Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

Outside, in the freezing night, Owls cry. And the sound they make, which is one of great Desolation, echoes the sound I hear inside myself, as I sit by her bedside.

  I have instructed the household that no visitors must come near Margaret any more, for that Typhus is a deadly Contagion, and I would not see sweet Mary and her sisters follow my daughter to this Place where she is.

  To Tabitha, who will not let herself be moved from her Mistress’s side, I have given instructions that she must tie rags about her own face – as I myself shall do, just as I did when I visited victims of the Plague in the year 1666 – when we are near her. ‘And when we wash her,’ I instruct, ‘we must afterwards wash ourselves and be always washing, so that we do not get any Contagion from her skin or from her mouth.’

  Margaret sleeps in uneasy rest. I see the rash creeping up to her chin and onto her cheek. I long to stroke her cheek, but I do not. Her hair is damp and tangled on the pillow, and this, too, I want to caress and smooth with my hand, but I do not.

  I talk softly to her. I tell her that I will fit out a carriage with furs and cushions, and take her home to Bidnold on the morrow.

  ‘This Bidnold of ours,’ I say, ‘was once described to me by the King as “the place where we shall come to dream”. He understood that it is a house of great Consolation. If you cannot get well at Bidnold, even though it be cold winter, you cannot get well anywhere on the Earth. And I swear to you, in the King’s name and in the name of my long-lost friend John Pearce, whom I could not save from Death, that I will do everything in my power, as a father and as a Physician, to make you well.’

  She stirs awake and sees me by her, and I know from her eyes that she has recognised me, and I take a little comfort from this, for that I know, in its Last Stages, Typhus muddies the brain, and it is by this that you may know that the sufferer is near death.

  I tell her once again that I am going to take her home. ‘And when you are well,’ I say, ‘we shall go out into the snow and there, in the Park, will you find a great lumbering beast, a Bear, which I have rescued and brought back from France. And in time we shall get to know its ways, and perhaps it will dance for us.’

  ‘I did not know this,’ she says. ‘That bears could dance.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘that is just another of my follies. I was afraid you would not recognise me unless I said something foolish.’

  ‘I recognise you, Papa,’ says Margaret, ‘except your clothes are a little different.’

  ‘Ah,’ I say. ‘Another folly: Shoulder-Ribbons! Even Will, with his poor eyesight, remarked upon them.’

  ‘They are very becoming …’

  She smiles, and to see this smile of hers gladdens my heart so much that I want to raise her up and hold her against my breast, but I do not.

  I ask her about the Pain in her head, and she tells me that this is the worst thing and the most difficult to endure, and I tell her that I will get Opium for her from my Apothecary in Norwich, and when she has taken this the Pain will be less.

  She closes her eyes and I imagine that she is drifting back to sleep, but she says quietly: ‘Tell me about the King of France.’

  I hear myself sigh. I realise at this moment, and not at any moment before, how weary I am and how great is my longing for sleep, but I force myself to begin on some small anecdotes from Versailles, to entertain and soothe her.

  ‘The King of France,’ I say, ‘calls himself Louis Dieu-donné, Louis Anointed-by-God. He is a man of Glory, who also likes to compare himself to the Sun – Le Roi Soleil.’

  ‘Does he resemble the sun?’

  ‘Yes, very much, for that he dresses himself in gold and the colour of his wig is a burnished copper, like your own beautiful hair, and the great Heat he creates in a room is a very Palpable Heat, and I have felt it myself and seen others almost swoon at it.’

  ‘Swoon and fall down?’

  ‘Yes. Faint clean away! For he is barely mortal, you see. He was born, I am told, with two teeth already in his head, translucent as Pearls, and this was taken as a sign that he was indeed God’s chosen child and would survive his infancy and reign for ever and ever …’

  ‘Nothing is for ever and ever, Papa,’ says Margaret.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I say. ‘What about my love and affection for you? I cannot see why these should have an end.’

  12

  NO WINTER IN my life was ever as cold as this one, the winter of 1683–4.

