Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

  I myself was weary and worn down. It was going to be difficult for me to be attentive to the Sovereign when all my thoughts were with Margaret. I was also undergoing great tidal fluctuations of guilt about my neglect of my Patients. My excuse, in these recent times, had been that I should stay away from them lest I be a carrier of the Typhus. But the truth was that during my absence in France, and in the long and terrible cold winter, I had given them virtually no thought, blithely assuming that old Dr Murdoch (that Quack!) and Dr Sims were doing their best for them, and that they had explained to them my great predicament in regard to my daughter’s sickness.

  But I had hoped to make amends very soon by visiting them, every one, and now I saw that, more than ever, I was Captive in my house and that all my endeavours would have to be for Margaret and for the King alone. Habitually, the King arrived here with sufficient of the Court to entertain him and I could play the quiet Host, popping up with jests and fooleries, as required or requested, from time to time. But here he was at Bidnold with only two Valets and a spoilt dog for company. I began anxiously to wonder how we might pass the coming days.

  When we left the Dining Room the King stopped and turned and looked back at the table, and at all the fifty candles dripping and burning. ‘Where is Gates?’ he said. ‘Was he not always faithful to the serving of Supper?’

  ‘Yes, he was, Sir,’ I said, ‘but his hands are become a little unsteady …’

  The King nodded gravely. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I believe you told me that in London. But I do so much dislike it when things I have appreciated come to an end.’

  15

  SPRING CAME IN.

  Each day, as it spread its sugaring of green on every tree and hedgerow, I saw signs of Amelioration in Margaret’s condition. She began to eat the small, tempting meals I persuaded Cattlebury to make for her: milk puddings, coddled eggs, celery hearts baked with cream. The colour crept back into her cheeks.

  I made sure that her hair was washed and curled, as she liked it to be.

  Sometimes I helped her to rise from her bed, and we would sit at a little table in front of the window of the room where she’d lain for so long and play a few games of Rummy, and I saw from these that her mind was sharp and clear. To the heartless God who had let my innocent parents perish in a fire I expressed my gratitude.

  I unearthed my tarnished oboe from its case, shined it up and, to Margaret’s amusement – and the King’s – led my daughter down to the Music Room and played for the two of them some of the old, badly remembered melodies with which I once entertained the mad of Whittlesea. At one of these sessions the King stood up and took Margaret by the hand, and led her to a short but stately dance, after which we three applauded enthusiastically, as though we had been at some marvellous new Drama at the Duke’s Playhouse.

  I sent word to Sir James Prideaux of Margaret’s recovery and invited his family to dine with us, and when the women understood that the King was here and would be part of the company they all – so Sir James wrote to me – requested new dresses and new ribbons and new shoes, ‘and your soirée will quite bankrupt me, Merivel, but of course I do not care a whit, such is our rejoicing to meet the King and to know that Margaret is with us again in the world’.

  They came in and filled the house with conversation and laughter. Each in turn embraced Margaret and Mary wept with such joy to see her friend restored that Arabella had to hide her face with her fan to conceal her own tears.

  To the King, the family gave great and immediate delight. Though he had made much of telling me how ‘staid and comfortable’ he was with Fubbsy, I could at once perceive that the arrival of four beautiful young women in my house lit up his eye with its old Fire.

  Penelope was but fifteen, but to her as well as to Mary, Jane and Virginia, he showed the kindest attention, impressing upon her the importance of her lessons in Dancing and Geography. ‘Grace in the world, Penelope, and Knowledge of the world,’ he said to her, ‘my Father taught me to value these things, before his Head was unkindly cut off. Therefore, in his name, you must pay attention to them.’ And all the company fell silent and we did not know where to look, and it was as well that Will (at last divested of his badger Tabard and wearing a suit of red-and-gold Livery too large for his bones) came in at that moment to tell me that the net that I had requested for a game of Shuttlecock had been rigged up in the hall.

  We took turns to play in different teams and whoever played in the King’s team won, for that his agility had diminished little since I used to play Tennis with him, and his strokes were very strong and keen. But nobody seemed to mind who won or who lost. Our capering about with Racquets, chasing a Feathered Ball, brought to our hearts an extraordinary gladness, and though we were short of breath and thirsty, and I had to send to the kitchen for Ale and Lemonade, we did not want these games to end.

