tassels hangs a sweet memory of Pearce.

The room is warm. I am wearing my nightshirt and my nightcap. I do not know what time it is, or what day, but seem to understand that I have slept for a long while.

I touch my face and find it very rough with stubble. I am a sight, I think, a terrible sight lately…

I draw back the bed curtains. On a little oak table is a china plate with a lardy cake upon it, and this discovery of the cake wakes in me a colossal hunger, as if I had not eaten for an entire week. So I cut myself a slice and cram it into my mouth with disgusting haste. Then I eat a second piece, dropping crumbs down my chin and onto my lap.

What I decide next is that the day upon which I have woken, whatever day it may be, is full of sunshine. I cannot see it yet, because this Olive Room faces north, but I know that, if I go to the front of the house, I will find it: a dazzling light.

So I leave the room, just as I am in my nightshirt with cake crumbs at the corner of my mouth, and go out onto the landing and, as I predicted, I see the sunlight falling upon the stairs. I stand and look down. And there, after a moment or two of blinking and rubbing my eyes and taking off my nightcap, I begin to see and hear a most peculiar commotion: the hall is full of dogs. There are seven or eight of them – little Spaniels like my poor Minette – and they are running in excited circles and yapping.

I try very hard to decide whether the dogs are truly there or not there at all except in my dilapidated mind, but I am quite unable to judge. I must go down, I tell myself, and try to touch one of them and, if it does not disappear or turn into a yellow scarf like the clump of primroses, then I will know that it is a living thing and not any hallucination.

I am barefoot, but the wood of the stairs, burnished by the sun, feels warm. And then I notice, as I go down, that the front door is open and I can see shadows on the gravel, as of people moving about, and somewhere in my brain, that has been so crammed with sleep, I know what this must signify and yet the meaning of it refuses to come to me except very slowly… so slowly… like an old memory that lies rusted and neglected and half hidden… and then I have reached the hall to call one of the dogs to me, but they all come, they all flock around me and jump up onto my legs and to my outstretched hand and wag their tails. I am surrounded by them. They are certainly real, Merivel, I inform myself, for two of them are biting the hem of your nightshirt and already you can hear it tearing. But I do not try to push the dogs away. I like their excitement. I think how sweet and pretty they are. So I start to play with them, dangling my nightcap towards them so that they jump high to try to bite it, then snatching it away and, as their yapping and frenzy increases with my teasing of them, I hear myself begin to laugh like a child.

And then a very long shadow falls across the golden floor and across me and across my laughter. At the same moment, one of the dogs starts to unwind the entire hem of my nightshirt. And then I look up. And I see the King.

Affecting not to notice that I was without my wig and unshaven and barefoot and wearing a torn nightshirt covered in cake crumbs, the King invited me, in a soft and gentle voice, to take a turn with him in the park.

While a cluster of liveried grooms and footmen – directed by Will, also strangely garbed in livery – unloaded a great many trunks and boxes from two magnificent coaches, we walked down the drive for a little way, then turned left into the grass towards a line of deer grazing in some shade. The dogs ran ahead of us, chasing each other and barking.

We had gone this far in silence. Then the King suddenly stopped and turned and looked back at the house.

"It is mine now," he said.

I looked at it. Bidnold Manor in the County of Norfolk…

"What, Sire?" I said.

"You heard me, Merivel. Now it belongs to me."

"To you…?"

"Yes."

"And the sale to the Vi -?"

"It was never paid for. Money was promised. Money I wished to use to fit out a ship. But it was never given. So Bidnold is to be a ship now."

"Be a ship?"

"Yes. Do you understand?"

"Not entirely…"

"It is to be my ship: in other words, the place in which, from time to time, I can sail away from care. Now you see it, n'est-ce pas? You, of all people, now you comprehend it, don't you Merivel? It is the place where I shall come to dream."

I nodded. The King watched me. I wanted to tell him that he could have chosen no better place, but under his gaze it was difficult to bring out the words.

"You need not comment," he said after a moment, "for I know everything you feel. But look at this. Do you remember to whom you gave it?"