  In my park the Great Frost spread its burning rash over every leaf and every twig and stone and every blade of grass. Birds, roosting in the trees, dropped to the ground and died. Red Squirrels clawed and bit at the earth, where their stores had been hidden, but the earth was turned to Granite. The Squirrels grew ragged and thin, and disappeared.

  I ordered that the deer be rounded up and brought to the shelter of the Cow Barns, but even there the water in their trough still froze in the night. The animals clustered all together for warmth and their sweet faces, regarding me in a silent, reproachful bunch, reminded me of Pansy-flowers.

  ‘It will end,’ I said to them. ‘It is a finite Season.’

  But it did not show any sign of ending. The Woodsmen, who had been charged with making the Stockade for the Bear, came to tell me that they could not, even with the sharpest iron picks, make any hole in the ground for the setting of the posts. The Bear, therefore, could not be given its liberty, but was forced to remain in the cage, and the children of the Woodsmen, ragged in their woollen clothes all tied together with string, came and trespassed on my land, and threw sticks and icicles at the creature to vex and torment it.

  ‘They must not do it!’ I scolded the Woodsmen. ‘You must constrain them, or I shall throw you all off my Estate.’

  But where should I throw them? To the Workhouse? And I depended upon these people for my supply of chopped wood, for Cattlebury’s stoves, for the fires that warmed my rooms, for the blaze that was kept burning, day and night, in Margaret’s Sickroom.

  And when I considered how these Woodsmen and their families lived, in poor hovels, built of mud and lathes and thatched with Reeds, and how I lived, with all my French furniture and stone Fireplaces and Hangings of tapestry and brocade, I suffered a worm of sorrow for their lot, and was mightily glad that Pearce was not at Bidnold to reproach me with all the Unfairnesses of the World and to blame me for them.

  Yet, still, the taunting of the Bear angered me. ‘Throw sticks at me, if you must,’ I wanted to say to the rude lads and ragged little wenches, ‘but spare this animal, for it has done you no harm.’

  Christmas was upon us, but I commanded that there be no feast.

  Snow fell silently and made walls and mounds all around us where none had ever been, and I began to be afraid that we would want for food, for that no Butchers’ nor Fishmongers’ carts could pass in the great press of snow on the drive, and many of our Chickens were dying, and all our winter vegetables were smothered three feet deep in the ground.

  I sent for Cattlebury and asked him how we stood as to Supplies, and he assured me that he, ‘sensing in my bones a cold Season’, had been laying down Potatoes, Onions, Neaps and Carrots, as well as sacks of flour, in the dark of the cellar and that we would all live off these ‘and not suffer for it’.

  ‘And when these are gone?’ said I.

  ‘We will kill the Deer,’ he said. ‘Venison is a lovely meat, Sir Robert.’

  I sent him away. I climbed the stairs to Margaret’s room, where Tabitha, draped in Muslin round her face, kept quiet watch. For all that a fire burned there, and every window was tightly closed, it felt chill. And when I approached the bed I noticed, for the first time, a foul Cancre blistering the skin of Margaret’s lip.

  Every incremental torment brought to her by the Typhus – from the looseness of her stool to the Convulsions of her stomach and the great Agony in her brain, relieved only by Opium – caused me such helpless anxiety that I had almost lost the art of sleeping at all. And when Tabitha and I undertook to wash Margaret, whic
h we did very often, for that she soiled herself and could not help it, I now began to see that her body was wasting away.

  And I was taken again in my mind to that time when John Pearce began to die, and I remembered how his coming death had been visible to me in the scanty flesh that clothed his bones, and how I had known – for all my long studies in Medicine – that I could do nothing to save him.

  As I stared at the horrible Cancre on Margaret’s lip, I began to have the feeling that her life was lost. I knelt by her side. I clung to her sheet, twisting it in my hands. And my prayer was to Pearce: ‘Help me! For the sake of our past Friendship, help me to save her!’

  His only answer was that sudden quiet – in which all the World seems to withhold its breath for a long minute – that I have termed ‘The Silence of Pearce’. Though, many times in my life, I have got consolation from this strange taking away of sound and movement, its manifest uselessness to me now put me into a sudden anger. I wanted to scream and cry, and break my hand hitting out at the wall.

