Restoration (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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