"Look at what, Sir?"

"At this."

The King held out his hand (encased in an emerald coloured glove) and I saw in his palm a small piece of card, very soiled and curled and thinned by time. I took it up and peered at it and, after looking at it blankly for a second or two, recognised my name upon it, R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. and my old address in Cheapside.

I looked up. Across the features of the King now spread the smile, the effect of which upon my heart it is impossible to describe.

"Yes," he said, "your card. Shown to me not long after the fire by one of my hatmakers, Arthur Goffe. He told me that it was you who had saved his wife."

"Well, I and another man, much larger and stronger than me. But I did not know this was one of your people."

"No. Of course you did not. And even if you had known, it would not have been me who drove you to bravery. It was others, was it not? A certain glovemaker and his dear wife?"

"Yes."

"How fortunate, Merivel. For it is one of my beliefs that we cannot truly live until the debts we owe our parents have been paid. For they and their deaths can never be forgotten. Is that not so?"

"Yes."

"Even in an age in which we wisely practice the excellent art of oblivion, certain things remain."

"Yes."

"And another thing, if I am not mistaken, is your love for this place."

"Yes. I love it. From the day when I first saw it – "

"So I knew you would come back here. Gates and I were entirely agreed. We knew that one day you would come and that this is how I would find you."

"You knew?"

"Naturally. But I remember also that there was always one room that entranced you, a round room in the West Tower, and yet I heard that you had never found any use for it."

"No. I think that when I lived here what I used to believe was that this room was… beyond me… too high, or some such thing… as if I could not understand what I should put in it… as if, almost, it was a part of my mind that I could not see."

"Why do you not, then, go and look at it now?"

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Well, Sir, I will, if you wish, yet I would prefer to continue our walk."

The King gave a hoot of laughter, which disturbed the deer and sent them bounding away.

"'Continue our walk'! "Continue our walk'! Look at me, Merivel."

I tried to look up into the King's face, but the sun was in my eyes, so I shaded them with my hand.

"Go back to the house," instructed the King, "and go up the stairs and into this empty room. And see whether you can make sense of it now."

"Very well, Sir."

"Then we may continue our walk if you wish."

"As you will, Sire."

"Off you go, then."

I paused and stared up at the West Tower. It was many, many months since my thoughts had returned to this room, which had never, in truth, been a proper room at all, but only a vacant space. Now I noticed that on the three window ledges were clustered some white birds.

"Fantails," said the King. "Very pretty, I think. It might be that, from time to time, you may decide to open a window and let them in."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"Into your room."

"Let the birds into the room?"

"Into your room."

"My room?"

"Yes. I am giving you the room. It is yours. Until my reign is over and another age comes. Until then it is restored to you – in return for the life you saved and in return for the man you have become. It is your room and you can come and go from it as you please, and I will never take it from you."

Do you see me now?

I am in the room.

I am standing in the white room in my torn white nightshirt.

Merivel. Just as he was. Do you see him? He has no wig on his head. His hogs' bristles itch. He puts a hand to his cheek and discovers a cake crumb.

But I am not thinking of him. What has returned to my mind, in this high white space, is Margaret. I hold her in my arms and take off her bonnet and put a soft kiss on her fiery curls and she squeaks and kicks and blows bubbles into my face and then reaches out a fat little hand and takes hold of my nose.

I laugh and remove her hand and carry her to one of the windows, where we can hear the pigeons murmuring. I hold her up and show her the great expanse of the park that I once saw as wild, undisciplined lines of yellow and green, and dark splodges of brown and purple, and above it the sun which, in the absence of any device by which to measure time, tells me that it is mid-day on the fairest April morning of my life.

I do not know how long I remain in the room. Perhaps, when you glimpse me for the last time, the dusk is already falling. I wrap Margaret more tightly in her shawl, for it is getting cold now, and together we move towards the door.

"Tomorrow," I tell her, "I must go on to Whittlesea. But one day soon – before you have learned to walk, before I have grown too frail to climb the stairs – I shall bring you back."