  At midnight we were still playing. The only spectators were Arabella and Margaret, who was not yet strong enough to run about and sweat and risk a fever, but they, too, were caught by the laughter in the game and sat by the guttering candles, sipping Lemonade and cheering on the teams. And I thought how there had not been an evening as sweet as this one at Bidnold for many a long time, and how it was as if all my Melancholy had been swept from my heart and sent by the Shuttlecock into some faraway void.

  True to what he said he would do, the King spent long hours walking alone in the Park in the early sunshine and as many quietly resting in the Marigold Room. ‘I am at peace,’ he kept repeating to me, ‘I am at peace in this place.’

  Letters followed him, more and more as the days passed, but he did not open them. He said that the very word ‘Parliament’ made him feel faint, ‘as though I were a youth again and in Exile’, and he made me vow never to utter it.

  He spent the evenings dining with me and with whatever amusing Company I could procure for him, including my Lady Bathurst, my former Amour, Violet, now widowed and quite aged, yet still beautiful in a ruined kind of way and with her Wit as sharp as ever it was.

  And one evening, after we had drunk a great quantity of wine, the King took her to his bed, and when I myself retired some time later, I (and no doubt Margaret, as well as all the Servants at Bidnold) heard the familiar shouting and screaming of Violet Bathurst, who could not find herself touched by a man without making of it an almost ungovernable Riot.

  At breakfast the following morning the King did not appear. Violet, looking pale, and with a fine Bruise on her neck, and drinking weak Cinnamon Tea, turned to me and said: ‘I did not tell you, Merivel, that I am dying.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we are all dying, Violet …’

  ‘But I am dying more utterly than you. There is a Cancer in my breast.’

  I was eating Porridge. I looked at its grey lumpishness and felt my gorge rise. Before I could say anything Violet said: ‘Now that I have been fucked by the King, I can die happy. Is this not so?’

  She was smiling her familiar, challenging smile, which used to cast an agreeable spell over me, but to which I now felt myself to be almost immune.

  ‘How can you be sure that what you have is a Cancer?’ I said.

  ‘Well, it is great Thing near my armpit, which should not be there. What else might it be? But I did not let the King’s hands discover it and he took, I think, much pleasure in me, as once you did, too.’

  ‘I have no doubt he did.’

  ‘But he may not come to me again …’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I believe I exhausted him!’

  Margaret came into the Dining Room at this moment, so Violet and I ceased to talk of these things. Margaret said ‘Good Morning’ to Violet, but would not look at her, being, I think, embarrassed to have overheard the night’s frenzy and not knowing whether all Normality in the house was henceforth to be altered by it. When Violet announced her departure, my daughter looked relieved.

  I accompanied Violet to the door. As she left the house I said to her: ‘I will come to Bathurst Hall to
morrow and examine your breast. Perhaps what you have is a mere Cyst, which I can drain.’

  She brushed my lips with her hand. ‘Thank you, Merivel,’ she said, ‘and for giving me the King. What delights I have always found under this roof!’

  Then she drove away in her carriage and I returned to my Porridge, which was cold, and to Margaret, who was very subdued and quiet.

  ‘I have made a decision,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow I shall resume, in some measure, just for an hour or two, the rounds of my Patients. Will you entertain the King, if he should request any entertainment, while I am gone?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret. ‘Shall I teach him to play Rummy?’

  My unfortunate Patients …

  For a long time they had been at the mercy of Dr Murdoch, whom I have known since my Days of Folly. He is old now, and from his nose and ears sprout vigorous hairs, like rats’ whiskers and I pity the recumbent Sick, who are forced to contemplate these whiskers and be repulsed by them, and fear the scratching or pricking of them, as Dr Murdoch bends down towards the bed.

  Though, like Pearce and myself, Murdoch once worked at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, he did not last long there and he has never, by my measurement, been a bona fide Physician, but merely stumbled through his life in a stupor of half-knowledge, dispensing this or that remedy at his ignorant whim.

