by Rose Tremain
"Come on," said my father. "Thanks to your acrobatics, we're already late."
The doors to the Royal apartments were guarded, but were opened to my father's nod. He held, over his arm, a silk pouch containing two pairs of satin gloves. We entered a Drawing Room. A fire was roaring under a vast marble mantel. After the chill of the gallery, I would have moved towards it, except that by now I felt almost too weak to move at all and wondered whether I was going to inconvenience my father (who had had enough embarrassment for one day) by falling down in a faint.
Moments passed, as if in a distorted, dreamlike time. A servant came out of the King's bedchamber and asked us to go in. I felt us glide, like skaters, across thirty feet of Persian carpet, stumble through the great gilded doors and fall flat on our faces at the feet of a pair of the longest, most elegant legs I had ever seen.
I realised, after a moment, that we were not prostrate, but only kneeling. Somehow, we the skaters hadn't fallen. This in itself seemed to be a. miracle, because everything around me – the canopied bed, the candle sconces, even the brocaded walls themselves – appeared to be moving, coming in and out of focus, first clear, then dim.
Then a voice spoke: "Merivel. And who is this?"
These days, enmeshed as I am in the tangle of the story, the voice returns to me frequently: Merivel. And who is this? First my name. Then a denial of all knowledge of me. Merivel. And who is this? And the memory is so fitting. I am not now the Merivel I was that day. On that November afternoon, I was shown a roomful of clocks, chiming and ticking in disunion. I was offered a sweetmeat, but could not swallow it. I was asked questions, but could not answer them. A dog snuffled at my foot and the touch of its nose felt repellent, like the touch of a reptile.
After an interminable time (and I do not know to this day how that time was filled up) I was out in the gallery again with my father, who began to shout at me for being a dumbcluck and a fool.
I walked alone back to Ludgate and climbed wearily to my room. There, in my shabby loft, the enormity of what had happened became suddenly and terrifyingly visible to me, as if a nest of maggots had all at once broken out of the wall. I had been within a glove's length of obtaining power, and I had not taken it. It had been there for me, and now it had gone for ever.
I began, like a pig in pain, to howl.
4. It is not clear what started the fire in my father's workshop in the New Year of 1662. It was of course crammed with wooden boxes and shelves holding the flammable materials of his trade: felt, buckram, goatskin, fur, lace, feathers, ribbons and bales of satin, camlet and silk. A small blaze begun by an upturned oil lamp or candle would have had ample substance on which to feed.
All that is known is that the fire began in the late evening, engulfed the workroom and spread ravenously upwards to my parents' apartments, where, it seems, they were at supper. Their servant, Latimer, managed to open a small skylight onto the roof, to scramble up and endeavour to haul his elderly master and mistress to safety. My mother had a hold of Latimer's hand when she suddenly fell back, retching and choking on the smoke. My father tried to lift her up again towards Latimer, but she was unconscious in his arms.
"Fetch a rope!" my father screamed, perhaps, but his instructions were muffled by the dinner napkin he had tied round his nose and mouth and Latimer could not make out what he was saying. He stared helplessly in, while all the time the smoke became thicker and darker and to belch out in his face while he clung precariously to the leads of the roof. He told me, in the bitter chill of the following morning: "I watched them die, Mr Robert. I would have given all my life's wages to save them, but I could not."
The burial was well attended. Lady Newcastle, for whom my father had made moleskin eye patches, arrived in a black coach with her horses decked with black plumes. The King sent two Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. Amos Treefeller, now in his dotage, hired a sedan-chair to carry him to the graveside, where he began to blub. The January wind carried the prayers up and away into silence.
The following day, I was summoned back to Whitehall.
The death of my kindly parents, as well as slaking for the time being my thirst for women, set moving in my anatomist's brain an acute awareness of the speed at which the body can succumb to death. I am not squeamish. At Padua, short of cadavers in the summer months, Fabricius once conducted an anatomy lesson on the body of a pauper that had been floating in the river for three days. The German students, notorious for their interruptions and disorderly behaviour, now took to vomiting and swearing all round me. I stayed perfectly well and calm and took notes as Fabricius worked. However, after my mother and father perished, I looked at my own body, of which I had never been at all proud, with a new distaste, with a new antipathy and with a new fear. And it was this fear which, in the contradictory workings of the world, brought me to the honour about to be conferred on me. Fear of death, you see, had lessened, if not obliterated, my fear of power. So when summoned to Whitehall, I was no longer overcome by the scent of majesty and thus no longer idiotic and dumb. My poor father would have been very pleased, in fact, by the way in which I was able to conduct myself.
The King received me in his Drawing Room. He talked at length and most flatteringly about my father's skill. He repeated his theory that no man should get above himself, but know his own talents and his own degree. I nodded and bowed. Then he said: "Out of my affection and admiration for your late father I have summoned you, Merivel."
"Yes, Sire," I said. "Thank you."
"But I have a task for you, a task in which you must succeed, because my heart will suffer very much if you fail."
"Did you know, Your Majesty," I ventured, "that the human heart – the organ itself, that is – has no feeling?"
He looked at me with sorrow. "Ah, Merivel," he said, "where have you learned that?"
"I have seen it, Sir."
"Seen it? But what we see is but a fraction of what it is. You, as a physician, must no doubt have understood that. Look at my hand, for instance. Wearing a glove made by your late father. What we see is the excellent glove, a little rucked on my fourth finger by the large sapphire ring I am fond of wearing. Whereas, underneath the glove is the hand itself, capable of a thousand movements, en l'air like a dancer, supplicant like a beggar, fisted like a ruffian, in prayer like a bishop… but then again of what fantastic complexity is the arrangement of bones in the hand…"
He went on to describe, with some degree of accuracy, the skeletal structure of the human hand. By the time he had finished, I thought it prudent not to return to the subject of the heart, but to allow him to come at last to his reasons for calling me to the palace.
"One of my dogs appears to be dying," he said. "The veterinary surgeon has bled him repeatedly, shaved the hair off his back in order to cup him, has tried without success lesions, emetics and purges, but the little creature doesn't rally. If you can cure him, Merivel, I will offer you a place here as a Court Physician."
I knelt. Aghast, I noticed there was a stain of boiled egg on the thigh of my breeches. "Thank you, Sir," I stammered.
"I will have you taken to the dog immediately, Merivel. Food and drink and night linen will be brought to you and any surgical instruments you may need made available to you. You will stay until the dog dies or recovers. Call for any medicines you deem suitable."
"Yes, Sir."
"The dog's name is Bibillou. He also answers to Bibi and Lou-Lou."
"Lou-Lou, Your Majesty?"
"Yes. Your own name, by the way, has a very pleasing cadence."
"Thank you, Sir."
"Merivel. Very pretty, to my ear."
I left the royal presence and followed two servants down acres (or should I say hectares, in that the King appears committed to distributing French names everywhere?) of corridor. I was shown into a pleasant bedroom, with a view of the river and the crowded wharves. A fire had been lit. In front of the fire, in a little basket, a brown and white Spaniel was lying. Its body was pitifully thin and its brea
th rasping. On a table near the window, a decanter of claret, a goblet and a dish of Portuguese figs had been placed. Laid over the bed was a fine linen nightshirt and a matching nightcap, which, once the servants had left me alone with the dog, I immediately put on, suffering as I was that day from a scabrous itching under my wig. I also removed my shoes and coat and poured myself a glass of claret.
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 natural! 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 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 Barts 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 mirrored, 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."