Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

  I felt extraordinarily tired. I had slept badly since the fire, but it was more a total exhaustion of the mind, rather than of the body, that I felt. I was glad to be alone. I took the claret over to the bed and half reclined on it, sipping the wine greedily, like a Roman senator. Once or twice, I glanced in the direction of the dog. It twitched and whimpered in its dreams. ‘Lou-Lou,’ I called softly, but it didn’t stir. Presently, I told myself, I will get up and examine the dog and see what can be done. Meanwhile, I went on drinking the claret, which was some of the finest I’d ever tasted, and soon began to feel a delicious ease, like velvet, caressing my mind. Once, experiencing a sudden hunger, I forced myself to get up and eat a couple of figs, but my body felt as heavy and unsteady as a barrel of eels in a swell, and I stumbled back to the bed, where I passed out in a stupor of claret and delayed grief for my parents’ dying.

  I slept, it seems, for seven hours. When I awoke, it was dark, but my room had been lit with candles and a supper of roast partridges and boiled salad placed on the claret table. Had the servants tried to wake me? If so, they would have had to report to the King that Physician Merivel lay in a drunken sleep, with his nightcap fallen over his eyes. I groaned. For the second time, I had been near to preferment, and yet again I had let it elude me.

  I got up, my legs still unsteady. I knelt down by the fire, which still burned well, with fresh logs laid on it by the invisible servants. I stroked the head of poor Lou-Lou. To my surprise, he opened a watery brown eye and looked at me. I bent and listened to his breathing. The rasp in it had lessened. I looked in his mouth. His tongue was swollen and his muzzle dry. I fetched water from my washstand and spooned a little into his mouth. He lapped it with all the eagerness a sick Spaniel can muster. It is as if, I said to myself, the purging and vomiting he’s been forced to endure has drained his body of its vital moisture. And with this realisation, I suddenly saw that my hopes of curing the dog were probably greater now than they had been when I had arrived eight hours before. My own neglect of him could, indeed, be the key to his recovery. For while I’d slept, he’d been left alone, possibly for the first time in several days and nights, and nature had had a chance to work quietly within him.

  ‘Studenti!’ Fabricius would thunder, his voice echoing like the word of God round the tiers of his primitive anatomy theatre. ‘Non dimenticare la natura! Do not forget nature! For nature is a better doctor than any of you – particularly you Germans, who are so noisy – are ever likely to be!’

  I watched over Lou-Lou for the next seventeen hours. I sent for alcohol to dress the boils and lesions made by the cuppings, but otherwise I didn’t touch him, only gave him water, and when his fever lessened, fed him morsels of partridge mashed in my own mouth. By the following night, when a meal of guinea fowl, cream and radishes was brought to me, I was confident that he wouldn’t die. And I was right. Four days later, I carried him to the King’s bedchamber and set him on the Royal lap, where he stood entranced and wagged his tail.

  5. The fifth beginning is the strangest, the most unlooked for and the most momentous. Without it, the story in which I find myself would not have happened as it has.

  I can tell it with reasonable brevity. (I am, unlike Pearce, usually able to come swiftly to the point of a story, whereas his tales are so larded with lugubrious metaphysical observations that his audience is prone to lose the thread of the thing almost before he’s begun.) Here it is then:

  I abandoned my studies at the Royal College and my lodgings at Ludgate. I was allotted two pleasant rooms inside the Palace, which lacked only, alas, a view of the river, which was of great fascination to me, in all its hubbub, vagabondage and changing light. My duties were defined as follows: ‘The daily Care and Comfort of the eighteen Royal Dogs, with, as required, the right to perform operations upon them, prescribe Remedy for Disease and do all in my power to ensure the Continuity of their Life.’ The stipend paid to me was one hundred livres per annum, and this, added to the two hundred and thirty-seven livres left to me and mercifully found unharmed in my parents’ damp cellar, was quite enough to keep me in good claret, high-heeled shoes, silk coats, Brussels lace and well-made wigs for the foreseeable future. Astonishing good fortune had, in short, fallen on me (‘All undeserving you are, Merivel,’ noted Pearce, who was struggling on, trying to cure the paupers of St Baits and – ghastly enterprise – the lunatics of Bedlam).

  I celebrated by visiting Mrs Pierpoint, getting drunk with her at the Leg Tavern and tumbling her in a muddy ditch on Hampstead Fields. Afterwards, she had the temerity to ask me whether, now that I was in the King’s employ, I could get some position at Court for the uncouth Mr Pierpoint, who is a mere bargeman, and I learned at once a lesson I never let myself forget: that power and success carry in their train a clamouring queue of greasers and supplicants, the noise and sight of which haunt my private pleasures and my dreams, but from whom multifarious and handsome bribes may very often be had.