  He is prone to muddling one Patient with another. To a man who had lost a great quantity of blood from inadvertently tripping over his own feet and falling onto his scythe while haymaking, what does Murdoch do but let more blood, misremembering him for a patient with choleric seizures – for the only reason that both men were large and bald. And so the scythed man dies, having almost no blood left in his body, and his poor wife says to me, ‘It were the Doctor that killed him and no mistake.’ But she has no money nor status in the world and so can bring no Suit against him.

  Murdoch has got very rich on his paltry skills and by pursuing his Patients to the grave, and beyond, for his payments. He has built himself a fine house at Walsham and acts as though he were a lord, demanding Deference from all and sundry, and disliking me very intensely, for that I am an Intimate of the King and Murdoch very prone to jealousy.

  In recent times, Murdoch has been assisted by a younger man, Dr Sims, who was called to Margaret when she first fell ill at Sir James’s house. Neither he nor Murdoch understood that she had Typhus, so I conclude that this Sims, too, is a Know-nothing fool, scarce better than the old rat-man. And I remember Pearce often saying to me that half the Physicians in England were imbeciles, and that this was a great tragedy for the people.

  ‘Do you include me in the Imbecile Category?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Pearce. ‘On the contrary. You are a very fine Physician – when you give your mind to it.’

  I set out with these thoughts turning in my brain, and guilt in my heart for my abandonment of so many of the sick and needy all through the bitter winter. I hoped that word had spread of Margaret’s illness and that I would be forgiven on account of it.

  The first Patient I visited was a Wool Merchant named Mr Percival Maybury, whose one great affliction – and that, he said, blighting his whole life – was his abiding Constipation, and because all his thoughts turned, day by day, upon the making of a good stool to relieve the pain in his bowel, his Wool business was neglected and going down towards ruin.

  He had grown very thin. He told me that Dr Murdoch had prescribed Clysters of bitter almonds, but that these ‘produced stools that are black and burning’ and causing him great agony as they passed out of him. And so he now forbade himself to eat, almost, so much did he fear the blocked passage of food in his gut.

  ‘This will not do, Mr Maybury,’ I said. ‘We must find some other remedy.’

  In previous times I had tried Clysters of Turpentine for him, and these would bring him ‘great relief’ for a while and then, I know not why, cease to have any effect whatsoever. I now told him that I had been told of an excellent device to sluice out foul matter and this was called an Enema Pump, made of a Sheep’s bladder, attached to a carefully sewn leather Pipe, and the bladder filled with salted water and squeezed into the anus through the Pipe, with a force that sent the liquid up the large intestine. And when, in time, it forced itself out again, why then, all the stools followed its downrush and came out with no hurt or strain.

  Percival Maybury looked marvellously cheered by this and asked me how he could come by such an instrument. I told him that I would ask my Apothecary in Norwich to procure one for him.

  Meanwhile I advised him to eat Oatmeal and peas, this diet – to my certain knowledge – having a very loosening effect upon the bowel. And I recounted to the poor Wool Merchant the flavour of my time at Versailles, in my shabby room with Hollers and drinking water from the garden fountains, and this made him laugh exceedingly and I was cheered, because I know that in laughter may reside Forgiveness.

  I proceeded on to an asthmatic Patient, Mr Joshua Phipps, once a Moneylender and Pawnbroker, but now forced to stay out of every city for fear of the vitiated air and what it did to his breath. Yet Moneylenders cannot prosper unless they be visible, and people see their Sign and come to beg loans or to trade their pitiful possessions for coins, and so Phipps, like Maybury, grieved both over his bodily state and over his failing enterprise.

  ‘I am doing battle with fear, Dr Merivel,’ he told me. ‘I cannot conquer my Asthma, but I am endeavouring to conquer my fear of it, testing myself to see how long I can last without breath till I inhale my Mint Balsam and get some air into my lungs. Now, by virtue of practice, I can endure two minutes.’

  ‘Two is heroic,’ said I. ‘I am sure that I could not last one minute.’