  I ran downstairs, snatched up my warmest Cloak and went out into the snow, hoping that a walk in the icy park would calm me. The Servants had cleared a passage through the great drifts from the house to the Barns and I followed the narrow path they had made, and for a companion I suddenly had a Hen, who appeared from I know not where and, with delicate steps, hastened along beside me.

  The Hen and I, with bright and hectic eyes, looked out at the frozen land.

  The Beech Trees, which had borne the tracery of the Frost with sumptuous grace, now looked lumpen and shapeless, with the great weight of snow upon them. And I was afraid that their limbs would break under the burden of it, and the thought that my trees would be brought low made my fury increase.

  I walked on. My breath billowed before me in a blueish Vapour and I felt the sharp stab of the frozen air in my lung. The green parkland around me had folded itself into sweeping white Dunes, shaped by the wind. To the Hen, who had to make little flapping runs to keep up with me but seemed determined to do so, as though she lacked companionship, I remarked: ‘These snow Dunes are like the sands of a Desert.’

  That same night, lying on a rug on the floor in Margaret’s room and sleeping a little, I had a dream of Pearce.

  He walked towards me along a riverbank, and the river was silvered with the sun and all the weeds that grew along the bank were lush and vigorous and bright.

  ‘Pearce,’ said I in my dream, ‘here you are at last. Tell me what I can do to save my daughter. I beg you to tell me.’

  Pearce sat down among the weeds, which seemed to hold him securely in a green Chair. He would not deign to look up at me, but after a moment or two had passed, while the water flowed sweetly on, he said: ‘Go where you always go. Go where you cannot prevent yourself from going.’

  I was silent. It was always one of Pearce’s most perturbing tricks to talk to me in Riddles, and very often these Riddles would not come to any solution at all, and I would be left only with a sense of my own obtuseness.

  ‘Where is that?’ said my dreaming self. ‘You must tell me where, Pearce.’

  But, to my dismay, he rose from his soft chaise of greenery and made as though to walk away from me.

  ‘Don’t go!’ I pleaded. ‘Tell me what I must do!’

  He stopped and stood still, and I saw that he carried in his hands the blue-and-white soup ladle, and I cried out: ‘I am glad that you have got the ladle, Pearce! I am very glad for your sake that it is not lost.’

  Ignoring this, yet cradling the implement to his thin body, he said: ‘Imagine you are a Slave at the time of Julius Caesar. That Slave suffers from that same deep forgetfulness of his own Absence of Freedom that afflicts you, does he not?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Imagine, then, if you were that same Slave and a terrible affliction or sadness came upon you; where would you go to ask for help?’

  I hesitated a moment, then I said: ‘I suppose that I would go to Caesar.’

  ‘Of course you would. For in your heart you love your servitude to him; that is why you are still a Slave. So there is your answer. You must go to Caesar.’

  Your Majesty, I wrote,

  Your Servant Merivel sends you his Affectionate Greeting from the Snow Deserts of Norfolk, where we are walled up in a Great Whiteness, the like of which I have never before seen.

  I do not know how this Letter will reach you, for that no Letter-Bearer, nor cart can make its way to Bidnold. But I write, in part, to try to assuage my Mind, which is in Mortal Anguish.

  Sir, Margaret is dying of Typhus.

  I am trying every remedy that I know of, but I do see that, as the days pass, these remedies are failing. If any Physician at Whitehall, with better knowledge of this foul Disease than I, has some counsel I might follow, I humbly beg of you that you write it for me. For I do think that to lose Margaret would bring me swiftly to my own death, and then I would no longer be able to entertain Your Majesty with my follies and Jokes.

  I pray you are well, Sire, and not suffering in the great Age of Ice that has come upon our land.

  From your Faithful Subject, and Loyal Fool, Sir R. Merivel

  Each day I prayed that the snow would melt, so that my letter could be conveyed to London, but no Thaw came. I began to believe that Margaret’s life hung upon this letter and that if I could keep her alive until the roads were passable once more, then she would not die, for some counsel would come from Whitehall to save her.