  A year passed most profitably and pleasurably. My nature, I quickly understood, was in every particular well suited to life at Court. My fondness for gossip and laughter, my brimming appetites, my tendency to sartorial chaos and my trick of farting at will made me one of the most popular men at Whitehall. Few games of Cribbage or Rummy were started without me, few musical evenings or soirées dansantes were given to which I was not invited. Women found me hilarious and in magnificent numbers allowed me to tickle not only their humours but their charming and irresistible centres of pleasure, and I seldom slept alone. And – most fortunate of all – the King showed towards me from the start a most flattering affection, stemming, he told me, not only from my curing of Lou-Lou, but from my ability to amuse him. I was, I suppose, his Fool. When I made him hold his sides with laughter, he would beckon me to him, take hold of my squashed nose with his elegant hand and draw me towards him in order to smack an affectionate kiss on my mouth.

  After a while, I realised that he actively sought my company and this realisation was to me a most astounding thing. He would show me his gardens and his orchards and his tennis court, and began coaching me at tennis, at which I proved more adept and nimble than I expected. He gave me presents: a handsome French clock from the collection I’d seen that first afflicting day, a set of voluminous striped table napkins, large enough to cover my whole suiting while I ate, lending me the risible appearance of a man in a tent and thus causing mirth at the dinner table, and a dog of my own, a sweet Spaniel bitch he insisted I christen Minette, after his own adored sister.

  Impossible to say I wasn’t happy. My half-finished knowledge of medicine was adequate to keep the dogs well, particularly dogs fed on milk and beef and bedded in warm rooms. And as to comfort, diversion and women, I had all any man could ask. I was growing fat and a trifle indolent, but then so were many at Court, not possessed of King Charles’s great energy and curiosity. When Pearce visited me, he grew white and rigid at the sight of so much profane luxury. ‘This age suffers from a woeful moral blindness,’ he said stonily.

  And then . . .

  On an April morning, the King sent for me.

  ‘Merivel,’ he said, ‘I want you to get married.’

  ‘Married, Sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Marriage, Sire, is not, has never been, on my mind . . .’

  ‘I know. I’m not asking you to want it. I’m asking you to do it, as a favour to me.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Have I not done very many favours to you, Merivel?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Voilà! You owe me at least this one. And there will be compensations. I propose to give you the Garter, so that your bride will have a title, albeit a modest one. And small but agreeable estates in Norfolk I have confiscated from a recalcitrant Anti-Monarchist. So arise, Sir Robert, and go to your duty without hesitation or barter.’

  I knelt. We were in the Royal Bedchamber and from the adjoining study came the disunified tick-tocking and pinging of the clocks, which perfectly mirror
ed, at that moment, my own confused thoughts.

  ‘Well?’ said the King.

  I looked up. The Royal visage was smiling at me benignly. The Royal fingers caressed the dark brown moustache.

  ‘Who . . .?’ I stammered.

  The King leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. ‘Ah yes. The bride. It is, of course, Celia Clemence.’

  The knee on which my weight was balanced trembled and then tottered beneath me. I fell sideways into the carpet. I heard the King chuckle.

  ‘It means, of course, that you – and possibly she – will have to spend some time in Norfolk, thus depriving me of your respective companies now and then. But this is a sacrifice I am prepared to make.’

  I endeavoured to right myself, but my left knee had gone suddenly numb and wouldn’t support me, so I had no alternative but to lie in a kind of foetal heap by the Royal footstool.

  ‘I don’t,’ said the King, ‘need to explain myself further, do I, Merivel?’

  ‘Well, Sir . . .’

  ‘I do? I’m surprised at you. I thought you were one of the most knowledgeable people at Court.’

  ‘No, it is merely that this is . . . this matter is . . . somewhat difficult for me to grasp.’

  ‘I can’t for the life of me see why. It is childishly simple, Merivel. The frequent presence of Celia Clemence in my bed has become a necessity in my life. I am, as everyone knows, utterly beguiled by her. Likewise, my grand amour, Barbara Castlemaine, is absolutely essential to my continuing health and well-being. In short, I love and need both mistresses, but I have no wish to continue to endure Lady Castlemaine’s tantrums on the subject of Miss Clemence. They make me edgy and give me indigestion. So she must be married at once – the better that I may come by her again secretly, without Castlemaine’s knowledge. But to whom must I marry her? Not, I think, to a powerful aristocrat, who will soon irritate me profoundly by starting to consider his own position and honour. No. What I am looking for in Celia’s husband is a man who will enjoy and profit from his estates and title, and who will be kindly and amusing company to his bride on the rare occasions he is with her, but who is far too enamoured of women in general to make the mistake of loving any particular one. And in you, Merivel, I have surely made the perfect choice. Have I not? You also, as I am fond of observing, have a pleasingly fashionable name. To ask Celia to become – in name alone, of course – Lady Merivel, is something I feel I can undertake with equanimity.’

  So that was it, uttered: the fifth beginning.

  The dogs were to be taken from my care and in their place was to be put the youngest of the King’s mistresses. The practical matter which most absorbed me, as I left the King’s presence, was that I could not remember how far from and in what relation to (viz. north-east or directly north of) London lay the county of Norfolk.

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  Copyright © Rose Tremain 2012

  Rose Tremain has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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