  ‘Fear constricts,’ he said. ‘Fear begins in the throat. Perhaps, if I can truly banish my terror, then I will banish the disease.’

  I replied that I thought this an admirable aspiration, but meanwhile conjured for him my sea voyage to France, and how the briny air had filled me with gladness and seemed to rinse me clean of some foul Humours.

  ‘When summer comes,’ I said, ‘why do you not get a boat from Harwich or Felixstowe, and stay on the deck and breathe, trying to fill your lungs with the West Wind?’

  He looked at me gravely. ‘I have never been inclined to go to sea,’ he said. ‘I prefer the company of dry things: Bills of Sale and Money Orders and nicely written Receipts.’

  I then rode on to Bathurst Hall.

  This house is very large and was once the scene of some Mad Revels, with a black Stallion being led into the Dining Room and shitting everywhere, and all the Fops mad with laughter and lust, and old Lord Bathurst himself rolling on the floor, shrieking out his half-witted nonsense, and Violet pirouetting on the table, and then everybody singing and copulating in corners or puking and falling asleep in the mess, and all the poor Servants toiling back and forth to try to clean everything up.

  When I think of this time, I feel a blush creeping up my cheeks, especially at the prolonged and immodest couplings I enjoyed with Violet in various Corners of the house and even on the stairs, as we crawled to bed, like dogs. Never, I think, have I known any woman quite as wanton, deep in her soul, as Violet Bathurst, and she led me on to great extremes of licentiousness. Had Pearce witnessed one half of what I did with her, his heart would surely have ceased long before it did.

  Now I was shown once more to her Bedchamber, a room I knew well, but which seemed, suddenly, to have become very dark, with heavy drapery drawn across the windows and stinking of Oil from the lamps that guttered near to Violet’s bed.

  She lay there, stroking a grey cat, with her grey hair coiled in a heavy plait and her face pale, yet painted with two spots of Rouge on her cheekbones. And when I saw her like this, what I felt was a terrible Pity for the passing of time, which had taken away her beauty and my lust, and left us as the mere husks of what we had once been.

  I tried to make my countenance cheerful. I felt glad that, if she were indeed dying, she
had had at least one night with the greatest lover in the land. And when she saw me she was immediately drawn to tell me how fine her night had been and how the King’s mouth was still ‘of a great voluptuousness and brought me to Pleasures deep as an ocean, Merivel, deeper than any that you gave me, so that I almost lost consciousness’ and how His Majesty’s prick was ‘as large and silky as any woman could dream of’.

  ‘Good,’ I said weakly. ‘I am very glad, Violet …’

  ‘Do you not wish to hear more, Merivel?’

  ‘Is there more to tell?’

  ‘Yes indeed, for he is a lover of wondrously new Positions. Do you not wish to hear about these?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not particularly in the mood for hearing about them. And I must return to Bidnold very shortly. I have left the King in Margaret’s care.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Violet. ‘That is very unwise. For he will surely make love to her.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Well, I merely stated what should be obvious to you. Margaret is now a very pretty young woman. Why should the King not try—’

  ‘Hush, Violet!’ I burst out. ‘Do not say such a terrible thing. The King is my friend and will not ravage my daughter while I am gone to visit my Patients.’

  ‘How do you know?’ retorted Violet. ‘It was plain to me within five minutes of arriving at your house that he intended to take me to bed. He cannot help himself, and now, I warrant, he will help himself to Margaret!’

  ‘Stop!’ I said, putting my hand over Violet’s mouth. ‘Or I shall leave. D’you wish to show me your infernal Lump or not?’

  Obediently she now pretended a great Contrition, kissing my hand and stroking it with her lips. Then she lay back on the pillows, holding the cat to her for comfort, and looked up into my eyes with a most piteous expression.

  I waited a moment, trying to calm the agitation in my breast. Gently I raised Violet’s arm. Then I reached out for one of the lamps, and brought it near to the arm and saw by its yellow light the ‘Thing’ she had described to me, where her left breast descended to her armpit. It was purplish and a little shiny, and hard when I touched it, and I saw at once that it did indeed have the appearance of a Cancer and not a Cyst, as I had hoped.