  My medical books told me that there was no certain Remedy for Typhus. All I could discover was that the disease was wont to have a duration of eight or ten or twelve weeks, at which time the Patient would very likely display some sign of recovery, such as a marked lessening of the Fever and a Calmness in the Bowel. But if these signs did not come, why then, what would occur would be a growing Confusion of the Mind, followed by Unconsciousness and Death.

  Both I and Margaret were thus in the hands of Fate, or (as my Parents, no less than John Pearce and the King himself would have insisted) in the hands of God. All that I, a mortal Doctor, was able to do was to relieve her symptoms a little. With Cattlebury’s broths I fed her Opium. I bled her from time to time, to try to calm the choler in her veins. I washed the sweat from her brow and from her body. On the Cancre I laid a smear of Louise’s Beeswax and Plantain salve and in a few days, to my great delight, the Cancre was reduced.

  This small success with the Cancre cheered me for a while and I blessed Louise for its invention.

  I spent much time talking. I reasoned that if I could keep Margaret’s mind alert, then I would stave off its gradual sinking into Unknowing. I told her the stories of her Childhood, beginning with that of her Birth, in the year of the Great Fire, and how it was I who, to save her life and her mother’s too, had cut her from Katharine’s womb.

  She had heard this tale many times before: how that I had been convinced I would be able to save them both and failed. The first time I told her, she wept for her Mother and asked: ‘Why could you not save her, too, Papa?’

  And I explained that no matter what I had tried, and what the Midwife had tried, we could not staunch the bleeding in Katharine’s womb, so her life drained away. But I reassured Margaret that her mother did not suffer, but only drifted into a beautiful sleep. And so died very calmly.

  All of this was true, but Margaret had also grown up with one terrible lie concerning Katharine. She believed her to have been one of the Quaker Sisters helping Pearce and his Friends to care for the Mad People at the Whittlesea Bedlam. But it was not so. Though she was a beautiful and seductive woman, Katharine had been one of the Hospital’s most tortured inmates. Pearce had warned me, again and again, to keep my distance from her. But I had not kept it. Lust, once more, had led me to a fatal place where I should never have trespassed.

  I had further told Margaret that her mother and I had married at the church of St Alphage, where Katharine is buried, but no such ceremony ever took place, for the simple reason that I, b
eing still estranged from the King, was unable to procure any agreement to the Annulment of my marriage to Celia. And I was not prepared to commit Bigamy with Katharine.

  Now, fearing that Margaret would die, I asked myself whether I did not owe her some Correction of the untruths surrounding her Mother’s short and fretful life.

  I knew that I shrank from it. I told myself that it was not just to inflict such cruel revelations upon an invalid. But when I stared into the flames of the fire that was kept always burning in her room, I also imagined how, upon hearing of her Mother’s insanity and the lamentable advantage I took of this poor, helpless woman, Margaret would suddenly turn from me, her only living Parent, and wish I might be devoured in Hell.

  The thought that, living or dying, my daughter would withdraw from me all her love was more than my exhausted mind could bear. So I stayed silent.

  Walking, one frozen morning, about the house, to try to judge how the very building itself was withstanding the wrath of the snow and the winds, I went into the room I had always designated the Olive Room. It was no longer decorated in Olive greens (with scarlet tassels above the bed), but in a plaintive watery blue, which was much to the King’s liking but a little too insipid for my taste.

  A great French Armoire, made of veneered Walnut, had always stood in this room and now I opened its doors, to draw into my lungs the scent of this cupboard, which was the Scent of the Past.

  I stood there, breathing hard through my nose. I reminded myself of an animal sniffing the air, to see what sustenance or carnal delight it might find riding on the wind; or a Connoisseur of Wine, snorting into his goblet, pretending to smell Blackberries and Wood of Elm and I know not what else in a beaker of Claret.

  What I could smell was my youth. A memory of its Delectation filled my veins and warmed me. In this very room had I lain with Violet Bathurst, and torn at her clothes and been made weak by her shameless demands. In this same place had Will and I nursed Pearce for thirty-seven hours. On this spot had I held baby Margaret in my arms, to show her each room of the house that had been restored to me in 1668 and would one day be hers.