Restoration (4 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have no idea."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mer-i-vel Bed her well!"

"Bed her well Mer-i-vel!"

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